Yep, the Obama club already has a transition team for when he becomes President:
The Democratic candidate is putting together a team to prepare him for taking office in January should he win the Nov 4 election. It is headed by John Podesta, Bill Clinton’s chief-of-staff when he was in the White House.
A senior adviser traveling with Mr Obama on his global tour told Atlantic.com: “Barack is well aware of the complexity and the organisational challenge involved in the transition process and he has tasked a small group to begin thinking through the process.
“Barack has made his expectations clear about what he wants from such a process, and the establishment and execution of his timeline is proceeding apace.”
The man is waddling around the Middle East and Europe playing President, and now he’s creating a “transition team’? Does he think he’s our anointed leader?
WASHINGTON — Every day around 8 a.m., foreign policy aides at Senator Barack Obama’s Chicago campaign headquarters send him two e-mails: a briefing on major world developments over the previous 24 hours and a set of questions, accompanied by suggested answers, that the candidate is likely to be asked about international relations during the day.
One recent Q. & A. asked, for example, whether Mr. Obama supported the decision by Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to include a timetable for American troop withdrawal in any new security agreements with the United States. The answer, provided to Mr. Obama with bullet points, was yes — or “a genuine opportunity,” as he put it in a speech on Iraq this week.
Behind the e-mail messages is a tight-knit group of aides supported by a huge 300-person foreign policy campaign bureaucracy, organized like a mini State Department, to assist a candidate whose limited national security experience remains a concern to many voters.
He needs so many people to suggest him answers to world issues, that even I, a humble 15 year old believe to have the answers to? His advisers need to give him the facts and the let him decide. But they tell him what to do.
Officials at the Public Utility Commission recently okayed a plan to “build billions of dollars worth of new transmission lines to bring pollution-free energy from West Texas to urban areas.” The ginormous Lone Star state is already the nation’s leader in wind power, but when said plan is fully implemented (pending final approval), it’ll produce more wind energy than the next closest 14 states combined.
The relative calm is apparent in Baghdad’s Ghazaliyah neighborhood, patrolled by troops stationed at Maverick from the 1st Squadron, 75th Cavalry Regiment of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division.
Instead of facing gunfire and roadside bombs, the soldiers’ armored Humvees are chased by waving children as they weave through streets crowded with pedestrians out to shop or just to stroll.
Some of Maverick’s troops saw combat a few months ago when they helped the Iraqi army take over the Ghazaliyah office of anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr in a battle complete with gunfire and rocket-propelled grenades.
But their days in Ghazaliyah have mostly been filled with routine patrols. The soldiers’ job is to serve as a critical presence that helps keep violence down in the mixed Sunni and Shiite neighborhood.
“Ninety-five percent of the time it is perfectly quiet in Ghazaliyah now,” said 1st Lt. Shane Smith, who leads one of the three platoons at Maverick.
Quiet can mean boredom, as Gebhart and a colleague turn in another four-hour shift in one of Maverick’s guard towers, looking over a landscape of two-story concrete buildings and green fields dotted with a few cows and goats.
To while away the time, the young soldier from Omaha, Nebraska, talks of his brother, who is fighting the Taliban in the mountains outside Kandahar city in southern Afghanistan.
“He spends 20 days at a time camped out in the mountains, and the Taliban come engage them in serious firefights,” said Gebhart. “At least it sounds exciting.”
“As long as nuclear weapons exist, we’ll retain a strong deterrent. But we will make the goal of eliminating all nuclear weapons a central element in our nuclear policy,” Obama said.
Heh. I can picture the conversation now: “Mr. Mahmoud, I was wondering, if ya know, maybe you could stop enriching uranium? I won’t bomb you or anything if you don’t, we’ll just put some international sanctions on you and the people you don’t care much for – but nothing serious. No? OK. I’ll go home and hope you’ll change your mind.
He added, “The danger … is that we are constantly fighting the last war, responding to the threats that have come to fruition, instead of staying one step ahead of the threats of the 21st century.”
Oh! Kinda like Bush and his preemptive strike on Iraq? Interesting.
Barring any major and unexpected developments (like an Israeli air strike on Iran and the retaliations that would follow), a fair-minded person could say with reasonable certainty that the war has ended. A new and better nation is growing legs. What’s left is messy politics that likely will be punctuated by low-level violence and the occasional spectacular attack. Yet, the will of the Iraqi people has changed, and the Iraqi military has dramatically improved, so those spectacular attacks are diminishing along with the regular violence. Now it’s time to rebuild the country, and create a pluralistic, stable and peaceful Iraq. That will be long, hard work. But by my estimation, the Iraq War is over. We won. Which means the Iraqi people won.
Excuse me as I wipe a tear of joy from my eye. And now I’m going to rub in some liberals face by saying it was possible to succeed in Iraq without running with our tail between our legs -evn though I don’t think the war has “ended”; just like Michael Tooten:
I’m reluctant to say “the war has ended,” as he did, but everything else he wrote is undoubtedly true. The war in Iraq is all but over right now, and it will be officially over if the current trends in violence continue their downward slide. That is a mathematical fact.
And now that Nuri al- Mailiki has said that he believes the Iraqi government can take over maybe we have almost won an “unwinnable war”.
The War: Our aims are victory, and we will leave each region of Iraq as our victory on the ground allows us to turn another province over to Iraqi security forces. While my opponent Senator Obama flips and flops to match the polls, I am constant in my views—Iraq is winnable and the surge is working to an astonishing degree. [...]
Money: Tax cuts led to greater aggregate revenues. Deficits grew due to uncontrolled federal spending. I’ll keep the money-earning tax stimuli and cut spending; my opponent will raise taxes that will stifle economic growth and cut our income, [...]
Energy: I’m as much for wind, solar, and conservation as Barack Obama. But for now at present rates of consumption and production, we will go bankrupt in the transition to green energy. So I will drill off the coast, develop tar sands and shale, use clean coal, and build more refineries and nuclear power plants to ensure that we don’t keep sending trillions to our enemies [...]
Illegal Immigration: We can talk all we want about “comprehensive immigration reform” but it won’t matter if we don’t close the border—now. I will; my opponent won’t. [...]
And he’s right. If McCain wants to succeed in this election, he must get his act together and focus on several things while bashing Obama on them. Otherwise, John McCain doesn’t have a lot to go on.
This clip makes John McCain look like Duncan Hunter:
When communities are terrorized by ICE immigration raids, when nursing mothers are torn from their babies, when children come home from school to find their parents missing, when people are detained without access to legal counsel, when all that is happening, the system just isn’t working, and we need to change it.
The ICE raids workplaces when they have probable cause to suspect an employer of hiring illegal aliens. They arrest workers who have false IDs and/or cannot prove their identification. The ICE takes pains to find children who have been in school when these raids occur and no other guardian can be found, and unless I missed a news story, ICE agents do not tear babies from nursing mothers’ breasts. Does Obama have a citation for that, or does he just feel like lying to people to make ICE agents sound like Nazi brownshirts?
Ed Morrissey at HA goes on to say that if Obama has such a problem with the ICE, why didn’t he do anything about it while he was in the Senate? Why hasn’t he done anything to combat all these things he wants to change in America in his short time in the Senate?
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Posted by Brandon Kiser 
Posted by Brandon Kiser 
Posted by Brandon Kiser 
