Transition 2009

This week is the science edition:

There has been a lot of complaining from the left that Obama isn’t appointing enough liberals to his cabinet. To those on our side of the blogosphere I ask; when did Obama become a Liberal? I remember supporting a candidate who was pretty much a moderate, despite my own liberal beliefs. I was also very happy to support this candidate and have been very pleased with his picks so far. After the last eight years, and with all the problems facing our nation today, the last thing we need is another ideologue running the country.

He is continuing to lay out his plans for getting our economy back on track. That's much more than Bush is doing - blaming everyone else.

One thing that is a big difference between Bush and Obama is the lack of cronies we see going into our new administration.

Barack Obama’s picks for Cabinet and other senior posts are many things: centrists, veterans, rivals. Most of all, though, they’re big: big names, big intellects and big egos.

The president-elect’s national security and economic policy teams, inside the White House and out, will be led by power politics veterans, all but one of them older than the president-elect, and all accustomed to being the most important voice in the room.

No horse racers running emergency response agencies? Nope – this is the sign of a man willing to actually run the government instead of making it a clearing house for his friends that failed at everything else in life.

Change is awesome! The Obama transition team has launched a section on change.gov dedicated to healthcare reform. There are already close to 1,200 comments on it. Imagine a government letting people voice their opinion? I thought that was America’s principal, but wasn’t so sure after the last eight years. Well it looks like it may be our principal again.

But that isn’t all. John Conyers is working on a single payer healthcare package and now has a page dedicated to informing the public about it.

A core belief of the Democratic Party is starting to see life, and could become reality. How many times has that happened for the Republicans?

No big surprise here:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates has agreed to stay on under President-elect Barack Obama, according to officials in both parties. Obama plans to announce a national-security team early next week that includes Gates at the Pentagon and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) as secretary of state, officials said.

Retired Marine Gen. James Jones, former Marine commandant and commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Europe, will be named national security adviser, the officials said.

I think it’s a good move. Keeping someone around who might know where the bodies are buried can be beneficial.

Ok I am impressed:

Melody Barnes, Domestic Policy Council served as chief counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee from 1985 to 1993. Want to get an idea of how progressive she is? Read this: In January of 2007, prior to President Bush's state of the union address, Barnes wrote this essay for the Washington Post, What a Progressive President Might Say:

Here at home there is urgent work to do to fight the historically high -- and growing -- gap between our richest and poorest citizens. While the mean income of households on the low end of the income spectrum -- the bottom 20 percent -- is just $10,655 a year, the income of the top twenty percent of households averages almost $160,000. That's 15 times as much. At the same time, according to the latest census figures, the middle class, beset with stagnant wages and mountainous debts, is shrinking. The sad fact is that one of our most cherished values as a society, namely equality of opportunity, is fading as a reality for far too many people...

More like this please?

Here’s the run down:

Tim Geithner - treasury secretary

Larry Summers - National Economic Council.

Christina Romer - chair of the President's Council of Economic Advisers.

Melody Barnes - director of the Domestic Policy Council

Heather Higginbottom - deputy director of the Domestic Policy Council.

I’ll be adding Geithner into the Cabinet 44 page later on.

Obama has announced that Robert Gibbs will be his press secretary. This really comes as no surprise. Gibbs will be great in that job. As a reminder of how well he is poised to take over from the line of idiots Bush has had, here is when Gibbs owned Hannity.

That’s the reports going around this morning:

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) has been chosen to serve as secretary of the vast and troubled Department of Homeland Security for President-elect Obama, Democratic officials said. Napolitano is a border governor who will now be responsible for immigration policy and border security, which are part of Homeland Security’s myriad functions.

Napolitano brings law-and-order experience from her stint as the Grand Canyon State’s first female attorney general. One of the nation’s most prominent female elected officials, she made frequent appearances on behalf of Barack Obama during the campaign. She was re-elected to a second four-year term in 2006.

Napolitano is a centrist, but also a very reasonable one. There is some moaning going on in the Blogosphere that if Napolitano does accept the job we will be losing a governors seat and possible the best candidate against John McCain in 2010. I say oh well. If she is the best person for the job in the eyes of Obama, then we should support her. I’m sure we can find someone else to run against McCain and the Republican that would replace Napolitano as governor would have to run again in 2010 also. That’s a lifetime in politics and we can always see something else happen that turns the tides in our favor.

The news right now is that Tom Daschle will head up the Department of Health and Human services and that he has accepted the position.

(updated and bumped)

Newsweek is reporting that D.C. power attorney Eric Holder is being tapped for Attorney General.

(Update 1)

NBC news is now reporting that Holder has accepted the position. Once confirmation comes out from the transition team, I will put him in the Cabinet 44 section.

(Update 2)

Via The Washington Independent, here is Holder on the detainees:

“We owe the American people a reckoning. It is our responsibility as citizens to preserve and protect our constitution… Let me be clear: I firmly believe that there is evil in the world, and that we still face grave dangers to our security. But our ability to lead the world in combatting these dangers depends not only on the strength of our military leadership but our moral leadership as well. … To recapture it, we can no longer allow ourselves to be ruled by fear. We must evaluate our policies and our practices in the harsh light of day and steel ourselves to face the world’s dangers in accord with the rule of law.”

Now that's a view I like!

Tonight 60 Minutes gives us the Obama interview, which contains this:

In a wide-ranging interview that will air Sunday night on the CBS program, “60 Minutes,” President-elect Barack Obama said he would choose at least one Republican for a position in his cabinet but declined to hint at who he had in mind.

“Will there be Republicans?” asked Steve Kroft, the “60 Minutes” interviewer. “Yes,” Mr. Obama replied. But when pressed, the president-elect would not name the G.O.P leaders he is considering nor did he tip his cards about which cabinet office he saw as a good fit for a member of the opposing party.

I have heard so much chatter from the right about how Obama isn’t being bi-partisan, especially after he picked Rahm as his chief of staff. It looks like Obama is out to prove them wrong again.

A familiar face from the Clinton years:

Gregory B. Craig, a well-known Washington lawyer who quarterbacked President Bill Clinton’s impeachment defense, has been chosen White House counsel by President-elect Barack Obama, according to Democratic officials.

Craig is intimately familiar with the president-elect’s record because he played the role of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in debate preparations.

The officials said Obama has settled on Craig but were not sure when the appointment would be announced.

Harriett Miers he is not – thank God!

Yesterday the Obama campaigned named two big advocates of net neutrality to his transition team. The best part is that they are heading up the review of the FCC:

Susan Crawford, a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, and Kevin Werbach, a former FCC staffer, organizer of the annual tech conference Supernova, and a Wharton professor, will lead the Obama-Biden transition team's review of the FCC.

Both are highly-regarded outside-the-Beltway experts in telecom policy, and they've both been pretty harsh critics of the Bush administration's telecom policies in the past year.

Perhaps we are looking at a new dawn in the world of online privacy and fairness under President Obama.