New Republic editor to Netroots: You don’t matter.

Are conservatives sure they want to imitate Daily Kos?

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So as it turns out, Zimbabwe has got one thing up on us.

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Timothy Geithner named SecTreas, stocks rally.

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Today’s PJTV Whip features Fausta (of Fausta’s Blog fame), Scott Ott and yours truly. After, I’ll stay on for a new segment called… “Blog Week in Review” or something like that. Hopefully we’ll come up with a cooler title, but the segment promises to be fast & fun & only a little bit furious.

The fun starts at 7PM Pacific.

UPDATE: The producers tell me that we won’t be going live to tape, but… live. I’d better pour that first weekend martini a little early.

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The New York Times says Clinton will indeed head up the State Department.

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David Corn on the Obama transition team:

And then there’s—you know, just in terms of looking at how this bunch may be different than the Bush bunch, which isn’t hard to do, Sarah Sewall is leading the transition’s national security team. She works at the Carr Center for Human Rights Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. And one of her specialties is the ethics of fighting terrorism. Just think about that for a moment. The ethics of fighting terrorism? That’s probably nothing that got a lot of attention in, say, Dick Cheney’s office.

Heck, it hadn’t gotten a whole lot of attention in my office, either. So I put on my thinking cap and compiled a list of ethical-type concerns when fighting terrorists. Here’s what I came up with.

1. Kill the other fella before he kills you.

2. And then I pretty much ran out of stuff.

3. Also, a good list needs at least three items.

Satisfied with my work, I took a quick nap.

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Remember that haughty, French-looking dude voters rejected in 2004 largely because of his foreign policy?

Yeah, John Kerry is set to chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

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Amazon’s Kindle is one year old today. But I still don’t want one.

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Over at Counterterrorism Blog — hey, remember terrorists? — Dr. Walid Phares posts his analysis of the latest al-Zawahiri tape.

CAUTION: SPOILER ALERT.

They still don’t seem to like us.

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Just like Herr Hasselhoff, we’re big in Germany!

Or maybe not so much.

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From the desk of Al Gore:

No, really — you can’t make this stuff up. Because apparently when primitive societies ruled by authoritarian patriarchies or whatever chop down all their trees and go bye-bye, it’s just the same as when declining sunspot activity changes the weather.

I mean, it’s all the same in that we need to turn power over to an (Algore-approved) authoritarian patriarchy to appease the Sun Gods.

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Starting at 7PM Pacific, PJTV will host various roundtable discussions on the future of conservatism. I’ll be on one of those panels, I’m just not sure which. Stayed tuned.

CORRECTION: 7PM Eastern. Oops.

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Liberty Girl has a little list, they never will be missed…

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My PJ Media column this week attempts to answer the question.

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…when I say that Obama is my President: “You can go to hell, too, buddy. That’s the US President-elect you’re talking about.”

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…to spread the latest virus.

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After more than a year in Iraq, 1/6th Cavalry has come home to Ft. Carson in Colorado Springs.

Thanks, guys.

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Hope! Change! Possibly corrupt Clintonites! Again! Really:

A Democratic source said a conditional offer for the post of attorney general had been made to former Clinton administration official Eric Holder, making him the automatic front-runner for the nation’s top law enforcement position.

Look, it’s SOP for the incoming administration to raid the kitchen cabinet of the previous administration of the same party. But I’m less certain that Obama supporters knew they were voting for the SOP.

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In space, no one can see you weave:

“The web was more or less three-dimensional and it looked like it was all over the inside of the spider hab,” said NASA astronaut Sandra Magnus, the space station’s science officer. “We took some pictures of it, so hopefully they will turn out.”

“So it was more of a tangled, disorganized-looking web rather than the standard, like ‘Charlotte’s Web,’ kind of web?” asked Mission Control.

After all, the fictional spider Charlotte from the children’s book “Charlotte’s Web” by E.B. White was an orb weaver spider, too.

“There was no symmetry that was noticeable in it,” Magnus replied.

Apparently, microgravity isn’t enough to let spiders know which way is up. Also, if there’s an astronaut on board named Peter Parker, I’m going to totally freak out.

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Hey Hey Hey, Goodbye.

Now, if Al Franken loses, too, then I think we can all agree that the Senate has had a not-too-shabby election year. Well, you know, as far as these things go.

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China’s social compact may be breaking down:

Exports constitute nearly 40 percent of China’s GDP–far too high a figure. (By comparison, in the U.S., exports account for about 10 percent of GDP most years.) And the global financial slowdown is already taking a terrible toll. Some 10,000 factories in southern China’s Pearl River Delta area had closed by the summer of 2008. Gordon Chang, a leading China analyst, estimates that 20,000 more will shutter by the end of this year. In the third quarter of 2008, Beijing also reported its fifth consecutive quarterly drop in growth, and several private research firms expect a sharper slowdown next year. Additionally, unemployment is skyrocketing; in Wenzhou, one of the main exporting cities, about 20 percent of workers have lost their jobs.

It’s a dangerous game Beijing has been playing — trading constant growth for political stability (ie, continued authoritarian rule). For starters, growth by definition isn’t stable. And then there’s that pesky global downturn.

So I guess the question is: Is Beijing the next United States, or the next Brazil? Do they make the leap or just miss it, again and again?

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Joe Lieberman will keep his caucus and his chairman’s seat.

It’s a rare case of the Democrats not indulging in a circular firing squad — and a welcome one, too.

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Ron Coleman has another take on the President-elect and his BlackBerry.

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After chopping his company’s stock value in more than half, and rejecting a buy-out offer from Microsoft for way more than that… well:

Yahoo co-founder and CEO Jerry Yang will step down as CEO as soon as a successor is found, the embattled Internet company just announced. The release (quoted in full after the jump) came shortly after the blog Boomtown broke the news.

Question is, when will GM’s Rick Wagoner man up and step down?

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President Obama will have to give up his CrackBerry:

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off.

Here we finally have a technology giving presidents the power to peer outside their protective bubble. And what do we do? We take it away amidst worries about security and lawsuits.

There’s got to be a better way.

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Cool:

In recent years, constantly improving computer processing and better imaging technology have allowed scientists to at last confirm what many have long fantasized — there’s a wealth of planets outside our solar system.

Pretty pictures at the link.

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The goings-on at the G20 summit were not quite so happening:

While the group put on a strong united front during its summit meeting here Saturday in the face of a global crisis, members delayed any top-level decisions, including far-reaching but hotly debated proposals on overhauling financial regulation, until the 101st day of the incoming Obama administration.

That’s your global leadership hard at work, kicking the can down the road.

More seriously, I’m not sure what was supposed to be accomplished by the G20, or even why the G20 exists. Well, apart from the food.

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