Recently in Obama Administration Category

In case you missed it, here's the press conference at which President elect Barack Obama announced his selections for his national security team.  (He had the decency not to hold the conference during Tyra this time, thank the Lord.)

Warning:  The video is 27 minutes long, because each of Obama's nominees wanted to yap on the mike for a bit. (Hey, they are politicos, aren't they?)

The nominees make up a team diverse in race, sex, ideology, geography and political party affiliation.  Here's the scoop on them, pulled straight from an email sent by the Obama transition team:

Hillary Clinton, U.S. Senator from New York and former First Lady, will serve as Secretary of State.

Secretary Robert Gates, the current Secretary of Defense, will continue to serve in that role.

Eric Holder, former Deputy Attorney General and a former United States Attorney for the District of Columbia, will serve as Attorney General.

Janet Napolitano, Governor and former U.S. Attorney for Arizona, will serve as Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Dr. Susan E. Rice, a Senior Foreign Policy Advisor to the Obama for America campaign, a Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs, will serve as Ambassador to the United Nations.

General Jim Jones, USMC (Ret), former Allied Commander, Europe, and Commander of the United States European Command, will serve as National Security Advisor.

Are we seriously doing a Meet and Greet to introduce you to Hillary Clinton?  Ummm... no.

What could we say about her that you don't already know anyway?  Married some guy named Bill?  Ran for president?  Put 18 million cracks in the proverbial glass ceiling?

(Uhh... you do know all of that don't you?)

Since we're doing Meet and Greets for members of Obama's new administration, we don't want to leave Hillary out even though she's already well known.  Internationally.  So we're doing this technical Meet and Greet for Hillary to mention just one little factoid:

• Hillary has one thing in common with Barack: she's a tease.  First Obama teases that he's probably going to ask Hillary to serve as Secretary of State (Oh, Americans, let the anticipation excite you!) and then Hillary hints that she'll probably accept (Americans, work yourselves into a frenzy at the thought!).  Now the latest is that Hillary will accept.  So expect a formal announcement sometime after Thanksgiving that Barack has chosen Hillary to serve as our new Secretary of State.

Barack Obama has appointed Jim Messina Deputy Chief of Staff.  He will serve with Mona Sutphen, who we already told you about over here.

So who's Jim Messina anyway? Keep reading to find out.

• Like we said, Jim just scored a gig as Obama's Deputy Chief of Staff.

• Jim is currently Director of Personnel for Obama's transition team.  Before that, he was national Chief of Staff for Obama's presidential campaign.

• Prior to joining Team Obama, he was Chief of Staff to Sen. Max Baucus (D-Montana).  Baucus "loaned" Jim to Obama, but it looks like Obama won't give him back.  (Obama is a lot like our younger sister.)

• Jim has also served as Chief of Staff to Sen. Byron Dorgan (D-ND) and Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-NY).

• Jim earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Montana.

• Jim was born in Denver, Colorado and raised in Boise, Idaho.

• His exercise of choice is running.  He runs every morning

.

• The good news is that he's single ladies!  The bad news is that he already has a girlfriend.

• For more on Jim, here's an interview he did back in August on his role as Obama's campaign Chief of Staff. 

Barack Obama recently appointed Mona Sutphen his Deputy Chief of Staff (along with Jim Messina, but more on him in a later post). 

Who is Mona Sutphen?  Keep reading for full scoop.

• Mona currently serves on Obama's Transition team staff.  She is also Managing Director at Stonebridge International LLC, a strategic consulting firm based in Washington D.C.

• She was a U.S. Foreign Service Officer from 1991 to 2000.  She spent the last two years of her service working on the National Security Council in the Clinton White House.

• She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at Mount Holyoke College and a Master's degree at the presitigious London School of Economics. (Oh la la.)

• She co-authored a book called The Next American Strategy with Nina Hachigian, a collegue from her days working on the National Security Council.   She talks about her book below.

Some girls like bad boys, and apparently so does President elect Barack Obama.  He has selected Congressman Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) to serve as White House Chief of Staff in his administration.  Contrary to Obama's nice guy reputation for working across party lines, Emanuel is known to throw a partisan punch every now and again.

Here's the scoop on Emanuel:

• At 48, he's a young cat as far as politicians go (DOB:November 29, 1959).

• He represents the 5th district of Illinois (basically part of Chicago) in the U.S. House of Representatives.  He was elected in 2003.

• He was Chairman of the D tripple C during the 2006 elections, when the Dems regained control of Congress.  He is currently Chairman of the Democratic Caucus, which makes him the 4th ranking Democrat in the House.

• Prior to coming to Congress, he was managing director of an investment bank.  Before that, he worked in the Clinton White House.  He started in the White House as Clinton's political director, but his combative ways earned him a demotion to policy adviser(compliments of Hillary Clinton). Loyal and fiesty, he fought his way back to the top.

• The Josh Lyman character on The West Wing was modeled after him.

• He graduated from Sarah Lawrence College in 1981 and got his master's in Speech and Communication from Northwestern University in 1985.

• If you hear someone say, "Something's fishy around here," they may have just received a holiday gift from Rahm.  He's said to have once mailed a rotting dead fish to a frenemy.

• He's no Rachael Ray.  While working at Arby's in high school, he cut his right middle finger badly and part of his finger had to be amputated.

• He could be a Bruce Jenner though.  Or a J.Lo.  Like both celebrities, he's a triathlete. (In our book, triathlete = cray-zay.)

• His father was a pediatrician and his mother, a former civil rights activist, used to own a rock club in Chicago.  Talk about cool mom!

• His brother, Ari Emanuel, is a Hollywood talent agent and founder of the Endeavor Talent Agency.  Ari is the inspiration behind the Ari Gold charcter of HBO's Entourage.

• He and his wife, Amy, have one son and two daughters.