Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side ”” on most days, it was fastened to his belt ”” to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

Read it all.

Q: There’s been a lot of discussion about whether the bishops’ teaching on voting is too nuanced, because it was used in all kinds of ways by all kinds of groups during this election, because it said Catholics are not single-issue voters. What do you think?

A: I think that most Catholics understand what the church’s teachings are and those voter guide things are always problematic but I think in general people understand. It was interesting, if one considers Massachusetts, which is so overwhelmingly Democratic, and 8 years ago Gore got 75 percent of the Catholic vote and four years ago, Kerry, who is Catholic and from Massachusetts, got 50 percent of it, so they lost 25 percent of the vote in four years, and I think a lot of that was the influence of people’s concerns about life issues and things like that. And obviously when you look at the differential between the way that Catholics who are church-going Catholics vote and those who are not church going Catholics, I think that the Catholics reflect the church’s teaching. Not as much as we’d like them to, but certainly this last election there were many other factors that intervened.

Q: You just alluded to the fact that many of the people in your archdiocese are Catholics who support abortion rights, including leading politicians, and both US senators. What is your position on whether they should present themselves for Communion, and whether you should be giving it to them?

A: The church’s teaching on worthiness for Communion and proper disposition is in the Catholic catechism, and it’s no secret, and I support that. There is perhaps a teaching where we have not done as good a job of late as we used to. When I was growing up, we would go to confession every Saturday, we would fast from midnight, there was much more of an awareness of the need to be spiritually prepared and in communion with the church and in a state of grace. Today I think we need to reinforce that teaching a lot. And once that teaching is better understood, then, I think, it will be obvious as to who should be coming to Communion and who shouldn’t. But until there’s a decision of the church to formally excommunicate people, I don’t think we’re going to be denying Communion to the people. However, whatever the church’s decision is, we will certainly enforce.

Q: Your position four years ago was that you did not want confrontations at the altar rail.

A: That’s right. We do not want to make a battleground out of the Eucharist.

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“Senator Obama built a substantial lead early and was able to maintain it throughout the race,” Barna explained. “Just when it appeared that he might win in a landslide, Senator McCain chose Governor Palin as his running mate, and that at least got the unmotivated conservative Christian vote on board. But the election clearly showed that a winning coalition requires more than just evangelical voters. George W. Bush rode to victory twice on the backs of the born again population. But Sen. McCain fared relatively poorly among the non-evangelical born again segment and was unable to compensate by replacing them with a large enough group of ideological moderates.”

Barna noted that in 2008, traditional issues did not energize the right. “There was substantial issue fatigue related to the moral issues that usually rev up the troops on the right. Although the candidates had very distinct and dissimilar views on moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage, those differences were not deal breakers for most voters. Voters are tired of fighting battles that seem interminable. And in a year when there were so many other significant crises and conflicts to consider, people’s focus shifted away from the usual throat-wringing issues.”

This may also have been a turning point for future elections. “It’s possible that the Catholic vote has now returned to the Democratic fold until another Ronald Reagan emerges to lead the Republicans. And ethnic voters flexed their muscle and came away with a win. Who would have suspected that African-Americans and Hispanics would have forged a bulletproof alliance? But they did this time around, and if Senator Obama fulfills his promise and his promises, then 2008 might have birthed a very significant new voting bloc for the future – one that is already 30% of the population and growing.”

Some different material here than that found elsewhere, so worth perusing.

Finally, the outlines of a coherent debate on the federal bailout. This comes as welcome relief from a campaign season that gave us the House Republicans’ know-nothing rejectionism, John McCain’s mindless railing against “greed and corruption,” and Barack Obama’s detached enunciation of vacuous bailout “principles” that allowed him to be all things to all people.

Now clarity is emerging. The fault line is the auto industry bailout. The Democrats are pushing hard for it. The White House is resisting.

Underlying the policy differences is a philosophical divide. The Bush administration sees the $700 billion rescue as an emergency measure to save the financial sector on the grounds that finance is a utility. No government would let the electric companies go under and leave the country without power. By the same token, government must save the financial sector lest credit dry up and strangle the rest of the economy.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson is willing to stretch the meaning of “bank” by extending protection to such entities as American Express. But fundamentally, he sees government as saving institutions that deal in money, not other stuff.

Democrats have a larger canvas, with government intervening in other sectors of the economy to prevent the cascade effect of mass unemployment leading to more mortgage defaults and business failures (as consumer spending plummets), in turn dragging down more businesses and financial institutions, producing more unemployment, etc. — the death spiral of the 1930s.

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A priest at St. Mary’s Catholic Church in downtown Greenville has told parishioners that those who voted for Barack Obama placed themselves under divine judgment because of his stance on abortion and should not receive Holy Communion until they’ve done penance.

The Rev. Jay Scott Newman told The Greenville News on Wednesday that church teaching doesn’t allow him to refuse Holy Communion to anyone based on political choices, but that he’ll continue to deliver the church’s strong teaching on the “intrinsic and grave evil of abortion” as a hidden form of murder.

Both Democratic president-elect Obama and Joe Biden, the vice president-elect, support legal abortions. Obama has called it a “divisive issue” with a “moral dimension,” and has pledged to make women’s rights under Roe v. Wade a “priority” as president. He opposes a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court decision.

Read it all.

A coalition of more than 200 religious groups urged U.S. President-elect Barack Obama on Wednesday to sign an order, once he takes office, banning torture by any federal government entity.

“This is an opportunity where one official could … with one stroke of a pen, really change history here,” said Linda Gustitus, president of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

The group, which has been pressing the issue since 2006, also wants the U.S. Congress to establish a special committee to investigate the use of what the Bush administration has called “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on terrorism suspects detained after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

Read it all.

President-elect Barack Obama made his first telephone call to Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday (Nov. 11), thanking the pontiff for sending a personal message of good will for his election victory, the Vatican confirmed.

“Mr. Obama made a call to the Holy Father in response to the congratulatory message the pope had sent to him upon his election. He wanted to call him, evidently, to thank him,” Vatican spokesman Rev. Federico Lombardi said by telephone. He gave no further details about the conversation.

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Much has been written about how people all around the world are celebrating the victory of our Hussein ”” Barack of Illinois, whose first name means “blessing” in Arabic. It is, indeed, a blessing that so many people in so many places see something of themselves reflected in Obama, whether in the color of his skin, the religion of his father, his African heritage, his being raised by a single mother or his childhood of poverty. And that ensures that Obama will probably have a longer than usual honeymoon with the world.

But I wouldn’t exaggerate it. The minute Obama has to exercise U.S. military power somewhere in the world, you can be sure that he will get blowback. For now, though, his biography, demeanor and willingness to at least test a regime like Iran’s with diplomacy makes him more difficult to demonize than George W. Bush and Dick Cheney.

“If you’re a hard-liner in Tehran, a U.S. president who wants to talk to you presents more of a quandary than a U.S. president who wants to confront you,” remarked Karim Sadjadpour, an Iran expert at the Carnegie Endowment. “How are you going to implore crowds to chant ”˜Death to Barack Hussein Obama’? That sounds more like the chant of the oppressor, not the victim. Obama just doesn’t fit the radical Islamist narrative of a racist, blood-thirsty America, which is bent on oppressing Muslims worldwide. There’s a cognitive dissonance. It’s like Hollywood casting Sidney Poitier to play Charles Manson. It just doesn’t fit.”

But while the world appears poised to give Obama a generous honeymoon, there lurks a much more important question: How long of a honeymoon will Obama give the world?

Read it all.

This was a decisive but not an overwhelming victory for Barack Obama and the Democrats. As I put it in the lead of my U.S. News column for next week, it was a victory that was overdetermined and underdelivered.

Read it all.

Uh oh. We all know where this leads. American myths are seductively powerful: You really want to believe them. Yes, it’s an incontestably wonderful thing that the U.S. public, saddled for two centuries with an appalling history of slavery and its legacy, has voted a biracial man into the most powerful office in the country.

But if racism was America’s original sin, arrogance runs a close second. Some time next year, the United States is going to wake up and realize much of the world already hated it way before George W. Bush took office, and hates it still. (Anyone who has backpacked around Europe with a Canadian flag realizes this.) And with these sorts of prideful comments, the U.S. is in danger of becoming the reformed smoker of race relations, lecturing every other country about civil rights.

While the pride is understandable, it’s a tad misplaced. Black men were granted suffrage in 1870. It took another 50 years for women to receive the vote, and the U.S. has yet to elect a woman to the highest office, while dozens of countries including India, Israel, Britain, New Zealand and Germany have all been governed by women who were democratically elected. (Kim Campbell sort of counts, too.) Hell, even Ukraine’s prime minister is a woman.

Important to hear perspectives from north of the border–especially in a time like this. Read it all.

This is one hell of a way to win.

Barack Obama owes his victory in large measure to the prospect of the longest and deepest economic downturn in a quarter-century and perhaps since the Great Depression. If he performs well, he could become a great president. If he flubs it, he could get the same reception as Jimmy Carter. In the crassest political terms, it was good luck to have the financial crisis hit so close to the election. But Obama’s lucky streak will end in a hurry if he can’t find a way out of this mess. He will also have to manage expectations: Even if he does everything perfectly, we probably won’t turn the corner for 18 months, and the downturn could last far longer than that.

Read it all.

I am rubbing my eyes in disbelief and wonder. It can’t be true that Barack Obama, the son of a Kenyan, is the next president of the United States.

But it is true, exhilaratingly true. An unbelievable turnaround. I want to jump and dance and shout, as I did after voting for the first time in my native South Africa on April 27, 1994.

We owe our glorious victory over the awfulness of apartheid in South Africa in large part to the support we received from the international community, including the United States, and we will always be deeply grateful. But for those of us who have looked to America for inspiration as we struggled for democracy and human rights, these past seven years have been lean ones.

Read it all.

[Bob] ABERNETHY: A lot of us have been trying to find words to describe the meaning of Tuesday’s election. What does it mean to you?

[Maryland] Bishop [Eugene] SUTTON: Well, words are difficult to describe significant moments. More than words on our lips, I think we have to see what’s happening on people’s faces and bodies. What it means to me was that I was crying on Tuesday night. My wife and I, sitting there and watching the screen, tears coming down our faces, tears coming down the faces of people such as a woman on my staff who said that she voted this morning, and this older African-American woman just stopped and cried. We see it in the dancing, the crying in that crowd and people all over the world. The words will come later, but right now the meaning of it was something touched deep in their heart after that election.

Ms. [Kim] LAWTON: It seemed to have touched a deep place not just for African Americans but people of many races as well. I mean, have you see that?

Bishop SUTTON: Yes. Yes, it’s a moment in our nation, but also in the world — a moment, I believe, of redemption, and I like to use that word, meaning opening a door for a new possibility rather than closing the doors of what has happened in the past, and we know about the past history of our nation, of oppression, and of closing doors and building walls. So this was a redemptive moment, I think. I think for people in my generation and older, we look at this as a redemption of the past, all of the work that our forefathers and mothers put in to make sure that we could see a day of a truly multiracial society, where barriers of race and gender and misunderstanding are broken down. That was our redemption. But for my sons and daughter, and for people in the younger generation, it’s a redemption, yes, but of the future. They’re looking forward. They’re looking ahead.’

Read it all.

With such a great victory come unreasonably great expectations. Many of Mr Obama’s more ardent supporters will be let down””and in some cases they deserve to be. For those who voted for him with their eyes wide open to his limitations, everything now depends on how he governs. Abroad, this 21st-century president will have to grapple with the sort of great-power rivalries last seen in the 19th century (see article). At home, he must try to unite his country, tackling its economic ills while avoiding the pitfalls of one-party rule. Rhetoric and symbolism will still be useful in this; but now is the turn of detail and dedication.

Mr Obama begins with several advantages. At 47, he is too young to have been involved in the bitter cultural wars about Vietnam. And by winning support from a big majority of independents, and even from a fair few Republicans, he makes it possible to imagine a return to a more reflective time when political opponents were not regarded as traitors and collaboration was something to be admired.

Oddly, he may be helped by the fact that, in the end, his victory was slightly disappointing. He won around 52% of the popular vote, more than Mr Bush in 2000 and 2004, but not a remarkable number; this was no Roosevelt or Reagan landslide. And though Mr Obama helped his party cement its grip on Congress, gaining around 20 seats in the House of Representatives and five in the Senate, the haul in the latter chamber falls four short of the 60 needed to break filibusters and pass controversial legislation without Republican support (though recounts may add another seat, or even two). Given how much more money Mr Obama raised, the destruction of the Republican brand under Mr Bush and the effects of the worst financial crisis for 70 years, the fact that 46% of people voted against the Democrat is a reminder of just what a conservative place America still is. Mr Obama is the first northern liberal to be elected president since John Kennedy; he must not forget how far from the political centre of the country that puts him.

Read it all. It is nice to see some in the media describe the outcome correctly. We have already posted about the numbers earlier, but this is best seen as a decisive electoral victory and a modestly solid victory in the popular vote. A landslide–as it was termed many times in the last week–it is not–KSH.

BARACK OBAMA’s victory in Tuesday’s presidential election was in many ways a repeat of Ronald Reagan’s win 28 years ago.

His eventual success as president may depend on a willingness to do what Mr. Reagan did: be willing to combat long-term economic problems while accepting short-term pain and the risk of a prolonged slowdown that could damage his popularity….

In passing a tax bill, the Congress and Mr. Obama will have to balance the long-term deficit problem with the need for shorter-term stimulus.

Mr. Bush’s first tax bill presaged a leadership style that focused on partisanship and a determination to avoid compromise with his opponents. Mr. Obama’s first tax bill could show whether he will follow the bipartisan approach that he, like Mr. Bush before him, promised in the campaign.

The success or failure of his administration is likely to be determined by how well he deals with the long-term problems the nation confronts, not by how soon the current recession ends.

Read it all.

Mr. Obama and his advisers acknowledge that their focus has to shift, but the change is still likely to be challenging, and a bit disappointing. “Unfortunately, the next president’s No. 1 priority is going to be preventing the biggest financial crisis in possibly the last century from turning into the next Great Depression,” says Austan Goolsbee, an Obama adviser. “That has to be No. 1. Nobody ever wanted that to be the priority. But that’s clearly where we are.”

Throughout the campaign, whenever Mr. Obama was asked about the financial crisis, he liked to turn the conversation back to his long-term plans, by saying that they were meant to solve the very problems that had caused the crisis in the first place. Back in January, he predicted to me that the financial troubles would probably get significantly worse in 2008. They had their roots in middle-class income stagnation, which helped cause an explosion in debt, and the mortgage meltdown was likely to be just the beginning, he said then.

His prognosis was right ”” and the pundits now demanding that he give up major parts of his economic agenda in response to the financial crisis are, for the most part, wrong. When you discover that a patient is in even worse shape than you thought, you don’t become less aggressive about treatment. But you do have to deal with the most acute problems first.

And Mr. Obama has a big incentive to do so. The hangover from a recession typically lasts more than a year, and this recession isn’t over yet. So he will be at risk of the same kind of midterm drubbing in 2010 that Ronald Reagan received in 1982 and Bill Clinton did in 1994. In the days leading up to this year’s election, as they confidently reviewed the polls, some Obama aides took to joking darkly that 2010 was already looking bad.

Read it all.

The Bishop of North Carolina, the Rt Revd Michael Curry, said on Wednesday: “This is a day that I honestly never dreamed I would see. I think about my grandmother, who was the daughter of a sharecropper here in North Carolina. My ancestors were slaves here. My daddy went to jail so folk could vote.

“My great-aunt Callie was a Sunday-school teacher at Sixteenth Street Baptist chapel where the little girls were killed in 1960. Somehow, all the things that people did without knowing how it was going to turn out helped to make this moment possible.

“But they never dreamed this. Americans have said what we want to be: a country for all. That was the American dream from the beginning. God blesses us sometimes, in spite of ourselves, and, every once in a while, something happens that says that dream is real, and don’t give up on it for America, and ultimately for the whole world.”

Read it all.

Gertrude Baines’ 114-year-old fingers wrapped lightly over the ballpoint pen as she bubbled in No. 18 on her ballot Tuesday. Her mouth curled up in a smile. A laugh escaped. The deed was done.

A daughter of former slaves, Baines had just voted for a black man to be president of the United States. “What’s his name? I can’t say it,” she said shyly afterward. Those who helped her fill out the absentee ballot at a convalescent facility west of USC chimed in: “Barack Obama.”

Baines is the world’s oldest person of African descent, according to the Gerontology Research Group, which validates claims of extreme old age. She is the third-oldest person in the world, and the second-oldest in the United States after Edna Parker of Indiana, who is 115.

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Reporting from Washington — During the campaign, when Barack Obama needed an authoritative voice to defend his tax and spending proposals, he turned to Lawrence H. Summers — the Clinton administration Treasury secretary and former Harvard president who has one of the sharpest minds in modern economics.

Now, as President-elect Obama considers his choice for Treasury secretary, Summers’ name is again front and center. But this time, the decision is not so clear. Obama faces conflicting advice from his close advisors, from Capitol Hill and from important Democratic constituencies.

Some argue that, with the economy gripped by a deepening crisis, he needs the country’s best and brightest to help him deal with it, chief among them Summers.

Others warn that Summers’ sharp elbows and his penchant for controversy could make him a damaging distraction at a time when the nation and the new president can least afford it. And they worry that Summers’ wide-ranging knowledge, expansive personality and combative impulses could clash with the president’s desire to have the White House deeply involved in the biggest problems facing the new administration.

These voices argue that a more reassuring pick might be the venerable former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul A. Volcker, perhaps teamed with New York Federal Reserve Bank President Timothy F. Geithner.

I prefer the Volcker option. Read it all.

Check it out.

So much for the “new evangelicals.”

For the past two years, hundreds of articles have appeared in newspapers across America making the claim that the old religious right was moving left and that Barack Obama, with his religiously infused rhetoric and various “outreach efforts,” was leading the charge. A year ago, David Kirkpatrick predicted the “evangelical crackup” on the cover of the New York Times Magazine. “Jesus Rode a Donkey: Why Republicans Don’t Have the Corner on Christ,” “Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America” and “Souled Out: Reclaiming Faith and Politics After the Religious Right” are just three of the dozens of books released since 2004 that suggested that evangelicals were rethinking their loyalty to the Republican Party and conservatism in general. The new evangelicals, just in case anyone missed the storyline, were not so backward as to vote on issues like abortion and gay marriage. They were enlightened about the environment and favored government aid to the poor.

Well, whoever these new evangelicals were, they didn’t show up at the polls on Tuesday.

John McCain won 74% of white born-again Protestants’ votes. And while this was four percentage points lower than George Bush’s share in 2004, President Bush’s re-election was “the highpoint” for evangelical support of Republicans at least since 1980, according to John Green, a pollster at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. It’s become something of a cliché that Mr. Bush has a “special relationship” with his fellow evangelicals — but it’s true. And it’s a little unrealistic to expect that Sen. McCain would enjoy the same relationship with them, given that he is not one of their own. But he did just as well as, if not better than, every other GOP candidate in the past 30 years. The large victory that Mr. Obama scored with most of the electorate makes it remarkable that his gains with white evangelicals were so small.

Read it all.

A new report from American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate concludes that voter turnout in Tuesday’s election was the same in percentage terms as it was four years ago ”” or at most has risen by less than 1 percent.

The report released Thursday estimates that between 126.5 and 128.5 million Americans cast ballots in the presidential election earlier this week. Those figures represent 60.7 percent or, at most, 61.7 percent of those eligible to vote in the country.

“A downturn in the number and percentage of Republican voters going to the polls seemed to be the primary explanation for the lower than predicted turnout,” the report said. Compared to 2004, Republican turnout declined by 1.3 percentage points to 28.7 percent, while Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 points from 28.7 percent in 2004 to 31.3 percent in 2008.

Read it all and follow the link to the full report.

For the first time in human history, a largely white nation has elected a black man to be its paramount leader. And the cultural meaning of this unprecedented convergence of dark skin and ultimate power will likely become — at least for a time — a national obsession. In fact, the Obama presidency will always be read as an allegory. Already we are as curious about the cultural significance of his victory as we are about its political significance.

Does his victory mean that America is now officially beyond racism? Does it finally complete the work of the civil rights movement so that racism is at last dismissible as an explanation of black difficulty? Can the good Revs. Jackson and Sharpton now safely retire to the seashore? Will the Obama victory dispel the twin stigmas that have tormented black and white Americans for so long — that blacks are inherently inferior and whites inherently racist? Doesn’t a black in the Oval Office put the lie to both black inferiority and white racism? Doesn’t it imply a “post-racial” America? And shouldn’t those of us — white and black — who did not vote for Mr. Obama take pride in what his victory says about our culture even as we mourn our political loss?

Answering no to such questions is like saying no to any idealism; it seems callow. How could a decent person not hope for all these possibilities, or not give America credit for electing its first black president? And yet an element of Barack Obama’s success was always his use of the idealism implied in these questions as political muscle. His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America — and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

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Watch it all.

Reporting from London — If history records a sudden surge in carbon emissions on Wednesday, it may be due to the collective exhalation of relief and joy by the hundreds of millions — perhaps billions — of people around the globe who watched, waited and prayed for Barack Obama to be elected president of the United States.

In country after country, elation over Obama’s victory was palpable, the hunger for a change of American leadership as strong outside the U.S. as in it. And there was wonderment that, in the world’s most powerful democracy, a man with African roots and the middle name Hussein, an upstart fighter who took on political heavyweights, could capture the highest office in the land.

Read it all.

A poll commissioned by the Club for Growth in 12 swing congressional districts over the past weekend shows that the voters who made the difference in this election still prefer less government — lower taxes, less spending and less regulation — to Sen. Obama’s economic liberalism. Turns out, Americans didn’t vote for Mr. Obama and Democratic congressional candidates because they support their redistributionist agenda, but because they are fed up with the Republican politicians in office….

Nancy Pelosi’s San Francisco district will always support universal health care, and Jeff Flake’s Arizona district will always support less government. But the 12 districts we surveyed represent the political middle of the country, and in this cycle their partisan allegiances changed. The question is, have their opinions on the issues changed as well? The answer is emphatically no.

Consider the most salient aspects of Mr. Obama’s economic agenda: the redistribution of wealth through higher taxes on America’s top earners; the revival of the death tax; raising the tax on capital gains and dividend income; increased government spending; increased government involvement in the housing crisis; a restriction on offshore drilling and oil exploration in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR); and “card check” legislation stripping workers of their right to a secret ballot in union elections.

On each of these issues, swing voters stand starkly against Mr. Obama. According to the Club’s poll, 73% of voters prefer the federal government to focus on “creating economic conditions that give all people opportunities to create wealth through their own efforts” over “spreading wealth from higher income people to middle and lower income people.” Two-thirds of respondents prefer to see the permanent elimination of the death tax, and 65% prefer to keep capital gains and dividend tax rates at their current lows.

Read it all and take the time to look at the overall poll results also

In Kenya, dozens of new-born babies have been named Obama. In Tehran, an Iranian leader has congratulated a US president-elect for the first time since the Islamic revolution. From Cairo to Kuala Lumpur, Americans abroad have been hugged and congratulated, have cast away their Canadian camouflage and suddenly felt they could walk tall again. The world joined America in its grief seven years ago; now all want to share in America’s rejoicing.

Even so, President-elect Obama knows that a difficult inheritance awaits him overseas. US forces are engaged in two wars, and Afghanistan at least is proving a harsh challenge. Pakistan stands on the brink of disaster. Iran, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, massacres in the Congo and Russia’s belligerence all demand skilful diplomacy and determined leadership in the White House. None of these, however, will be the priority for the incoming president. His first task must be to use the goodwill created by his election to restore confidence in America.

Read it all.

Bishop Robinson, in London as a guest of the gay rights group Stonewall for its annual “Hero of the Year” awards dinner at the Victoria and Albert Museum tonight, said that Mr Obama’s campaign team had sought him last year and he had the “honour” of three private conversations with the future president of the United States last May and June.

“The first words out of his mouth were: ”˜Well you’re certainly causing a lot of trouble’, My response to him was: ”˜Well that makes two of us’.”

He said that Mr Obama had indicated his support for equal civil rights for gay and lesbian people and described the election as a “religious experience”.

Bishop Robinson described his conversations with him as part of Mr Obama’s “extraordinary” outreach to all religious communities, not just Christian groups. Mr Obama, although not a member of The Episcopal Church to which Bishop Robinson belongs, is a committed Christian with the United Church of Christ.

Read it all.

I will take comments on this submitted by email only to at KSHarmon[at]mindspring[dot]com.

Voters in U.S. 2008 presidential election: c. 131 million
Total voters in all U.S. pres. elections, 1788-1908: c. 137 million

—From the Progressive Policy Institute

Charleston has a special place in the heart of president-elect Barack Obama, as anyone who heard his victory speech Tuesday night could tell.

“Our campaign was not hatched in the halls of Washington. It began in the backyards of Des Moines and the living rooms of Concord and on the front porches of Charleston,” he told the crowd of 1 million gathered at Chicago’s Grant Park and millions more watching at home.

Obama spent a warm spring day on one of Charleston’s most handsome porches during a campaign stop in April 2007.

Read it all. It really is a wonderful city in numerous ways. Those of you who have yet to visit, you need to put it on your “some day in the future” list–KSH.