Yes We Can (Have Political Problems Already)

I wanted to title this post about re-dos (Obama), postponements (Holder and Geithner) and drop-outs (Kennedy) “Mo’ Power, Mo’ Problems,” but I guess if you’re dropping out, you don’t actually have more power.

So, Caroline Kennedy is officially out of the race for Hillary Clinton’s now-vacant Senate seat — Clinton resigned it yesterday just after taking the oath of office to become the 67th Secretary of State (thank goodness she’s not 69 — we’d never hear the end of it). Speculation as to why includes that Kennedy knew she wasn’t going to get it, was upset by her uncle Ted’s seizure and that she thought she wasn’t going to get in and reconsidered when Paterson’s office asked her to but then realized she looked like she was waffling and had to end it anyway. In short: It’s a mess. Paterson has reportedly said he feels some sort of pressure to nominate a woman to the seat, so it might go to either Congresswoman Carolyn Maloney (safe Democratic seat) or Congresswoman Kirsten Gillibrand (unsafe Democratic seat if it opens) but, then again, he might just give it to Andrew “Shucking and Jiving Is Not A Racist Term” Cuomo anyway.

In the meantime, Obama bucked tradition — much to the chagrin of Pat Buchanan on Morning Joe this morning — and sat around in his office without his suit coat on yesterday and ZOMG THE WORLD IS ENDING! While Republicans like Buchanan have their knickers in a twist over that, other Republicans are holding up the confirmations of Eric Holder as Attorney General and Tim Geithner as Treasury Secretary. Geithner, by the way, is blaming TurboTax for his failure to pay self-employment taxes while at the IMF; as someone who uses a computer program to pay her self-employment taxes (and did in 2000), I know that’s kind of bullshit because if you say that you had no Medicare or Social Security withholding, it automatically prompts you to pay them, not that a Senator or Hill staffer would know that. Oh, and someone’s anonymously holding up the nominations of Lisa Jackson to head the EPA and Nancy H. Sutley for chair of White House Council on Environmental Quality, too.

Yesterday, Obama froze White House staff pay, prepared to close Gitmo and issued restrictions on lobbying, so it wasn’t a terrible day even though he had to take the freaking Oath of Office a second time because John Roberts fucked up the wording the first time. And here everyone thought Clarence Thomas was the moron on the Court! He also gets to keep his BlackBerry (which is going to get spy-proofed), and found out Fidel Castro “believes” in him, so apparently this Hope thing is audaciously infective like the cold virus. Or Ebola.

And finally, a moment of silence for former French President Jacques Chirac, who was seriously mauled yesterday by his clinically depressed poodle. And absolutely no jokes about cheese-eating surrender monkeys or the French being pussies because it’s a New Day In America and those jokes aren’t funny anymore. I swear.