The Associated Press is reporting tonight that Barack Obama will nominate Hillary Clinton as his Secretary of State on Monday, "transforming a once-bitter political rivalry into a high-level strategic and diplomatic partnership."

This will do for a panicked international community what the naming of Timothy Geithner did for a panicked Wall Street.

I'll put the update first: according to the Huffington Post, two "senior Democratic officials" report that "President-elect Barack Obama offered Sen. Hillary Clinton the position of Secretary of State during their meeting Thursday in Chicago." If that's true, then the ball is in her court now. But at least we can say that Obama did the right thing. Here's the story: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/11/14/clinton-met-with-obama-ab_n_143810.html

First off--not to rub salt in wounds--but I hated, hated, hated Hillary's campaign.  I've said some pretty hateful things about the campaign she ran, about Mark Penn in particular, and about Bill Clinton.  

But I've never doubted that Hillary's brilliant, and she's the best I've seen this election cycle at thinking on her feet.  She's just untouchable in the semi-improvisational talking-point milieu.  

Here are my reasons why I think he should strongly consider Hillary:

Like the "uniter" George W. Bush before him, John McCain is a maverick only when it comes to the truth.  The word maverick, Wikipedia tells us, entered the English lexicon from Samuel A. Maverick, who refused to brand his cattle.  

"Maverick's stated reason for not branding his cattle was that he didn't want to inflict pain on them.  Other ranchers however, suspected that his true motivation was that it allowed him to collect any unbranded cattle and claim them as his own."

       

And so one of the definitions of "maverick" in the Oxford English Dictionary is this:

C v. 1 v.t. . . . take possession of without any legal claim; steal.

In this sense John McCain truly is a maverick.  He wants to steal the presidency with the kind of lies that make even politicians blush.  And the closer to the election, the primaries teach us, the more he'll lie.  Remember how he won Florida and so the primaries?  He out-sleazed the sleazy Romney by, you got it, lying his way to victory.

And just wait until you hear what Republicans had to say about him.

All right, I don't hate Hillary.  But I did hate her campaign, and I hated it in a big, big way.  I could list all of the horrible tactics pursued in the Penn/Rovian playbook, but I don't want to invite Hillary supporters to unload on Obama's shortcomings, so I'll stay mum.  "They're horrible people," I think, was my comment in the midst of the campaign's end.  Let that speak to my deep animosity toward the Clintons for their campaign.

So why in the world would I be excited, even overjoyed, to see Hillary get the VP nod?

Lost in the admiration of Obama's landmark speech on race was the emerging consensus that Jeremiah Wright's comments were too political, too inflammatory, and uniquely out of bounds for a preacher- something freakish in the history of the church.  His comments are shocking and inflammatory, yes, but they're not new.  As abolitionist and prophetic evangelical Christian William Lloyd Garrison put it back in the 19th century: "reform is commotion."  And he knew what he was talking about: on Independence day, Garrison shocked audiences by holding the Constitution above his head, cursing it as "the source and parent of atrocities," and then lighting it on fire.  "And let all the people say, `Amen,'" he concluded.   Now that's inflammatory preaching.

Fox's Sean Hannity interviews Paul of Tarsus, transcript below:

(cross-posted at Dailykos)

Wearied from the Pelosi-Hoyer-Murtha blood-letting?  Well now it looks like we may well have a reprise of precisely the same imperfect storm of the personal vindictiveness and possible ethical improprieties in the selection of the intelligence committee chair.  The personalities here are even less familiar than in the majority leader race, but from what I've read, the Alcee Hastings-Jane Harman controversy looks like a yet worse nightmare for both Pelosi and the Democrats. Primer and observations follow. . .