Joe Sudbay, AmericaBlog.com, states it:

The Republicans, under the leadership of George Bush, destroyed the American economy. We're on the precipice -- facing a depression. But, the House Republicans are being petulant - they got 33% of the House stimulus bill devoted to questionable tax cuts, but that's not enough. Obama tried...

Bi-partisanship only works when both sides come to the table. The GOP leaders are like little children. If they don't get their way 100%, they won't play. They don't seem to understand the precarious situation we're in. Or, maybe they don't care. The message from today should be pretty simple: A "NO" vote is a vote for a depression.

Simple, huh?

What me panic or fearful?  Well, where I work, which is a nonprofit, there has been jobs eliminated, jobs consolidated and some positions going from full time to part time, with 401k contributions cut (not eliminated yet) on the employer side.

Will some of Obama's picks turn out to be moles for the previous discredited and criminal Bush administration?

Glenn Greenwald writes about the suspension of the kangaroo court called military commissions at GitMo:

This is only a first step and a temporary one at that.  Subsequent actions that the Obama administration is clearly considering could severely undermine both the symbolic and substantive value of this act, particularly if they go and create new "national security courts" of the kind aggressively advocated by newly-appointed Deputy Solicitor General Neal Katyal, which would likely enable coerced evidence to be used in order to obtain convictions of accused Terrorists.  Even with Obama's order yesterday, many of the most vital questions surrounding the closing of Guantanamo remain unanswered.

Why do I say criminal because the laws against torture were broken.  Furthermore it is not a matter of choice for President Obama to not investigate.  He has a legal obligation to investigate.

Glenn writes:

Harper's Scott Horton notes that the leading U.N. official in charge of torture conventions, such as the Convention Against Torture (signed by Ronald Reagan and ratified by the U.S. Senate), just stated that the Obama administration is obligated by that treaty and by international law to criminally investigate Bush officials for torture....

Rachel Maddow interviews law professor Johnathon Turley:

Rachel Maddow:  If the administration has confirmed that they tortured people -- and they have, they have used the "t" word; they have described what they have done, which is recognized as torture, it is something for which we have prosecuted people -- are we literally looking at the possibility where administration officials from this administration cannot travel abroad to the other 145 countries that have signed the torture treaties because they might get arrested?

Jonathan Turley:  Most certainly. The status of George Bush is not that different from Augusto Pinochet. They've both been accused of running a torture program.  Outside of this country, there is not this ambiguity about what to do about a war crime.  There are four treaties that make this an international violation.  So if you go abroad, and try to travel, most people abroad are going to view you not as "former President George Bush" -- they're going to view you as a current war criminal.

Rachel Maddow:  And they're going to view us as an outlaw regime for not arresting him on our own soil.

I have argued that Bush like Pinochet will become a wanted man throughout the world.

The problem with the NYT's report, "Intelligence Court Rules Wiretapping Legal", is that it is about the legality of international wiretapping which was never in question.  The problem is that the NYT gives the impression that the domestic wiretapping program(s) authorized by Mr. Bush as being constitutional which they are expressly not.

NYT reporter Eric Lichtblau writes:

In validating the government’s wide authority to collect foreign intelligence, it may offer legal credence to the Bush administration’s repeated assertions that the president has constitutional authority to act without specific court approval in ordering national security eavesdropping.

The appeals court is expected to uphold a secret ruling issued last year by the intelligence court that it oversees, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance, or FISA, court. In that initial opinion, the secret court found that Congress had acted within its authority in August of 2007 when it passed a hotly debated law known as the Protect America Act, which gave the executive branch broad power to eavesdrop on international communications [my emphasis], according to the person familiar with the ruling.

There never was any constitutional or legal question on tapping international calls.

The problem is that Mr. Bush authorized programs that allowed to tap domestic calls on a "dragnet" or "driftnet" basis; i.e., hardware installed on telecom switches allowed for capture of millions of telephone calls- both land line and mobile- by citizens without any probably cause by a court order from a judge.  This is the crux of the illegal spying programs that are the basis of class action lawsuits against the telecom giants like AT&T.

For a quick background go here or here.

Now is the time to strike for a progressive "shock and awe" to remake the economic landscape that is balanced and fair for all parties.  This means a wholesale rejection of the policies of the Republicans that created this economic nightmare of "free market" pirates.

Josh Marshall gets it:

...a couple centuries of our history and you'll see that there are just no examples of administrations that started small and did big things in year 2 or 4 or 6. That doesn't happen. Look at Roosevelt, Johnson, Reagan, presidents pack their biggest punch on day one. And even though many big things can happen in subsequent years, the presidencies are almost always defined at the beginning. Later triumphs and reforms grow from the changed political terrain created at the outset.

The time is now to remake this nation into a nation for all.  The Republicans is the party of old ideas and old men who cling to the racist past for their success.

BTW- I will point out this incisive critique of "IOUSA" documentary that aired on CNN over the weekend. The Center for Economic and Policy Research shows clearly that one of the root enconomic problems is health care costs.

The Republican led investigation in Bill Clinton's sex life was tagged by the DOJ at 40+ million dollars.

Elana Schor, Talkingpointsmemo.com, writes:

H.R. 104, a bill introduced on Tuesday by House judiciary committee chairman John Conyers (D-MI) and nine other lawmakers. The measure would set up a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties, with subpoena power and a reported budget of around $3 million, to investigate issues ranging from detainee treatment to waterboarding to extraordinary rendition. The panel's members would hail from outside the government and be appointed by the president and congressional leaders of both parties.

Now tell me that there is a grave wrong in which a sitting President and his administration has committed egregious crimes against the Constitution, U.S. statutory laws, and international conventions that the United States of America are signatories to but the new Congress may only allocate 3 million dollars to investigate those crimes? 

I am outraged that those policies by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Tenet (and supported by illegal theories promulgated by Yoo and Bybee) led directly to the interrogations and wrongful deaths of many human beings in my name as a citizen of the United States of America.  

Call our Colorado representatives- DeGette, Perlmutter, Salazar, Polis, and Markey and tell them that they need to become a co-sponsors of this important legislation to get to the bottom of what Mr. Bush and his cohort were actually doing in our name.  

Write to Barack Obama's www.change.gov website and tell him that the past sets precedent for the future:  Prosecute the torturers.   This will be the the clearest and strongest action for all of the world to see that America can repudiate the horrors of Mr. Bush and his actions.

What does this trial balloon mean?  The is longstanding precedent for a barrier between NASA and Department of Defense is due in part to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.  Bloomberg.com news reports:

President-elect Barack Obama will probably tear down long-standing barriers between the U.S.’s civilian and military space programs to speed up a mission to the moon amid the prospect of a new space race with China...

The potential change comes as Pentagon concerns are rising over China’s space ambitions because of what is perceived as an eventual threat to U.S. defense satellites, the lofty battlefield eyes of the military.

The article then describes that launch vehicles would be shared and emphasizes the rivalry between Chinese deep space goals and US fears for its state of the art, real time battlefield command, control and communications systems.

However what is being left out of the equation of rivalry is "why not cooperation in space" like the International Space Station project.  Are we, as a people, still stuck in the old 20th Century way of aggression and war making for a nation state to behave?