Selection of Eric H. Holder Jr. as his attorney general was another history-making step by President-elect Barack Obama, and a good one.

First, Holder has the right experience.

Yesterday the New York Times wrote:

Now in private practice as a partner at the Washington law firm of Covington and Burling, Mr. Holder served as a federal prosecutor, a trial court judge, and United States attorney for the District of Columbia before becoming the top-ranking aide to Attorney General Janet Reno in 1997. He was the first African-American to serve in that post.

Second, Holder has the right values and stands for the right policies. He is "not a proponent of the death penalty" and Michael Iskoff of Newsweek, who broke the story, wrote today:

A New York City native who graduated from Columbia University and Columbia Law School, Holder spent years as a federal prosecutor - a job in which he earned a reputation as tough and aggressive foe of public corruption. After serving in the public integrity section of the Justice Department's Criminal Division and later a District of Columbia Superior Court judge, Holder was named by President Clinton as U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia. He became deputy attorney general in 1997 under Janet Reno and was viewed as a centrist on most law enforcement issues, though he has sharply criticized the secrecy and the expansive views of executive power advanced by the Bush Justice Department.

Since the Obama staff has let it be known that they have the Senate votes required for approval, we can consider the task Holder faces.

Michael Tomasky of the Guardian got it right today when he wrote that Holder "will need Herculean fortitude to clean out the sewage that has polluted the Justice Department in the Bush years. God bless him."

Indeed.

Addendum

Eric Holder on the Rule of Law - 2008 American Constitution Society National Convention

Below is a Windows Media Video of Holder blistering the Bush administration for "the disastrous course" it has set in pursuit of the war on terror.

"Our needlessly abusive and unlawful practices in the 'War on Terror' have diminished our standing in the world community and made us less, rather than more, safe,” Holder told the American Constitution Society 2008 Convention. He went on to say, "For the sake of our safety and security, and because it is the right thing to do, the next president must move immediately to reclaim America’s standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights."

It is not condensed, is not brief and IMHO it is well worth listening to in full.

              

President elect Barack Obama 's speech via video to the bi-partisan Governors Global Climate Summit in Los Angeles this morning renews his stand against global warming, giving it to us correctly as a national security and economic issue.

This is in sharp contrast with the Bush administration's attempts to manipulate and censor the science in order to justify inaction.

"Refreshing to have an adult as incoming president," writes Greg Sargent in his coverage of the speech at TPM.

              

(update below)

Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain gave a misleading answer to his first Faith Forum question, and so tarnished his entire performance.

As Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren put it to McCain on Saturday, "Now, my first question: Was the cone of silence comfortable that you were in just now?"

McCain answered, "I was trying to hear through the wall" and thus told a charming lie.

His dishonesty first became apparent when NBC News' Andrea Mitchell reported Sunday the Obama campaign's objection that McCain was not secluded.

Affirming Mitchell's account the New York Times' Kit Seelye wrote today:

Senator John McCain was not in a "cone of silence" on Saturday night while his rival, Senator Barack Obama, was being interviewed at the Saddleback Church in California... The matter is of interest because Mr. McCain, who followed Mr. Obama's hourlong appearance in the forum, was asked virtually the same questions as Mr. Obama. Mr. McCain's performance was well received, raising speculation among some viewers, especially supporters of Mr. Obama, that he was not as isolated during the Obama interview as Mr. Warren implied. ...
Mr. Warren, the pastor of Saddleback, had assured the audience while he was interviewing Mr. Obama that "we have safely placed Senator McCain in a cone of silence" and that he could not hear the questions... Interviewed Sunday on CNN, Mr. Warren seemed surprised to learn that Mr. McCain was not in the building during the Obama interview.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis confirmed the allegation in a heated letter of protest to NBC. Davis wrote, "The fact is that during Senator Obama's segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed."

Davis was of course protesting Mitchell's report by using the time-honored "seppuku strategy" of affirming the accuracy of the report and then screaming that the accurate and relevant report should not have been aired or published.

McCain's dishonesty regarding "the cone of silence" gave additional force to the allegation that his Saddleback account of Christmas in Saigon was freely adapted from Alexander Solzhenitsyn's accounts of his time in the Soviet Gulags.

McCain talked of a Vietnamese prison guard drawing the sign of the cross in the sand (an account which absent from McCain's detailed, 1973 account of his time in North Vietnamese prison, and apparently first emerged in 1999 when his bid for the Republican presidential nomination made it convenient.).

Solzhenitn's strikingly similar account in "The Gulag Archipelago" (published in the U.S. in 1973) is:

As he waited, head down, he felt a presence. Slowly he looked up and saw a skinny old prisoner squat down beside him. The man said nothing. Instead, he used a stick to trace in the dirt the sign of the Cross. The man then got back up and returned to his work.
As Solzhenitsyn stared at the Cross drawn in the dirt his entire perspective changed. He knew he was only one man against the all-powerful Soviet empire. Yet he knew there was something greater than the evil he saw in the prison camp, something greater than the Soviet Union. He knew that hope for all people was represented by that simple Cross. Through the power of the Cross, anything was possible

McCain attends a Baptist Church and certainly knows that actual faith in the way of the Cross requires one to tell the truth about both trivial and important things, not fudge one's account of events three and half decades past. And not fudge one's account of events an hour or so past.

I don't think the right name for those who fudge is "straight shooter."

McCain's behavior in both of these instances appears to have been that of a "hypocrite."

The Baptist Center for Ethics publication Ethics Daily has called Rick Warren out for his failures to tell the truth.

In "How Fast Can Rick Warren Spin," Mark McEntire, an associate professor of religion at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., carefully contrasts the claims Warren made during the Aug. 16 ":Faith Forum" at Saddleback Church with the revelations and admissions which have followed.

McEntire ends with a call for public repentance and abandonment of any plans for future fora:

What I believe is certain is that Warren needs to apologize to the candidates and his audience, first, for not telling the truth, and second, for arguing, after he was caught not telling the truth, that the truth does not really matter.
The first "Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency" was a bad idea from the start, and Warren and his church proved ill-equipped to handle it. Let's hope it was the last.

              

Think Progess collected the numbers. During the week following the debate I believe calls for a recourse to a fair, third party -- specifically the League of Women Voters -- NBC news beat ABC news by some 600,000 viewers. And yes, according to TVNewser, that is an unusually wide margin.

              

Last night, performer/journalists went after audience emotional reaction, passed on questions all of us need answered and the result was an uninformative train wreck.

Whatever the effect on this presidential campaign, the impaneled questioners demonstrated conclusively the overarching need for nonprofit, nonpartisan League of Women Voters oversight of political campaign debates.

That's the only approach proven to restrain the otherwise commercially irresistible drive of full-time performer/journalists to use presidential debates the same way they use other forums -- by doing whatever they feel they can get away with to build their own audience numbers and so better pay the bills.

Only the oversight of an impartial gatekeeper who has the authority to bar them from participation can restrain the impulse to ask eyebrow-raising questions which consume time better-used for questions about the issues which will actually preoccupy the time of whoever is actually elected president.

              

San Antonio Pastor John Hagee, in 'NYT' This Sunday, Says McCain Sought His Endorsement, which he of course gave.

E&P Editor Greg Mitchell wrote:

In an interview that will appear in this Sunday's New York Times Magazine, controversial televangelist Rev. John Hagee declares, "It's true that [John] McCain's campaign sought my endorsement."
Senator and soon-to-be Republican presidential candidate McCain has attempted to distance himself from some of Hagee's views, much as Democrat Barack Obama is doing in relation to Rev. Jeremiah Wright. But unlike McCain, Obama has not stood on stage with Wright and accepted his accolades this year.

From Bill Moyer's Journal we learn that Hagee has suggested that Hurricane Katrina was punishment to the U.S. for its role in removal of Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip. He has called for war with Iran to facilitate "the rapture," and more.

McCain has a history of caring little about such radicalism, or not at all. He says he doesn't support every Hagee view. Which, as intended, leaves McCain in a position of considerable sympathy for the views of Hagee and others like him.

Of course. How else could McCain sustain his friendship and/or close working relationship with Hagee and others of like mind?

              

Associate Washington Post Editor Eugene Robinson's blog at the offers admiring insight into Democrat Barack Obama's Road Map on Race.

Faith in Public Life covers the Man Behind the Southern Baptist Climate Initiative. He is currently a seminarian at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary in North Carolina and gives an interesting interview.

Semi-Happy Seventh Birthday today to DangerBush's Faith-Based Initiatives. Bill Berkowitz is a longtime observer of the conservative movement, writes about them accurately and with clarity.

Republican soon-to-be Presidential nominee John McCain's relationship with his ultra-right pastor is covered by Mother Jones' David Corn in McCain's Spiritual Guide: Destroy Islam. After reading that you may agree that McCain really wants A permanent war, as does the Bush Administration.

Changing days have of late frequently blessed the lives of politically powerful members of the Christian Right. Jeff Sharlet covers them with acid humor in This is Not a Religion Column: Christian Candidate Quiz Bowl.