And, actually, a tip of the hat to President-elect Obama for having the wisdom to keep at least part of the command structure in place through the transition:

President-elect Barack Obama will keep Defense Secretary Robert Gates in that job for at least a year, according to an official familiar the two men’s discussions.

Obama is expected to announce the selection of Gates and other members of a national security brain trust next week. Gates has served as President George W. Bush’s defense chief for two years.

Gates, a moderate with long-standing ties to Republican administrations and the Bush family, would fulfill an Obama pledge to include a Republican in his Cabinet.

Retaining Gates provides stability for a stretched military fighting two wars during the turbulent changeover in administrations. Gates once said it was inconceivable that he would stay on past the close of Bush’s term on Jan. 20.

But the 65-year-old former spymaster had recently turned mum in public on the circumstances under which he would stay, even briefly, in an Obama administration.

Keeping Gates might afford Obama a sort of extended transition, in which critical military issues are left in trusted hands while Obama focuses most intensely on the financial crisis.

Indeed – and provide Obama a wellspring of good advice when the inevitable challenge comes (which one friend in the know advises might come from Putin over the Baltic States). Obama will still have to take the advice and act with courage, but with Gates at Defense there won’t be any way to say that Obama isn’t equipped with sagacious counselors who know how things work in the military field.

To help out Senator Chambliss who, with Franken still trying to steal Minnesota, may be all there is between liberty and 60 Democratic Senators:

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin will come to Georgia next week to campaign for incumbent Republican U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss on the eve of the runoff election.

Palin, who drew large crowds while running for vice president with Republican presidential candidate U.S. Sen. John McCain, will appear at Chambliss rallies in Augusta, Savannah, Perry and Atlanta on Monday, the day before the Dec. 2 senate runoff between Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin.

A Chambliss victory following hard upon a Palin visit will make Governor Palin a top draw as we head towards 2010, and thus give her a massive leg up for the GOP nomination in 2012.

Have at it. Just can’t think of anything to write which is either relevant, true or not part of a book I’m writing.

UPDATE, by Matt Margolis: Be sure to tune into The American Resolve tonight on BlogTalkRadio from 6 to 7 pm EST. We will be talking abeout the RNC Chairman race, and the state of conservative blogging.

I have been getting a lot of complaints of inappropriate comments being posted here, so i have decided to enable mandatory registration before you can post a comment.

That’s all folks.

UPDATE: I have decided on a short term transition. You all are advised to register right now, but I will allow unregistered comments to continue for a week… So starting Tuesday, November 25, you will have to be registered and logged in to comment.

UPDATE 11/25/08: Today is the day… Mandatory registration will begin at approximately 12 PM EST.

The words for today, boys and girls, are “well-connected” and “nepotism”. Can you say those words, boys and girls?

Delaware Gov. Ruth Ann Minner announced she will appoint Ted Kaufman of Wilmington, a long-time aide to Sen. Joe Biden, to fill the Senate seat Biden will soon vacate to become vice president.

Kaufman’s term will expire after a special election in 2010. Picking someone so close to Biden fueled speculation that Democrats want to keep the seat warm for a 2010 run by Biden’s son, Beau Biden. The younger Biden, Delaware’s attorney general, is currently serving in Iraq.

Kaufman, 69 years old, was chief of staff in Biden’s Senate office for 19 years and has worked on all of his campaigns. He is also advising Biden on the transition.

This is The Great Hopenchange in action…

A verdict at last regarding the Holy Land Foundation:

On the very day, November 24, 2008, that the United Nations spent all day and countless sums of money “mourning” the alleged Palestinian catastrophe, a federal jury in Dallas found all five former officials of the Holy Land Foundation, guilty of having illegally raised money in the United States to assist the Palestinian terrorist group, Hamas, in its hot war against Israel.

According to terrorism expert, Steven Emerson, the defendants, “Shukri Abu-Baker, Ghassan Elashi, Mohamed El-Mezain, Mufid Abdulqader and Abdelrahman Odeh, could face up to 20 years in prison for their convictions on conspiracy counts, including conspiring to provide material support to terrorists. The verdicts, read Monday afternoon, ended a two-year saga in what is considered the largest terror financing case since the 9/11 attacks.”

All five defendants are “Palestinians” and/or American citizens as well. Elyashi was born in Gaza; Abu-Baker moved to the “Palestinian territories” as a child; both Abdhulqader and Odeh were born in the West Bank; El-Mezain was born in Gaza.

It is this sort of stern effort on the part of the Bush Administration which has curbed terrorism and kept us safe since 9/11 – and it is the same sort of thing Obama will have to do if he wants to build on the amazing success of the Bush Administration in this area. The worry is that Obama and Administration simply won’t have their heart in this sort of thing – much as the Clinton Administration let things slide out of indifference.

It remains a dangerous world out there, and anyone who thinks that Obamania will magically turn those who hate us for what we are into people who love us for what Obama does are ignorant fools.

Michael Yon reports:

As we rolled out from dusty Forward Operating Base (FOB) Falcon, I asked how many casualties the unit had taken since they had arrived, from Fort Hood (Texas), in March 2008. The soldiers told me that one Humvee had taken an EFP strike, but that a Private Rafael Martinez had received only a ruptured eardrum.

It represents vast progress to observe that the current rotation in 2008 has lost only two soldiers to an EFP strike. As sad as those losses are, the extreme distinction over the 100 lost in the Dragon Brigade from the previous year is immense and exultant. The area has fallen nearly completely silent. The war has ended. The canary in the mineshaft survived. It is starting to chirp and it is just a matter of time before it begins to sing.

One battalion in the Dragon Brigade was the 2-12 Infantry, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Michael. His right hand man, Command Sergeant Major Charles Sasser, was open to and confident with the press and provided more than just combat expertise. I went on missions with his men, who spent important time educating me about their area when they could have been sleeping. LTC Michael is a native of Guyana in South America. The Guyanese are famously soft-spoken. In fact, Major Kirk Luedeke said of LTC Michael, “Soft spoken guy, but an extremely bright and tenacious fighter.” It was true. The commander seemed gentle and grandfatherly, but he commanded his units with great expertise in what must have been one of the most complicated areas in Iraq. LTC Michael’s battalion took 18 KIAs and more than 150 wounded, mostly during the surge. (2-12 was one of the battalions in the Dragon Brigade.) The 2-12’s old area has fallen quiet now. The soldiers accomplished their mission, though I doubt anyone will ever know how hard they worked.

Read the whole thing – and remember to thank those glorious men and women of our armed forces, and their international and Iraqi allies, who fought so hard to bring this victory to you, my fellow Americans. And, also, the courage of President Bush, Senator McCain, Senator Lieberman and all those others who refused to back down and pressed for victory when many Americans, to their shame, were calling the war a failure and demanding we pull out regardless of consequences.

President-elect Obama will inherit a victory – I hope he knows how to use it.

Uh, governor, the place to make such a statement is anywhere but Iowa:

Jindal to Iowa: I’m not running for president

Strictly speaking, of course, this is ok – governor Jindal is running for re-election as governor of Louisiana at the moment, and as that election happens prior to 2012, its all good. Meanwhile, however, Jindal isn’t coming in top ranked in GOP enthusiasm at the moment:

Republicans and Republican-leaning independents are most interested in seeing Sarah Palin, Mitt Romney, and Mike Huckabee run for the party’s presidential nomination in 2012. Those three received the highest scores among the 10 possible candidates evaluated in a recent Gallup Panel survey.

GOPers are clearly not blaming Palin for the loss – and rightly so; without Palin it would have been a bigger loss. McCain was crushed when the financial crisis hit and, in hindsight, all the effort post-crisis was towards lessening the loss, and in this Palin did far more than McCain. Jindal, on the other hand, is still my early favorite, though his numbers are much weaker than Palin’s – on the other hand, he’s not nearly as well known as Palin and it could be that once people get a good look at him, his numbers will rise.

HAT TIP: Hot Air

Seems that the people of Venezuela are out of step with American leftists:

President Hugo Chávez’s supporters suffered defeat in several state and municipal races on Sunday, with the opposition retaining power in Zulia, the country’s most populous state, and winning crucial races here in the capital, the National Electoral Council said.

Pro-Chávez candidates won 17 of the 22 governor’s races at stake. Many of the seats that Mr. Chavez’s supporters did win were in relatively sparsely populated rural states.

The losses were Mr. Chávez’s second setback at the polls in the past year, after the defeat of a proposed constitutional overhaul last December that would have enhanced his powers. The results will put opponents of Mr. Chávez in charge of areas with more than a third of Venezuela’s 26 million people.

In the early hours of Monday, electoral officials announced opposition victories in two important states, Táchira, on the border with Colombia, and Carabobo, with a large industrial base.

An opposition candidate also won in Sucre, a municipality in Caracas with sprawling slums that had been a symbolic bastion of support for Mr. Chávez since he rose to power a decade ago.

“These victories came in the economic and political centers of the country,” said Luis Vicente León, director of Datánalisis, a polling firm here. “They represent the most important symbols in terms of cities and population.”

It is clear that the shine has worn off of Chavez – who has spent Venezuela’s wealth in foolish arms build ups and sponsoring terrorism, and now faces the economic bill as oil prices collapse. It is now hoped that Chavez will read the writing on the wall and gracefully exit the scene. Unfortunately, Chavez might not be reasonable – one of the challenges Obama might face is what to do if Venezuela, under Chavez, becomes a full blown dictatorship as Chavez refuses to step down…

And, in the end, it might prove beneficial for the United States – that is, the more Obama follows the policies of President Bush, the better off we’ll be:

In light of the downturn, Mr. Obama is also said to be reconsidering a key campaign pledge: his proposal to repeal the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. According to several people familiar with the discussions, he might instead let those tax cuts expire as scheduled in 2011, effectively delaying any tax increase while he gives his stimulus plan a chance to work.

And just figure the odds that Obama will really let them lapse a year out from his re-election bid.

You want to know what might end up annoying me most? That by 2011 we’ll have a strong economic recovery propelled by Obama holding to Bush economic policies our mindless liberals trying to convince us that Obama was the guy who figured this all out…

Ah, well, it’ll be ok if Obama does it – the main thing to be concerned about here is the United States.