That said, I am sensitive to the fact that letting the big three go out of business would be a pretty serious blow to our already fragile economy. But if the solution to what ails automakers is an infusion of cash, wouldn’t it be better to get banks involved? If we’ve already set aside $700 billion to help bailout banks in the hopes that it will free up lending, wouldn’t it be a better idea to just have Congress mandate that banks participating in the bailout must offer debtor-in-possession loans to the big three. That way, if an auto manufacturer fails, they need to file for Chapter 11 like any other company whose poor business decisions lead to their downfall AND the banks free up some cash and start lending again.

Obviously this is probably an oversimplification, but there’s gotta be a better way of saving the auto industry than just writing another giant check.

The best reason for Obama to be looking for a place in his cabinet for Clinton is simple: to get her out of the Senate. Just ask George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Jimmy Carter what it was like to have a once or future presidential rival in the Senate serving as a one-person Roman tribunal. Remember how easily the press gravitated to John McCain in ‘01 or Bob Kerrey in ‘93 or Ted Kennedy in ‘77 to allow them to be one-senator judge/juries on Administration proposals? The upside for Obama putting Clinton at State (or even the Pentagon) is that it gets her out of the Senate and gets her out of the domestic policy debates.

For Clinton, if she’s really interested in making another run at the White House in 2016, then this will be the perfect setup for her. Taking on a high-profile, nonpartisan role like Secretary of State would keep her name in the news and do so in a much more positive light than the vapid “he said, she said” press-manufactured drama that largely defines her public persona now.

Additionally, if she wants to be President, getting out of the Senate would be a much better long-term career decision. Of the dozens of Senators over the past half century that have tried to make the jump into the White House, the only two who have been successful have had relatively short careers (Kennedy 8 years, Obama 4 years). I get the impression that the longer someone serves in a legislative role, the more they’re opened up to the “he/she has never run anything” executive experience argument or silly attacks like “Senator X has voted against puppies and ice cream more than 900 times”.
It seems to me that the longer you stick around the Senate, the harder it is to escape.

UPDATE : My bad. It turns out I misread the article regarding the Plain hoax. She really is THAT dumb. Sorry folks. Blogging and NyQuil don’t mix.

The contradictions give rise to questions about the essential McCain. Is he an opportunist with a conscience, or a man with so singular a moral compass that sometimes only he knows where it points?

In fact, McCain lives by a series of honor codes, instilled in him by his father (an admiral) and his father’s father (also an admiral). To boil them down to their simplest formulation: One must never lie, cheat or steal. McCain would be the first to admit that he has failed, sometimes spectacularly, at all three. But he also has perfected the familiar American ritual of coming clean and moving on.

“He is the best apologizer in politics,” said Dan Schnur, who was McCain’s campaign spokesman in 2000 and now directs the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at USC.

That’s John McCain in a nutshell.

I find it amazing that so many in the press seemed so disillusioned by John McCain’s campaign this year and were so quick to praise his gracious concession speech as the “real” McCain. He’s the honorable “country first” public servant AND the sleazy opportunist scumbag who spent the last few weeks implying that our next president is a terrorist-affiliated, socialist America-hater. McCain acolytes are so in love with the notion of McCain the POW who has bravely owns up to his moral failings, they overlook the fact that his string of moral and ethical lapses are as intristic parts of his character as the virtues that he extols on the campaign trail. John McCain the honor-obsessed POW and John McCain the lobbyist-courting adulterer are the SAME PERSON. They’re both the “real” McCain.

As Barack Obama begins the hard work of turning his campaign promises into reality come January, we’ll see constant reminders that the nasty xenophobia of the McCain/Palin campaign has poisoned the well of public opinion. John McCain didn’t have to run a dirty campaign. He could have just been the decent man that we’ve all seen he can be. Rather than lose a campaign with his dignity intact, John McCain made a choice to repeat his cycle of dishonor followed by a public show of remorse. Fool me once and all that.

So while many might want to look at John McCain’s concession speech and his inevitable public mea culpas as a return to form, forgiveness for “the best apologizer in politics” won’t be coming quickly from me. Anyone who follows John McCain’s career could have seen his campaign’s “relapse” coming from a mile away. Spare me.

I feel it is necessary to move an agenda that I told the American people I would move. Something refreshing about coming off an election, even more refreshing since we all got some sleep last night, but there’s — you go out and you make your case, and you tell the people this is what I intend to do. And after hundreds of speeches and three debates and interviews and the whole process, where you keep basically saying the same thing over and over again, that when you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view, and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress, that I made it clear what I intend to do as the President, now let’s work to — and the people made it clear what they wanted, now let’s work together.

And it’s one of the wonderful — it’s like earning capital. You asked, do I feel free. Let me put it to you this way: I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it. It is my style. That’s what happened in the — after the 2000 election, I earned some capital. I’ve earned capital in this election — and I’m going to spend it for what I told the people I’d spend it on

Yesterday, Barack Obama beat John McCain by more than 7 million popular votes and at least 186 electoral votes. That’s a lot of political capital and he earned it the old-fashioned way, by bringing people together :

When it was over, more than 120 million pulled a lever or mailed a ballot, and the system could barely accommodate the demands of Extreme Democracy. Obama won more votes than anyone else in U.S. history, the biggest Democratic victory since Lyndon Johnson crushed another Arizona Senator 44 years ago. Obama won men, which no Democrat had managed since Bill Clinton. He won 54% of Catholics, 66% of Latinos, 68% of new voters — a multicultural, multigenerational movement that shatters the old political ice pack. He let loose a deep blue wave that washed well past the coasts and the college towns, into the South through Virginia and Florida, the Mountain West with Colorado and New Mexico, into the Ohio Valley and the Midwestern battlegrounds: you could almost walk from Maine to Minnesota without getting your feet wet in a red state. After months of mapmaking all the roads to 270, Obama tore right past with ease.

As the New York Times showed, Obama’s victory wasn’t just isolated to big cities on either coast.

The biggest problem with our energy policy has been to lurch from crisis to trance. And what we need is a sustained, serious effort. Now, I actually think the biggest opportunity right now is not just gas prices at the pump but the fact that the engine for economic growth for the last 20 years is not going to be there for the next 20, and that was consumer spending. I mean, basically, we turbo-charged this economy based on cheap credit. Whatever else we think is going to happen over the next certainly 5 years, one thing we know, the days of easy credit are going to be over because there is just too much de-leveraging taking place, too much debt both at the government level, corporate level and consumer level. And what that means is that just from a purely economic perspective, finding the new driver of our economy is going to be critical. There is no better potential driver that pervades all aspects of our economy than a new energy economy.

I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.

For us to say we are just going to completely revamp how we use energy in a way that deals with climate change, deals with national security and drives our economy, that’s going to be my number one priority when I get into office

Unlike 2004, in which George W. Bush misinterpreted his victory as a mandate to privatize social security, Barack Obama has been very open about his intentions for this entire campaign. Yes, Obama has promised to work across the aisle (a promise I think he intends to keep, btw), but he did so while running on a platform that was, if John McCain and his Republican allies are to be believed, “liberal” and “socialist”.

As John McCain was quick to point out in their final debate, Obama wasn’t running against George W. Bush, he was running against John McCain, a straight-talking Republican “maverick”. If John McCain is the centrist reformer that he claimed to be, then the contrast between McCain and Obama is even more stark. Given their consummate differences, shouldn’t the fact that voters chose Barack Obama mean something?

Now that he has won the presidency in a landslide, Barack Obama is under no obligation to govern like a centrist or temper his policy goals to accommodate a point-of-view that the American people have decisively rejected. Obama won. Elections have consequences.

With so many great things to say about this election, I can’t help but dwell on the fact that Prop. 8 has passed. The fact that this failure was in “liberal” California was a crushing blow. Through shameful propaganda and the inadvertent assistance of the mushy-mouthed Democrats who tried to straddle both sides of this issue (I’m looking at you, Barack), bigotry has been enshrined into our state constitution. Thousands of marriages are going to be nullified because a slim majority of insecure strangers want their discomfort about homosexuality to be codified into law.

It’s hard to celebrate an Obama victory with this stunning reminder that Americans can still be small and bitter and hateful and cruel.