As “Change We Can Believe In” morphs into “Continuity That Doesn’t Freak Us Out Entirely,” the continuity offered by Obama’s senior picks seem less continuity-ish.  Take David Gates at the Pentagon, for example.

Sure, Gates is staying on as Defense Sec, and that’s a very good thing in these tumultuous times. But good leaders require and depend on good deputies, and Gates’ deputies apparently are not too keen on working with the Obama team, or visa versa.

WaPo reports today that all of Gates senior advisers are heading out the door, and Obama-picked replacements are coming in.  Here’s the brief:

Deputy Defense Sec. Gordon England is out for sure and possible replacements include Obama campaign adviser Richard J. Danzig (Who as Clinton’s undersec and sec of the Navy oversaw a huge reduction in the Navy’s ships, from 454 to 341 - and he’s rumored to be Gates’ replacement!), transition team co-leader for the Pentagon Michèle A. Flournoy (who hopefully won’t be too French in her approach to defense) and former Pentagon comptroller William J. Lynn, who was appointed to that post by one William Jefferson Clinton.

Eric Edelman, Undersec for Policy is out in January and Flournoy is a possible replacement. Air Force Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. is out as the Undersec for Intelligence, and no replacements have hit the rumor mill yet. Undersec for Personnel and Readiness David S.C. Chu is also rumored to be “hitting the reset button.”

One prospect for continuity is Michael G. Vickers, who the Post says may keep one of the longest titles around - assistant secretary for special operations, low-intensity conflict, and interdependent capabilities. He oversees some of the U.S. military’s most sensitive operations - which hopefully will be continuing in AO1 (Age of Obama, year one).

What do you call the drones at the Office of the President Elect - Opies? Well, the Opies have their work cut out for them to recast Hillary from wannabe tea-sipper to foreign policy diva, all the while trying to do a disappearing act on the problems Bill Clinton brings to his wife’s nomination.

The NYT spilled the beans on the hardball negotiations that have been going on with lawyers from the transition team and Clinton’s team, revealing that there’s an 8-point agreement that won’t be made fully public until after Hillary’s Sec of State announcement has had its headline run.

Foremost among the points is Bill’s agreement to release by year-end the names of the 208,000 donors to the William J. Clinton Foundation, which raised $500 million to build his presidential library. The names that have already leaked out are troubling to Hil as Statemeister - Marc Rich’s wife Denise, the Saudi royal family, the king of Morocco, the United Arab Emirates, the governments of Kuwait and Qatar and the son-in-law of Ukraine’s former dictator.

Clinton also will agree to re-incorporate his foundation and the Clinton Global Initiative as separate corporations and, very interestingly, run his speeches by State and possibly the White House prior to giving them. He made over $10 million giving 54 speeches last year, so he’s not going to favor meddling he feels counterproductive to a major income stream.

The NYT opines (in its editorial columns) that releasing the donor names will “eliminate any concerns.” Fat chance of that. With the names being released before confirmation hearings, concerns will abound; it’ll be up to the GOP to decide whether to pounce on them or not. I believe some pouncing is in order.

Meanwhile, the Opies are trying hard to reinvent the record of the campaign, which saw the Prez-elect saying of his State nominee such things as:

“What exactly is this foreign policy experience?” Was she negotiating treaties? Was she handling crises? The answer is no.”

And incoming White House Counsel Greg Craig saying:

“She did not sit in on any National Security Council meetings when she was first lady. There is no reason to believe … that she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton administration.”

But that was then. Count on the Opies to quickly find the other side of Obama’s mouth and stuff it full of fine-sounding words about his problematic nominee.

It may not rank up there with the selection of a Secretary of State, but in today’s communications-driven world selection of White House Communications Director is big news in itself - especially when it signals that the president elect, who is running to the center with other nominations, has selected the voice of the radical pro-abortion agenda for the position.

Ellen Moran comes to the position from EMILY’s List, where she served as executive director. EMILY’s List raises money early in the election cycle for women who are pro-abortion and claims to have helped elect a who’s who of far-Left congresswomen.  Says Discover the Networks:

In August 2006, the EL website stated, “Since our founding, we have helped elect 61 pro-choice Democratic women members of Congress, 11 senators, and eight governors.” These figures do not include the hundreds of local candidates whose campaigns EL has supported over the years. Among the notable recipients of EL funding have been Cynthia McKinney, Maxine Waters, Sheila Jackson-Lee, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barbara Boxer, Patty Murray, Dianne Feinstein, Jan Schakowsky, Barbara Lee, Hilda Solis, Diane Watson, Lynn Woolsey, Rosa DeLauro, Stephanie Tubbs Jones, Nydia Velazquez, and Tammy Baldwin. Many of these are members of the Progressive Caucus.

Besides fundraising to keep abortion going, Moran led the AFL-CIO’s campaign to keep low priced goods out of the hands of working families, a.k.a. it’s anti-Walmart efforts and has been a heavy-lifter for the Dem party. Here’s her bio.

Into her hands goes the task of crafting the messages in support of Obama’s policy initiatives.  Her appointment underscores the fact that Obama intends to be pro-union, anti-corporate and most definitely anti-pre-borns.

Hot! Hot! Not!

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t’s one of those cognitive dissonance moments: They tell you this October was the hottest October ever recorded - excuse the pandering Paris photo - and you’re asking yourself, “Yeah, but wasn’t I freezing my fanny off for most of the month?” Yes you were, and you should believe your fanny, not Warmie “scientists,” who live to feed bogus data into the global warming industrial machine.

Fortunately, they don’t get away with this malarkey like they used to. Here’s Christopher Booker from the UK Telegraph, with emphasis added by Okie:

A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore’s chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China’s official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its “worst snowstorm ever”. In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS’s computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

As the Okie says,

Innocent error, or intentional manipulation of the data sets because the reality of the situation just doesn’t fit into the Anthropogenic Climate Change catechism? Shoot, I don’t know. But, the Global Warming proponents have been willing to use funny numbers before. At the very least it’s sloppy work that went unnoticed by GISS because the information was exactly what they wanted to see.

Yup. And there’s much, more more. Read the Okie’s post.

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his week’s non-Watcher’s Council winner in the Watcher of Weasel’s weekly running of the blogs underscored the points I’ve been making in my “The Lies They Teach” series based on Larry Schweikart’s 48 Liberal Lies about American History (That You Probably Learned in School.

Writing in American Thinker, Paul Kengor details How the Academic Left Elected Obama.  In the piece, Kengor details the youth vote:

MSNBC’s exit polling, which is consistent with other exit polling, showed that voters aged 18-29, who made up nearly one in five voters — or about 25 million ballots — went for Obama by more than two to one: 66 to 32 percent. Those voters alone well exceeded Obama’s overall popular vote advantage, which was roughly eight million.

These voting bands of Obama youth are largely parallel with the kids who are in college today, released by their parents into the tutelage of professors who can’t be trusted with American history or culture.  To illuminate the point, Kengor writes:

I’m reminded of the statement from the late atheist philosopher Richard Rorty, who said that the job of professors like him was “to arrange things so that students who enter as bigoted, homophobic religious fundamentalists will leave college with views more like our own” and “escape the grip of their frightening, vicious, dangerous parents.”

To these liberal profs, Obama was the realization of a dream they have taught could never be attained in racist, classist, white-dominated America.

Thus, when the university community was presented with Barack Obama, a charismatic, impressive, seemingly excellent Democratic presidential candidate — who happened to be African-American — the reaction was nearly reverential, bordering on idolatry. The good senator’s bracing radical associations — enough to deny any other American a security clearance — and which were not coincidental to a man ranked the most leftist member of the most leftist Senate in U.S. history, didn’t matter to the academic world. Quite the contrary, those who dared to point out these associations — FoxNews, talk-radio, the McCain-Palin ticket — were deemed loathsome Neanderthals deserving of being burned in effigy from the nearest dorm.

Today’s college kids were born after Reagan confronted Communism and ended the Cold War. They have no experience with the Soviet threat and have been taught little or nothing about the horrors of Stalin, the Gulag and life under the Soviet thumb. Instead, they’ve been taught about the evils of anti-Communist crusaders in the U.S.  Kengor points out that McCain’s heroic suffering as a POW didn’t resonate with students who had been taught Vietnam was a war of American imperialist aggression, and that Sarah Palin stood opposed to the false teachings they had received about separation of church and state.

This is no longer child’s play.  Liberal indoctrination on college campuses has achieved its ultimate goal of electing an American president.  We must see that this is the zenith of that movement, and it progresses no further.

Elsewhere in the Watcher’s Winners, on the Watcher’s Council side of the slate, Joshuapundit won with a clear and helpful analysis of the challenges that face Obama’s Afghanistan policy in The Afghanistan Blues.

You can see all the winners, plus some nifty commentary, at Watcher of Weasels.

If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed. - David Brooks

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avid Brooks writes today of the Obama valedictocracy (rule by those who graduated first in their high school class):

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This piece is a hoot; a serial killing with a keyboard of any citizens who hang onto the idea that Obama is anything but an elitist:

Already the culture of the Obama administration is coming into focus. Its members are twice as smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them, three times if you include the columnists. They typically served in the Clinton administration and then, like Cincinnatus, retreated to the comforts of private life — that is, if Cincinnatus had worked at Goldman Sachs, Williams & Connolly or the Brookings Institution. So many of them send their kids to Georgetown Day School, the posh leftish private school in D.C. that they’ll be able to hold White House staff meetings in the carpool line.

Read it all here.

Who cares if the economy is sucking air? Certainly not federal employees, who received letters from Barack Obama on the eve of the election reassuring them that their jobs are safe and the federal government will be expanded during his term, at your expense.

The letters, sent to employees at seven federal agencies, were a cooperative effort between the Obama campaign and the American Federation of Government Employees, reported WaPo in a non-critical article earlier this week.

The letters describe Obama’s commitment to greater levels of government regulation andd scaling back on contracts to private firms (another anti-business plank in Obama’s platform).

To Department of Housing and Urban Development employees, he promised a big role in restoring public confidence in the housing market - “We’re from the government and we’re here to help.” To Social Security Admin workers, he promised more staff to deal with backlogged disability claims, which worries me because I think over-employment at the agency and over-indulgence in disability claims to druggies and alcoholics are part of the Social Security problem. And, signaling a major reversal of one of Bush’s rare battles for fiscal conservatism, Obama promised Transportation Security Admin workers the same bargaining rights and bennies as other fed workers.

His letter to Labor Dept. employees signaled higher costs to employers, another anti-business plank in the Obama house of cards. It promised to set new policies requiring longer paid family leave and more “flexible” work schedules - with the federal government leading by example. Oh boy! More paid time off and less time at the desk when I’m not paid to be off - think I’ll Go with O.

Of course they’re all nothing more than campaign promises, so Obama will either deliver, driving up governmental overhead when he’s promising the rest of us he’ll cut it, or he’ll add more names to the long list of those disappointed that Mr. Manna can’t deliver the miracles.

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he name of the author of the Newsday piece Entrenched Majority and Obama cracked me up: Les Paine. This black columnist is definitely not ready for less pain in America, and he’s swinging with big roundhouse punches:

After voting heavily against the first black U.S. presidential candidate, the white majority in this country seems bent now on declaring Sen. Barack Obama’s victory as the end of racism in the republic.

As the world celebrates this historic ‘08 election, the media downplay the fact that were it left to whites alone, John McCain and Sarah Palin would be heading to the White House, accompanied, we assume, by Cindy McCain as first lady. [We assume? What the heck does that mean?] Instead, pollsters and pundits seem hell bent on placing on the defensive those blacks and Hispanics who voted for Obama in record numbers.

Paine dismisses a 96% black vote for Obama as the continuation of a strong Dem minority vote - 90% for Johnson some 44 years ago and 88% for Kerry, for example. That’s defensible to an extent, but in presidential elections nowadays, swings of one or two percent are significant, so a bump of 8% in four years cannot be so easily dismissed as being wholly without racial motivation.

Paine assures us blacks aren’t racist - but whites most definitely definitely are:

“In four Southern states, Alabama, Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi,” [Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies pollster David] Bositis said in his prepared remarks, Obama “received a smaller share than John Kerry received in 2004. Given the political environment of 2008, those declines can only be attributed to race.”

Only. Attributed. To. Race - in the four most southern of southern states. Worries about Obama’s associations or inexperience had nothing to do with it? If Bositis is as “respected” as Paine says he is, then the pollster would have weighted his conclusions with data on the comparative experience of the long-termer Kerry and the neophyte Obama. But no. (The Joint Center, BTW, is a think tank dedicated to providing services to black elected officials - a group that happily plays the race card whenever and however it suits their re-election or political purposes.)

Bositis refused Paine’s requests to call white voters in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia and North Carolina racist, even though they voted in the majority for McCain/Palin? No, “those whites’ voting for Obama was cause for optimism.”

I don’t get it. If Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas whites vote McCain, it’s racism, but in other states where the same phenomenon occurred, there’s optimism to be found in the whites who voted there for Obama. My only conclusion: Paine is right - America is a racist country, and the effort to keep it that way is being led by Les Paine, Jeremiah Wright and others who loudly protest calling the election of a black president proof that the old American racism is dead or dying.

hat-tip: RCP

WaPo reports this morning that Greg Craig, a high-powered DC trial attorney who provided counsel to the Obama campaign and served as a John McCain stand-in during the debate prep, has been selected as White House Counsel.

Many may remember Craig as Bill Clinton’s lead attorney during the president’s impeachment - experience any incoming president should flee from for image’s sake - but what will make the GOP faithful take notice is Craig’s 1981 successful insanity defense of John Hinckley, Jr., who tried to assassinate Ronald Reagan.

Craig was also central to one of the most intense political battles of the Clinton administration - one he won for the wrong side - when he represented the Cuban father of Elián González during the 2000 child custody dispute. Is working to strip a person of freedom and successfully forcing him back into totalitarianism a prerequisite for legal work in the Obama admin? What does this tell us about Obama’s intent toward relations with Cuba?

More recently, Craig swam in sewage as he represented United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan during the Volker Commission’s investigations of the UN oil-for-food scandal in 2004.

And this may be a peek into the low regard we’ll see from Obama for the military: Recently, Craig represented Pedro Miguel González Pinzón, a Panamanian legislator wanted in the US for the murder in 1992 of a US soldier, and the attempted murder of another.

According to the bio on his firm’s Web site, Craig also has a storied history of defending various corporate executives charged with such offenses as tax-dodging and bribery. Personally, given the behaviors preceding the Wall Street melt-down, I’d rather see a prosecutor of such crimes next to the president, not a defender of these slime.

To be fair, in 1977 Craig scored one for justice and order, representing an FBI agent accused of illegal wiretapping, breaking and entering, and mail opening in connection with the FBI investigation of the Weather Underground.

The pick of Craig shows Obama once again trading change for experience.

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n Good Morning America this morning a still unrepentant Bill Ayres came very close to calling for violent action against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan - so close that any crazy could easily have heard in his words an endorsement of a new round of bombings.

Here’s the passage, from ABC’s write-up of the interview:

“What you call the violent past, that was a time when thousands of people were being murdered every month by our own government… We were on the right side,” he told “GMA.”

The co-founder of the Weather Underground was, as McCain has claimed, unrepentant about the the bombings his group committed during the 1960s.

“The content of the Vietnam protest is that there were despicable acts going on, but the despicable acts were being done by our goverment [sic]… I never hurt or killed anyone,” Ayers said.

“Frankly, I dont [sic] think we did enough, just as today I dont’ [sic] think we’ve done enough to stop these wars,” he said. (emphasis added)

In the context of previous interviews, “not enough” meant Ayres and the wife of Frankenstein felt there should have been more bombings, enough bombings to bring the American government to its knees. If that wasn’t enough then, then his words, “just as today I don’t thing we’ve done enough to stop these wars” is a lament that there has not been enough violent - and terrorist - actions against the wars.

I’m comfortable using “terrorist” to describe Ayres despite his denials, because he and his group were planning a terrorist act - complete with bombs stuffed with nails, nuts and bolts - to be used at at dance at a military base. Part of his regrets, I’ve always felt, is that he and Dohrn didn’t get a chance to glory in the human carnage they would have caused from that bomb.

Later in the interview, perhaps aware that he had brushed up pretty close to a charge of inciting to violence, Ayres moderated his comment:

“We knew it was wrong. We knew it was illegal. We knew it was immoral,” he said, but the group’s members felt they “had to do more” to stop the Vietnam War.

He urged people today “to participate in resistance, in nonviolent, direct action” to stop the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Which is it? Do more of the stuff the Weather Underground did, or just be a nonviolent protester? In my book, the first statement is the true statement, and the follow-up is the cover-up.

It’s not surprising that Ayres hasn’t taken measure of his actions. He still thinks his side won in Vietnam, and refuses to measure the deaths caused by the US during the war - which he incorrectly refers to as murders - against the actions of the Communist Viet Cong and North Vietnamese army, nor does he measure it against the nightmare of murders, imprisonment, denial of freedoms, poverty and death that followed our departure and the fall of South Vietnam.

This is because, as I said, his side won. Capitalists were forced to become socialists; all spoke with one voice, the voice of “the people.” This is the vision Obama’s “family friend” still holds for our country, and he’s dedicating his life to brainwashing educating the next generation to make it happen.