The night before Obama is sworn in, HuffPost is co-hosting a pre-Inaugural ball at the Newseum in Washington. Just before midnight we will have a Countdown to a New Era. It's a new era not just because Bush will be out and Obama in, but because taking on the challenges America is facing will require a new era of citizen engagement. To illustrate this we are putting together a video that will symbolize that we are all stakeholders -- all being inaugurated on January 20th -- by having people from across America send us video of themselves taking the presidential oath of office. The preamble of the Constitution starts with We the People. And it has never been clearer that we can't "form a more perfect Union" without the active participation of millions of us.
If there is a better place for someone to start shaking up Washington, I can't think of a better place for Obama to begin than with those currently in high caterwaul about Panetta's appointment.
I don't quite understand why Feinstein and Rockefeller are objecting to Obama's pick, Leon Panetta. As objections go, theirs are weak. There is no reason that the CIA director has to be an intelligence expert.
In this contest of wills -- the governor's rightful authority to appoint a senator as opposed to the Senate's power to judge the qualification of its members -- the last word simply belongs to the Senate.
Leon Panetta certainly understands intelligence. But, most importantly, he understands the importance of our intelligence apparatus operating on the moral, ethical, and legal high ground.
It doesn't matter how clean his record was when he was in office a decade ago or if he didn't pay a cent for his appointment: Roland Burris is a willing pawn in a very corrupt game.
From a legal and Constitutional perspective, the question of whether or not Burris should be allowed to take his seat as the Junior Senator from Illinois is not especially difficult. He should.
What we're watching in Gaza is not so much low-intensity warfare as the continued fracture of the post-Soviet international order.
While Israel's explicit goal is to cease all attacks on southern Israel, senior IDF and intelligence officials have privately signaled that this is unrealistic, even with a ground invasion.
Obama comes into office with a clear election mandate, and the last thing he needs is the public view of a bunch of squabbling Democrats (see: Burris, Roland) doing the GOP's work for it.
Where others had the moral wherewithal to turn down the Senate seat, this appointee carries the same sense of defiance and entitlement as the appointer.
I wish I didn't believe that the events now unfolding in the Middle East are too complicated for unalloyed outrage. I wish the arguments of only one side rang wholly true to me.
This stimulus package should have been approved two months ago, but for whatever reason no action has been taken. There is no reason that the public should be forced to wait until mid-February.
An international stabilization force may well be what is needed in Somalia, but the tough groundwork will have to be laid first. And for this, the Somali people must be on board.
By choosing tactical advantages over the safety of its citizens, the terrorist organization chose its military goals over the safety of its fellow Palestinians in Gaza.
2008 was an especially grim year in Zimbabwe -- and prospects for the coming year seem little better. The fact that Zimbabweans were celebrating the new year at all might seem surprising.
The forces of money and power in New York are trying to replicate what their counterparts engineered here in Colorado.
The surprising trend in American opinion on Gaza may be because the same pundits who are cheerleading Israel's assault once sold the occupation of Iraq, and with a nearly identical set of arguments.
