From Ray Walser at, nat­u­rally, The Corner:

Con­gress, the courts, and the mil­i­tary joined forces to send [Hon­duran Pres­i­dent] “Mad” Mel [Zelaya] pack­ing. In a delib­er­ate, bipar­ti­san manner, they selected a new pres­i­dent to serve until reg­u­lar elec­tions in November.

And for the reality-​based among us, here are the first 3 parts of the OAS res­o­lu­tion con­demn­ing the coup—

1. To con­demn vehe­mently the coup d’état staged this morn­ing against the constitutionally-​established Gov­ern­ment of Hon­duras, and the arbi­trary deten­tion and expul­sion from the coun­try of the con­sti­tu­tional pres­i­dent José Manuel Zelaya Ros­ales, which has pro­duced an uncon­sti­tu­tional alter­ation of the demo­c­ra­tic order.

…Read More…

While few polit­i­cal respon­si­bil­i­ties strike me as abso­lutist and unde­mo­c­ra­tic as that of a gov­er­nor appoint­ing a U.S. Sen­a­tor to office in the case of a vacant Senate seat, the rank process has smelt to heaven in all three post-​election situations.

Little more needs to be said on Barack Obama’s vacant Senate seat after Bobby’s Cliff­s­Notes ver­sion of the filed crim­i­nal com­plaint against Blago. Might I just point out that Illi­nois res­i­dents knew the score before the latest shock twist: Ras­mussen had Blago’s approval rating in an Octo­ber 13 poll at 4%. Yes, 4%.  A greater per­cent­age of a random sample of people believe that the sun revolves around the earth than approve of the job that Blago is doing in the Spring­field state house.

But the other two seats in play, VP-​Elect Joe Biden’s Senate seat in Delaware and Secretary-of-State-designate Hillary Clinton’s Senate seat in New York, are falling prey to the other kind of cor­rup­tion, i.e., the soft crony­ism of nepotism.

The news that Hillary Clin­ton may be our next Sec­re­tary of State has trig­gered all the expected reac­tions in all the expected quar­ters: Clin­tonites are secretly ecsta­tic, polit­i­cal reporters are not so secretly sali­vat­ing, and many Obamaphiles are won­der­ing, in a word, WTF?

If the appoint­ment hap­pens, every­one agrees, it will owe much in inspi­ra­tion to Doris Kearns Goodwin’s 2005 Team of Rivals. The book’s sub­ject is Abra­ham Lincoln’s Cab­i­net, to which he appointed three of his rivals for the Repub­li­can nom­i­na­tion of 1860, and Obama’s fond­ness for both the book and its ani­mat­ing idea is well known. Back in May he described Team of Rivals as “wonderful” and spoke admir­ingly of how Lin­coln “basically pulled in all the people who had been run­ning against him into his Cab­i­net because what­ever, you know, per­sonal feel­ings there were, the issue was, ‘How can we get this coun­try through this time of crisis?’”

The Boston Globe recently asked Good­win what she thought of the Clin­ton possibility:

Goodwin…said Obama’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Clin­ton for sec­re­tary of state is anal­o­gous to Lincoln’s select­ing William Seward for the same post in 1861. Seward was con­sid­ered the favorite for the Repub­li­can pres­i­den­tial nom­i­na­tion, as Clin­ton had been for this year’s Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion. Though ini­tially dejected from the loss, Good­win said, Seward even­tu­ally accepted Lincoln’s offer to join his Cab­i­net and the two men devel­oped a pro­duc­tive friend­ship. “The par­al­lel with Hillary is almost eerie,” she said yesterday.

The deal isn’t done (though Politico’s Mike Allen is report­ing it’s close) and yet that hasn’t stopped the election-​deprived pun­di­toc­racy from feed­ing a frenzy about what the appoint­ment would mean for Obama, for Hillary, for Bill, for the Repub­li­cans, for Iran, etc., etc.

But there is, I submit, a more impor­tant ques­tion that needs our atten­tion: if Hillary Clin­ton is going to be the new William Seward, what’s going to be the new Seward’s Folly?

John McCain sur­ro­gate Carly Fio­r­ina, speak­ing to NBC’s Andrea Mitchell about Sat­ur­day Night Live’s por­trayal of Sarah Palin last weekend:

I think, of course, the por­trait was very dis­mis­sive of the sub­stance of Sarah Palin, and so in that sense they were defin­ing Hillary Clin­ton as very sub­stan­tive and Sarah Palin as totally super­fi­cial. I think that con­tin­ues the line of argu­ment that is dis­re­spect­ful in the extreme, and, yes, I would say sexist in the sense that just because Sarah Palin has dif­fer­ent views than Hillary Clin­ton does not mean that she lacks substance.