Penny Starr, CNS News.com

 

An 18-year veteran of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), who advocated for federal legislation to give the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States a path to citizenship, has been tapped for President-elect Barack Obama’s White House staff.

 

Cecilia Muñoz, who currently serves as senior vice president for the office of research, advocacy and legislation at the NCLR, will serve as director for intergovernmental affairs in the Obama administration.

 

“We’re continuing to build a White House team that can rise to the challenges facing this country,” Obama said when he announced the appointment of Muñoz and Jonathan Favreau as director of speechwriting last week.

 

“And I couldn’t be more excited to announce Jon and Cecilia," Obama added. Read article.

Traditional Values.org

 

 President-Elect Barack Obama has picked Dr. Susan Rice to be the new United Nations Ambassador.

 

Rice served as Bill Clinton’s Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs and later worked as foreign policy advisor to John Kerry and John Edwards during their 2004 presidential campaign.

 

Terrorism experts blame Rice for having played a key role in blocking efforts to neutralize Osama bin Laden in the 1990s. According to Mansoor Ijaz, a former trouble shooter for Clinton, the FBI had their efforts to capture bin Laden “overruled every single time by the State Department, by Susan Rice and her cronies, who were hell-bent on destroying the Sudan.”

 

In a Washington Post Op-Ed published in 2002, Mansoor Ijaz and Tim Carney, U.S. Ambassador to Sudan blamed Susan Rice for being a major obstacle to accepting offers of help from Sudan and to share their intelligence on bin Laden’s terror network. Read article.

George Neumayr, Spectator.org

 

The bipartisan cooing over Barack Obama's selection of Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State is a little hard to take. She hasn't become more conservative; Republicans have become more complacent -- and PC.

 

There was Condoleezza Rice on Monday extolling Hillary Clinton's "deep love" for America's "values." Which ones?

 

Hillary Clinton has long made it clear that she considers those values passé, preferring the Brave New World ideology of the internationalist elite to the philosophy of America's founding.

 

If anything, the State Department gives her a powerful perch to advance UN-style propaganda at the expense of American values. The striped-pants Strobe Talbotts she will select to work there find those values tiresome.

 

Yes, desperately needing to contrast herself with Obama, she faked up some populist concerns during the campaign, but the Hillary Clinton of the not-so-distant past oozed contempt for Americans who worried about the erosion of American traditions and the country's sovereignty under corrupting internationalist influence. Read article.

Tom Deweese, Canada Free Press.com

 

Former Vice President Al Gore had quite a year. He produced an Oscar-winning film warning of the coming global warming Armageddon. The film and his activism led to a Nobel Prize. Flush from those victories, Gore “took the Hill,” as he testified before a hushed hearing room in his old Senate haunt, predicting more dire consequences if global warming isn’t stopped.

 

All of that was followed by mass rallies across the nation, with energized college students; editorials and magazine covers, and even legislation in Congress to curtail the use of carbon fuels. Gore concluded his triumphant moment in the spotlight with a major address in Washington on July 17, 2008, in which he boldly laid out his plan for a “wrenching transformation” of society he deemed necessary for man to survive.

 

That was the highlight of his life and probably his last hurrah, because ever since, an inconvenient truth found in science is showing (as I’ve reported over and over on these pages) that global warming is not man-made. In addition, scientists are finding more global cooling than heating – and that too is not man-made. To add insult to injury for poor Al, the legislation in Congress was defeated with the help of 30% of Democrats. Now scientists around the world have begun to speak out against Gore’s zealotry. In short, Al has no scientific consensus. Read article.

 

George F. Will, NY Post.com

 

Three days after the president- elect announced in a radio address that he had directed his "economic team" to devise a plan "that will mean 2.5 million more jobs by January of 2011," he told a news conference that he favored measures "that will help save or create 2.5 million jobs." To the extent that his ambition is clear, it is notably modest.

 

It is, however, unclear. How will anyone calculate the number of jobs "saved"? Saved from what? Saved by what? By government action, such as agriculture subsidies or other corporate welfare? What about jobs lost because of those irrational uses of finite economic resources? Should jobs "saved" by, say, protectionist policies that interfere with free trade be balanced against jobs lost when export markets are lost to retaliatory protectionism? Read article.

 

Abe Greenwald, Commentary Magazine.com

 

It’s hard to figure out how the Los Angeles Times could stick the headline “Gates on board with Obama’s Iraq plan” at the top of this article. Barack Obama’s plan - at least, the one he swore to uphold throughout his campaign - was to pull U.S. troops out of Iraq within 16 months of taking office. According to the LA Times, Robert Gates said of the withdrawal issue: “That bridge has been crossed,” by virtue of the U.S.-Iraq security agreement. That agreement calls for U.S. troops to be out of Iraq by the end of 2011.

 

If Gates is okay with American forces staying in Iraq for three more years, in what way can it be said that he is “on board with Obama’s Iraq plan”? There is one answer, and a responsible article would have reflected it in the headline, “Obama on board with Bush’s Iraq plan.” Obviously, Obama has come around to dropping his notion of a 16-month drawdown and embraced the three-year time table worked out between the Bush administration and the Maliki government in Iraq.

 

This is a good thing. Abandoning Iraq in the midst of its recovery would likely lead to a humanitarian disaster and an irreversible American geopolitical catastrophe. Read article.

 

Martha Zoller, Human Events.com

 

Saxby Dhambliss beat the odds, winning re-election by the huge margin of almost 15 points. Chambliss had 57.5 percent of the vote while his runoff challenger Jim Martin had only 42.5 percent.

 

Chambliss’s margin expanded by twelve points since the November 4 election, when he was forced into a runoff by not exceeding 50 percent. At that time, he’d exceeded Martin’s vote by only three points. Georgians haven’t reelected a U. S. Senator since Sam Nunn. It seems he stemmed the tide of the runoff nobody votes in -- almost 40 percent of the electorate turned out -- and he put a doorstop, at least, in Obamamania.

 

Barack Obama kept all of his campaign offices open and staffed through the runoff for Democrat Jim Martin, but Martin couldn’t close the deal. He never really had a chance once the Libertarian candidate, Allen Buckley was out of the picture. And -- pretending he had some power over the outcome -- Buckley withheld his endorsement from both candidates. Read article.

 

Mere Rhetoric.com

 

Let's imagine that it's not breathtakingly stupid to embrace the woman who kissed Suha Arafat - right after Arafat ranted about how Jews poison Palestinian children - as some kind of Atlas holding up the US-Israel alliance. I mean it's obviously asinine. But since large swaths of the Israeli media are fantasizing otherwise - eagerly helped by Obama boosters in the US - let's imagine that Clinton actually is some kind of pro-Israel bulwark. Fair enough. But isn't it a little weird how she seems to be having less than zero influence on Obama's agenda?

 

Obama just announced that an Israeli-Palestinian peace deal will be at the center of his agenda. He's even bringing back Daniel Kurtzer - who was firmly against the security fence that all but ended suicide bombings - to push Israel on concessions. And of course none of this is surprising given how Obama's "main foreign policy sounding board" - the same guy who spent last year trying to detonate US-Israel relations - thinks that the peace process should be the US's single most important foreign policy goal. Read article.

 

Rick Moran, American Thinker.com

 

Senator Saxbe Chambliss says that the appearances of Sarah Palin in the last week of his campaign "allowed us to peak" at the right time and credits her with energizing the Republican base in the state:

 

Fresh off his runoff victory Tuesday night, Georgia Republican Sen. Saxby Chambliss credited Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with firing up his base.

 

"I can't overstate the impact she had down here," Chambliss said during an interview Wednesday morning on Fox News.

 

"When she walks in a room, folks just explode," he added. "And they really did pack the house everywhere we went. She's a dynamic lady, a great administrator, and I think she's got a great future in the Republican Party." Read article.

 

Michael Barone, USNews.com

 

Saxby Chambliss has won the Georgia runoff by a 57.4 percent-to-42.6 percent margin with 97 percent of precincts reporting. That's a margin of 14.8 percentage points, far greater than the 49.8 percent-to-46.8 percent margin that Chambliss led by in the November 4 voting, and it's well above the 53 percent to 46 percent that was projected for the runoff on pollster.com.

 

Chambliss's victory over Jim Martin means that the Democrats will not get 60 seats in the Senate, even if Al Franken somehow manages to overcome Norm Coleman's circa 300-vote lead in the Minnesota recount. Franken's only apparent recourse is to the courts or to the full Senate; I doubt he'll get anywhere in the courts, and I doubt that Barack Obama will want the Democrats to take on a bruising partisan fight to get a 59th seat in the Senate (though labor leaders, eager to pass the card check bill and knowing that Arlen Specter voted to cut off the filibuster against it in the outgoing Congress, may press for that).

 

What are the other implications? For that, let me take a closer look at the election results and compare the results of the December 2 runoff as reported on the Georgia Secretary of State website with the results of the November 4 election on Dave Leip's election website. Read article.

 

Jason Lee Steorts, NRO.com

 

Since the election, rather a lot of ink (if not quite blood) has flowed through RightWorld in answer to such questions as: Why don’t the cool kids like us? Is it the social conservatives? Is it their primitive tribal god? Are the Neanderthals scaring away thoughtful folk with inarticulate grunting noises? How shall we taxonomize Sarah Palin — or shall we diagnose her instead? A cancer, or some non-terminal disorder?

 

As Ramesh Ponnuru argues very persuasively in the current issue of National Review, the evidence — the election results, the exit polls — simply don’t support the thesis that socially conservative positions have cost Republicans more votes than they’ve won. Those who feel otherwise have tended to be long on condescension and short on facts.

 

All the same, I think they may be on to something. But I don’t think it’s what they think it is. To me, they’re like people looking at a giant mural and describing what they see in one tiny corner as though it were the whole. I’ll tell you what I mean — but first, a little story.

 

The Saturday night before Election Day I found myself on the roof of a condo in Santa Monica with about twenty twenty-something Californians. Read article.

 

Philip Klein, Spectator.org

 

Sen. John Ensign, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a conference call that Senate Democrats were unlikely to take the political risk of contesting the Minnesota election results in the U.S. Senate.

 

"I think that the Democratic majority will not want to see this come to the Senate," Ensign said this afternoon. He added that, "there will be a heavy political price to pay" if they try to overturn the choice of Minnesota voters. Ensign said he faced a similar decision in his 1998 Senate race, when he went through a recount but still trailed Harry Reid by about 400 votes. "I was in the exact same position that Al Franken is in today," Ensign said. He said he conceded the race without taking it to the courts or to the Senate even though there were irregularities in the election. Read article.

 

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