President Obama hosted 47 world leaders at a summit yesterday, with the goal being to find ways to reduce the threat that terrorists such as al Qaeda could obtain nuclear materials or weapons.
President Obama completed a first meeting of world leaders on combating nuclear terrorism with a list of specific commitments from dozens of nations to eliminate or lock down nuclear materials, in what he called a “bold and pragmatic” program to finish the task in the next four years.
The meeting that Mr. Obama convened, and to a great degree stage-managed, was unlike any negotiations over arms control with the Soviets during the cold war or, more recently, the so-far fruitless talks to get North Korea to disarm. This was a far broader effort to persuade African, Latin American, Asian and European nations to agree on steps to deny terrorist groups the two materials necessary to make a bomb: plutonium and highly enriched uranium.
Mr. Obama began the session arguing that while superpower confrontation was far more remote, the risk of nuclear terrorism had never been greater, and he quoted the warning of Albert Einstein soon after the beginning of the nuclear age: “We are drifting towards a catastrophe beyond comparison.” [……]
He achieved some success[emphasis is mine].
At the end of two days of meetings, Mr. Obama could claim two major accomplishments: The summit meeting forced countries that had failed to clean up their nuclear surpluses to formulate detailed plans to deal with them, and it kicked into action nations that had failed to move on previous commitments.
A second summit meeting will be held in two years in South Korea, Mr. Obama said, to make sure countries are on track. [……]
Image source: Doug Mills, New York TImes
Samantha Power, who earned notoriety for calling Hillary Rodham Clinton a "monster" while working to elect Barack Obama president, will take a senior foreign policy job at the White House, The Associated Press has learned. Officials say Obama has tapped Power to be senior director for multilateral affairs at the National Security Council, a job that will require close contact and potential travel with Clinton, who is now secretary of state. White House officials wouldn't provide details of Power's new role. Power, a Harvard University professor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning author who has specialized in global humanitarian issues, made headlines last March when she told a Scottish newspaper that Clinton would stop at nothing to defeat Obama in the presidential primaries. "She is a monster, too," Power said. "She is stooping to anything."
House Republican Whip Eric Cantor [1], a rising star in the Republican party, has been a prominent voice demanding accountability in how the government doles out hundreds of billions for bank bailouts.
My reasons for writing this post are solely to encourage you, and to arm you. I am compelled to do so not only by the events of the past eight years, but by what has been revealed in Keith Olbermann's interview with former National Security Agency analyst, 
“No less an aspiring kingmaker than Steve Schmidt, the chief strategist of McCain's failed presidential bid, sees Jindal as the Republican Party's destiny. "The question is not whether he'll be president, but when he'll be president, because he will be elected someday." The anti-tax crusader Grover Norquist believes, too, that Jindal is a certainty to occupy the White House, and conservative talk-radio host Rush Limbaugh has described him as "the next Ronald Reagan.".” 
President-elect Obama announces his "team of rivals" as with a statement deriding "group think", he turns a page in history. You may now (well almost - she still has to undergo confirmation hearings) call Hillary Clinton "Madame Secretary". As I type, President-elect Obama is formally announcing his national security team, which will include 
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