The drama whirling around whether Hillary Clinton will be Barack Obama’s first Secretary of State, including her Hamlet-like deliberations, has centered around how willing she may be to give up the independent power base she enjoys in the Senate.  This is another way of saying she’s still playing with the idea of running against him in 2012, which would be her last shot.

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Please read here.

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Upon taking office, President Obama will push hard for the ridiculous (for Israel) “Saudi Peace Initiative”, which asks for Israel to give up land it won in the 1967 war, in return for peace with the Palestinians and other Arab neighbors yet to make peace with Israel.

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Here’s an essay from one Bob Cesca, apparently a blogger when he’s not doing whatever it is he does to make a living. I offer this post as an example of the sort of petulant spit-balling from deep in the bleachers that characterizes so much of the angriest of the Angry Left. Here’s a guy whose side won the election, whose cause is in magnificent  ascendency with a popular President-elect waiting in the wings, and what does he do? He devotes a thousand words or so to impugning the motives of Senator Joe Lieberman, a man whom he surely does not know. I can tell, because if Mr. Cesca knew anything about Senator Lieberman except what he read in another blog somewhere, he’d appreciate that Senator Lieberman is at least as liberal as Mr. Cesca is on every issue save the war on terror. And, since Mr. Cesca is happy to tell us that the war on terror is simply a Bush-conjured fantasy–the world loves us, don’t you know–then Sen. Lieberman should be a useful Senate vote for a liberal agenda. But Mr. Cesca, like most of his loud and uninformed friends, appears to know something approaching nothing about the practical demands of politics. Guys like Bob Cesca–spewers of hate for the sheer joy of it–are President-elect Obama’s greatest potential trouble. They don’t care about advancing an agenda. They just like to yell.

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     On November 20th, while delivering a speech to the Federalist Society, Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed, lost consciousness and was rushed to the hospital.  On November 21rst, this sober news, along with the uncertainty of Mukasey’s condition, was reported on page 20 of The New York Times.

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The thought of pirates usually evokes Hollywood blockbusters involving swashbuckling buccaneers, tropical isles and buried treasure marked on a tattered map with an “X.”

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Please see here.

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I fell to temptation once again and took a look at the Puffington Host to see what the commenters are saying about the sudden illness of the Attorney General. As usual, something like half of them are wishing death on the man. I am confident that during Obama’s term, we won’t act like the other side has during Bush’s term. It has to stop somewhere. It must be with us. We understand that life ought to be far more than politics. Will they ever figure that out? (If they did, they’d be a lot happier, cos they’d worry more about their own lives and less about running everybody else’s.) G-d be with AG Mukasey.

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While observers waited for the release of the “official” Al Qaeda position on the election of Barack Obama as the next President of the United States, seasoned experts on the Jihadist movement had little doubt about the substance of the main message. As I have outlined in my appearances on Arabic television channels since November 4, Usama bin Laden or his second in command, was expected to declare that their “Jihad” will continue despite the election of an African-American president and despite Obama’s intention to withdraw from Iraq. Ayman al-Zawahiri lived up to expectations on Wednesday in his latest message to his supporters and his enemies. His message? Even if the war ends in Iraq, the global war will continue everywhere.

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A powerful social science theory, much advanced by Robert Frank of Cornell, provides a strong rationale for setting a ceiling on the incomes of the executives of all corporations that receive public loans, capital injections, or some other favor from tax payers. (Surprisingly many, by the way, if you include specially tailored tax loopholes, credit below the market rates, export assistance, and so on). Before I can lay out what the theory of relative deprivation suggests the next Congress and White House should do in this department, a few words on how we got executives who are paid scores of millions in the first place.

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Al says today that if you don’t agree that global warming is 1) real and 2) the most profound and difficult challenge humankind has ever faced, you are helping bring on the collapse of civilization itself. Wanna debate global warming? Fine. But as soon as somebody shows up to the table waving “The End Is Near!” signs like those toga-wearing, bearded guys from Times Square, it’s difficult to take him seriously. Al Gore considers himself conversant in the science of this, but speaking as a fellow who has formally studied more science than Al Gore ever did or will, I can tell you that Al doesn’t understand the investigative philosophy of science. He is now in the marketing business, not the science business. His global-warming-as-religion approach is daily increasing the barriers between the general public and an appreciation for the dispassionate approach that science demands. Over time, that’s a spectacularly irresponsible thing for anyone to do. We come crawling out of the slime over the centuries to come to accept the scientific method and the need to live with competing explanations of reality. Then this guy shows up insisting that disagreement is the enemy of science–and that anyone who disagrees should be drummed out of the public discussion. Gore. Is. Trouble. Not just for now, but for the ages.

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Osama bin Laden’s deputy gangster Ayman al-Zawahiri is back with a new videotape, and the press went wild with his offensive description of Barack Obama as a “house negro.”

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Seeking to follow through with his reckless campaign promise to win the war in Afghanistan, Barack Obama’s men looked hopefully to India. Perhaps, if the Washington helps them achieve their goals in Kashmir, Pakistani extremists will lay off Afghanistan.

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     In the real world, we prosecute men who beat women, even when women continue to hang around for more abuse.  In the notorious case of Joel Steinberg, his sentence for the death of his adopted daughter was undoubtedly affected by the courtroom’s stunned reaction to the pulverized face of Hedda Nussbaum, his longtime partner who testified to her repeated hospitalizations, disfigurement and loss of her spleen.  Though Ms. Nussbaum had remained in the relationship for many years, her implied consent didn’t mitigate against his dastardly and vicious assaults.  In the lofty world of letters, comes the authorized biography of V.S. Naipaul, a man who openly admits to having psychologically brutalized his first wife throughout their long marriage while repeatedly beating his longtime mistress.  Lest we think that these are vague descriptions, we should understand that even while his wife Pat was dying, Naipaul continued tormenting her, disparaging her and reminding the reader of his impatience for her death.  As for his mistress Margaret, he once complained that his hand was swollen from the severity of the beating he had just administered to her face, one that kept her at home for many days thereafter.

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[A]n exit poll of voters showed single women were a decisive factor in Barack Obama’s historic victory…Tuesday night, unmarried women supported the Democratic candidate by a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin…

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(First published in the Vallejo Times-Herald) 

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This week’s battle over whether to bail out the Big Three U.S. automakers is far more than a policy struggle. It is a touchstone of where we stand as a society.

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So last time I wrote about Boulder, it was in defense of naked pumpkin-headed people running down the Pearl Street Mall. But last night I drove up there, when the streets were indeed fully clothed, to catch the Colorado stop of the national tour “Separate Is Never Equal: Stories of Apartheid from South Africa to Palestine,” presented by the U.S. Campaign to End the Israeli Occupation and hosted by the Rocky Mountain Peace and Justice Center on the University of Colorado campus (yes, the onetime home of Ward Churchill himself!). This isn’t exactly my idea of an enjoyable Monday evening, but I’d gotten wind that members of the Israeli student group planned to show up, listen respectfully to the speakers (which they did), and then ask hard-hitting questions during the Q&A (which they also did).

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Oh, yeah!

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Two weeks ago, when the election was over, I was in Germany and have to tell you what I read and heard hacked me off.

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Again with the Clintons.

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Thank you, Bill Clinton! Obama said that if premature withdrawal will lead to the take over of Iraq by Iran or to rise of a Talibanlike state, the US will return. Well, how about returning to Somalia? According to Somalia’s ‘official president’ Islamists control most of country. US Admiral is ’stunned’ by pirates’ reach Yes, this is Mullen, the man whose navy the Iranians can tease with impunity. Interestingly, Mullen now says that U.S. Would Need More Than 2 Years for Iraq Withdrawal. Does it mean that he is finally learning?

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For the second straight week, Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell tackles perceptions and realities of political bias at the paper.Equally compelling as last week’s quantitative evidence is this week’s qualitiative observations by Tom Rosenstiel, a former political reporter who directs the Project for Excellence in Journalism:

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Barack Obama is seeking to stitch together a “broad coalitional government,” which would include former opponents such as Hillary Clinton and John McCain and others from the Republican party.

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Public voices that are often raised (frequently for very good reasons!) to criticize many of the policies of the Bush Administration (and Israeli policies in dealing with the Palestinians), are mum about atrocities committed by extremist Muslims. I wonder why we do not hear a peep from these voices when a 13 year old girl is stoned to death for the “sin” of having been raped, as just happened in Somalia. There are good people who are concerned about the pain inflicted on those executed in the United States during the last minutes of their lives by the chemicals they are injected with—a valid concern—but why are these same voices strangely mum when they learn about the particularly prolonged, painful, agonizing death of a child?

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I’m sure Jim Manzi is a bright fellow conservative, but his explanation as to why it’s cheapter to bailout the Big 3 with $25-$50 billion when you could buy the companies for one-third to one-seventh of that amount is a textbook example of revising the question to fit the answer you already have in mind.

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Here’s Stephen Colbert making a joke about a drug trial. The result of the trial was that statins (I believe that’s the term) can reduce the likelihood of heart attacks in patients who ordinarily would not be prescribed statins. Colbert concludes [sic] that this is not a sound medical conclusion but simply an end-around way for drug companies to sell more statins. Of course, someday someone will sue somebody else precisely because this study existed and his or her doctor did not prescribe statins. “What about the preventive power of statins?” they’ll rail. And Colbert and the rest will pile on–something about holding back preventive medicine in order to make more money off heart surgery, I’m predicting. Can’t win.

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Much is written about American yellow and green lights for Israeli actions. But little about Iranian/Syrian green light for Hamas action. But it would be a folly to ignore the fact that Hamas renewed rocketing of Southern Israel corresponds to IAEA’s El Baradei official confirmation that traces of processed Uranium were found in the Israeli bombed Syrian area. Let us not forget that Mashal, the leader of Hamas is not residing in Gaza but in Damascus.

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