Chief of Staff: Rahm Emanuel

Rahm Emanuel has accepted the job of Chief of Staff:

Born One Generation Past Slavery

And lived to vote for Barack Obama and see him elected president of the United States.

Fewer than 12 hours earlier, President-elect Barack Obama told the world the story of a 106-year-old woman who knew Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a child and who decades later cast her ballot for the country’s first African-American president. Obama spoke about Cooper at length in his nationally televised acceptance speech.

“She was born just a generation past slavery; a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky, when someone like her couldn’t vote for two reasons — because she was a woman and because of the color of her skin,” he told thousands of supporters gathered in Chicago’s Grant Park.

“And tonight, I think about all that she’s seen throughout her century in America — the heartache and the hope; the struggle and the progress; the times we were told that we can’t, and the people who pressed on with that American creed: Yes, we can.”

Back in Atlanta Wednesday morning, throngs of reporters — NBC News, The London Times — traipsed through Cooper’s home near the Atlanta University Center, where she has lived since 1937.

Her reaction to Obama becoming the nation’s first black president: “I never thought we’d see that happen. I always thought it would be a white man. Now I see that things can change and I’m glad to know it.”

Joe Lieberman Has An Appointment At the Woodshed

TheHill.com:

Democratic leaders are discussing a major reshuffling of Senate committee chairmanships, according to multiple sources, and the proposed changes include ousting Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) from his coveted chairmanship.

Lieberman, a former Democrat who supports Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) for president, is likely to lose his gavel on the Homeland Security Committee he has chaired since January 2007, say the sources who see him being replaced by Sen. Daniel Akaka (Hawaii), the committee’s third-ranking Democrat.

Lieberman spokesman Marshall Witmann dismissed the speculation, saying Lieberman “is focused on doing all he can to elect John McCain as president rather than post-election Washington politics.”

One Democratic source said Lieberman is not likely to lose his position in the Democratic caucus, even if the party picks up several seats in next week’s election. While Democrats could approach or exceed the filibuster-proof threshold of 60 votes, they may still need Lieberman’s vote often.

“There’s no sense in cutting off our nose to spite our face,” one source said.

Obama Gets To the Mountaintop

That was the headline on the print version of the Star-Ledger this morning — New Jersey’s biggest newspaper. The online version is here.

My daughter was a small part of making history. She was in Virginia with her campus Democratic group getting out the vote from Friday until the polls closed last night. This is the first presidential election in which she could vote.

Right now, I’m still savoring these early moments, and feeling the wonder of it all. We may have believed it could happen, but having it happen is a whole other ball of wax.

And Now, the Moment You’ve Been Waiting For

It’s hard to believe that after so many years of longing for this day, George W. Bush’s presidency is finally over. The feeling of relief is so exquisitely sweet it’s hard to put into words. Fortunately, I don’t have to, because Matthew Yglesias has written the perfect piece about Bush’s abysmal legacy. Here it is, in full:

Excuses, Excuses

The McCain campaign has a lot of them, and Shaun Mullen put ’em into a roundup.

My favorites?

“Negroes favor big government and that’s why they don’t like the GOP.” And “Sarah Palin’s staff are a bunch of turncoats.”

Rashid Khalidi and the “Idiot Wind”

The Washington Post has an editorial today that pretty much says everything that needs to be said about the McCain campaign’s latest Obama bogeyman:

WITH THE presidential campaign clock ticking down, Sen. John McCain has suddenly discovered a new boogeyman to link to Sen. Barack Obama: a sometimes controversial but widely respected Middle East scholar named Rashid Khalidi. In the past couple of days, Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, have likened Mr. Khalidi, the director of a Middle East institute at Columbia University, to neo-Nazis; called him “a PLO spokesman”; and suggested that the Los Angeles Times is hiding something sinister by refusing to release a videotape of a 2003 dinner in honor of Mr. Khalidi at which Mr. Obama spoke. Mr. McCain even threw former Weatherman Bill Ayers into the mix, suggesting that the tape might reveal that Mr. Ayers — a terrorist-turned-professor who also has been an Obama acquaintance — was at the dinner.

For the record, Mr. Khalidi is an American born in New York who graduated from Yale a couple of years after George W. Bush. For much of his long academic career, he taught at the University of Chicago, where he and his wife became friends with Barack and Michelle Obama. In the early 1990s, he worked as an adviser to the Palestinian delegation at peace talks in Madrid and Washington sponsored by the first Bush administration. We don’t agree with a lot of what Mr. Khalidi has had to say about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict over the years, and Mr. Obama has made clear that he doesn’t, either. But to compare the professor to neo-Nazis — or even to Mr. Ayers — is a vile smear
[…]
It’s fair to question why Mr. Obama felt as comfortable as he apparently did during his Chicago days in the company of men whose views diverge sharply from what the presidential candidate espouses. Our sense is that Mr. Obama is a man of considerable intellectual curiosity who can hear out a smart, if militant, advocate for the Palestinians without compromising his own position. To suggest, as Mr. McCain has, that there is something reprehensible about associating with Mr. Khalidi is itself condemnable — especially during a campaign in which Arab ancestry has been the subject of insults. To further argue that the Times, which obtained the tape from a source in exchange for a promise not to publicly release it, is trying to hide something is simply ludicrous, as Mr. McCain surely knows.

Which reminds us: We did ask Mr. Khalidi whether he wanted to respond to the campaign charges against him. He answered, via e-mail, that “I will stick to my policy of letting this idiot wind blow over.” That’s good advice for anyone still listening to the McCain campaign’s increasingly reckless ad hominem attacks. Sadly, that wind is likely to keep blowing for four more days.

Superstition Ain’t the Way

Ta-Nehisi Coates has my vote:

OK, I’m tired of this. Someone–who shall remain nameless–just asked me if I was “nervous” about Obama. FTDS. I don’t believe in black cats. I don’t toss salt over my shoulder. I step under ladders whenever the mood strikes me. I break mirrors in my spare time. I’ve made a hobby out of splitting poles. Thirteen is my favorite number. So fuck it, I’m gonna say it–Barack Obama will be the next president of the United States.

Gary Kamiya on “The Republican Shipwreck”

The real Reagan was a pragmatist who raised taxes, increased the size of the government, and wanted to rid the world of nuclear weapons. The mythical Reagan has been sitting in the White House for the past eight years:

Mark Levin Beclowns Himself

Mark Levin, in his enormous respect for the judgments of the American people, apparently believes that Obama supporters, both liberal and conservative, are under the influence of an evil spell: