David Plouffe: Let The Eagle Soar 
Barack Obama campaign wizard David Plouffe appears to be following the well worn path of other political advisers: make your name in America, then make a killing advising foreign tyrants on prettying up.
Plouffe is traveling to Azerbaijan to meet second generation oil despot and President Ilham Aliyev. 
 Poppy was a Brezhnev crony and KGB general reborn after the Soviet Union’s dissolution as maximum leader of the Caspian kleptocracy, and sonny Aliyev currently presides, with his fetching wife Mehriban. 
It’s a land of enchantment. At home the Azerbaijanis enjoy 
   a cult of personality built around former President Heydar Aliyev and fixed elections, 
while abroad the Aliyev’s enjoy collecting pictures of themselves with world leaders from Bushes  
     
to Clinton 
 to Belorussian Strongman   Alexancer Lukashenko.
Hiring Plouffe would be a step up for the Aliyevs.  A previous thrust for swankiness entailed renting out Mount Vernon to try and link the Father Of Their Country to George Washington, an event graced by the presence of Bush family Consiliari James Baker.
Who Is The Real Michelle Obama? 
Alarms are being sounded over First Lady Michelle Obama forays into the policy realm, as she made the first of what are promised to be more federal agency visits. Mrs. Obama has touted Obama Administration policies recently at both the Housing & Urban Development and Education Departments.
First Lady historian Myra Gutin told The New York Times she is disappointed:
“She went to some lengths to say she was going to be first mom in chief …I don’t think we ever really imagined her edging toward public policy like this.”
A different view was expressed in November, when The President’s Partner: The First Lady in the Twentieth Century author Dr. Myra Gutin looked ahead:
“I think she could be active the way Hillary Clinton wasâ€
But as First Lady historian Myra Gutin cautioned the Washington Times last June:
 “There is a real disconnect between what we know and what people are really like. The media doesn’t always match what a person is. “
We Are The Ones We’ve Been Waiting For 
Springfield Illinois is getting a jump in the Barack Obama commemoration/memorializing sweepstakes, as a sculpture commemorating a 100 year-old riot contains a figure looking remarkably like Obama.
 The 1908 Springfield riots featured lynchings and destruction of black neighborhoods, and the shock of this in Lincoln’s hometown in a Northern state helped launch the NAACP.
Memorial Sculptor Preston Jackson was coy with the Chicago Tribune:
“That could be him…But I have a nephew that looks just like him.â€
We’re Jacket-less To Serve You Better! 
The American people know two things about recent Bush Administration talking points:Â whatever they say will get endless media replication, and down the road be found to be a lie.
We are now at stage two in the battle over Andrew Card’s stirring defense of White House decorum. The former George W. Bush Chief of Staff was saddened to see a jacket-less Barack Obama in the Oval Office, and Huffington Post has now surfaced photos of Bush among a parade of Presidents in shirtsleeves, often with ties.
Because If We Can’t Laugh About Differences Over Torture… 
Light-hearted jibes about torture were in the house Sunday at DC’s Alfalfa Club dinner.
The annual gathering of Washington’s great and good is of course a temple of good natured joshing amongst the elite, the very pinnacle of our treasured bipartisanship. Thus Barack Obama found himself making light of the founding purpose of this entirely white until the 1970s dinner, honoring Robert E. Lee.
The sparkling event was brightened even more by the podium styling of “Jumping” Joe Lieberman, who the Washington Post reports wow’d them with topical laughs.
Lieberman’s rib-tickler sprang from Dick Cheney’s mysterious back-injury-while-moving-offices. “I had no idea waterboards were so heavy,” quipped the Nutmeg State Senator.
