Guess who the new Attorney General will be? Eric Holder! He was an assistant AG back in—wait for it—the Clinton Administration! Yay, change! Hah, see, this is what happens when you only had an eight year vacation from your 40 years of desert wandering. Holder will help close Guantanamo Bay. Thankfully, Holder has a lot of experience freeing evil criminals, because he totally signed off on the Marc Rich pardon! Let's all take a magical trip back to that wonderful story, shall we? Marc Rich founded Glencore, a commodities supplier that does lots of business with "rogue states" and so on, back in the wild 1970s. Rich was a fantastically wealthy commodities trader and decided one day to evade some taxes and also to do some illegal business with Iran, during the oil crisis. He bought some cheap oil, from Iran, and sold it in the US for double the price. Some of this oil dealing happened while Iran was holding a couple Americans hostage. Whoops! Then Rudy Giuliani indicted him and Marc forgot to come back to America from Switzerland and he ended up on the Most Wanted List for a while. Some time later, Marc's lovely wife Denise donated millions of dollars to Democrats, including Hillary Clinton, and she ponied up $450k for the Clinton library. One day, as his presidency ended, Bill pardoned Marc. Denise was thrilled! Some mean Republicans wanted to indict Bill, because honestly they'd just had a lot of fun hounding him for bullshit and were sad to see that wonderful time come to a close. But, you know, the president can pretty much pardon anyone he wants for any reason he wants. Pardoning an asshole millionaire because his socialite wife gave you money is probably more defensible than pardoning Nixon so the nation can heal or whatever. Still, it was gross and dumb, because no one liked Marc Rich besides his wife and some Israeli charities he donated to and the King of Spain. Not even his old lawyer, noted asshole Scooter Libby, actually liked him that much, though he defended the tax evasion, which was, oddly, the thing Bill didn't pardon him for. Anyway! Bill didn't seriously ask anyone in his Justice Department about whether or not he should pardon Marc Rich, but he did ask then-deputy AG Holder for his opinion, and Holder said he was "neutral, leaning towards favorable." So it's all his fault and he will be the worst Attorney General ever, as long as you pretend not to notice that the last three guys to do it have probably been the worst in history, or at least since Ed Meese. The Clinton scandals were fun because no one actually got hurt or was tortured and most American cities survived more or less intact.

Hey, let's all be disappointed! Did you hear that President-elect Barack Obama is already a huge sell-out? He's not even going to cut Joe Lieberman's nuts off! (We think it's dumb to give Lieberman subpoena power over the incoming president but whatevs, it's Barry's call.) Now, he's apparently going to let Hillary Clinton be Secretary of State. That is, if you believe The Guardian. The lefty UK paper says the Clinton selection is a done deal, though no US paper has been quite so bold. Michael Wolff thinks this is brilliant media strategy on the part of either the Obamas or the Clintons, to punish the New York Times for some unspecified crime or simply to bypass them in order to teach them a lesson about who's in charge. We, uh, aren't so sure. Neither the Clintons or the Obamas seemed to show much favor to the foreign press during the campaigns, and no UK paper, let alone The Guardian, was handed a scoop of this magnitude over the domestic press. So why now? As Wolff points out, the Europeans love Bill Clinton much more than we do, here where he used to run things, because we had to see his shouty red face so much during the primaries. So maybe it's just wishful thinking? But now the speculation has lasted days, without denials from anyone, so, yeah, it seems like the SecState gig is Hillary's. The trial balloons been floating out there for a while now, and no one's yet come up with a great argument against the nomination that doesn't boil down to "the Clintons are a headache." We are probably happier with her than with, say, hilarious clown Bill Richardson or old man Richard Holbrooke, but we were kinda warming to the John Kerry idea. That guy's been in the Senate way longer, and is clearly way more sick of being there, right? He was investigating Iran-Contra when Hillary was in Arkansas doing whatever she was accused of doing in that Whitewater thing! (Remember that?) Both of them were dead wrong on Iraq, obv, but we're probably not going to sell anyone on Secretary of State Russ Feingold. At least she's smarter than Condi Rice. Still, Clinton's rehtoric on foreign policy has always seemed more resolutely, defensively hawkish, in that "Democrats can be war-mongering badasses too" way we deplore, than that of genuine old-timey liberal John Kerry. Of course, Obama's language has been similar, so we probably shouldn't expect the doves and peaceniks to run the foreign affairs department in an Obama administration. Which means it's disappointment season! Turns out the new politics of hope might involve some hopeless old politicians! Because, hey, the only Democrats hanging around Washington with any experience in the executive branch are old Clinton people (there might be some Carter guys, at Brookings or something, but no one talks to them). So the faces of triangulation did not melt, Raiders of the Lost Ark-style, when Obama won the nomination. It is a great excuse for us Coastal Liberal Elites to Hate America Again, for the very first time. Just keep Mark Penn far away from 1600 Pennsylvania, Barry, for the sake of the country.

Earlier today, we were sent a link to Change.gov, the amusingly named official government website of President-elect Obama's transition team. The site is a wholesale transfer of Obama's Apple-inspired fancy millennial Brand to an official White House website, which is still jarring and a bit, uh, hard to believe. The site links to Obama's acceptance speech, a blog, and, tantalizingly, jobs. Obama administration jobs!! Everyone in America needs jobs, right now, so of course now Change.gov has crashed, and it returns only an error message when you try to visit. Breaking promises already, Senator Hopey! Click for the screenshot of the New America that was too good to be true, while you endlessly refresh the page and fine-tune your resume.

You think this election was all fun and games and hope and first black presidents and gay marriage banning? No! No, it was not! There were real things at stake that Americans didn't even think about, lives in the balance that Americans never considered, and now they've gone and torn a family apart with their "voting." That's right, the 110th Congress's only all-member rock band has been forced to disband. "The Second Amendments" are an actual, instrument-playing rock band made up of members of congress. They were basically a crappy wedding band, playing dad music semi-competently, but the "members of Congress" thing made the whole show a little more surreal. Now, though, they are done, forever.

After calling Fox News Channel to task for its Barack Obama coverage, the Daily Show's Jon Stewart asked Fox host Chris Wallace if the network might need to change its stripes under the incoming Democratic administration. Actually no, Wallace said, because Obama, like all presidents, will inevitably screw up, and skeptical coverage will be rewarded. "Let me just say," Wallace added, "I worry about you. That William Ayers joke bombed. This crowd is not ready." He had a point.