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- Barack Obama held his first press conference as president-elect this morning, remarking on the continuing "sobering" news about the economy. As Ben Smith observes, the press corps rose to meet Obama as they ceremoniously do for the sitting president.
- David Plouffe, Obama's campaign manager, will not be joining the White House staff in January, and (sorta) shoots down rumors that he might run for the Senate seat vacated by vice president-elect Joe Biden. Plouffe is a Delaware native.
- Headed into a recount next month, Al Franken is down by a mere 238 votes, according to The Minnesota Star-Tribune.
- The conventional wisdom seems to be that Senate Democrats will strip Joe Lieberman of his committee chairmanship while offering to let him remain in the Democratic caucus. In such an event Lieberman is likely to take up Mitch McConnell's offer to join the Republican caucus.
- Everybody's favorite Muslim basher, Rep. Virgil Goode (VA-05), is currently losing his seat to challenger Tom Perriello by 745 votes. I guess Real America™ has spoken.
- Sen. Robert Byrd has voluntarily stepped down from his chairmanship of the Senate Appropriations Committee, making Sen. Daniel Inouye next in line. The prestigious Senate Foreign Relations chair, currently held by Sen. Joe Biden, would normally pass to Sen. Chris Dodd but Dodd is more likely to stay in his Banking and Finance chairmanship. Further complicating the musical chairs in the Senate is John Kerry, third in line for Foreign Relations, but who has expressed a strong desire to be Secretary of State in the Obama administration. This would leave Sen. Russ Feingold, who has been arguably the best spokesman for liberal opposition to the entirety of Bush's foreign policy, as the fourth stringer for this powerful position.
- Democrat Jim Martin isn't wasting any time in the second round of his bout to wrestle away Saxby Chambliss' Senate seat in Georgia. Martin has already gone on the air with a new ad designed to mobilize Obama supporters in the state.
- James Vega warns that "after the 1992 election, it took over a year for the first signs of significant right-wing populist activity to appear in America" but "this time very genuinely disturbing trends are starting to appear even before Obama takes office." Vega cites one caller to the G. Gordon Liddy radio show who argued that the Obama "civilian corps" would lead to concentration camps and Liddy's response: "Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei." Right on cue, John Derbyshire, at The Corner: "Arbeit Macht Frei." See also The Huffington Post's compilation of various right-wing blogosphere reactions to the Obama presidency.
--Mori Dinauer
