IT’S NOT JUST THE NETROOTS: Bob Woodward wonders what Obama’s been smoking to pick Hillary as Secretary of State. Actually, I can see why it’s good for Obama. What I can’t understand is why Hillary took the job — unless, that is, she cut a deal to be running mate in 2012.

LAUGHING AT RECESSION-TALK with luxury laundry products!

WHO WILL fill Hillary’s Senate seat?

MARK STEYN: “I didn’t think I could like Sarah Palin more than I do, but the nancy boys at MSNBC bleating all over the screen about the Great Turkey Carnage is hilarious.”

More from Tim Blair. I still like Ann Althouse’s “candy-asses” remark. I’ll bet those guys have never even cleaned a fish . . . .

IT’S POLIWOOD, and Roger Simon and Lionel Chetwynd talk about the changing roles of men and women in film. Free to everybody, no registration required.

SUCKERS!

Barack Obama’s signature issue in the primaries was his “good judgment” to oppose the Iraq war. He invoked this more than any other qualification in his early battles with Hillary Clinton. She may have experience, he’d charge, but she lacked the wisdom to oppose the war. Indeed, the whole Democratic establishment was somehow corrupt or out of touch for not opposing the war, according to the Obamaphiles. So now Barack Obama is going to appoint Hillary Clinton to be the chief architect of his foreign policy. Moreover, he picked Joe Biden to be his running mate and “partner” in the White House explicitly because of his foreign policy experience and judgment. But wait: Joe Biden, too, supported the war. Meanwhile, at Defense, it looks like he will keep George W. Bush’s man, Robert Gates. Admittedly, Gates has always been more nuanced about the war than, say, Don Rumsfeld. But surely keeping Bush’s SecDef is not exactly what the anti-war Dems had in mind as “change we can believe in.” Heck, Joe Lieberman’s sitting pretty and he endorsed McCain. It will be interesting to see how long Obama’s charisma can paper over reality.

Heh. Plus, Tom Maguire on the National Security Advisor choice. More on that here.

UPDATE: Reader C.J. Burch emails: “The right bloggers should study all this. Should they form their own Kos contingent they can pretty much count on the same sort of treatment from a future Republican President.” I think that’s probably right and it’s one reason — one of several — why I think the Kos path isn’t the way to go.

ANOTHER UPDATE: So how’s this prediction looking now?

MORE: Bill Quick comments: “On the other hand, without a conservative version of the Kossacks, there may never be another Republican President.”

SOME ADVICE FOR people on the right.

A PREDICTION: “The early twenty-first century civil libertarian critique of government surveillance and detention activities will seem as eccentric in 2025 as the early nineteenth century critique of the national bank seems to us today.”

THE DOWNSIDE of a J.D.

PROMOTING DIVERSITY with military education on campus.

UPDATE: A reader emails: “Once there is no formal discriminatory policy against gays, what will the rationale for keeping ROTC out be? Does anyone really think academia will welcome it back? I think it will be fun to see the campus left scramble to find a new reason to tether its hate of the military.”

WHY G.M. IS teetering on the edge.

HOW TOM DASCHLE MIGHT kill conservatism.

SO MAYBE THAT Dow 36,000 thing was a typo. Maybe it was supposed to be Dow 3600. I’m just sayin’ . . . .

UPDATE: Rand Simberg emails: “Maybe Glassman was just factoring in the coming hyperinflation….”

That Rand. Always so cheerful!

IT’S NOT ELECTRIC: The Green Car of the Year is the Volkswagen Jetta TDI.

WELL, THEY’RE NO LONGER USEFUL: Hard left disappointed in Obama.

BARACK OBAMA and the wisdom of crowds. “Call it what you will, but the markets appear to have reacted to Obama’s promises of economic ‘fairness’, ‘spreading the wealth’ and raising taxes on the job creators of society.”

A BUNCH OF game releases for the iPhone. One of my friends just got one, entirely for the games.

JENNIFER RUBIN NOTES some modest progress on the part of the media. Very modest. But hey, baby steps, baby steps . . .

OBAMA FANS ARE TRYING TO LOWER EXPECTATIONS:

President-elect Barack Obama’s supporters have dropped much of the “messiah” talk.

No more talk of him being The One (Oprah), or a Jedi Knight (George Lucas), or a “Lightworker” (the San Francisco Chronicle), or a “quantum leap in American consciousness” (Deepak Chopra). Instead we have more humble and circumspect conversation about the man. Now he’s merely Abraham Lincoln and FDR and Martin Luther King, combined.

It’s a step down from divine redeemer, but you have to start somewhere.

Heh.

STANDING UP AGAINST anti-redneck prejudice.

DOWNSIZING AS A SOLUTION to illegal immigration.

I’D LIKE TO SEE MORE OF IT AT HOME:  NASA looks at nuclear power for Moon bases.

STANDING BEHIND REP. GARY ACKERMAN at Jiffy Lube.

HEH: “Deal with it, you candy-asses.”

TECHNOLOGY MOVING TOWARD nanotechnology-based memory devices?