Facetiously, of course.
     Cf. CNN, Political Ticker, Obama adviser who called Clinton a ‘monster’ back,

     Samantha Power, the Obama foreign policy adviser who stepped down from her post earlier this year after labeling Sen. Hillary Clinton a “monster,” is now working for the president-elect’s transition team. …
     Power is also formally listed as part of the State Department agency review team…and could directly work with Clinton should she be nominated, as expected, for the Secretary of State job.
     Power stepped down from the Obama campaign in March after she called Clinton — then Obama’s rival for the Democratic nomination — a “monster” and someone who “is stooping to anything.” The comments came in an interview with a Scottish newspaper.
     “You just look at her and think, ‘Ergh,’ ” Power also told The Scotsman then. “The amount of deceit she has put forward is really unattractive.” …

     Is Barack taking this “team of rivals” thing too far? Or is this all just an elaborate way to *@^$ over Bill Clinton?

     Bill Clinton has to be symbolically emasculated by Barack Obama in an Oedipal fashion sacrifice a great deal in order for Hillary to become Sec of State, see the Guardian, Clinton named as Obama’s secretary of state,

     …Most notably, Bill Clinton has agreed to divulge the identities of 208,000 donors to his presidential library and foundation. He also agreed to identify all future donors.
     The deal also sees several measures designed to rein in the activities of the “Big Dog”, as the former president is sometimes called. The Clinton Global Initiative will stop accepting donations from foreign governments and cease holding meetings overseas, while Clinton will submit his lucrative speaking schedule to review and submit any new sources of income to an ethical review. …

; and then Barack can drop her at any time. Leaving the Clintons up a creek.
     Or so he thinks.

     Obama is the world’s most successful politician at the moment, but if he thinks he can play “[Samantha] Power Politics” on that dynamic duo from Arkansas, he may be in for an unpleasant surprise a couple years (months) down the road…

     (Postscript: Whatever’s in Barack’s subconscious–or publicly unrevealed conscious–, in inviting the Clintons on board perhaps for the pleasure of having them subordinate to him, it is hard to conclude he may not be flirting with disaster. Even some Republican like Brent Scowcroft–or of course, any qualified Democrat, such as Bill Richardson–as Sec of State might not be as dangerous as having the Clintons there; especially since Obama could instead just, say, leave Hillary in the Senate, maybe as majority leader to placate her.
     He is quite free to risk his own mistakes, though.)

     See the Guardian, Abe Hayeem, A monument to intolerance? The Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s plan for a ‘Museum of Tolerance’ on top of a Muslim cemetery is causing anger in Jerusalem,

     The whittling away and destruction of Muslim memory and history has been a key aim in Jerusalem’s development (as in the rest of Israel). …
     The Muslim cemetery in Mamilla, West Jerusalem, is suffering a similar fate in one section, where hundreds of skeletons are being unearthed and boxed, to make way for the Simon Wiesenthal Centre’s euphemistically-named “Museum of Tolerance”. …
     The building itself will be “the world’s largest and most expensive museum complex”, 30,000 sq m , built at a cost of $250 million, with money raised by wealthy American Jewish donors. It will include “two museums, a library-education centre, a conference centre and a 500-seat performing arts theatre” and seems more of a tourist attraction that will “swamp the fragile urban fabric of Nahalat Shiva” a poor area of Jerusalem. The building contains the Gehry trademarks and shapes – twisting, leaning, colliding, collapsing, folding, tilting, swirling (which Zandberg considers McDonaldesque) – all crammed together fortress-like on a raised plinth, and an unnecessary intervention into Jerusalem’s uniqueness. In fact local reaction has described it variously as a white elephant, Orwellian, or the world’s largest physical oxymoron. Some say it is doubling up on the Yad Vashem with its proposed Holocaust library, and that the money would rather be spent on helping still-impoverished Holocaust survivors.
     Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre claims that “All citizens of Israel, Jews and non-Jews, are the real beneficiaries of this decision” and that the project will be used to create mutual respect. Yet this will be a distinctly Zionist-orientated complex, which, as declared at the launch, is to express the dream of the foundation of the Israeli state. …
     Rabbi Hier is reported to have said that while the museum will not conspicuously avoid the Palestinian situation, “It’s not about the experience of the Palestinian people. When they have a state, they’ll have their own museum.”…

     I don’t know if Hayeem is entirely unbiased here, but at least he raises interesting questions. Which is almost always a good thing to do.

     What?
     Well, McCain beat Chuckabee, uh, Huckabee; Ah-nut Schwarzenegger and Rockhead, uh, “Rocky” Sly Stallone–along with the unforgivable Clint Eastwood–endorsed McCain, who was in turn beaten by Barack Oba…

     Thus, Obama vicariously beat ALL 4 of those guys. Chuckles, Terminator, Dirty Harry AND Rambo. But when you have “Rahmbo the Nine-Fingered Like Frodo” as Chief of Stuff, who needs Rambo??

     And when is Steven Seagal going to be appointed Secretary of Defense? Huh? (Maybe after Gates is crashed, so to speak…)

     –Last but least, don’t forget Heidi Montag’s endorsement of McCain. I knew that would be Johnny boy’s winning ace in the hole.

     I’m not sure Code Pink has ever been my favorite group, but I see an e-mail they sent a few days ago,

     …We can also give Peace on Earth by saying No to War and War Toys. We are grateful for CODEPINK Pittsburgh, who stage their “Women Don’t Buy the War” event the day after Thanksgiving each year to protest the human and financial cost of war, and LaOnf, an Iraqi non-violence coalition, who, in spreading the message of No War Toys to Iraqi children, were able to get war toys banned from the Muthanna province. …

     I think maybe it’s more important to ban the WAR, but what do I know.

     (Some further information linked in the e-mail claims that Iraqi kids playing with war toys have been accidentally shot by soldiers, so that there may be some purpose to the ban after all; but that information should have been in the e-mail proper: and in any case, the irony of banning war toys, while war rages on, is horrific…)

     In honor of the Mumbai dead, etc.

     Pray and reflect, as you will. Thank you.

     On Barbara Walters’ “20/20″ interview of Barack (and Michelle) Obama tonight, Barack had a great deal to say. (And so did Michelle, though we may focus on her husband in this post)

Quotes from Mr. Obama:

     “I am not a miracle worker.” (Is he sure?)

     Aid to auto companies should be a “bridge loan to somewhere, and not a bridge loan to nowhere”! I guess he thinks the auto company heads are like Sarah Palin!
     (Obama also called the 3 auto company heads “tone deaf”)

     “When Mama’s happy, everybody’s happy.”
     (about Michelle)

     “We rise or fall as one nation.”
     (about cooperation)

     And about his not planning to be a judge, he labeled himself “a little too restless to sit on a bench all day long”!!

     …As for paraphrases (when I don’t have exact quotes):

     He said of bank baron bonuses (see our previous post), that the big bankers should make sacrifices like their workers are doing.

     And when BW asked him, re his Clinton-esque alleged Cabinet appointments, “What happened to change?”, B said that people that have experience are useful, but the change comes from his own personal vision.

     Finally (although he said it early on in the interview), he said something to the effect that his administration is one that every single day is trying to make the lives of ordinary Americans a little bit better.
     –Let’s hope so! That would be something really to give thanks for.

     (…Last note: Obama said that his girls would be taught, re the new White House dog, to “scoop the poop”. Some of us still think the word “po-p” should be avoided in polite company, even by popular Presidents-elect…)

     See AP via the Detroit News, Obama: bank execs shouldn’t get bonuses this year,

     President-elect Barack Obama thinks bank executives should forgo their bonuses this year to show they are taking responsibility amid difficult economic times. …
     According to excerpts of the interview released by ABC, Obama said bank executives should make sacrifices because so many other people are struggling as the nation’s economy slips further. Some financial firms, including Goldman Sachs, the Swiss bank UBS and the British bank Barclays, have said they aren’t handing out annual bonuses to top executives, and Obama encouraged more to follow.
     “I think that if you are already worth tens of millions of dollars, and you are having to lay off workers,” Obama said, “the least you can do is say, ‘I’m willing to make some sacrifice as well, because I recognize that there are people who are a lot less well off, who are going through some pretty tough times.’” …

     Let’s hope some people actually take that to heart, rather than laughing themselves silly in their oak-paneled executive suites…

Rappin’ Forte free to music-play for another day (photo courtesy of the London Times)

     See the London Times (online), Rapper and police sergeant among President Bush pardons,

     A Grammy Award-winning hip-hop artist and a former Detroit police sergeant are among 16 individuals to be pardoned or to have their prison sentences commuted by President Bush. …
     John Edward Forte, a Grammy Award-winning rapper, is arguably the best known of those pardoned. He was arrested at Newark International Airport in 2000 after being found with a briefcase containing $1.4m of cocaine and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
Forte, who has always protested his innocence, co-wrote and produced two songs on The Score, the Fugees’ Grammy-winning 1996 album and several singers, including Carly Simon, had joined a campaign for his pardon, claiming he was not given a fair-trial.
     The singer, of North Brunswick, New Jersey, will be released after serving half of a 14 year sentence. …

     Nice to see Bush is not prejudiced against rappers.
     And also from the Times, Pardon bill for boycott heroine,

     The Alabama Legislature has approved a Bill that sets up a process to pardon Rosa Parks and hundreds of others who were arrested for violating segregation laws. …
     The legislation will now go to Bob Riley, the Governor of Alabama, who has not confirmed whether he intends to sign it. Some black politicians have questioned whether civil rights figures should be pardoned when the laws that they violated have been ruled unconstitutional.

     Shouldn’t she be pardoning them instead? or something.

     …By the way, will Obama be pardoning Phil Spector? Just wondering.

     This may be our last “Dingell dinged out” post for a while: focusing on ideas put nicely by the UM-Ann Arbor student paper, the Michigan Daily, in From the Daily: Changing chairs–Dingell’s defeat may be bad for Michigan, good for country,

     In a week that couldn’t have gone much worse for Michigan, the final hit last week came Thursday. That’s when Rep. John Dingell, long a protector of Michigan’s automotive industry, lost his chairmanship on the House Energy and Commerce Committee. Though it’s difficult to say this because Dingell has been a great congressman for Michigan and the country, his loss may be a blessing in disguise. …
     Overall, Waxman is a decent replacement. While losing Dingell’s powerful support on the committee may be a hard pill for Michigan to swallow, it is better for the country. That’s not to say that Waxman should run roughshod on the automakers, regulating them into nonexistence. Like Dingell, Waxman needs to understand that many lives and families depend on this industry. As Waxman considers important environmental issues like fuel efficient standards, he must find the balance between protecting these people and pushing the Big Three to protect the environment we all live in. Dingell wasn’t quite able to do this, but hopefully Waxman can.
     It is tough to see Dingell go. But, in doing so, the state (and the country as well) will see necessary change on matters of alternative energy and the environment.

     There are 50 states, and we can’t just consider one, we have to think of the other forty-nine…glad that the Daily noticed that. Someone had to, and most of the other Michigan papers haven’t been very balanced about the issue at all…..
     Maybe it really does take young people to see the truth sometimes!!

     On a piece of paper received from a church today, I read a sentiment by St. John of Avila, to the effect that “One act of thanksgiving when things go wrong is worth one thousand thank-yous when things are going well.”

     Indeed.
     (And quite applicable to this period of our collapsing economy at home and dangerous situation abroad. . .Happy Thanksgiving!)