I hear many people expressing doubts that Obama can bring about the change he promised after nominating so many people who served in the Clinton administration to high posts in the Obama administration.  The following is my reason for believing these appointments are not a hindrance to the change that he promised.

I accept Obama’s statement that the vision comes from him.

When a board of directors replaces a failing CEO with a new, powerful CEO with vision, many times the company will successfully make a large change in direction. Many of the people in the company other than the new CEO will continue to be the same people that managed the company with the old CEO. Nevertheless the company takes a drastic change in direction. So it can plausibly be with Barack Obama as the new CEO and experienced people who served in the Clinton administration as the rest of the management team.

Since the managers manage to the leader’s vision, many of the people from the Clinton administration may actually have had a vision that aligns more with Obama than with Clinton. They just did not get to behave this way when working for Clinton.

A good manager will either follow the leader’s vision or get the leader to modify his or her vision. If the manager cannot do either, the the manager ought to resign.

The leader sets the direction by deciding the tone that solutions should take. It is up to the managers to find and implement solutions that match the tone or explain to the leader why it can’t be done. A good leader will recognize good faith efforts that fail to find the solution in the direction she or he desired. Upon this recognition, the leader will bow to reality and accept a different solution.

Follow this link to the announcement of the program that is the subject of this video.

Your Seat at the Table is your opportunity to know what is going on in the transition and to provide your inputs to the process.

A book titled How to Break a Terrorist is about to be published.  Its author is a former special intelligence operations officer who, along with his team of interrogators, “successfully hunted down one of the most notorious mass murderers of our generation, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq and the mastermind of the campaign of suicide bombings that had helped plunge Iraq into civil war.”

Contrary to George Bush’s assertions, this interrogator and his team did not use torture to gain the information that led to this result.

This former U.S. interrogator has said the US  “torture policy has led to more deaths than 9/11 attacks”.

Follow this link to an interview with this author. At the link you will find out why non-torture techniques of interrogation work much better than their immoral counterparts.  You will also find a link to a stunning op-ed in the Washington Post called “I’m Still Tortured by What I Saw in Iraq.”

If you didn’t already know that if you want to be moral and ethical you should not use or condone torture, then learn why wanting to be effective should also prevent you from using or condoning torture.

Huffington Post has this story on their web site. I made the following comment on the story.

Sen Corker, Republican from Tennessee, was full of it when he said that the GM pensions were toast if GM went into bankruptcy. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (US Taxpayer) would be on the hook for it.

These Southern Republicans just want to protect the foreign auto companies that they lured to their states with huge tax giveaways. Where is the putting country first slogan when you need it? Do they expect us to believe that Japan and Korea are not going to bailout their own auto companies?

Did you notice that Senator Shelby, Republican from Alabama, seems to have inherited the Bush smirk as he twists the knife into the body of the auto companies?

Later I posted, the following additional comment:

Senator Bennett, Republican Utah, is concerned that any help to the Big 3 automakers is tantamount to the government having an industrial policy like the Japanese do.

The huge tax breaks, favorable labor laws, and other giveaways that the Southern states gave the transplant automakers to lure them to their states is not an industrial policy, I suppose.

Another commenter on Huffington Post remarked:

An ultimatum implies an “or else”. What are the Dems going to do if the White House refuses??? Seriously… what is the “or else”???

I came up with the following or else:

Or else we will seriously investigate the Bush administration war crimes and violations of the constitution?

In his review of Paul Krugman’s book The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008, Brad Delong explains:

And the problem this time is that we did not understand the degree to which all the mortgage finance companies, investment conduits, MBS vehicles, CDO tranches, monolines and other non-bank financial players that had taken on the role of banks — of making long-term durable risky investments yet promising those who contributed the funds that their funds were liquid and safe — without being regulated like banks.

A French priest in Cambodia. An idealistic U.S. Senate staffer in Iraq. A Canadian general in Rwanda. Each one tried to focus the world’s attention on genocide. Each time, they were shunned, ignored or told it was someone else’s problem

Follow this link to see the web page about CNN’s special report Thursday at 9:00 PM ET by Christine Amanpour about genocide.

Follow this link to see their overview web page.

Declassified U.S. government documents show that while Saddam Hussein was gassing Iraqi Kurds, the U.S. opposed punishing Iraq with a trade embargo because it was cultivating Iraq as an ally against Iran and as a market for U.S. farm exports.

Huffington Post has a transcript and comments on this video.

Joe Klein has written the article Bush’s Last Days: The Lamest Duck in Time Magazine online. It’s not nice to kick someone who is already down, but, in this case, it is warranted.  I hope you readers will forgive me.