From Top of the Ticket: It may come as a huge surprise for everyone that ex-President Bill Clinton thinks that ex-First Lady Hillary Clinton would be a “really great” secretary of state in the new administration. His reaction comes amid unsourced reports that President-elect Barack Obama is considering his former Democratic primary rival for the post of chief U.S. diplomat. She’s said she just wants to be the best possible

How Obama got elected: I’d add my piece about voters being conditioned by many of our institutions to respond to certain ideological cues and easy political bromides — and for good measure, throw in a bit about how so-called conservatives who went for Obama were gulled by a boogey man created for their benefit, namely, this idea that improperly educated religious conservatives are hoping to burn books and build a

The cankles that roared. Not really sure how this will work, policy-wise: will Clinton provide a muscular foreign policy cover for Obama? Or will she now be free to adopt a more “progressive” foreign policy, and please the base that largely abandoned her in favor of Barack? One of the reasons I would have been less concerned with a Clinton presidency than I am with a Barack Obama stewardship is

That is, if you’re interested in returning to the economic paradigm of the Carter years. Foreign-owned manufacturers who build cars with American workers pay wages similar to GM’s. But their expenses for benefits are a fraction of GM’s. GM is contractually required to support thousands of workers in the UAW’s “Jobs Bank” program, which guarantees nearly full wages and benefits for workers who lose their jobs due to automation or

NYT, “Post-Guantánamo: A New Detention Law?”: As a presidential candidate, Senator Barack Obama sketched the broad outlines of a plan to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba: try detainees in American courts and reject the Bush administration’s military commission system. Now, as Mr. Obama moves closer to assuming responsibility for Guantánamo, his pledge to close the detention center is bringing to the fore thorny questions under consideration by

On FoxNews Sunday with Chris Wallace: “I think the other thing that I’ve found that’s been lacking over the last four years, especially the last two cycles–’06 and ’08—we don’t know how to talk to people. We’ve absolutely forgotten how to communicate a message … to espouse those principles in the context of people’s everyday lives. … Our party needs to have a voice, it needs to have a relevant

A dubious and self-serving equation long espoused by those scholars reared on identity politics, postcolonialist theory, and the Balkanizing structural imperatives of multiculturalism — given perhaps its most popular airing by Spike Lee, who, rumor has it, once got into a fight with a swirly cone, accusing the vanilla of suffering from jungle fever while berating the chocolate for it’s desire to “assimilate.” David Thompson explores the trajectory of such

Nope, Sorry. Never heard of the guy.

History, it is on the march. And this time it’s wearing lederhosen, munching on Belgian chocolates, and smoking Gaulloises cigarettes. So much for American “hegemony.” I have little doubt that any epic failure on the part of this new regulatory body will lead to a rather predictable round of scapegoating — with the “world banking money men” to blame. The more things change… (h/t Geoff B)