Dick Cheney or Mr. Potter? you decide....

Dick Cheney former U.S. Vice President or Henry Potter mean banker from It's a Wonderful Life?

Thank goodness we have our own George Bailey...er...Barak Obama to keep America from becoming another Pottersville!

Where was THIS John McCain?

That is a question that has been asked a bit since the election. Sen. John McCain has given a new interview that shows the McCain we wish would have been present during the 2008 presidential campaign. In this interview with George Stephanopoulos yesterday he doesn't jump on the RNC bandwagon of trying to find fault with every.single.thing president-elect Barak Obama is doing (or not doing)

STEPHANOPOULOS: The chairman of the Republican National Committee, Mike Duncan, has been highly critical of the way President- elect Obama has dealt with this. He's had a statement every single day, saying that the Obama team should reveal all contacts they've had with Governor Blagojevich. He says that Obama's promise of transparency to the American people is now being tested. Do you agree with that?

MCCAIN: I think that the Obama campaign should and will give all information necessary. You know, in all due respect to the Republican National Committee and anybody -- right now, I think we should try to be working constructively together, not only on an issue such as this, but on the economy stimulus package, reforms that are necessary. And so, I don't know all the details of the relationship between President-elect Obama's campaign or his people and the governor of Illinois, but I have some confidence that all the information will come out. It always does, it seems to me.

You should check out the RNC website to what I'm talking about- it's like the campaign never ended and they didn't learn a darn thing about what American's really want out of our leaders. Hey, RNC, in case YOU missed it- we're tired of the divisive smears! Why not focus on what is positive about YOUR cause rather than smearing the president elect. THAT would be a change I would believe in!

You should also check out this incredible article from the November 17th(published edition) Newsweek. it is incredibly long but well worth the read.

This is... a seven-part in-depth look behind the scenes of the campaign, consisting of exclusive behind-the-scenes reporting from the McCain and Obama camps assembled by a special team of reporters who were granted year-long access on the condition that none of their findings appear until after Election Day.

You really get a great understanding of how Obama won this election and much of what helped him along were the internal conflicts of the Clinton and McCain campaigns. You get a sense that Hillary Clinton really questioned whether she wanted to be president at all. And John McCain- perhaps he wasn't *really* all that much of a race baiter- he just trusted the wrong people with his message.
As for Sarah Palin - really no surprises there, just confirmation of the obvious- what you see is what you get.

Ok, break is over.

Yes I was on a break after the election. Then came Thanksgiving and then a short vacation. But now I'm back. And since Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich decided to go and try to sell Barak Obama's senate seat and get arrested by the feds, I'll have lots to discuss.
But I'll come back to that later. I have tea to drink...

Weekly Video Addresses on Change.gov

...also available on YouTube.

The first one-

Note to GOP: It's the rest of the country, stupid.

Republican governors are gathered in Miami this week for the annual Republican Governors Association meeting. According to this story on Morning Edition of WBEZ it sounds like they are really thinking hard about how to rebuild their party and make a comeback. Their insights are telling as to just how out of touch the party has been all along.

From Louisiana's Bobby Jindal:

"When the Republican Party is no longer the party of fiscal conservatism, when we start defending spending that we would have rightfully criticized on the other side — whether it's earmarks or growth in discretionary spending or new programs that we never would have tolerated if the other side had proposed it — then clearly, I would argue that we've lost our way, we've lost the reason that we stand as fiscal conservatives."

Maybe having Governor Sarah Palin on the 2008 ticket as a fiscal conservative when really she asked for more government money per person than any other state in the form of the dreaded earmarks was not such a good way to get this message across. I mean, you can call her a fiscal conservative all you like, her record says otherwise. Unless you count all that money she saved the taxpayers by having rape victims in the state of Alaska pay for their own rape kits-ok, ok their insurance paid for the kits. Seeing as Alaska has one of the highest rape counts in the country that's a lot of dough Sarah saved. Go Sarah!

And I think this observation by Republican consultant and pollster Frank Luntz is telling:

Young people increasingly communicate and get their information over the internet. The Obama campaign understood that and compiled a list of 10 million names and e-mail addresses.

"It makes him and his supporters the most powerful special interest group in all of America," Luntz said of the president-elect. "And 3 million of those people have donated to the campaign. We've never had that situation where so many people are so active and so engaged, and they can be reached by the stroke of a key."

So American voters are now a 'special interest' group? Good to know! And yeah, that internet thingy- it's quite a unifier. Maybe the term 'world wide web' should have clued you in about 10-15 years ago.

And here's an epiphany from Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman:

That paradigm shift is the narrative Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman says Republicans must embrace. Otherwise, he says, a party that has trouble reaching Hispanics, women, and African-Americans is doomed to permanent minority status.

"And if we're not able to identify the changing demographic in this country and the needs of that changing demographic in terms of the issues that really matter — education and health care and quality of life and jobs — then we're going to lose and we're going to keep losing big time," Huntsman said.

Um, ya think?

Well you can also hear it here straight from Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty.

"[The Republican party has] a deficit with women, we have a deficit with Hispanics, we have a deficit with African Americans, we have a deficit with people of modest incomes and I think the best thing that we can do as a party is reach out to "Sam's Club voters" — folks who are just focused on bread-and-butter issues..."

Note to Pawlenty- if you're still set on finding nicknames for certain demographics like "Sam's Club voters" after the whole "Joe the Plumber" and "Joe six pack" garbage you still don't get it.

I'm a total map nerd.

Presidential Election Interactive map
You can check the outcome of every presidential election from 1789 til now with this cool little tool.
It's interesting to look waaaay back and see a time when "Deomcrat' and "Republican' didn't even exist. And how 'bout the "Deomcratic Republicans" that started popping up around 1800?

More recently it's amazing to see Nixon's veritable sweep in 1972 and Reagan's in 1984.

Hitting the ground running

This article in the Washington Post shows just how serious President-elect Obama's campaign for "Change" was. Apparently he had experts working for months to find Bush policies that could be reversed or changed soon after January 20th.

A team of four dozen advisers, working for months in virtual solitude, set out to identify regulatory and policy changes Obama could implement soon after his inauguration. The team is now consulting with liberal advocacy groups, Capitol Hill staffers and potential agency chiefs to prioritize those they regard as the most onerous or ideologically offensive, said a top transition official who was not permitted to speak on the record about the inner workings of the transition.

Some changes to look for:

Obama himself has signaled, for example, that he intends to reverse Bush's controversial limit on federal funding of embryonic stem cell research, a decision that scientists say has restrained research into some of the most promising avenues for defeating a wide array of diseases, such as Parkinson's...

The new president is also expected to lift a so-called global gag rule barring international family planning groups that receive U.S. aid from counseling women about the availability of abortion, even in countries where the procedure is legal, said Cecile Richards, the president of Planned Parenthood Federation of America. When Bill Clinton took office in 1993, he rescinded the Reagan-era regulation, known as the Mexico City policy, but Bush reimposed it....

The president-elect has said, for example, that he intends to quickly reverse the Bush administration's decision last December to deny California the authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions from automobiles. "Effectively tackling global warming demands bold and innovative solutions, and given the failure of this administration to act, California should be allowed to pioneer," Obama said in January.

Awesome.