The top CIA job is just one of many administration slots that will change hands over the coming months. Deval Patrick and Tom Daschle in the mix — and Massachusetts contemplates changing its rules.

Image by Chuck Kennedy / Getty Images

Washington, D.C. — President Barack Obama's tentative plans for reshuffling his deck of aides and Cabinet members accelerated this week when word reached the White House of an FBI investigation that brought to the surface CIA Director David Petraeus’ infidelity.

The former general’s swift exit provided an immediate reminder of the task facing the administration as it looks to planning out the next for years — ensuring the orderly exit of long-serving, but tired, aides and bringing in fresh blood.

Obama’s Cabinet, which has been unusually stable for the past four years, will be at the center of the government-wide change, with three of the four top appointees already looking for the door in the coming months, while numerous heads of smaller agencies are also expected to begin exiting.

Attorney General Eric Holder hinted at an exit on Thursday, according to Reuters, telling University of Baltimore law students that he hadn’t discussed his future with either the president or his family.

"That's something that I'm in the process now of trying to determine," he said.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick spent Friday night dinner at the White House with the goal of personally lobbying the president for the attorney general post. Patrick's ambition for the job dates back to 2008, when he was passed over the job, and he’s never hid it since. Democrats in his home state say he’s increasingly been talking to local officials about leaving for Washington.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has thus far remained silent on the specific timing of her departure from the administration, but she was the first Cabinet secretary to meet with Obama and Biden after their victory on Tuesday. The top two contenders to replace her are Sen. John Kerry and UN Ambassador Susan Rice. Rice’s role in the aftermath of the Benghazi attack in September — stating repeatedly that a video was to blame — is seen as a major obstacle.

“She’s probably not confirmable after that,” said one Capitol Hill Democrat.

However, Democrats, particularly in the Senate, are leery of letting Kerry leave Capitol Hill unless the state party has an orderly succession in place. But that’s easier said than done — ironically because of Kerry himself.

With the Massachusetts Democrat making a strong run for president in 2004, state Democrats changed the law to for replacing retiring members, stripping then Gov. Mitt Romney of his ability to appoint a new members and putting in a place a special election process. Kerry obviously never needed a replacement, and perhaps fittingly, following the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy the new law resulted in the state electing Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican.

And with Brown on his way out thanks to Elizabeth Warren, he is considered an odds-on favorite to take a special election against the current crop of Democratic contenders. According to Republicans close to the campaign, former Brown aides have been told to “keep the gunpowder dry” in case Kerry makes the move.

Democratic operatives Thursday said the state could simply change its rules back, since they control the legislature and governor’s office, which would allow Patrick to appoint a candidate who could take the next several years to build up state-wide name ID to win their first election.

The other option would be for Patrick to step down as governor and run for the Senate himself, something that is extremely attractive to party elders, since he would bring significant celebrity wattage to the chamber and help further cement in the public mind the demographic differences between Republicans and Democrats.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner has been edging for the exits for more than a year, being convinced by Obama to stay on in his post until the end of the first term after then-chief of staff Bill Daley’s efforts to reach out to business failed. But he won’t be leaving immediately.

“Secretary Geithner has indicated that he'll stay on through Inauguration, and he will be obviously a key participant in the negotiations around the so-called fiscal cliff issues,” White House press secretary Jay Carney said Friday.

When he does — likely as soon as a spending and tax compromise is reached — White House chief of staff Jack Lew is seen as the inside choice for the post. Lew, more wonk than manager, previously headed the Office of Management and Budget.

“It’s almost a done deal,” said one Democrat close to the administration.

Geithner’s eventual exit could also mean a return to public life for former Majority Leader Tom Daschle. Obama and Daschle are very close — indeed much of his staff in his first term and while in the Senate had worked for the South Dakota Democrat.

Although Republicans torpedoed Obama’s bid to install Daschle at the Department of Health and Human Services in 2009, the White House Chief of Staff position does not require confirmation.

Democratic and Republican aides said Daschle would be a solid pick, since his longstanding relationships with members of both parties and intimate understanding of Capitol Hill would go a long way towards thawing the icy relationship Obama’s administration has had with lawmakers during his first term.

The boiler-plate denial?

Image by Kevork Djansezian / Getty Images

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick doesn't want the job of Attorney General said an aide, a day after he dined with President Barack Obama at the White House.

Alex Goldstein, the Executive Director of Patrick's political committee "TogetherPAC," said in a statement to BuzzFeed that the governor's visit was "social."

"The Governor has the only job in public life that he wants — and he looks forward to completing his term as Governor," Goldstein said. "The purpose of the trip was a social dinner and nothing more."

Patrick was considered for the post before Attorney General Eric Holder was selected in 2008, and has widely been viewed as angling to replace Holder as soon as next year.

Petraeus seduced America. We should never have trusted him.

The fraud that General David Petraeus perpetrated on America started many years before the general seduced Paula Broadwell, a lower-ranking officer 20 years his junior, after meeting her on a campus visit to Harvard.

More so than any other leading military figure, Petraeus’ entire philosophy has been based on hiding the truth, on deception, on building a false image. “Perception” is key, he wrote in his 1987 Princeton dissertation: "What policymakers believe to have taken place in any particular case is what matters — more than what actually occurred."

Yes, it’s not what actually happens that matters — it’s what you can convince the public it thinks happened.

Until this weekend, Petraeus had been incredibly successful in making the public think he was a man of great integrity and honor, among other things. Most of the stories written about him fall under what we hacks in the media like to call “a blow job." Vanity Fair. The New Yorker. The New York Times. The Washington Post. Time. Newsweek. In total, all the profiles, stage-managed and controlled by the Pentagon’s multimillion dollar public relations apparatus, built up an unrealistic and superhuman myth around the general that in the end did not do Petraeus or the public any favors. Ironically, despite all the media fellating, our esteemed and sex-obsessed press somehow missed the actual blow job.

Before I lay out the Petraeus counter-narrative — a narrative intentionally ignored by most of the Pentagon press and national security reporters, for reasons I’ll soon explain — let me say this about the man once known as King David, General Betray-Us, or P4, by his admirers, his enemies, and his fellow service members, respectively. He’s an impressive guy, a highly motivated individual, a world-class bullshit artist, a fitness addict, and a man who spent more time in shitty places over the past 10 years than almost any other American serving his or her country has. I've covered him for seven years now, and he’ll always have my respect and twisted admiration.

So it’s fair to say that P4 probably deserves something a little better than the public humiliation he’s about to endure. Sources who long feared him have already begun to leak salacious details; one told me this weekend that he took Broadwell along with him on a government-funded trip to Paris in July 2011. And questions about his role in the Benghazi debacle are also likely to deepen.

And Broadwell, too, is about to get slandered in a way no woman deserves. She’s the Pentagon’s Monica Lewinksy — and, despite Team Petraeus’ much advertised lip service to courage and integrity, it didn’t take long for his allies to swarm the press with anonymous quotes smearing the West Point graduate and married mother of two. That she wore “tight clothes,” as The Washington Post reported, or that she had her “claws in him.” In other words, how could Old Dave have resisted that slut’s charms?

Pretty shitty behavior, all around. As Petraeus ally and counterinsurgency scholar Dr. Andrew Exum might put it, stay classy!

But the warning signs about Petreaus’ core dishonesty have been around for years. Here's a brief summary: We can start with the persistent questions critics have raised about his Bronze Star for Valor. Or, that in 2004, during the middle of a presidential election, Petraeus wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post supporting President Bush and saying that the Iraq policy was working. The policy wasn’t working, but Bush repaid the general’s political advocacy by giving him the top job in the war three years later.

There’s his war record in Iraq, starting when he headed up the Iraqi security force training program in 2004. He’s more or less skated on that, including all the weapons he lost, the insane corruption, and the fact that he essentially armed and trained what later became known as “Iraqi death squads.” On his final Iraq tour, during the so-called Surge, he pulled off what is perhaps the most impressive con job in recent American history. He convinced the entire Washington establishment that we won the war.

He did it by papering over what The Surge actually was: We took the Shiites' side in a civil war, armed them to the teeth, and suckered the Sunnis into thinking we’d help them out too. It was a brutal enterprise — over 800 Americans died during The Surge, while hundreds of thousands of Iraqis lost their lives during a sectarian conflict that Petraeus’ policies fueled. Then he popped smoke and left the members of the Sunni Awakening to fend for themselves. A journalist friend told me a story of an Awakening member, exiled in Amman, whom Petraeus personally assured he would never abandon. The former insurgent had a picture of the Petraeus on his wall, but was a little hurt that the general no longer returned his calls.

MoveOn may have been ill-advised to attack the general as "Betray Us" in Washington, but there was little doubt that many in the Awakening felt betrayed.

Petraeus was so convincing on Baghdad that he manipulated President Obama into trying the same thing in Kabul. On Afghanistan, he first underhandedly pushed the White House into escalating the war in September 2009 (calling up columnists to “box” the president in) and waging a full-on leak campaign to undermine the White House policy process. Petraeus famously warned his staff that the White House was “fucking” with the wrong guy.

The doomed Afghanistan surge would come back to bite him in the ass, however. A year after getting the war he wanted, P4 got stuck having to fight it himself. After Petraeus frenemy General Stanley McChrystal got fired for trashing the White House in a story I published in Rolling Stone, the warrior-scholar had to deploy yet again.

The Afghan war was a loser, always was, and always would be — Petraeus made horrible deals with guys like Abdul Razzik and the other Afghan gangsters and killed a bunch of people who didn’t need to be killed. And none of it mattered, or made a dent in his reputation. This was the tour where Broadwell joined him at headquarters, and it’s not so shocking that he’d need to find some solace, somewhere, to get that daily horror show out of his mind.

(This past summer, there were more attacks in Afghanistan than in the summer before The Surge, a devastating statistic. I could keep going, but if you’re interested, check out The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying Inside Story of America’s War in Afghanistan.)

How did Petraeus get away with all this for so long? Well, his first affair — and one that matters so much more than the fact that he was sleeping with a female or two — was with the media.

(For the record: Who really cares whom P4 is sleeping with? The idea that the FBI was investigating his sex life says more about the FBI and our absurd surveillance and national security state than it does about King David’s morality.)

Petraeus’ first biographer, former U.S. News and World Report reporter Linda Robinson, wrote a book about him, then went to CENTCOM to work for him. Yes — a so-called journalist published a book about him, then started getting a paycheck from him soon after. This went largely unremarked upon.

Another huge supporter was Tom Ricks, a former Washington Post journalist who found a second career as unofficial press agent for the general and his friends. Ricks is the ringleader of what I like to call “the media-military industrial complex,” setting the standard for its incestuous everyday corruption. He not only built Dave up, he facilitated the disastrous liaison between Broadwell and Petraeus. Ricks helped get Broadwell a literary agent, a six-figure book deal, and a publisher.

Broadwell was sold to publishers as much for her looks as what she was writing — she was an attractive package to push Petraeus and his counterinsurgency ideas. Little Brown editor Geoff Shandler once told me how “hot” he thought Broadwell was after she came in to meet him at his office, and indicated to me that Broadwell had made him somewhat aroused. Intellectual integrity all around, to be sure.

Ricks blurbed her in "All In," and earlier had promoted her content on his blog — the oddly titled Travels With Paula, a headline he slapped to a story about the U.S. military’s total destruction of a small village in southern Afghanistan. Broadwell described the ultra-violent wipeout in favorable terms — and when she was confronted with an angry villager whose house had been destroyed, she wrote that the Afghan’s tears and anger were a “a fit of theatrics.”

This was the kind of bullshit Ricks and Broadwell had been pushing — and it not only wasn’t called bullshit, it was embraced as serious work. Ricks wasn’t the only offender, of course — Petraeus more or less had journalists from many major media outlets slurping from the Pentagon’s gravy train. The typical route was to have all the cash and favors funneled through a third party like the Center For A New American Security.

CNAS was a Petraeus-inspired operation from its inception in 2007, and it made its reputation promoting Petraeus’ counterinsurgency plans. No problem, right? Except that it put the journalists who were covering those same plans and policies on its payroll. For instance, New York Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker took money and a position from CNAS and still covered the Pentagon; Robert Kaplan, David Cloud from the Los Angeles Times, and others produced a small library’s worth of hagiographies while sharing office space at CNAS with retired generals whom they’d regularly quote in their stories.

But Petraeus’ crash is more significant than the latest nonsense sex scandal. As President Obama says, our decade of war is coming to an end. The reputations of the men who were intimately involved in these years of foreign misadventure, where we tortured and supported torture, armed death squads, conducted nightly assassinations, killed innocents, and enabled corruption on an unbelievable scale, lie in tatters. McChrystal, Caldwell, and now Petraeus — the era of the celebrity general is over. Everyone is paying for their sins. (And before we should shed too many tears for the plight of King David and his men, remember, they’ll be taken care of with speaking fees and corporate board memberships, rewarded as instant millionaires by the same defense establishment they served so well.)

Before Dave fell for Paula, we fell for Dave. He tried to convince us that heroes aren’t human. They are human, like us, and sometimes worse.

View Entire List ›

An Austin Powers-themed cover for New York's greatest tabloid.

Source: webmedia.newseum.org

The Simpson takes on the Karl Rove freakout.

Source: youtube.com

Via: @ditzkoff

At 25,000 signatures, the White House says it will respond. Potheads and UFO truthers displaced by secessionists.

More than a dozen petitions sprung up on the White House petitions website "We The People" this weekend asking for various states to be allowed to secede from the United States after President Barack Obama won reelection.

The Texas petition was the first, and most detailed, listing complaints such as the Transportation Security Administration and the National Defense Authorization Act, which petitioners called "blatant abuses" of their rights.

According to the White House website, if any petition garners 25,000 signatories, the administration will respond. Previous petitions have asked the U.S. government to acknowledge the existence of extraterrestrials and to reveal the White House beer recipe, along with countless others dealing with the legalization of marijuana.

Source: petitions.whitehouse.gov  /  via: washingtonpost.com

Source: petitions.whitehouse.gov

Source: petitions.whitehouse.gov

View Entire List ›

Disappearing Romney tracks Mitt Romney's Facebook “like” count in real time. There's something oddly hypnotic about it.

The line squeaks down and to the right, down and to the right, steady and unyielding. Mitt Romney now hovers just above 12 million "likes" on Facebook. A "reappearing Obama" page would be its inverse — slowly ascending up and to the right, as every refresh of his Facebook page reveals fresh "likes," adding to the 33.2 million he already has.

If a campaign — a man, really — is increasingly measured by the size of its presence on social networks, what are we watching, really, as we witness Mitt Romney's "like" count on Facebook trickle away? This must be a new and special kind of pain, particularly for a man not regarded by the press as particularly likable. A news cycle now is measured in minutes, a day or two at the most. Then it's done. And social media, by design, explodes exponentially. A million followers today, two million tomorrow, four million the next. It's quick, when it's on your side. But the fade-out is creeping attrition, the next "unlike" a little slower than the last. Undoing may well be the hardest thing to do on the Internet, unfortunately for Romney.

LINK: Disappearing Romney

Sinema will follow Tammy Baldwin, elected to the Senate, as the second out LGBT woman in Congress.

Image by Ross D. Franklin / AP

WASHINGTON, DC — Kyrsten Sinema is the victor for a House seat in Arizona that had been too close to call, according to a call by the Associated Press on Monday. Sinema will be the first out bisexual member of Congress come January.

Sinema defeated Vernon Parker in the closely fought contest. She will be the only out LGBT female in the House in the 113th Congress and only the second out LGBT female in Congress. Tammy Baldwin, who served in the House since winning her seat in 1998, was elected to the Senate in Wisconsin this past Tuesday.

Sinema will, however, be joining the largest group of out LGBT lawmakers on the Hill in the nation's history. In addition to Baldwin and Sinema, out Reps. Jared Polis of Colorado and David Cicilline of Rhode Island were reelected, and Sean Patrick Maloney of New York, Mark Pocan of Wisconsin, and Mark Takano of California also were elected to Congress.

Sinema will be the second out LGBT member of Congress from Arizona. Former Rep. Jim Kolbe, a Republican, was the first.

Sinema's first reaction came via tweet:

“It's not a bad idea.”

Michael Steele suggested he hadn't ruled out running for the chairmanship of the Republican National Committee during a C-SPAN appearance on Sunday.

"It's not a bad idea," Steele said.

"It would shake up the house a little bit more," Steele said. "What do you think?"

A recent Politico report indicated that Reince Priebus, the current chairman of the RNC, will probably try to stay on.

Google is not a social network, and other elementary errors.

Via: reddit.com

The 2012 election proved that while a well-run digital campaign may not be enough to win you the election, a bad one can help you lose it. And moving forward, any winning national or state campaign must know that to fund-raise, mobilize, and persuade, it has to place a new emphasis on data capture and usage.

The Obama campaign began this cycle with a huge leg up online. Having been running for president for the better part of four years and having been in national office for two, the president had amassed a huge database of small-dollar donors, supporters, e-mail addresses, and Facebook fans. There’s no doubt that the institution of the presidency awarded his candidacy advantages and attention that the Republican candidates could never reach. That said, the Obama campaign deserves credit yet again for an incredibly well-run digital operation, one that broke the barriers that they themselves had set in 2008.

Simply put: The Obama campaign understood how to empower individuals through technology. Arguably the best use of technology this cycle, the campaign's downloadable canvass application allowed users to walk their neighborhoods without needing to visit a local campaign office. While not always perfect, the Obama campaign used various rich data points borrowed from Facebook to send targeted e-mails around Election Day, urging people to help encourage specific friends in battleground states to vote for Obama. Supporters would open up their e-mail to see pictures of their friends staring at them, and with the click of a mouse could write testimony on their digital Facebook walls.

Republicans squabbling about messaging and reaching youth often have a common misconception that only young people are active online. At one point in the campaign, Ted Cruz’s average online donor was 55 and Newt Gingrich’s most active audience on Facebook were people 45+. Certainly issues that motivate a 55-year-old man in Florida to take action online are drastically different than those motivating a 25-year-old woman in New York. Most Republican campaigns this cycle lost out on harnessing the animosity online against Obama into anything tangible. Facebook messages, e-mails, and tweets often talked at voters, and not with them, missing the intimacy that digital communications allows.

Perhaps part of the issue is that Republican campaigns in particular have become focused on ad spending as a metric of success in a specific medium. If you look at tracking polls, the truth is that 90+% of the electorate was always polarized and already decided in this election before a single ad ran. Billions of dollars ran on television from super PACs trying to persuade and reach a small percentage of the electorate in each swing state, while virtually nothing went into creating forward-looking technologies that would be around to help the movement regardless of election results.

Sure, the Obama campaign spent money on television, but it also understood the marketing power in using others to advocate its brand. It knew that a voter sharing an advertisement on a friend’s wall was ultimately more powerful and a better use of money than costly and inefficient broadcast buys. There’s no doubt that television continues to be the dominant place people consume media, but does that necessarily mean it is the best place to persuade a voter? Pollsters, often among the smartest people working on campaigns, can help answer that question, but sometimes even they might need a little help.

A question I saw in the field this cycle asked, “What social network do you use the most?” with answers of Google, MySpace, Facebook, or Twitter. The results came back skewed heavily toward Google. Not because Google is dominant but because the question confused the voter by implying that Google’s search engine was a social network (Google’s social network is dwarfed by Facebook, in reality). The fact that MySpace still appeared as a serious answer also highlights the hard road we have ahead.

Another question I saw multiple pollsters ask this cycle was, “How often do you use the Internet to consume political news and information?” The responses came back unsurprisingly bleak and in one case was used to slash the digital budget. But is the voter watching Dancing with the Stars in Ohio consuming political news and information? Is the voter listening to country-music radio in Iowa consuming political news and information? A more relevant question would ask how voters use the Internet in terms of time and media consumption patterns.

In many cases consultants continue to hold digital to a higher standard, refusing to give money without knowing the immediate return on investment. Republicans cannot run successful forward-looking campaigns with this continuing to be the case. The Romney campaign certainly deserves credit for being able to utilize relationships to get digital properly funded, something that hadn’t been done in the previous cycle. The Republican Party as a whole, however, should yet again look to Obama’s use of technology as a means to empower individuals and figure out the best way to spend its money. We simply can’t afford not to.

No regrets.

A Dreams From My Real Father mailer sent to a voter in Ohio.

The man who created "Dreams From My Real Father," the anti-Obama film that argues that the president's real father is late Chicago communist Frank Marshall Davis, told BuzzFeed on Monday that he believes the film was a success despite Obama's reelection.

"The DVD continues to sell well and has discredited the mainstream media even further as liberal political partisans, rather than public trustees and watchdogs for the American people," said Joel Gilbert in an e-mail, calling the movie an "important historic document."

Gilbert started a direct-mail blitz over the summer and fall, mailing millions of copies of the film, he said, to voters in swing states all over the country. He would not specify how much the distribution of the free copies cost him.

"The publicity campaign of sending some free DVDs around the country was very helpful in getting media attention, including The New York Times, Media Matters, The Daily Beast, local TV stations nationwide," Gilbert said on Monday.

Gilbert said that there's more in the works — theatrical distribution and a sequel to the original film.

"The marketing campaign for Dreams from My Real Father continues," he said.
"We are seeking theatrical distribution, and a sequel is in the works."

This is how you tell the president about the time he was kind of responsible for you getting engaged.

"Telling the president how we got engaged."

Put a ring on it.

Via: @cschweitz

Attacking Netanyahu, swinging Kiryas Joel.

A vocal group of anti-Zionist ultra-Orthodox Jews — who call themselves "True Torah Jews" are vocally claiming victory on Monday for increasing President Barack Obama's support in the small village of Kiryas Joel in upstate New York.

The village, almost entirely populated by the Satmar Hasidic sect, has the highest poverty rate in the nation. The sect's leaders opposed the founding of the state of Israel on the grounds that the reunion of Jews in the Holy Land should await the coming of the Messiah.

According to the "True Torah Jews," only 7% of village residents voted for Obama in 2008, but in 2012, 42% backed him — a reaction to Romney's close ties with Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, a man reviled by the anti-Zionist group.

The group sponsored a radio ad billing the election as an opportunity to repudiate Netanyahu's outspokenness about the U.S. election — even though the Israeli leader avoided taking a public stance on the race.

The full press release is below:

Dramatic Leap in Orthodox Jewish Vote for Obama, Accompanied by Radio Campaign, Makes Strong Statement in Election

WASHINGTON, Nov. 12, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- During the election season, the religious Jewish group known as True Torah Jews sponsored a series of radio ads expressing their disapproval of pro-Israel groups attempting to "influence the outcome of the election." The reference was to an ad that aired in swing states featuring clips of a speech by Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu, intended to persuade Jews to vote for Romney. Another more explicitly anti-Obama ad featured a "debate" between the President and Netanyahu, using actual clips of their speeches taken out of context.

"We view these ads as an insult to our status as Americans Jews," said Yirmiyahu Cohen, a spokesman for True Torah Jews. "The Torah obligates Jews to be loyal citizens of their country, and to pray for its success and safety. Now a leader of another country comes and interferes in the election of our country. We felt we had no choice but to speak up and correct the impression this made.

The True Torah Jews radio ad stated the following:

"As the United States presidential campaign reaches its climax, Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu has voiced historically-unprecedented statements in an effort to influence the outcome of the United States elections. Moreover, these statements are being propagandized to American citizens as political ads, especially in critical swing states.

"American Jews are disturbed by these ads. This time, the Israeli prime minister has clearly crossed the red line. By recklessly interfering in United States elections, he may very well have damaged the image of American Jews. Therefore American Jews wish to repudiate this interference in the elections and clarify that, as always, the statements of Israeli politicians do not reflect the opinion of American Jews."

The ad ran many times over the final three weeks before Election Day on WABC and its affiliate stations throughout the United States.

In Kiryas Joel, a village in upstate New York whose residents are all members of the Satmar hasidic sect, many voters took this campaign a step further and voted for Obama - despite the fact that they hold socially conservative views and would normally vote Republican. In 2008, for example, Obama got only 7% of the votes in Kiryas Joel - 199 people voted for him, while John McCain picked up 2757 votes. In the 2012 election, however, 42% of the village voted Obama - 1442 votes, while Romney got 1904. The reason for this tremendous leap for Obama, was the voice of protest from the Satmar sect against the Israeli leaders for their attacks on the President.

"I usually vote for the Republicans," said village resident Joel Klein, "but this time I voted for Obama to show my protest against the Israeli politicians, and to show that they don't represent Jewish interests."

Klein added, "I have relatives in Israel and I help them out with money very often. I also donate to many charities in the holy land. But when their government mixes into American elections, that is a crime and it harms the image of Jews - not only in America but in the whole world as well."

“They need to understand that it's not just about rich white men. It just isn't,” says Jennifer Westfeldt.

Image by Bryan Bedder / Getty Images

President Obama won — as Democrats typically do — the celebrity vote in the 2012 election, with Mitt Romney's Kid Rock rallies no match for Bruce Springsteen and Jay-Z.

BuzzFeed caught up with few of Obama's celebrity fund-raisers and campaigners Monday and asked them about the campaign, and about what advice they'd offer a defeated Republican party.

"I'm so, so relieved. We had been campaigning in swing states with Obama surrogates and the races were so close. I was so panicked, I couldn't sleep for a solid month just worrying about it," said Jennifer Westfeldt at Cosmopolitan's "Cosmo 100" luncheon at Michael's restaurant in New York on Monday. Westfeldt, along with her longtime boyfriend Jon Hamm, campaigned for Obama in a number of swing states and attended the Democratic National Convention.

"I think that [Republicans] have to do a lot of soul-searching and realize that they're totally out of touch with America and the diversity of America. The fact that they have absolutely no relationship with women and minorities is shameful," she added. "They need to understand that it's not just about rich white men. It just isn't."

Sarah Jessica Parker, who hosted a $40,000 per head fund-raiser for Obama at her Manhattan home in June, wouldn't say whether or not she's heard from the president since he was reelected last week. "But the American people have," she said.

Parker suggested Republicans take note of "the reality of this country, the wonderful diverse group of Americans that now exist — that's the voting bloc."

"But I don't need to tell the Republicans that," she said. "I think it's abundantly clear what happened on election night."

Parker stuck close to her friend Diane Von Furstenberg, even whispering in her ear for a few minutes. The designer, also an outspoken Obama fan who in September told shoppers in an event at her store that, "Everyone here better be a Democrat; no Republicans!" said she was "very happy" that Obama was reelected.

"You have to understand, I'm a European who became American. What I love about America is the unity," she explained. She then walked a few feet away to tell a woman — seemingly a stranger — that she had dropped her scarf. She picked it up, put her arm around the woman's shoulder, and placed the scarf back on the woman. "So that's what I would like more than anything, that people come together."

The FBI Agent Investigating the fallen general allegedly sent shirtless photographs to one of the women involved.

Petraeus family friend Jill Kelley today.

Image by Brian Blanco / Reuters

The Wall Street Journal reported Monday that the FBI Agent whose investigation led to the resignation of CIA Director David Petraeus over an extramarital affair had to be pulled off the case — because he sent shirtless photographs of himself to one of the women involved.

Petraeus's affair became public after his alleged mistress, Paula Broadwell, allegedly sent threatening emails to a woman she may have suspected of stealing Petraeus's affections, Jill Kelley.

Kelley was also allegedly the lucky recipient of the shirtless images of the lawman. The Journal reported that the agent allegedly sent the photographs to Kelley.

The New York Times, however, reported that the agent sent the shirtless photographs to Kelley before the Petraeus incident, when he had "previously pursued a friendship with Ms. Kelley."

“He'll run into a buzz saw of Vietnam vets,” GOP aide says of potential Defense Secretary nomination of Sen. John Kerry. Benghazi scandal looms large in Ambassador Rice's future.

Image by Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

WASHINGTON — Senate Republicans roundly criticized the potential nomination of UN Ambassador Susan Rice to become the next Secretary of State Monday, warning her handling of the Benghazi terrorist attack could make confirmation extremely difficult, if not impossible.

The Washington Post reported the Rice trial balloon as part of a possible nomination of Sen. John Kerry as Defense Secretary, a move that would make Rice an "almost certain" pick to head the State Department.

Rice's Sunday show appearances on the attack — in which she initially blamed it on an anti-muslim Youtube video — have become a lightning rod within the Republican Party's foreign policy hawk wing, with Sen. Lindsey Graham going on record on Sunday saying he would oppose any effort to name her to the top Cabinet post in the upcoming second-term shake-up.

"I cannot imagine promoting anybody associated with Benghazi at this point," the South Carolina senator said on CBS Face The Nation, stopping short of threatening a hold or filibuster on the potential pick.

A senior Republican leadership aide expressed shock at the possibility that Rice would be nominated for the State Department slot and said it would almost go poorly for the ambassador.

"Lindsey Graham is perhaps to most accommodating Republican in the Senate to Presidential nominations and he's 24 hours removed from saying he would oppose her. It's unclear whether her nomination would be blocked entirely but what is clear is that she would not be confirmed until the entire Benghazi situation has been fully litigated, which has been something the Administration has meticulously avoided," the leadership aide said. "The public declarations by the administration on her behalf that her public statements were consistent with the intelligence at the time are flatly false and she will be held accountable. If they were looking for a smooth confirmation she would be a uniquely bad choice."

The idea of Kerry heading up DoD was also questioned by Republicans, who warned the selection of the Vietnam veteran-turned-critic wouldn't be simple either.

"He'll run into a buzz saw of Vietnam vets" if Obama taps Kerry for the pentagon slot, a GOP aide said.

A Senate GOP foreign policy aide predicted that ultimately both could be confirmed, but not without a protracted and ugly confirmation fight for the White House — a difficult way to start off a second term.

"Whether fair to her or not, Susan Rice has become the posterchild for congressional suspicions of a coverup of the attack on our consulate in Benghazi," the aide side. "If the President sent up a Rice nomination, you'd just have one more committee holding hearings, asking questions and sifting through documents with a media drum beat on Benghazi - not the start I'd imagine he wants for the second term. If a Kerry nomination comes up, Republicans will probably dredge up every email, document, memo, and diplomatic cable surrounding Kerry's role as unofficial envoy to Bashir Assad, forcing another difficult Obama foreign policy into the forefront - and who knows what embarrassing things we'll find. In the end, while both Rice and Kerry would likely win confirmation in the end, the administration just needs to weigh the costs of weeks of hearings and questions on Benghazi and Syria."

"This seems like a trial balloon to clear the way for Kerry at State," mused another GOP aide.

The then-Senator appeared on the popular 1990s game show Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego? in November 1993. (H/t to David Montgomery , who first found the clip.)

Source: youtube.com

A longer clip of the episode.

Source: youtube.com

Just in case you didn't know that you were watching a segment about a sex scandal.

View Video ›

Watch as the Fox News producers roll the tape at normal speed and then replay it at sexy speed:

Likely incoming chief of House Republican campaign shop Greg Walden tells colleagues work must start “right away.”

Image by Alex Wong / Getty Images

WASHINGTON, DC — The man expected to head up Republican efforts to grow their majority in the House of Representatives Tuesday warned that while the party can pick up seats in 2014, the GOP must immediately begin the process of reforming the party and correcting the mistakes that hurt them this year.

In a "dear colleague" letter to House members, Rep. Greg Walden, the Deputy Director of the National Republican Congressional Campaign Committee, praised the party’s efforts in a hard election year, but also bluntly warned that changes must be made — and soon.

“We also came up short in some key races and have important lessons to learn from our losses as we go forward into 2014. We also have some solid opportunities to pick up seats and we must get started right away to do so,” Walden said in the letter, which additionally was a pitch for his bid to become the NRCC chairman next year.

The Oregon Republican is popular within the GOP and is not expected to face serious opposition during leadership elections later this week.

Republicans have increasingly turned introspective in the wake of last week's electoral defeat.

View Entire List ›

Will Obama act on his own? “The window is closing for climate.”

Image by Seth Wenig, File / AP

WASHINGTON, DC — One of the most enduring images of the election cycle is President Barack Obama’s embrace of Chris Christie in the wake of Hurricane Sandy, which gave the president an image boost just a week before polls closed.

The storm also appeared to give new momentum to the failed push to regulate greenhouse gas emissions — but that momentum may be fading as the White House looks to spend the political capital of the president's reelection on budget negotiations.

Obama “has a mandate on the issues he claims to have a mandate on, and right now that's taxes," said one Capitol Hill Democrat involved in climate change legislation. "The window is closing for climate.”

Indeed, as the East Coast struggles to rebuild from Hurricane Sandy, and as some coastal residents still suffer its effects, Congress remains unlikely to act on carbon emissions, experts say, and the central open question appears to be whether Obama's Environmental Protection Administration will take unilateral action on the issue — and avoid dealing directly with Congress on a question that has split Democrats from coal states from their party.

“I think the administration will do what they tried to do on climate in 2009,” said one. “With the courts ruling that the EPA can regulate greenhouse gases, the EPA becomes the hammer.”

With the EPA’s court victory over a business community challenge earlier this year, the agency can continue to regulate emissions of carbon dioxide under the Clean Air Act, but more expansive efforts, including a cap-and-trade system, would have to come from Congress.

“I don't think anyone has had a clearer mandate than Obama in 2008, yet…the greenhouse gas bill got through the House, but couldn't get through the Senate,” the activist said.

The stalled energy legislation was a signal defeat of Obama's early first term, which saw him succeed in passing both an economic stimulus and health care legislation. And climate had been the subject of some of Obama's most urgent campaign trail promises.

“This was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal,” Obama promised of his election.

To date, he has taken some steps in that direction, enacting tougher mileage requirements for vehicles in particular, but nowhere near what the Green lobby had hoped.

That's in part because of the unexpectedly difficult politics of the issue, with Republicans turning grand promises into a joke.

“President Obama promised to slow the rise of the oceans and to heal the planet,” Mitt Romney quipped at the Republican National Convention. “My promise is to help you and your family.”

In the wake of the storm, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg endorsed Obama specifically because he was open to leading on climate change, and groups like the League of Conservation Voters juxtaposed Romney's sneering line with scenes of coastal flooding, a new kind of environmental attack ad.

But with the election in the rearview mirror, other priorities like the fiscal cliff and immigration reform stand to occupy the next year or more of the president’s attention.

“The president has got a mandate on what he deems to be his priorities,” said Navin Nayak, the senior vice president for campaigns at the League of Conservation Voters. “I think Sandy has absolutely put this front and center, but it remains to be seen if this will be a priority.”

“You don’t want to squander your time on things that don’t get done in Congress, but you also don’t want to squander time on small bore issues,” he added. “Climate is not small bore. There’s no bigger issue. There’s no bigger legacy opportunity.”