by Frank James

Congressional Democrats have volleyed the auto-bailout ball back into the Big Three automakers' court.

Lawmakers asked the auto industry chieftains who appeared on Capitol Hill this week to provide a plan by early December of what they would do with the $25 billion they sought

It was a sign that the automakers clearly hurt their efforts to get taxpayer money to tide them over by not being able to adequately answer lawmaker questions on how they would spend the money. Nor could they offer assurances that they wouldn't be back for more money.

Explaining Congress's unwillingness to give the automakers what they wanted, Sen. Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader, said:

The main reason is what we've all witnessed in the congressional hearings this week. The executives of the auto companies have not been able to convince the Congress or the American people that this government bailout will be its last.

In light of the importance of this issue, to all of us, we have decided, the best way to proceed is to give the auto companies another opportunity to make their case, make their case to Congress and to the American people.

by Frank James

Sen. Ted Stevens gave his valedictory speech on the Senate floor today. The 85-year old who holds the record as the longest-serving Republican senator in history said repeatedly stressed his love for and sense of duty to Alaska.

He said:

And home is where the heart is... If that is so I have two homes. One is right here in this chamber and the other is my beloved state of Alaska. Alaska and the Senate. I must leave one to return to the other."

He also said:

"My motto has been here, to hell with politics. Just do what is right for Alaska. And I've tried everyday to live up to those words."

Oh yes, he did say he hopes to clear the cloud caused by his conviction for lying on his federal financial disclosure forms which helped lead to his defeat this week by Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (D-Ill.), the incoming chief of staff for President-elect Obama, met on Capitol Hill Thursday with the House and Senate GOP leaders to tell Republicans that the new president wants to hear their ideas and to work with them.

"We welcome their ideas and their concepts," said Emanuel, who similarly reached out to Republicans after he helped Democrats take back control of the House in 2006. "The challenges facing the country require that people of both parties work together to solve those problems."

Emanuel called his first meeting with Senate Republican leaders "very, very, very good" and said he was talking to them at the direction of Obama. Emanuel has also held individual meetings with House Republicans and estimated he had spoken by phone with at least 20 other Republicans.

"The challenges for the country are large. The problems we face are of a serious magnitude and there's enough area and enough good will for ideas from both parties to solve those challenges," Emanuel said.

by Frank James

Many people who live and work in the Washington, D.C. area have been closely following stories in the local media about what we're likely to face on Inauguration Day, Jan. 20, 2009.

There are estimates that as many as four million people will descend on downtown Washington to try and witness history, to see either the inauguration of the first African-American president or the parade to the White House.

For those who have to work that day and don't live right downtown or are used to driving in and don't have a hotel room or space at a friend's house lined up, the question has been "How do I get downtown that day?"

Fortunately, the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority which runs the city's mass transit system said today that it will run the city's subway and bus system on a rush- hour basis from 4 am to 7 pm.

Many Republicans have been rethinking what their party should do to regain its political mojo.

Morton Kondracke has a provocative column today in which he says the GOP needs to essentially chew off its leg. That leg would be conservative broadcasters who have done so much over the years to rally the conservative base.

According to Kondracke they are not only expendable, they are dangerous to Republican prospects because they have set an agenda that has been destructive to the Republican party's prospects.

But Step One is to fire Rush Limbaugh and his ilk as the intellectual bosses of the GOP. They shouldn't be muzzled, as some liberals want to do by reviving the "fairness doctrine" in broadcasting, just ignored more frequently.

The result is that the demographic groups representing the future of American politics shifted decisively to the Democratic Party in 2008 -- Latinos, young people, the well-educated, moderates, working women, first-time voters, suburbanites and seculars."

In a sign that President-elect Barack Obama's environmental agenda will receive strong support from Capitol Hill, House Democrats today voted to install Rep. Henry Waxman of Los Angeles as leader of the House committee that handles environmental legislation, ousting the auto industry's strongest ally, Rep. John Dingell of Michigan, from the job.

Waxman is an advocate of much stricter regulation to curb global warming than Dingell, who as chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committe had compiled a long record of defending the auto industry against emissions rules that automakers consider too strict.

Waxman's promotion to chairman of the committee was approved 137-122 in a closed meeting of the House Democratic Caucus.

He argued that the panel needed new leadership in order to manage upcoming legislation on healthcare, energy and global warming -- all signature issues of Obama. Dingell, who is 82 and recovering from knee surgery, argued that there was no reason to upend the House's longstanding seniority system.

Chicago billionaire Penny Pritzker has told Barack Obama's team she does not want to serve as Commerce Secretary, said a senior Obama official.

"Penny Pritzker ultimately has decided she does not want to do the Commerce thing," the senior official said.

Pritzker has issued this statement: "Speculation has grown that I am a candidate for Secretary of Commerce. I am not. I think I can best serve our nation in my current capacity: building businesses, creating jobs and working to strengthen our economy. It has been my great privilege to serve in the Obama campaign.

"I look forward to helping our new president in every way possible and am excited about the future under his leadership,'' she said.

The senior Obama official also said reports that Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano will be Secretary of Homeland Security are premature.

"I expect Napolitano will end up in the Cabinet. But whether she ends up where the speculation is (has her), I don't know," the official said.

Don't read this if you're in a blue mood because it won't help lift your spirits.

Nouriel Roubini, a professor at New York University's Stern Business School gives 20 reasons why consumers aren't spending. Really, it's no mystery. Boiled down, we don't have any money. To elaborate further: we have too much debt, not enough savings and are losing our jobs.

While most others were still at the economic punch bowl of cheap money and easy credit, Roubini warned years ago that the economy was heading toward the cliff, so he's worth listening to now. But it's not easy listening, that's for sure.

An excerpt from his a piece he has on the Forbes website:

This week's news about October retail sales (-2.8% relative to the previous month and now down in real terms for five months in a row) confirm that the U.S. has entered its most severe consumer-led recession in decades. At this rate of free fall in consumption, real gross domestic product growth could be a whopping 5% negative or even worse in the fourth quarter of 2008. And this is not a temporary phenomenon: Almost all of the fundamentals driving consumption are heading south on a persistent and structural basis.

If Republicans didn't have bad luck, they wouldn't have any luck at all, it seems.

Gallup's pollsters have found that Americans have an even more unpopular view of the Republican Party now than they had on Election Day.

An excerpt from Gallup's report:

PRINCETON, NJ -- The Republican Party's image has gone from bad to worse over the past month, as only 34% of Americans in a Nov. 13-16 Gallup Poll say they have a favorable view of the party, down from 40% in mid-October. The 61% now holding an unfavorable view of the GOP is the highest Gallup has recorded for that party since the measure was established in 1992.

Meanwhile, Americans view Democrats about as positively now as they did on Election Day, with Democrats getting a 55 percent favorable rating. That would seem to indicate that Democrats have a good amount of political capital to expend when the new Obama Administration and Congress take charge in January.

Back to the Republicans. One of the Gallup's most interesting findings was this: it was 78 percent of Republicans want the party to become more conservative while only 12 percent want it to become less conservative.

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is "a leading contender'' for the job of Homeland Security secretary in the administration of President-elect Barack Obama, National Public Radio reports.

And Penny Pritzker, the Chicago real estate executive who steered Obama's phenomenal campaign fundraising, could be in line for appointment as Secretary of Commerce, NPR says this morning.

Napolitano was an early supporter of Obama's presidential campaign and serves on his transition team.

While she has no national security experience, she does have extensive knowledge of border security as the governor of a border state constantly crossed by illegal immigrants.

Pritzker, CEO of Pritzker Realty Group, manages the family's non-hotel real estate investments.and served as chair of the Obama campaign's fundraising.

Have the federal bailouts been biased towards white-collar and against blue-collar workers?

That question was starkly raised by Rep. Barney Frank, chair of the House Financial Services Committee, which yesterday heard the chief executives of the Big Three automakers beseech Congress for $25 billion in taxpayer-funded loans.

Frank, the committee's chair, said:

I have been struck, not happily, in the time that we've been discussing this, at what frankly seems to me an inherent cultural bias. There's a double standard here. Aid to blue-collar employees is being judged by a standard different than white-collar employees.

New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, raises an important question about the possibility that President-elect Barack Obama could name Sen. Hillary Clinton as his secretary of state.

Friedman questions whether the relationship between Obama and Clinton can become so close that Clinton would be viewed by foreign leaders as speaking for Obama, of having his full backing, when she enunciates policy, or if there would always be some doubt about that.

My question is whether a President Obama and a Secretary of State Clinton, given all that has gone down between them and their staffs, can have that kind of relationship, particularly with Mrs. Clinton always thinking four to eight years ahead, and the possibility that she may run again for the presidency. I just don't know.

When it comes to appointing a secretary of state, you do not want a team of rivals.

That's the rub. To be effective, a secretary of state can't be thought to be freelancing or have an agenda other than that of the president's. If nothing else, it prevents confusion and the kind of misunderstanding that can literally prove deadly to someone.

A successful secretary of state almost needs to be a president's alter ego or right hand, as James Baker was to the first President Bush or Madeleine Albright was to President Bill Clinton, knowing what the president wants to accomplish and doing it. Because of the decline in U.S. standing abroad and the challenges of terrorism, Iraq and Afghanistan, among others, there's little margin for error or infighting.

Is it possible for Clinton to be throw herself completely into the task of making Obama's foreign policy a success is the key question before Obama right now in these days before he makes his choice for the State Department officially known.

The Illinois ball for president-elect Barack Obama's inauguration might be Washington D.C.'s hottest ticket, but the event's headliners aren't exactly Kanye, The Boss or any of those A-list entertainers who've endorsed Obama.

In fact, wedding singers, corporate-events crooners and bar mitzvah bands make up the list of the musicians scheduled to perform at the Illinois State Society's Jan. 19 Inaugural Gala, according to a partial list obtained by the Tribune.

Planners say they are still hoping to hire a handful more professional acts, who will also be joined by two high school choirs.

Of course, it's not the musical entertainment that's making the D.C. event so popular but the assumption that Obama will keep with inaugural tradition and hit his home state's party. In 2001 and 2005, Texas' "Black Tie and Boots Inaugural Ball" reigned as the not-miss affair because of Pres. George W. Bush's Lone Star connections. In 2005, headliners at that ball included Asleep at the Wheel, Lyle Lovett and Clay Walker.

by Frank James

It was kind of a cheap shot but still an effective moment that made the point the lawmaker was seeking.

Rep. Brad Sherman, a California Democrat on the House Financial Services Committee asked at today's hearing on a potential bailout for the struggling U.S. auto industry asked the Big Three's chief executive officers which of them had flown by private jet into Washington for the hearing. All three raised their hands.

Then he asked which would be heading home commercially. None of the three raised his hand.

It definitely didn't match the image of cash-strapped companies in desperate need of a taxpayer-financed bailout that the auto industry officials were trying to get across.

Not that there wasn't some thought given ahead of time to image. Alan Mulally, Ford's CEO made sure to arrive at Capitol Hill today in a Ford Fusion hybrid.