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- It's (almost) official: Hillary Clinton will be Secretary of State in the Obama administration. For homework, read Spencer Ackerman on the loyalists Clinton will likely bring to State and how that could affect Obama's foreign policy.
- Timothy Geithner is expected to head the Obama Treasury, as Robert Kuttner suggested in September. Other likely appointments include Bill Richardson for Commerce Secretary, Patrick Gaspard for Political Director, and Ret. Gen. James L. Jones for National Security Adviser.
- Al Franken is claiming that the ongoing Minnesota recount now has him behind incumbent Norm Coleman by double digits, with about half of the ballots counted. And for true political junkies, you can watch a live feed of the recount here.
- Attorney General Michael Mukasey collapsed last night while concluding a speech at the Federalist Society but was released from George Washington University Hospital this morning. A battery of tests indicated "he had not suffered a stroke or other heart-related incident."
- Barack Obama's 21-month campaign for raised half a billion dollars online, according to The Washington Post. The president-elect has also extended his influence to pitching for Jim Martin in a Georgia radio spot and recording a video promoting Chicago's bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics.
- Marin Cogan has an excellent piece in The New Republic on conservatism's new phantom menace: reinstating the Fairness Doctrine. On the same subject, this post by Nate Silver comes about as close to the Platonic ideal as I've ever seen towards explaining the relationship between talk radio to the conservative movement: "There are a certain segment of conservatives who literally cannot believe that anybody would see the world differently than the way they do. They have not just forgotten how to persuade; they have forgotten about the necessity of persuasion. ... Stimulation [what conservative talk radio does -MD], however, is somewhat the opposite of persuasion. You're not going to persuade someone of something when you're (literally, in Ziegler's case) yelling in their ear. The McCain campaign was all about stimulation. The Britney Spears ads weren't persuasive, but they sure were stimulating! "Drill, baby, drill" wasn't persuasive, but it sure was stimulating! Sarah Palin wasn't persuasive, but she sure was (literally, in Rich Lowry's case) stimulating!" (emphasis in original)
- A popular new meme concerning the revival of conservatism seems to be the "technology will save us all" approach toward what Jonathan Stein calls "The GOP's Internet Insurgents." This is all interesting stuff, but at the end of the day the ability to communicate more effectively and more widely isn't the same thing as making the GOP brand more appealing, which is the real problem.
- The only thing I don't understand about this AP story reporting that Fred "future of the GOP" Thompson is returning to acting and abandoning his (quest?) for the RNC chairmanship is why the AP chose to claim Thompson is returning to acting; hasn't he already been playing the part of a laughably unambitious politician for the better part of a year now?
- And finally, Michelle Bachmann is now claiming that her McCarthyite rant last month is actually just an "urban legend." Uh-huh. Shorter Bachmann: I respect the intelligence of my audience so little that I assume they don't recognize the existence of the video recording technology which captured my unhinged rant in the first place.
--Mori Dinauer
