The world has intruded on what was supposed to be Obama’s final Hawaiian idyll before taking the oath of office. As Mike Allen notes, the international community is watching how the President-elect and his incoming Secretary of State will react to the Israeli attack on Gaza that killed more than 225 270 people, with the London Sunday …

Jackie Calmes wants to make sure the folks at Fox News don’t get all confused again:

Pool Report #2a, Saturday Dec. 27, 2008
Kailua

Apologies to mainlanders for my omission in Pool Report #2 in not describing “the shaka” hand gesture that President-elect Obama flashed as he left Semper Fit this morning: Fold three middle fingers and

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These pool reports from the Obama press office are killing me. Note the time on this one:

Dec. 26, 2008
Pool report No. 3
Kailua, Hawaii

The wonderful Samantha Tubman called a lid at 9:27 a.m., so your pool is
returning to Waikiki Beach. President-elect Barack Obama is not planning
other movements today, but if he decides to

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The early months of the Obama Administration are likely to be dominated by debates over massive amounts of new domestic spending. But we also will be continuing to pay another big bill. Mark Thompson has an illuminating look at the more than $1 trillion we will soon have spent fighting the wars that have started since 9/11.:

Even after

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Josh Marshall writes:

Only a day after issuing a presidential pardon to Isaac Robert Toussie, a real estate scammer from Brooklyn, President Bush decided to reverse the pardon, after it emerged that Toussie’s father had contributed almost $30,000 to the Republican party.

Pardons are absolute. They can’t be reviewed or

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President Bush issued another round of pardons yesterday, including a rare posthumous one for a man convicted of selling B-17s in 1948 to Jewish resistance fighters in Israel. None of the names on the list were the big ones (like Scooter Libby) about which there has been so much speculation. But P.S. Ruckman Jr., an associate professor …

The Obama Transition Office has released the report of White House Counsel-to-be Greg Craig regarding contacts between Obama’s circle and that of disgraced Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. The most interesting part (which, really, isn’t all that interesting) concerns a few conversations that future White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel …

In yesterday’s installment, we were introduced to a seaweed-and-spam delicacy known as musubi, which I’m sure we have all since tried to recreate at home. Today, we find the President-elect attempting to work it off (if indeed he ate it, of which we have no confirmation, and which we sincerely hope he didn’t) at a Marine Corps base gym …

Here’s the latest from me. I find this issue really interesting because it encapsulates perfectly the struggle between supply-and demand-side economics. If it passes, or if Obama manages to enact rule changes without going through Congress, it’s a victory for all those demand-side economists who for years have been saying that

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It’s bad. Never mind that for two elections in a row Republicans have lost political independents by wide margins. Never mind that their reputation for competence is approaching Bernie Madoff-like levels, or that the nation’s demographic shift, particularly the growth in Latino voters, imperils their electoral future. Never mind that …

Franken’s up by 251, and the canvassing board won’t meet again until tomorrow.