Our nation’s Presidents have a long and glorious history of promising “bipartisan healing” and such when it comes to Cabinet appointments. They say they will appoint members of the opposition party to important positions and then they give some toothless middle-of-the-roader an invisible Cabinet post that nobody cares about. Remember Norman Mineta, the Democratic transportation secretary in the early George W. Bush years? No? That’s because he was completely boring and unimportant. (He did have an airport named after him, though! A terrible airport.) Our future President Barack Obama plans to follow in this grand tradition, with one Clintonesque twist: Just like Bill Clinton did, he’ll let a Republican have the high-profile job of Defense Secretary. MORE »

NAPOLITANO TO RUN HOMELAND SECURITY: Barack Obama has asked the Arizona governor Janet Napolitano to run the useless, bloated Department of Homeland Security. She was frequently mentioned on Obama’s short list of possible vice presidents, but presumably that would have been just too many vowels on the ticket, so she gets this instead: figuring out how to keep an influx of Canadian terror-squads from invading Minnesota. [Politico]