Another cabinet member chosen:

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) has been chosen to serve as secretary of the vast and troubled Department of Homeland Security for President-elect Obama, Democratic officials said. Napolitano is a border governor who will now be responsible for immigration policy and border security, which are part of Homeland Security's myriad functions.

Napolitano brings law-and-order experience from her stint as the Grand Canyon State's first female attorney general. One of the nation's most prominent female elected officials, she made frequent appearances on behalf of Barack Obama during the campaign. She was re-elected to a second four-year term in 2006. [...]

The Democratic officials said Napolitano has not been officially offered the job but is likely to be named and to accept. The selection was first reported by CNN.

Happy birthday, John McCain, two years early. You dodged a bullet.

I haven't looked into how she would be replaced. Does anyone know how Arizona law works in this regard? How's our Arizona bench?

Update [2008-11-20 2:15:18 by Todd Beeton]:Nate has the answer:

Democrats will also lose the governorship if Napolitano accepts a cabinet position. Arizona is one of four states without a lieutenant governor's position, so the honors would go to Jan Brewer, the Republican Secretary of State.

Double Arggh, although, Brewer would serve just until 2010 when Nate posits Gabrielle Giffords might have a run at it to reclaim it for the Democrats.

Was out at a Drinking Liberally "End of the Bush years" event. Thanks CREDO for the food!

What are you up to tonight?

Speaking of the Minnesota Senate recount, results are being updated in real time at the Minneapolis Star Tribune website. Yesterday's certification had Coleman ahead of Franken by 215 votes. As of this posting, with 17% of votes and 25% of precincts recounted, Al Franken has gained 34 votes (or rather, Franken has lost 34 fewer votes than Norm Coleman has) for a margin of 181 votes.

Nate Silver explains:

The reason the vote totals are going down when you might intuitively expect them to go up is that either candidate has a right to challenge any ballot for any reason, even if it had been counted as legal originally. When a vote is challenged, it is deducted from the opposing candidate's total. These challenged votes will go before the state canvassing board in December and be debated (and debated and debated) one by one (by one by one).

Team Coleman has challenged 141 ballots, while Team Franken has challenged 122.

There are also instances where undervotes are counted as valid and added to the candidates' totals, such as Franken's net gain of 28 votes in St. Louis County:

In several precincts in the Democratic stronghold of St. Louis County, Franken made a net gain of 28 votes today that officials said were faintly marked and therefore not originally picked up by an old brand of optical scanner.

Elections officials said the votes were missed by a small number of outdated "Eagle" scanners still in use in 18 of the large county's 184 precincts.

The machines read a ballot that requires voters to draw a thick line connecting the back and front ends of an arrow that points to the candidate.

Only half the St. Louis County precincts that use those old machines had been counted, so one suspects there may be plenty more where those came from.

Also, earlier today Franken won a partial victory when a judge ordered Ramsey County -- MN's 2nd largest -- to release information of the voters whose absentee ballots had been invalidated. While this ruling could mean other counties follow suit, here is the rub:

A key board hasn't decided whether to allow wrongly rejected absentee ballots into the statewide recount.

Certainly, so far, the numbers are moving in the right direction but Franken's going to need to slash that margin at a quicker pace if he's going to overtake Coleman. Some good news for Franken: the two largest counties, Hennepin and Ramsey, which are both Franken strongholds, have only just begun to count (5% and 15% of votes respectively so far.)

This isn't exactly the kind of speculation Norm Coleman likely wants to hear.

Minnesota Republican Sen. Norm Coleman is locked in a recount battle with comedian Al Franken to retain his seat.

But a Republican colleague of Mr. Coleman's on Wednesday floated his name as a potential chairman of the Republican National Committee.

"Somebody like Norm Coleman would be great," said the senator, speaking to a small group of reporters at a Capitol Hill steakhouse on the condition of anonymity.

The senator quickly clarified the statement by expressing hope and confidence that Mr. Coleman would emerge from the recount victorious over Mr. Franken, a Democrat who was on Capitol Hill Wednesday meeting with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Nevada Democrat.

But the senator said that whoever the RNC chooses as its chairman, it should be someone with a national profile, preferably with experience as a governor, senator or congressman.

Al Franken is expressing cautious optimism about his chances, and there is reason to believe he has a realistic shot at making up the roughly 200 votes separating him from Coleman in the coming recount. It is likely this line of reason that is apparently leading some Republican elected officials to publicly ruminate about Coleman's future outside of the Senate. That said, recounts cost money, and Franken can use our support. So if you want to help out in the effort to reach 60 votes in the Senate, head over to the MyDD Road to 60 Act Blue page and make a contribution to his campaign today.

Josh Goodman alerted me to this piece he wrote for Governing.com: "Move Over Missouri, Iowa Is the New Bellwether State."

John McCain appears likely to take Missouri's 11 electoral votes, which would be the first time since 1956 that the state did not vote for the winner of the presidential election.

However, Goodman argues that Missouri has not been the best bellwether for the last few cycles. Even though it voted for the winner each time through 2004, Missouri has steadily trended more Republican in relation to the national popular vote.

Goodman then lists "the five states that have come closest to matching the national popular vote in each election since 1988." (Click here to see which other states made these lists.) Guess what he found?

Iowa is the only state that has been one of the top five bellwethers in four of the last five elections. The only year that it doesn't make the list is 1996, when it was sixth -- and only off by 1.82 points.

So, in every presidential election from 1992 through 2008, Iowa's popular vote margin was within 2.55 percentage points of the national popular vote result. That is an impressive performance as a bellwether. [...]

None of that guarantees that "as Iowa goes, so goes the nation" in 2012. Four years out, elections are never that predictable. But, just from the numbers, if there's one state that we can expect to be a microcosm of the nation in 2012, it's Iowa.

It's interesting that Iowa's vote has tracked so closely to the national popular vote, even though Iowa's population is relatively unrepresentative demographically (96 percent white and with a higher proportion of senior citizens than most states).

Anyone have a theory to explain this phenomenon?

A quick note for those requesting presidential inauguration tickets from their Congressperson or Senators: If you live in a state with a new senator or a district with a new congressperson, contact the Member-elect's office, not the outgoing Member. Tickets will be distributed in January after the new Congress is sworn in, so retiring and defeated Members do not have tickets to distribute. I've spoken with several offices to find out how they're handling tickets, and the methods vary. Some selected examples: Idaho Senator-elect Jim Risch (R) is letting senior Senator Mike Crapo (R) handle requests for both offices, so for all intents and purposes Risch has no tickets and Crapo has double the allotment. The office of Representative-elect Walt Minnick (D), however, is creating their own list. In New Hampshire, a snippy and uninformed aide to the defeated Senator John Sununu (R) referred me to Judd Gregg's (R) office, but of course, Sununu's tickets would be Senator-elect Jeanne Shaheen's (D) tickets, and the aide said he didn't know what Shaheen was doing.

Additionally, if your Member or Member-elect doesn't list any information about tickets on their website, try giving the office a call. And as always, be polite; the interns and staff assistants answering the phones are 20-somethings just getting started on their own careers and aren't responsible for any procedural or policy decisions, whether about the tickets or anything else.

Upon further reflection, I probably should have kept this to myself to increase my own odds of getting tickets... you can thank me later. :P

MSNBC just reported the news that the California Supreme Court, which declared a ban on same sex marriage unconstitutional in May, has now agreed to hear the legal challenges to Prop 8, which have been filed since its passage on Nov. 4th.

The Sacramento Bee has it:

The California Supreme Court agreed Wednesday to consider complaints by opponents of Proposition 8 that it improperly revised the constitution to ban gay marriage. The court declined to stay its enforcement in the meantime. [...]

Holton said the court established an expedited briefing schedule. She said oral argument could be held as early as March 2009.

This isn't really that surprising and probably doesn't reveal anything about how they would rule as all sides of the issue have been urging the court to hear the challenges.

California Attorney General Brown Monday urged the California Supreme Court to accept review of the legal challenges to Proposition 8.

"The profound importance of the issues raised by Proposition 8 warrants that this matter be reviewed and promptly resolved by the California Supreme Court," said Brown in a statement to News10.

Attorney General Brown has said publicly he believes same-sex marriages performed between June 17 and November 4, 2008 remain valid and will be upheld by the Court. [...]

Meanwhile the sponsors of California's new same-sex marriage ban are urging the state's highest court to hear a series of lawsuits seeking to overturn the measure.

Lawyer Andrew Pugno said the backers of Proposition 8 are so confident the California Supreme Court would uphold the voter-approved initiative they would prefer the court take the cases and resolve the question quickly.

The crux of the legal challenges to Prop 8 is a process argument rather than a civil rights one. Essentially, Prop 8 opponents argue, as they have for months, that Prop 8 would constitute a "revision" to the constitution, not an "amendment" and as such, a simple majority vote by California voters is not sufficient to make the change that Prop 8 does, i.e. eliminating a minority group's fundamental right. The proper process by which Prop 8 should have gotten to the ballot, they argue, is by 2/3 vote of the legislature; only then should a simple majority have been allowed to revise the constitution in such a fundamental way.

Update [2008-11-19 17:36:36 by Todd Beeton]:Until the court rules, we must continue to assume that Prop 8 will be enacted and fight for its repeal, which is exactly what the Courage Campaign (for whom I do some work) has begun to do with its Repeal Prop 8 petition. If you haven't signed it, please join the almost 300,000 people who have and sign the pledge today.

Via TPM, Rahm Emanuel last night went in front of business leaders at a Wall St. Journal event and challenged them to get behind what Emanuel implied would be an agenda not of incremental change, but of sweeping change.

President-elect Barack Obama's incoming White House chief of staff challenged chief executives and other business leaders Tuesday night to join the new administration in a push for universal health care, saying incremental increases in coverage won't be acceptable.

"When it gets rough out there, a lot of business leaders get out of the car and say, 'We're OK with minor reform.' I'm challenging you today, we're going to have to do big, serious things," Rahm Emanuel said, speaking to The Wall Street Journal's CEO Council, a conference convened to elicit corporate opinion on the challenges facing the new president. [...]

He stressed that the new administration would "throw long and deep," taking advantage of the economic crisis to push wholesale changes in health care, taxes, financial re-regulation and energy. "The American people in two successive elections have voted for change, and change cannot be allowed to die on the doorsteps of Washington," Mr. Emanuel said.

This might be as close to "I earned political capital and I'm going to spend it" as Obama ever gets but it seems to me to be sending the same signal and it's good to see. The Republicans will try to throw Obama's promise to reach across the aisle and his message of reconciliation around his neck, calling anything he does that remotely has any Republican opposition as "partisan" and "divisive" and the big question for me is to what extent will Obama be cowed by that (see the Lieberman situation.) As Josh noted earlier, Republicans are particularly afraid of card check and will go to the mattresses to fight the Employee Free Choice Act, but the fact is that passing this legislation, which Obama promised to sign on several occasions, should not be difficult. Every Democrat (except Johnson who was out,) both Independents and even Arlen Specter (R-PA) voted for cloture when it came up for a vote last year. Now that Obama has a clear mandate and 7 new Senators (at least) to add to his majority, a cloture vote in early 2009 could very well clear the 60 vote hurdle. The fact is that the Obama agenda is a mainstream agenda that the American people have voted for overwhelmingly 2 cycles in a row, it's not leftwing (if only...), it's not partisan (wish it were...) or divisive, even if Republicans intend to dig in their heels. Emanuel, by sort of raising expectations in this way, is sending the first sign that the Obama administration intends to pursue that agenda aggressively and spend that political capital that the President-elect earned 2 weeks ago.

Ben Smith has video of Rahm's speech.

Update [2008-11-19 16:30:56 by Todd Beeton]:Ezra Klein calls Obama's choice of Tom Daschle to head up HHS yet another sign that Obama intends to go long on health care:

This is huge news, and the clearest evidence yet that Obama means to pursue comprehensive health reform. You don't tap the former Senate Majority Leader to run your health care bureaucracy. That's not his skill set. You tap him to get your health care plan through Congress. You tap him because he understands the parliamentary tricks and has a deep knowledge of the ideologies and incentives of the relevant players. You tap him because you understand that health care reform runs through the Senate. And he accepts because he has been assured that you mean to attempt health care reform. [...]

The choice of Daschle suggests that the Obama team has learned those lessons well. Magaziner and Clinton signaled that the Clinton administration viewed health care as a policy problem. For them, the key to success was the genius of the policy team. Daschle signals that the Obama administration view health care as a political problem. The key to success is votes. And Daschle is a guy whose last job was lining up votes. He is also a guy who has recently written a book on health reform. Critical: What We Can Do About the Health-Care Crisis should now be on every health wonk's reading list. Among other things, his book argues that reform must be comprehensive, as we can no longer afford incrementalism or inaction, and that the real problem with health care reform is, well, Congress.