Thursday Afternoon

* The day would come when many West Virginians recalled the story of Jack’s Powerball Christmas with a shudder at the magnitude of ruination: families asunder, precious lambs six feet under, folks undone by the lure of all that easy money.

* The Great Maria Bamford has a new comedy special filmed in her living room where the only audience is her parents.

* Austerity everywhere: they’re going to start charging for the bus between Duke and UNC.

* Jokes I’ve stolen from elsewhere on the Internet: Let’s do a sequel to that beloved show starring a grown-up version of that Savage brother. #youfools #yousaidtheincantationwrong #monkeyspaw

* When scams collide! Grand Canyon University, a for-profit Christian college located in Phoenix, Ariz., now has a Division I athletics program. Inside Higher Ed reports that GCU will become a member of the Western Athletic Conference, as the first for-profit college to join a Division I NCAA conference.

* Apocalypse as wish-fulfillment.

* And an actual scandal alert! Susan Rice, Top Candidate For Secretary Of State, Has Millions Tied To Canadian Tar Sands.

Also

Also: The New York Times guarandamntees Clinton at State, while Bill Richardson’s thirty pieces of silver may be Commerce Secretary.

Daschlementum

News that Tom Daschle will head HHS has encouraged advocates of health care reform. Meanwhile, John Kerry collects his SecState consolation prize: he’s likely to succeed Biden as chair the Senate Foreign Relations Committee.

HRC, SOS

My very first use of the “Barack Obama” tag was on August 30, 2007, when I wrote of some now-vanished article concerning some saber-rattling HRC comments on Iran:

Hillary Clinton, working as hard as ever to make it impossible to support the Democrats in 2008.

A few months later, in December, I was more explicit:

God save us from the Clintons.

So you can imagine how happy I am to see Hillary Clinton apparently being offered, and accepting, Secretary of State.

I see the logic of it, accept the political wisdom of it, but good lord, this is not what I had in mind.

Clinton to SoS?

Lots of buzz on the internet last night about rumors that Hillary Clinton might become Barack Obama’s Secretary of State. I’m with Josh Marshall on this: being a senator, even a senator with comparatively low seniority, seems like a much better gig both in itself and in terms of her potentially running for president again in 2016. But maybe there’s an angle we’re not seeing, or maybe—maybe—she just genuinely wants the job…

Kerry as SecState?

Besides Howard Dean, the other “John the Baptist” figure for this landslide progressive victory is John Kerry, whose selection of Barack Obama as the DNC keynote speaker in 2004 catapulted him to national prominence. Now rumors are swirling that Kerry is “actively seeking” an appointment as Secretary of State.

How strange it is to contemplate an administration that isn’t manned by moral monsters.