Obama to Announce Energy, Environment Team and Hold Presser Monday

By GottaLaff

Cue rise in stock market:

President-elect Barack Obama will announce his energy and environment team late Monday afternoon at a news conference in Chicago -- continuing a steady roll-out of his Cabinet, which is now nearly complete.

Obama is expected to name Carol Browner, former head of the Environmental Protection Agency, as the head of a new policy council to coordinate climate, environment and energy issues. He is also planning to make official other choices: Steven Chu, a Nobel laureate in physics, as his energy secretary; Lisa Jackson, the chief of staff for New Jersey's governor, as head of the EPA; and Nancy Sutley, deputy mayor of Los Angeles, as head of the White House Council on Environmental Quality.

Obama is expected to take questions at the news conference...

The questions will have nothing to do with his cabinet choices. It's way more important to tie him to a scandal so that:

1. The media won't appear to be as irrevelant as they've become.
2. The media won't have to report on complex issues like a Depression aka the Bush economy, foreign policy, the abysmal state of health care and education, Bush war crimes, their own ineptitude.
3. The media can be more self-congratulatory than usual for topping each other's numbers of "BREAKING NEWS!" graphics.
   
4. The media can increase their ratings.
5. They can facilitate the Republicans as they lay the foundation for their attempts to methodically destroy the very Democratic president who will do everything in his power to undo the horrific wreckage that the GOP made of this once-prosperous country.
   

Secretary updates

By GottaLaff

Transportation Secretary possibilities:

The Washington Post's Al Kamen reports that Steve Heminger, executive director of the commission that oversees transportation planning in the San Francisco area, is the favorite for Transportation secretary. Former FAA chief Jane Garvey, former Deputy Secretary of Transportation Mortimer L. Downey and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk are other candidates.

And Chu on this one:

Fans of clean energy and skeptics of "clean" coal and nuclear energy (like us) might take comfort in this Wall Street Journal blog post about expected Energy secretary nominee Stephen Chu. "Coal is my worst enemy" the Journal reports Chu said "repeatedly" in a speech earlier this year in which he raised doubts about the feasibility of "storing billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions underground" as a way to stop coal from furthering global warming. On nuclear, Chu said, “The waste and proliferation issues still haven’t been completely solved.”

Obama Likely to Name Energy-Environment Team Wednesday or Thursday

By GottaLaff

The stock market should jump on Wednesday or Thursday, as it does every time Obama holds a press conference:

President-elect Obama will likely announce his energy and environment team this week, according to CQ Politics.

The announcement "probably will come Wednesday or Thursday."

"Obama is expected to introduce his nominees for Energy secretary, Interior secretary and head of the EPA together, in keeping with a pattern of announcing 'teams' for particular issue clusters. He already has named his economics and national security teams."

Dorgan Won't Be Energy Secretary

By GottaLaff

Aleksandar Rodic’s Energy Plant

There's plenty of energy surging through the new Obama administration, but Dorgan won't be secretary of any of it:

Sen. Byron Dorgan (N.D.) is no longer under consideration to be secretary of energy in President-elect Barack Obama's administration, according to transition officials. The decision was arrived at based on a belief within the former Illinois senator's inner circle that the plains state Democrat is more valuable to them where he is. [...]

The names still in the mix for energy secretary, according to well informed senior Democrats include: Govs. Kathleen Sebelius (D-Kansas), Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-Calif.), Bill Ritter (D-Colo.) and Jennifer Granholm (D-Mich.), Sen. Jeff Bingaman (N.M), Google's Dan Reicher, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers, former Edison International CEO John Bryson, Federal Express Chairman Fred Smith and Steve Chu, the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

The decision to take Dorgan off the list is an acknowledgment by the Obama team of political reality. Dorgan is up for re-election in 2010 in a state that John McCain carried 53 percent to 45 percent in November over Obama, and that President Bush won with 63 percent in 2004. [...]

Obama and his team have been careful in their Cabinet picks so far not to hand seats to Republicans.