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Malia and Sasha to join elite student body at Sidwell Friends
Hillary Clinton to State; Timothy F. Geithner to Treasury; Malia and Sasha to Sidwell Friends School.
Washington got some answers to its transition questions last week, not the least of which was where Barack and Michelle Obama would send their two daughters to school.
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Sasha, 7, a second-grader, will attend Sidwell’s lower school in Bethesda, Md. Annual tuition for the lower school is $28,442
Her sister Malia, 10, a fifth-grader, will enroll in Sidwell’s middle school on the campus in Northwest Washington where the annual tuition is $29,442.
“A number of great schools were considered,” a spokesman for Michelle Obama said, as reported in The Washington Post. “In the end, the Obamas selected the school that was the best fit for what their daughters need right now.”
The Obamas had also looked at Georgetown Country Day, the Post reported. And they considered Maret School, but did not visit there, according to reports.
Michelle Rhee, the superintendent of Washington’s public schools, as well as Washington Mayor Adrian Fenty, also talked to the Obamas about their school choice, the Post reported.
The Obama girls are currently attending the private University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.
The Post suggested that the Obamas may have selected Sidwell, which has about 1,100 students, because it has experience with the security and privacy issues that surround the presence of children of high-profile parents at the school.
In addition, three granddaughters of Sen. Joe Biden, the vice-president-elect, attend Sidwell. Malia Obama is friends with at least one of these girls, the Post reported.
The Biden grandchildren, Maisy, 8, Finnegan, 10, and Naomi, 14, are the children of Biden’s son, Hunter Biden.
The last presidential offspring to attend Sidwell was Chelsea Clinton, the daughter of Bill and Hillary Clinton who graduated in 1997.
Both of Richard Nixon’s daughters attended Sidwell before he became president. Tricia Nixon Cox, graduated in 1964. Her sister, now Julie Nixon Eisenhower, attended Sidwell but graduated elsewhere.
Former Vice President Al Gore’s son, Albert Gore III, graduated from Sidwell in 2001.
The Quaker school’s other notable alumni include ABC-News anchor Charles Gibson, Ana Gasteyer, a former “Saturday Night Live” regular, and Hanna Holborn Gray, former University of Chicago president.
The list of people who attended Sidwell but did not graduate from the school includes former First Lady Nancy Reagan, authors Gore Vidal and John Dos Passos, and aviator Charles Lindbergh.
The Obamas are likely to bump into a wide variety of Washington’s elite at Sidwell open houses.
Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s controversial pollster and a person not liked by the Obama campaign during for the Democratic primaries, has children at Sidwell.
Daniel H. Mudd, the former CEO and president of Fannie Mae, is a Sidwell graduate and member of the school’s board of trustees.
Maxine Isaacs, a former aide to Walter Mondale when he was a senator and when he was vice president, is also on the Sidwell board.
She’s married to James Johnson, another former Fannie Mae chairman who briefly served as one of the leaders of Obama’s vice-presidential search team. He left the post after his former connection to Fannie Mae became controversial.
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Carol Bartz may bring new direction to YahooJanuary 18, 2009 at 12:56pm
The selection last week of Carol A. Bartz to be CEO of Yahoo Inc. is receiving generally favorable reviews.
Muck tracker – Obama economic team
President-elect Barack Obama announced key members of his economic team Monday, including Timothy Geithner as Treasury secretary; Lawrence Summers as head of the National Economic Council; and Christina Romer, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, as chair of his Council of Economic Advisers.
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Domino’s CEO named U-M athletic directorJanuary 6, 2010 at 8:29am
The University of Michigan Tuesday named David A. Brandon, the CEO of Domino’s Pizza, as the school’s new athletic director.
Muck Tracker Obama Economic Team
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Muckety Movers George Soros
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Waxman’s coup likely to boost Obama energy agenda
He has been called the “scariest guy in town” and the Democrats’ Eliot Ness.
Rep. Henry Waxman, the 69-year-old Californian who wrested control of the powerful Energy and Commerce Committee from Congress’ longest-serving chairman yesterday, is expected to usher in far more activist approach to global warming and energy independence than his predecessor, Michigan Rep. John Dingell.
And with his longtime chief of staff Phil Schiliro just tapped by President-elect Barack Obama as his liaison with Congress, Waxman is likely to work closely with the new administration, speeding passage of Obama’s health and energy agenda, which includes spending $150 billion on renewable fuel research and one million new hybrid cars.
“We are at a unique moment in history,” Waxman told reporters after the secret-ballot vote. “Seniority is important, but it should not be a grant of property rights to be chairman for three decades or more.”
Waxman developed a reputation as a tough and tenacious inquisitor as chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, where he churned out an endless series of reports on issues ranging from Halliburton’s excessive billing on contracts in Iraq to the ineffectiveness of abstinence-only education programs.
Though he represents one of the most liberal and affluent districts in Congress – an area that includes Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and Santa Monica – there is nothing slick about the man.
He grew up in an apartment over a Watts grocery store owned by his father, the son of Russian-Jewish immigrants. After a stint in the California assembly, he came to Congress as part of the group of post-Watergate reformers known as the Class of 1974.
“Doing reports, conducting oversight – it’s what he has always done,” Schiliro told the Nation.
Although both Dingell and Waxman support universal health care, they have fought over the best methods of curbing global warming.
Dingell, 82, has worked on some environmental legislation, helping pass the Clean Air Act of 1990 and the raising of fuel-efficiency standards on the auto industry last year. But he has resisted previous efforts to raise fuel-efficiency standards, and environmentalists view him as an impediment.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was officially neutral in the Waxman-Dingell contest, circumvented Dingell last year by creating a temporary global warming committee chaired by Rep. Edward J. Markey of MA., a close ally.
While Dingell’s biggest contributors have been Detroit’s automakers and telecommunications giants – hardly surprising for a Michigan lawmaker and commerce chairman – Waxman’s are health-care players and unions.
The Center for Responsive Politics lists Dingell’s top donors as General Motors, Ford, BellSouth and DaimlerChrysler, AT&T and Comcast, according to the Center for Responsive Politics.
Waxman’s biggest contributors are the American Association for Justice, a lawyers’ trade group, the National Association of Letter Carriers, the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, the American Hospital Association, the Service Employees International Union and the American Medical Association, according to the watchdog group.
The leadership change is a blow to the already-reeling auto industry, another confirmation of their diminished power on Capitol Hill. Republicans, meanwhile, expressed concern that the Democratic party is shifting leftward.
“This decision sends a troubling signal from a Majority that has promised to govern from the center,” House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said in a statement. “They moved away from Chairman Dingell because he is committed to approaching energy and environmental issues in a manner that protects American jobs.”
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New owners take charge of Houston AstrosNovember 23, 2011 at 7:38am
After a long vetting process by Major League Baseball, ownership of the Houston Astros passed Tuesday to businessman Jim Crane and his partners.
Feinberg and Cerberus: out of the frying pan
What’s in a name? Ask the folks at Cerberus Capital Management, named for the three-headed dog that guards the gates of hell.
Managers of the private equity firm like to stay out of the limelight, an impossibility given Cerberus’ ownership of Chrysler.
As Reuters noted yesterday, Cerberus co-founder Stephen Feinberg is in the untenable position of seeking government funds to rescue a privately held company:
Feinberg – a frequent contributor to Republican coffers — seems content to let fellow executives John Snow, a former treasury secretary in the current Bush administration, and Dan Quayle, who was vice president under former president George H. W. Bush, be the famous names at his company.
Snow’s title is chairman of Cerberus Capital Management. Quayle is chairman of Cerberus Global Investments.
It has been Snow who has been the public face of the Chrysler deal. Snow talked in a press release at the time of the deal about the “inherent strength of U.S. manufacturing and of the U.S. auto industry” – a judgment called into question by the current economic crisis.
Cerberus has pledged that federal assistance would be used to shore up Chrysler, and would not flow back to the investment company.
Chrysler chief Bob Nardelli told a Senate committee Tuesday that Cerberus “has made it clear that it will forgo any benefit from the upside that would, in part, be created from any government assistance that Chrysler LLC may obtain.”
Although Republicans have vociferously opposed a bailout for the automakers, Feinberg is a generous supporter of the GOP. Earlier this year, he gave $28,500 to the National Republican Senatorial Committee.
When Cerberus bought Chrysler in 2007, Feinberg was hailed as a man who might save Detroit. In retrospect, the task seems as impossible as Katie Couric saving network news.
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FDR knew networksJuly 29, 2010 at 8:03am
A 75-year-old document released Wednesday by the National Archives highlights Franklin Roosevelt’s keen understanding of network dynamics.
Muck tracker – Clinton nomination ‘on track’
Transition team members are confirming that President-elect Barack Obama is “on track” to name Hillary Rodham Clinton as secretary of state. Politico reports that Clinton is expected to accept.
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New owners take charge of Houston AstrosNovember 23, 2011 at 7:38am
After a long vetting process by Major League Baseball, ownership of the Houston Astros passed Tuesday to businessman Jim Crane and his partners.
Waxmans Coup Likely to Help Obama Deliver Energy Agenda
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Muckety Movers Matt Drudge
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Feinberg and Cerberus Out of the Frying Pan
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Obama to Pick Timothy Geithner As Treasury Secretary
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Muck Tracker Clinton Nomination on Track
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Newt Gingrich’s stock rises as GOP scrambles
Out of the ashes of the Republican Party an old GOP warrior may be rising.
Or at least that’s the story being pushed by boosters of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who see him as a potential savior of a battle-scarred party.
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But Gingrich resigned in 1998 in the face of GOP midterm losses and mounting ethics questions – among them, an income-tax probe and whispers that he helped lead the attack against Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair while having an extramarital relationship himself.
In the decade since leaving Congress, Gingrich has remained a mainstay of conservative politics, aligning himself with leading conservative think tanks and writing several books.
And at least some in the party’s conservative wing are convinced he is the man to shepherd his party to leadership once again. They say he is an endless fount of ideas and a bulldog of a competitor. Columnist Robert Novak goes so far as to suggest him as a contender for the 2012 GOP presidential nomination:
In serious conversations among Republicans since their election debacle Tuesday, what name is mentioned most often as the Moses, or Reagan, who could lead them out of the wilderness before 40 years?
To the consternation of many Republicans, it is none other than Newt Gingrich, the former speaker of the House.
Gingrich is far from a unanimous or even a consensus choice to run for president in 2012, but there is a strong feeling in Republican ranks that he is the only leader of their party who has shown the skill and energy to attempt a comeback quickly.
Gingrich himself appears to be doing everything he can to encourage such talk.
After deciding to sit out the Republican presidential primaries last year, purportedly because he wanted to devote himself to his new think tank, American Solutions, he told Los Angeles Times reporter Bob Drogin: “Make a note now. Call me the day after the 2008 election.”
And as Republicans cast about for someone to lead them out of the post-election wilderness, he has been a relentlessly upbeat presence on the political circuit, positioning himself as party guru, if not a candidate.
As he told Bob Schieffer on Face the Nation last Sunday: “I’ve been through the ‘64 collapse when the Republican Party was going to disappear, and the ‘74 Watergate collapse when the Republican Party was going to disappear, and the ‘92 defeat of President Bush.
“And in each case, I watched us within a short time focus on new ideas and new solutions, and within a very short time come back as a stronger and healthier party.”
But rehabilitating oneself as a candidate, as opposed to a talking head, may be a tough sell.
A longtime crusader for traditional family values, Gingrich is now on his third marriage, and his infidelities have been vividly chronicled by the media, for instance in Gail Sheehy’s 1995 Vanity Fair profile.
Also damaging were the widespread reports about how he confronted his first wife, Jackie, in a hospital room in 1980 where she was recovering from uterine cancer surgery, to hammer out the terms of a divorce.
Even Novak acknowledges concerns about “deep ‘character flaws’ of Gingrich’s that would be difficult to overcome in a presidential campaign.”
The problem, as Novak sees it, is that nobody else in the GOP firmament has what he calls Gingrich’s “dynamism”:
“What is certain is that Gingrich has the desire and the will. He has a deep-seated ambition. He had not even settled into the House speaker’s chair in 1995 when he confessed to me his presidential desires for 1996. That was not to be, but he never abandoned the personal dream and is ready to pursue it now.”
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Apocryphal or not, the sotry goes that Clinton seated Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich in the back of Air FOrce One while flying from DC to Jerusalem to attend Yshak Rabin’s funeral. Dole and Gingrich felt snubbed. Gingrich was infuriated.
Gingrich led the Republicans not to submit a revised budget, allowing the previously approved appropriations to expire on schedule, and causing parts of the Federal government to shut down for lack of funds. Gingrich inflicted a blow to his public image by seeming to suggest that the Republican hard-line stance over the budget was in due to his “snub” by the President.
Gingrich’s record has shown him to be a diva and drama queen. He’s intractable and thetorically vitrolic. His vaunted, self-image polishing Contract with America turned out to be braggadocio.
It just goes to show how backward thinking the broken GOP leadership has become in the wake of its defeat. To resurrect Gingrich illustrates that it can not(refuses?)think outside the box. Piyush (Bobby) Jindal is a better choice though the thinking behind that is warped. If pitting two people of color against one another is the GOP’s idea of “fighting fire with fire” it will fail.
I hope they do select the former Speaker of the House as their guy. They will surely fail with that intractable man blathering at the GOP’s bully pulpit. Whatever the GOP decides it’s a guarantee that it will harken back to its static ideological belief that there is a big bad bogeyman lurking in every issue nationally and interntaionally. They are not America’s saviors. And I, for one, am sick of them.
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Muckety this! Jennifer Hudson to Sylvester StalloneJanuary 8, 2009 at 3:00pm
Though they’ve never been co-stars, actors Sylvester Stallone and Jennifer Hudson can be connected on a Muckety map. Your challenge is to figure out how.
Penny Pritzker says no thanks to Commerce post
Penny Pritzker, the billionaire heiress who oversaw Barack Obama’s record-breaking fund-raising efforts, has taken herself out of the mix for U.S. Commerce Secretary.
“Penny Pritzker ultimately has decided she does not want to do the Commerce thing,” the Chicago Tribune’s Swamp quotes a senior Obama official.
Pritzker is already part of the Obama Biden economic transition team. But sources said it would have been exceedingly difficult for her to disentangle from her family’s far-flung business empire to fulfill the president-elect’s ethics requirements for members of his administration.
The 49-year-old Harvard- and Stanford-educated lawyer and businesswoman, whose net worth was estimated at $2.8 billion last year, is one of a trio of Pritzkers who run a sprawling family empire that includes the Hyatt hotel chain.
Pritzker first met the Obamas in the late 1990s when her son and daughter played in a summer basketball league at a Chicago YMCA coached by Craig Robinson, Michelle Obama’s brother, who introduced them.
Another key link was Obama’s longtime friend Martin Nesbitt, a vice president of the Pritzker Realty group, who approached her about getting involved in Obama’s U.S. Senate campaign, where she also would serve as finance chairman then.
A Pritzker appointment would certainly have not broken the “business as usual” mold that Obama has campaigned against. On the other hand, many commerce secretaries have been major donors of the presidents who appoint them.
Pritzker also would have brought baggage as the former chairwoman of Chicago’s Superior Bank, which failed in 2001 after making large amounts of sub-prime loans. While she stepped down as chairwoman in 1994, she remained on the board of the bank’s holding company.
The Chicago-Sun Times reported in April that it had obtained a letter showing that until Superior’s end, Pritzker made efforts to try to revive the bank with an expanded push into subprime loans. Pritzker’s attorney Kevin Poorman said that the kind of subprime lending that Superior was doing in 2001 was not predatory.
Update: Chicago Sun Times columnist Lynn Sweet posts an email from Pritzker herself saying she is not a candidate for the Commerce post. “I think I can best serve our nation in my current capacity: building businesses, creating jobs and working to strengthen our economy,” Pritzker said.
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Sibling rivalries in national politicsMay 21, 2010 at 7:30am
Not since 1968 have brothers stood against one another for such a powerful political position.
Muck tracker – Michael Mukasey rushed to hospital
Attorney General Michael Mukasey was rushed to George Washington University Hospital Thursday after he collapsed while giving a speech to the Federalist Society.
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Muckety this! Jennifer Hudson to Sylvester StalloneJanuary 8, 2009 at 3:00pm
Though they’ve never been co-stars, actors Sylvester Stallone and Jennifer Hudson can be connected on a Muckety map. Your challenge is to figure out how.
Muck tracker – Janet Napolitano top choice for Homeland Security
Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice to lead the Homeland Security Department, which is charged with immigration enforcement, among other duties, reports Politico’s Mike Allen.
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It’s a boy!July 22, 2013 at 2:38pm
Aside from the paparazzi, the sartorial pressures and the scrutiny of a perfectly behaved great-grandmother, Baby Boy Cambridge has the burden of so many names.
Tom Daschle Tapped for Hhs
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Penny Pritzker Reportedly Passes on Commerce Post
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Newt Gingrichs Stock Rises As Gop Scrambles
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