Cheat Sheet

Could a Cabinet post be in the works? Howard Dean, former Vermont governor and presidential candidate, will not be back for a second term as chairman of the Democratic National Committee. His decision not to seek reinstatement clears the way for an Obama loyalist to be named to the post, The Fix’s Chris Cillizza reports. “At this point he has said that he doesn’t intend to run again,” a DNC source tells Cillizza. “He has said so publicly for a while. He has not said what he will do next.” Dean has clashed publicly over his job with top Democrats, including new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel. While Dean could be named head of the Department of Health and Human Services, Claire McKaskill, Tim Kaine, and Bill Richardson are among his possible replacements at the DNC.

P.J. O’Rourke has in this week’s Weekly Standard one of the more entertaining displays of conservative self-flagellation. “Our 28-year conservative opportunity to fix the moral and practical boundaries of government is gone,” O’Rourke writes, arguing that conservatives have no one to blame but themselves. O’Rourke on immigration: “Conservative immigration policies are as stupid as conservative attitudes are gross.” On abortion: “If the citizenry insists that abortion remain legal—and, in a passive and conflicted way, the citizenry seems to be doing so—then give the issue a rest.” On taxes: “A low tax rate is not—never mind the rhetoric of every conservative politician--a bedrock principle of conservatism.” “It took a Democratic majority in the House of Representatives 40 years—from 1954 to 1994—to get that corrupt and arrogant,” O’Rourke marvels. “And we managed it in just 12.”

Last week, Newsweek unleashed its quadrennial campaign opus—a deeply-reported piece of writing that spans some 50,000 words. Major revelations include Sarah Palin appearing in a towel before McCain aides; a shadowy cyber-attack on both campaigns; and a full list of the negative commercials the McCain campaign deemed too ugly to air. The Daily Beast staff has plowed through the article's seven chapters and presents a guide to the scoopiest bits. You'll never think of the 2008 campaign the same way again.

Americans may be—gasp—brewing their own coffee: The financial crisis is pummeling Starbucks, which today reported fourth-quarter net income fell 96 percent, to $5.4 million, or 1 cent a share. The Seattle-based coffee giant fell 2.9 percent on the Nasdaq late today after predicting a bleak 2009, with earnings per share forecast between 71 and 90 cents. Sales at stores open at least 13 months declined 8 percent, belying CEO Howard Schultz’s suggestion last month that same-store sales could have hit rock bottom. “There is only so much they can do internally without the economy getting better,” Walter Todd, a principal at Greenwood Capital Associates LLC, said today in a Bloomberg Radio interview. The company has already announced plans to cut 13,000 jobs.

On the heels of American Express’ reported 24 percent drop in quarterly profit, the Federal Reserve has granted its request to become a bank holding company. What does the new status give the credit card giant? Coveted low-cost financing from the Fed, The Wall Street Journal reports—a lifeline for the company, which announced last month it would cut 7,000 jobs. “In light of the unusual and exigent circumstances affecting the financial markets, and all other facts and circumstances, the [Federal Reserve] Board has determined that emergency conditions exist that justify expeditious action on this proposal,” the Fed said in a statement.

Bankruptcy is usually considered the end of the road for a company, but for General Motors, it may be a saving grace. “The main advantage of Chapter 11,” Paul Ingrassia writes in Portfolio, “is that it would give G.M. a chance to wipe the slate clean and do what pretty much everyone agrees it needs to—reduce its number of brands and cut costs.” Currently, car dealers, labor unions, and suppliers are too powerful but bankruptcy would force them to the table. Chapter 11 would allow GM to reduce its number of domestic brands, as it needs to, from eight to two or three and close about 60 percent of its dealerships in the process. It would also be able to renegotiate better deals with the United Auto Workers and its largest supplier, Delphi.

Suicide bombers are typically the instruments, not the victims, of Islamic fanaticism, but this is probably an exception: The bomber who killed four people at a security checkpoint today in Iraq was a 13-year-old girl. Her victims were members of the Sunni Muslim “Awakening” councils, and 15 additional civilians were wounded. In two separate attacks in Baghdad, 31 people were killed, making today the deadliest day in the capital in months.

What’s the stuff of Bill Kristol’s nightmares? The Obama family puppy. “While we’ve all known that Obama is a very skillful politician,” The New York Times’ resident conservative writes, “he hasn’t until now been a particularly empathetic one.” And yet when Obama discussed his family’s puppy deliberations in his press conference, “he deepened his bond with every dog lover in America. … And he demonstrated a dry and slightly politically incorrect wit by commenting that ‘a lot of shelter dogs are mutts like me.’” The selection of Rahm Emanuel deepens Kristol’s anxiety, as it demonstrates that he’s “not going to be mindlessly leftist.” You know things must be bad in the GOP when even Kristol writes, “It could be a tough four or eight years for conservatives.”

Barack Obama’s campaign collected an unprecedented number of email addresses and used the Internet like no campaign before it. Did you think that he would check these assets at the White House door? The Washington Post reports that Obama is “preparing a major expansion of the White House communications operation, enabling them to reach out directly to the supporters they have collected over 21 months without having to go through the mainstream media.” After victory, Obama sent his supporters a text message saying that they hadn’t heard the last of him. Obama’s email database is so valuable that, during a cash-crunch late in his campaign, they offered it as collateral on a loan.

Batman may have a home in Italy, the Telegraph reports, as Italy’s anti-immigration league proposes legalizing vigilante groups. Crime has spiked in Italy, and concerned citizens have been fighting back while police look the other way, just as they did when Mussolini’s blackshirts took the law into their own hands. Under new plans by the anti-immigration Northern League, vigilante patrols would work with local police to target criminals. The League has proposed another controversial proposal – introducing referendums before new places of worship are built, which would mean virtually no new mosques in the Veneto region of northern Italy, a hotbed of vigilante activity that also happens to be home to a high proportion of Muslims.

Holocaust survivors announced today that they are throwing in the towel on their efforts to stop the Mormon Church from posthumously baptizing Jews who died in Nazi death camps. The rite is performed with a Mormon standing in for the deceased. "We ask you to leave our six million Jews, all victims of the Holocaust, alone, they suffered enough,” said the Jewish leader of the talks. Jews aren’t the only ones vexed by the tradition. In May, the Vatican ordered its dioceses to withhold its member registries from Mormons, so that their congregants would not be baptized.

New York’s tony private schools are suffering a sudden drop in class sizes, but not in a good way. So many parents are short of cash because of the credit squeeze and layoffs from Wall Street, they are having to do the unthinkable: remove their children from school, reports Victoria Goldman, author of The Manhattan Family Guide to Private Schools, in New York magazine. At 300-year-old Trinity on the Upper West Side, fees $31,000 a year, 45 families have given notice their kids won’t return next year, and some parents who previously paid in full are asking for financial aid. The same is happening at Horace Mann, too, which charges the same fees as Trinity. And schools are expecting things to get worse. “The hardest thing,” says Goldman, “will be for admissions directors to figure out which new applicants will be able to stay the course.”

How does Obama’s presidential victory affect black comedians? Traditionally, The Los Angeles Times reports, black comics have “made fun of a system they feel has shut them out and treated them unfairly.” Now they’re “wrestling with hope, cautious optimism and celebration.” Many are treating Obama gingerly, but a few are seeking to milk fears about his safety for laughs. Comic Mario Joyner: “I love it. Here’s a black president who hit the ground running. He’s appointed a Jewish chief of staff. You just know the Ku Klux Klan is having a big meeting right now.”

Now that the election’s over, and Obama has declared his family’s puppy-purchasing plan, there’s nothing left to distract us from the dismal economic future. Former Clinton labor secretary and Berkeley professor Robert Reich provides a quick summary of the extent of our problem (no one is buying anything), and suggests a way out (the government should start spending like crazy). Reich thinks we should regard the Treasury as “the spender of last resort.” As cash strapped consumers are pulling back to bare necessities while the value of their investments sink, Reich says it’s time for the government to step up.

Twenty-eight sketches of the Auschwitz concentration camp that Germany’s chief archivist called the plans “of extraordinary importance” have been found in a Berlin apartment following the inhabitant’s death, the Guardian reports. The plans show barracks, gas chambers, and “L. Keller,” an abbreviation for leichenkeller or corpse cellar, providing evidence that Auschwitz was built for killing from the very start. Historians believe that on January 20, 1942, top Nazi officials met and created the “final solution,” but one of the blueprints dates from eight months earlier and would represent a major find. The plans were found on the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht, the pogrom that preceded the Holocaust.

The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza has a terrific piece decoding the strategy of the Obama campaign, which for the team boiled down to one word: Bush. The winner would be “anyone who could credibly define himself as ‘not Bush,’” Lizza writes. “The appeal of the strategy was that, with only minor alterations, it could work in the primaries as well as in the general election.” Other vital nuggets: sections about Obama’s ego—he “regarded himself as just as gifted as his top strategists in the art and practice of politics”—and his drama-free, un-Clinton-like campaign staff.

Miriam Makeba, the South African singer who was banned from her country under apartheid for 30 years, died early today at 76. She first rose to international prominence in 1959, when she started in the anti-apartheid documentary Come Back, Africa. When she tried to return to South Africa a year later for her mother’s funeral, she discovered that her passport had been revoked. She won the Grammy for best folk recording in 1966, performed for JFK at his birthday party in 1962, and was married to Stokely Carmichael in the late 1960s. Nelson Mandela invited her back to South Africa after his release from prison. "It was like a revival," she said about going home. "My music having been banned for so long, that people still felt the same way about me was too much for me. I just went home and I cried."

David Grann writes a postmortem for the McCain campaign in this week's New Yorker, tracking how McCain betrayed his "character-based politics" in order to satisfy the Republican base. The piece includes quotes from several critics, but this quote, from a friend "who has been instrumental in his career," sums it up: "I don't think he'll ever recover. My fear is that people who view the John McCain from the years '96 to '06 will think it was a political gimmick and what they've seen in the last five months is who he really is. If honor is your ideology, and you lose that, then what do you have left?"

Late Sunday night the Treasury finalized a new $150 billion rescue deal for AIG, replacing the original $85 billion agreement put in place in September, topped up weeks later with a further $37.8 billion. The aid amounts to a $60 billion loan, a $40 billion preferred-stock investment, and $50 billion in capital largely to purchase distressed assets. “The revised structure is designed to improve both AIG's ability to sell assets for a decent price and the taxpayers’ ability to recoup the money that has been pumped into the insurer,” reports the Wall Street Journal. This third rescue deal “could also spark a political backlash, especially from congressional Democrats,” warns the paper, “because the Treasury … has thus far refused to extend a hand to the struggling Big Three auto makers.”

President-elect Obama will be heading into the White House with an digital following the likes of which has never been seen before. As David Carr writes this morning, the meeting of an open-source campaign with an imperial office is sure to produce fireworks. "While many people think that President-elect Obama is a gift to the Democratic Party, he could actually hasten its demise," writes Carr. "Political parties supply brand, ground troops, money and relationships, all things that Mr. Obama already owns." And while Obama now has control of a large, rapid response team, he is, like all generals, beholden to his troops in many ways. "Like every other presidency, the Obama administration will have its battles with the media, but that may seem like patty-cake if it runs afoul of the self-publishing, self-organizing democracy it helped create — say, by delaying health care legislation or breaking a promise on taxes."