side note: What a bunch of fuckin bullshit!!! This is why I was against these bailouts without serious strings attached! These bush administration officials are fuckin crooks and Congress better look into this…..what a joke our government has become under these fools!

By Hugh Son
Bloomberg News

American International Group Inc., the insurer that said yesterday it scrapped bonuses for top executives after a U.S. bailout, will still pay 130 managers “cash awards” to stay with the firm, including $3 million to retirement services chief Jay Wintrob.

Wintrob, 51, will get the “retention” payment in two installments, the first in April 2009 and the rest a year later, New York-based AIG said today in a regulatory filing. The firm previously disclosed the program in a Sept. 26 filing and said today that Wintrob and Chief Financial Officer David Herzog elected to get the payments four months later than planned.

“The expectation from the public and Congress was that they weren’t getting bonuses, not that they’d be pushed off by several months,” said David Schmidt, a consultant at executive pay firm James F. Reda & Associates. “That clearly violates the spirit of AIG saying they’ll forgo their bonuses.”

Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy is encouraging top employees at AIG subsidiaries to remain so the units retain their value while he finds buyers. The insurer is selling businesses, including the U.S. retirement group Wintrob heads, to repay a $60 billion loan included in the expanded government rescue package AIG got this month. (more…)

side note: When dubya nominated Gates, I wasn’t too pleased. Gates has a long history in our government, most notably his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal in the 80’s…he was a high ranking member of the CIA at the time and had to have known what was going on. Now that we’ve had him in there for close to 2 years, I have seen some good things happen. He doesn’t appear to follow the same ideology that these fuckin nutty neo-cons do. Obama’s decision to keep Gates on tells me 2 things…one is that he has some trust in Gates, and we really at this point have no reason not to trust Obama’s intuition on this. The second is that Obama thinks he really needs to focus on the economic crisis staring him in the face and doesn’t need a Defense Secretary learning on the job as we fight wars on 2 fronts and have nation’s such as Russia and China looking to establish themselves and international players.

By PETER BAKER and THOM SHANKER
The New York Times

WASHINGTON — President-elect Barack Obama has decided to keep Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates in his post, a show of bipartisan continuity in a time of war that will be the first time a Pentagon chief has been carried over from a president of a different party, Democrats close to the transition said Tuesday.

Mr. Obama’s advisers were nearing a formal agreement with Mr. Gates to stay on for perhaps a year, the Democrats said, and they expected to announce the decision as early as next week, along with other choices for the national security team. The two sides have been working out details on how Mr. Gates would wield authority in a new administration.

The move will give the new president a defense secretary with support on both sides of the aisle in Congress, as well as experience with foreign leaders around the world and respect among the senior military officer corps. But two years after President Bush picked him to lead the armed forces, Mr. Gates will now have to pivot from serving the commander in chief who started the Iraq war to serving one who has promised to end it.

In deciding to ask Mr. Gates to stay, Mr. Obama put aside concerns that he would send a jarring signal after a political campaign in which he made opposition to the war his signature issue in the early days. Some Democrats who have advised his campaign quietly complained that he was undercutting his own message and risked alienating war critics who formed his initial base of support, especially after tapping his primary rival, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, for secretary of state.

But advisers argued that Mr. Gates was a practical public servant who was also interested in drawing down troops in Iraq when conditions allow. (more…)

side note: I just had a co-worker stop by my desk to tell me that her conservative family is heading into town for a long weekend…….and they’re staying at her house. I know the holidays are a time of the year when all different types of backgrounds come together to try and be civil….but from my many experiences, this usually never happens. Someone usually makes a comment that gets the ball rolling. I will have to admit that I’m usually that “someone”…..and I love it! As most NT readers know….I truly believe that the 2 topics we should be talking about the most with our family, friends and neighbors are religion and politics, they play the largest role in our society and affect our lives the most. Good luck this holiday season and remember, keep those drinks a flowing b/c it makes for better conversation!

By Sara Robinson
Ourfuture.org

Oh, Lordy. It is that time again. Thursday is Thanksgiving— the official kickoff event of the 2008 holiday season. For a lot of progressives, these festivities also mean that we’re about to spend more quality time with our conservative relatives over the next six weeks than is strictly good for our blood pressure, stress levels, or continued sanity.

Personally, I’m not a wholehearted fan of turkey—probably because the mere smell of it instantly slams me back into memories of several decades of Thanksgiving dinner arguments with conservative kin that took a turn for the ugly. We all know we’re supposed to stick to “safe” topics like the kids, college football, and the weather; and avoid controversial issues like religion, politics and whether oysters belong in a proper bird stuffing. But the afternoon is long, and after the approved topics have been exhausted and that third bottle of Cabernet vanishes and the tryptophan torpor hits, decorum and discipline are at high risk of going all to hell. After that, things can and do get contentious, usually in ways that make everyone wish we could all just go back to fighting over oysters in the stuffing.

These family gatherings were hard enough to stomach through the appalling years of the Bush Adoration—but this year, it’s likely to be even worse. Our beloved family wingnuts were insufferable, in a grotesque Mayberry-on-acid surreal kind of way, while crowing into their succotash about the manly Godliness (or was it Godly manliness?) of Our Divinely Ordained Commander-in-Chief. But this year’s different. This year, they’re on the way out of power—and they’re scared witless about it. Which means big steaming heapin’ helpings of liberal-bashing are likely to be featured prominently on the menu next to the mashed potatoes, as they put fresh vigor into every paranoid anti-liberal fantasy ever spouted by Rush, Reverend Pat, or their new darling, Sarah Palin. (more…)

side note: I’ve been very clear on my stance concerning these bailouts……if they are to happen, there have to be some hefty strings attached. With that being said, I’m still confused about the choice of the Congress not to give $25 billion to the auto industry. I ran across this article and got a kick out of it.

BY MITCH ALBOM
DETROIT FREE PRESS COLUMNIST

OK. It’s a fantasy. But if I had five minutes in front of Congress last week, here’s what I would’ve said:

Good morning. First of all, before you ask, I flew commercial. Northwest Airlines. Had a bag of peanuts for breakfast. Of course, that’s Northwest, which just merged with Delta, a merger you, our government, approved — and one which, inevitably, will lead to big bonuses for their executives and higher costs for us. You seem to be OK with that kind of business.

Which makes me wonder why you’re so against our kind of business? The kind we do in Detroit. The kind that gets your fingernails dirty. The kind where people use hammers and drills, not keystrokes. The kind where you get paid for making something, not moving money around a board and skimming a percentage.

You’ve already given hundreds of billions to banking and finance companies — and hardly demanded anything. Yet you balk at the very idea of giving $25 billion to the Detroit Three. Heck, you shoveled that exact amount to Citigroup — $25 billion — just weeks ago, and that place is about to crumble anyhow.

Does the word “hypocrisy” ring a bell?

Protecting the home turf?

Sen. Shelby. Yes. You. From Alabama. You’ve been awfully vocal. You called the Detroit Three’s leaders “failures.” You said loans to them would be “wasted money.” You said they should go bankrupt and “let the market work.”

Why weren’t you equally vocal when your state handed out hundreds of millions in tax breaks to Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai, Honda and others to open plants there? Why not “let the market work”? Or is it better for Alabama if the Detroit Three fold so that the foreign companies — in your state — can produce more?

Way to think of the nation first, senator.

And you, Sen. Kyl of Arizona. You told reporters: “There’s no reason to throw money at a problem that’s not going to get solved.”

That’s funny, coming from such an avid supporter of the Iraq war. You’ve been gung ho on that for years. So how could you just sit there when, according to the New York Times, an Iraqi former chief investigator told Congress that $13 billion in U.S. reconstruction funds “had been lost to fraud, embezzlement, theft and waste” by the Iraqi government?

That’s 13 billion, senator. More than half of what the auto industry is asking for. Thirteen billion? Gone? Wasted?

Where was your “throwing money at a problem that’s not going to get solved” speech then? (more…)

Please take one minute to view the heartbreaking video footage that emerged from Yellowstone National Park last winter.

Hundreds of wild bison — better known as American buffalo — were chased down by snowmobiles, cruelly confined to pens, and sent off to slaughter.

By the end of the winter, almost half of our nation’s last free-roaming herd was dead. Over 1,400 wild buffalo were killed in the largest buffalo extermination since the 1800s.

In just a few weeks, the slaughter will start again — unless we mobilize to stop it now.
(more…)

side note: I didn’t see this when it aired, so I went to SNL’s site to find it and it wasn’t anywhere to be found….seems as though some people were offended by it. When is someone not offended by an SNL skit?

side note: Whoa…..this kinda fucked up!

BY CORY DOCTOROW
BoingBoing

Barry Ritholtz sez,
In doing the research for the “Bailout Nation” book, I needed a way to put the dollar amounts into proper historical perspective.
If we add in the Citi bailout, the total cost now exceeds $4.6165 trillion dollars.

People have a hard time conceptualizing very large numbers, so let’s give this some context. The current Credit Crisis bailout is now the largest outlay In American history.

Crunching the inflation adjusted numbers, we find the bailout has cost more than all of these big budget government expenditures – combined:

• Marshall Plan: Cost: $12.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $115.3 billion
• Louisiana Purchase: Cost: $15 million, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $217 billion
• Race to the Moon: Cost: $36.4 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $237 billion
• S&L Crisis: Cost: $153 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $256 billion
• Korean War: Cost: $54 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $454 billion
• The New Deal: Cost: $32 billion (Est), Inflation Adjusted Cost: $500 billion (Est)
• Invasion of Iraq: Cost: $551b, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $597 billion
• Vietnam War: Cost: $111 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $698 billion
• NASA: Cost: $416.7 billion, Inflation Adjusted Cost: $851.2 billion

TOTAL: $3.92 trillion

original article

By Jeanne Carstensen
Salon.com
The crusade for Proposition 8 was fueled by the broken American family, explains gay Catholic author Richard Rodriguez.

For author Richard Rodriguez, no one is talking about the real issues behind Proposition 8.

While conservative churches are busy trying to whip up another round of culture wars over same-sex marriage, Rodriquez says the real reason for their panic lies elsewhere: the breakdown of the traditional heterosexual family and the shifting role of women in society and the church itself. As the American family fractures and the majority of women choose to live without men, churches are losing their grip on power and scapegoating gays and lesbians for their failures.

Rodriguez, who is Mexican-American, gay and a practicing Catholic, refuses to let any single part of himself define the whole. Born in San Francisco in 1944 and raised by his Spanish-speaking Mexican immigrant parents to embrace mainstream American culture and the English language, he went on to study literature and religion at Stanford and Columbia. His first book, “The Hunger of Memory: The Education of Richard Rodriguez,” explores his journey from working-class immigrant to a fully assimilated intellectual — angering many Latinos with his view that English fluency is essential. “Days of Obligation: An Argument With My Mexican Father,” which was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993, continued his investigation into how family, culture, religion, race, sexuality and other strands of his life all contribute to the whole, a complex “brownness” of contradictions and ironies. “Brown: The Last Discovery of America” completes the trilogy — but not his insatiable intellectual curiosity, which he is now shining on monotheism.

Rodriguez’ stinging critiques of religious hypocrisy are all the richer for his passionate love of Catholicism and the Most Holy Redeemer parish in San Francisco, where he and his partner of 28 years are devoted members. Today, Rodriguez is at work on a new book about the monotheistic “desert religions” — Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Ever since Sept. 11, “when havoc descended in the name of the desert God,” Rodriguez said in one of his Peabody Award-winning radio commentaries for PBS’s News Hour, he has been trying to understand the strands of darkness that run through these religions.

Salon spoke to Richard Rodriguez by phone at his home in San Francisco.

What was your reaction to California voters’ going heavily for Obama and also passing Proposition 8, banning gay marriage?

I was like a lot of other Americans at the moment when the West Coast tipped the balance in favor of Obama. I didn’t so much think it represented the end of racism but the possibility of change. At the same time, I also knew that large numbers of Californians in religious communities were voting against gay marriage and that Latinos and blacks were continuing to take part in this terribly tragedy. We persecute each other. The very communities that get discriminated against discriminate against other Americans.

The Spanish language newspaper La Opinión called the results an “embarrassment,” saying “California still has two faces.” Do you agree?

La Opinión represents the opinion of a lot of Latinos who are more educated and — what should I say? — more cosmopolitan. But Latinos in both my family and the Catholic Church belong to a more traditional America. This is a troubling aspect of the way our country is formed right now. It is a time of great change but also a time when people are afraid of change.

You said recently the real issue behind the anti-gay marriage movement is the crisis in the family. What do you mean?

American families are under a great deal of stress. The divorce rate isn’t declining, it’s increasing. And the majority of American women are now living alone. We are raising children in America without fathers. I think of Michael Phelps at the Olympics with his mother in the stands. His father was completely absent. He was negligible; no one refers to him, no one noticed his absence. (more…)

side note: You mean the GOP created a story to instill fear in the public?

By jamie
http://www.intoxination.net

Is the FBI still investigating ACORN? I remember hearing how there was tons of fraud here in Ohio, especially Cincinnati. Well the local election board has now finished investigating, and look what they found:

We now have an answer to the million-dollar question: was there voter fraud in Hamilton County?

“I don’t think we’ll find anything criminal with those,” Krisel said.

Out of all those ballots, there are only four that are questionable. Now that is widespread fraud. It’s ironic that we heard all this talk about fraud by ACORN before the election, and then there was silence. The Republicans just created another boogie man, and he scared no one.

original article

side note: This is why the editors at NT and others around the country backed Barack Obama for President of the United States! He still has 2 months before he’s actually President and he’s already working to get this country back on track. It’ll be nice to see someone in the White House who actually has a work ethic and wasn’t given everything in life, and who is interested in making this country a better place to live for the majority of people who live here. He has a long road ahead b/c that fuck-up dubya really screwed things up!

business.timesonline.co.uk
by Tim Reid

Barack Obama effectively took control of the US economy – two months before he takes office – by declaring that his plan to confront the financial crisis “starts today”.

As he unveiled his new economic team, Mr Obama struck a very different note from the diffident election winner of three weeks ago who stressed that America is led by only “one president at a time”.

Today, he appeared fully aware that the US and global markets are looking to him, not President Bush, for solutions to the deepening crisis.

Continuing the quickest White House transition of modern times, forced upon him by the speed at which the US is plunging into recession, Mr Obama stepped aggressively into what appeared to be a growing power vacuum in Washington over the economy.

Giving the outlines of a massive stimulus package to “jolt the economy back on track”, Mr Obama stressed the need to act “swiftly and boldly”. He said: “That work starts today, because the truth is, we don’t have a minute to waste.”

At a press conference in Chicago, Mr Obama formally announced his nomination of Timothy Geithner, 47, the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, as Treasury Secretary, and Larry Summers, Bill Clinton’s former Treasury Secretary, as director of the National Economic Council, his chief White House financial adviser.

Mr Obama refused to specify how much his stimulus package will cost, but some leading Democrats on Capitol Hill are now calling for a huge injection of cash of up to $700 billion.

The president-elect repeatedly stressed the urgency of the situation and spoke of an economy “trapped in a vicious cycle” as he made clear his expectation that Congress will have a plan ready for him to sign into law as soon as he is inaugurated.

“We know this won’t be easy and it won’t happen overnight,” Mr Obama warned. (more…)

side note: Anyone who watches Real Time w/Bill Maher or any news show….knows Barney Frank. He is a smart SOB who doesn’t take shit from anyone…..this sounds like someone who we need right now!

Michelle Cottle
The New Republic
The redemption of Barney Frank

Barney Frank simply would not shut up. On the afternoon of September 25, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee was holed up in the White House Cabinet Room with a dozen or so government officials laboring to hammer out a rescue package for the flailing financial markets. Those gathered around the grand mahogany table included the president and vice president, the House speaker and Senate majority leader, the ranking Republicans of both chambers, the Treasury secretary, the Fed chairman, and the Democratic and Republican presidential nominees. Frank was on hand at the insistence of his party’s leaders, who had been relying heavily on him since the crisis erupted.

In the presence of such august company, a less confident man might have been intimidated into silence or at least decorous deference. Not Frank. He kept jumping in, quizzing Bush officials and pressing Republican legislators on their objections to the proposal. When John McCain rambled vaguely about the need to alter the package, Frank cut in to demand: “Like what?” As the senator finished, Frank huffed, “I still don’t know what your proposals are.” Similarly, when House Minority Leader John Boehner argued for changes, Frank snapped at him to be more specific. (”Like what?” was a common Frank refrain, say those in attendance.) At one point, recall multiple observers, President Bush felt compelled to remind the congressman that White House protocol calls for participants to wait until the president recognizes them before speaking. Unfazed, Frank resumed his prodding and prying. “It didn’t affect me,” the chairman later explained with a shrug (though he recalls the chiding coming from someone other than Bush). “I wasn’t there because he wanted me to be there. I was there because he knew he couldn’t leave me out.”

While (characteristically) immodest, Frank’s observation is also (characteristically) spot on. The 68-year-old congressman may be imperious, antisocial, and abrasive–President Bush’s nickname for him is “Sabertooth”–yet, these days, he is also indispensable. In recent weeks, as financial markets around the world melted down, Frank has found himself in frequent consultation not only with his party leadership and caucus, but also with top Bush officials and major players on Wall Street. His bespectacled, Droopy-Dog mug has been all over the news, cementing him as the public face of Washington’s efforts to cope with the chaos. (He recently told his swarm of press stalkers that he now knows how Britney Spears feels.) Meanwhile, conservatives have gone after Frank–long a favorite target–with renewed vigor, both blaming him for the current disaster and attempting to knot the controversial rescue package around his neck. Back home in Massachusetts’s fourth district–which stretches from the suburbs south of Boston to the western edge of Cape Cod–Frank felt moved to run TV ads for this election cycle, something he normally doesn’t bother with. (He won with 68 percent of the vote.) (more…)

side note: An interesting article debunking the myth that the US and China are not only tied together but need each other. I’ve always heard from people that China can’t just stop buying Treasury Bills b/c if they did that….we would stop buying Chinese goods. But now it seems as though China has another option for massive consuming….their own people.

by Fareed Zakaria
Washington Post

For weeks the world has eagerly awaited word from the Obama transition team about the people who will head up the next administration — the new secretaries of state and treasury, the attorney general. But one of the more crucial positions in the Obama administration probably isn’t going to be filled for months and is likely to get little attention when it is — the post of U.S. ambassador to China.

China has become the key to America getting through the worsening economic crisis. The American ambassador in Beijing (okay, this is a metaphor for all those officials who will be managing this relationship) will need to make sure that China sees its interests as aligned with America’s. Or else things could get very, very ugly.

Everyone agrees now that Washington needs to spend its way out of this recession, to ensure that it doesn’t turn into a depression. Economists on both the left and right agree that a massive fiscal stimulus is needed and that for now, we shouldn’t be worrying about deficits. But to run up these deficits — which could total somewhere between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, or between 7 and 11 percent of gross domestic product — America has to get someone to buy its debt. And the only country with the cash to do so is China.

In September, Beijing became America’s largest foreign creditor, surpassing Japan, which no longer buys large amounts of Treasury notes. In fact, though the Treasury Department does not keep records of American bondholders, it is virtually certain that, holding 10 percent of all U.S. public debt, the government of the People’s Republic of China has become Washington’s largest creditor, foreign or domestic. It is America’s banker. (more…)

side note: I wonder if we will ever know the truth, and if somehow we do, is there recompense possible?

While President George W. Bush held the fewest first-term press conferences in modern presidential history, the administration’s suppression of information also took place on other, more secretive fronts.

By Eric Alterman, George Zornick | November 20, 2008

If December 2000 is any guide, we’re about to be inundated with stories about the “Bush Legacy,” with all sides of the ideological spectrum battling over this administration’s rightful place in the proverbial “record books.” Yet the media’s role in our democracy will likely go unnoticed amid discussions of Iraq, Afghanistan, a collapsing economy, rendition and torture, domestic wiretaps, the Katrina catastrophe, continued environmental degradation, and the destruction of the Republican majority.

The public has largely missed the eyes of this particular wolf at its door because of the crisis of survival in the media business itself, particularly within the newspaper business. But the Bush administration’s war against not just the media, but the very idea of free expression, is one that will need to be reversed as surely as the midnight regulations currently being written by administration officials. This will need to be done despite the apparent discomfort so many reporters and editors evince when it comes to defending their constitutional role as guardians and watchdogs of a democratic society.

I wrote a cover story for The Nation in early 2005 on the then-little discussed topic, and the crisis has only worsened since. This column, and a few to follow, will highlight and update information on this continued assault in the hopes that public officials and the media in a new administration will revisit some of the practices that have allowed those in power to keep the rest of us in the dark.

All presidents keep secrets, and just about all of them lie as well. This is unfortunate, but not a source of scandal—an argument I tried to elucidate in a book on presidential lying that was also the topic of my Ph.D. thesis. Yet during the Bush era, America entered a period I call “the Post-Truth Presidency” during which it mattered little to almost anyone whether the president and his representatives accurately represented reality in their statements to the press and the public. What mattered was what they thought it reasonable to try and get away with. They used their newly discovered power of audacity to rewrite the rules of political discourse and badly weaken the foundation of our democratic discourse. The attack was waged on numerous fronts simultaneously; indeed that was part of its genius. Even the most conscientious media watchdog had a hard time keeping up.

On one level, the effort has been obvious. President George W. Bush held the fewest first-term press conferences in modern presidential history. Bush has still never given an interview to The New York Times as president. And when was the last time you saw Dick Cheney—universally understood to be the most powerful and influential vice president in America—interviewed anywhere, save the friendly environs of Fox News or Rush Limbaugh’s radio program?

Make no mistake: This is a calculated strategy. As one Bush adviser explained to reporter Ron Suskind, “Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered two to one by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or the LA Times.”
(more…)

side note: $7.4 trillion? WTF?? I can’t even fathom that amount of money! That’s why so many red flags have popped up when the Congress refused to give $25 billion to the big 3 in the auto industry. They have no problem forking over trillions to a broken, unregulated banking industry……but nothing for anyone else.

By Mark Pittman and Bob Ivry
Bloomberg News

Nov. 24 (Bloomberg) — The U.S. government is prepared to lend more than $7.4 trillion on behalf of American taxpayers, or half the value of everything produced in the nation last year, to rescue the financial system since the credit markets seized up 15 months ago.

The unprecedented pledge of funds includes $2.8 trillion already tapped by financial institutions in the biggest response to an economic emergency since the New Deal of the 1930s, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. The commitment dwarfs the only plan approved by lawmakers, the Treasury Department’s $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program. Federal Reserve lending last week was 1,900 times the weekly average for the three years before the crisis.

When Congress approved the TARP on Oct. 3, Fed Chairman Ben S. Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson acknowledged the need for transparency and oversight. Now, as regulators commit far more money while refusing to disclose loan recipients or reveal the collateral they are taking in return, some Congress members are calling for the Fed to be reined in.

“Whether it’s lending or spending, it’s tax dollars that are going out the window and we end up holding collateral we don’t know anything about,” said Congressman Scott Garrett, a New Jersey Republican who serves on the House Financial Services Committee. “The time has come that we consider what sort of limitations we should be placing on the Fed so that authority returns to elected officials as opposed to appointed ones.” (more…)

side note: I know it’s tough to ask Obama to intervene, but this economy needs it. We need his confidence to help the markets navigate through the crisis!

by The Editors,
The New Republic

On November 15, President Bush will host a “Summit on Financial Markets and the World Economy” at the National Building Museum in Washington, D. C. Great Britain’s Gordon Brown, China’s Hu Jintao, and Russia’s Dmitri Medvedev are among the 20 heads of state who will attend what’s being billed as “Bretton Woods II.” But there’s one world leader, a soon-to-be head of state, who will be sitting out the proceedings: Barack Obama plans to spend the weekend in Chicago.

Ever since winning the White House on November 4, Obama has kept a wary distance from the financial crisis that began in September. Although many expected him to name the key members of his administration’s economic team, including the new Treasury secretary, in the immediate aftermath of his election, transition officials have now indicated that no cabinet appointments will likely be made before Thanksgiving. Next week, when Congress reconvenes and Democrats attempt to pass emergency legislation to help the ailing auto industry, Obama won’t be there, having announced that he’ll be resigning his seat just before the lame-duck session begins. And then there’s the aforementioned global financial summit, to which Obama will merely send envoys Madeleine Albright and Jim Leach, neither of whom is expected to play any substantial role in his administration. (more…)