Democratic Senate candidate Al Franken, with his wife Frannie at his side, speaks to members of the media outside his home in Minneapolis after Minnesota

More Obama Drama: Hot on the heels of Gov. Richardson’s dropping out from consideration for his cabinet post, Obama has another mini-scandal on his hands with the selection of Leon Panetta, another Clintonite and former congressman and White House chief of staff, heading up the CIA.

Banana Republic, anyone? Does anyone remember the days when we had elections and there was a winner, pure and simple? It’s been a while? We’ve got not one, but two, up-in-the-air Senators, with Al Franken, after being declared the winner in Minnesota by the canvassing board (225 votes!), is likely to be challenged by Republicans; his fellow midwesterner, Roland Burris, the poor dude “apppointed” by disgraced Gov. Rod Blagojevitch, is being blocked by Congress from being seated.

Israel v. Palestine, the 1000th Sequel Surprise, there’s still fighting going on in the Mideast. In today’s atrocities, 30 were killed in a Gaza school. Which means that Hamas is fighting mad, and vows revenge. Yeah, this should turn out well. As Adam Sandler’s mother says in movie, You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, “They’ve only been fighting 2,000 years, it can’t last much longer.”

Gas prices are climbing again. Thanks to a standoff between Russia and the Ukraine, oil output is diminished, with the price-per-barrel climbing to $50. The disruption is effecting Europe, including Italy and Austria.

Another billionaire bites the dust. Adolph Merckle decided he would rather not live than deal with the mess of the economic crisis. A bad investiment in Volkwagen shares sent Merckle in a downward spiral; he lost “millions of dollars” and a likely breakup of his business.

Michael Ramirez cartoon for December 2, 2008 at Investor's Business Daily.

Barack Obama may have flip-flopped on Hillary’s foreign policy experience, but that’s small potatoes. Allahpundit, in a post at Hot Air, writes that lying is to be expected from the President-elect, but the more important issue is that he has made ambassador to the U.N. a Cabinet-level position, signaling to Hillary Clinton that she can be replaced, and that Obama means business when he says he wants soft diplomacy to play a bigger role in his administration.

Advice to Obama: don’t repeat the mistakes of Hoover and Roosevelt. Investor’s Business Daily points out this economic downturn is serious but by no means as severe as the Depression, but warns that we still ought to heed past lessons. In a nutshell: support free trade, cut taxes across the board, don’t rely on big government projects as economic stimuli, and support the Fed as it cuts rates.

Piracy is one of those unconventional threats Washington worries about: so get ‘em where it hurts. Seth Cropsey argues on The Weekly Standard’s blog and in an article that arming merchant vessels and increasing Navy patrols may help, but nothing will work quite so well as finding and attacking the pirates on shore (in Somalia), something the Russians have suggested.

Chambliss’ win in Georgia could spell a tough midterm election for Dems in 2010. When Saxby Chambliss beat Jim Martin by 16 points in what was expected to be a very close race, Democrats lost their chance at a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. Ed Morrissey at Hot Air argues that Democratic gains in 2008 don’t mark an endorsement of their policies and warns them against moving any farther to the left. The win also means Senate Dems will be unlikely to step in and decide the outcome in Minnesota, where Al Franken is caught up in a protracted recount effort—not without a chance for 60 in the Senate, argues Gary Gross at Let Freedom Ring.

Gay marriage won’t be all bad, but enough with the scorched-earth tactics, says Jonah Goldberg in an opinion piece for the L.A. Times. Goldberg cites vandalism against Mormon temples, mailing envelopes filled with white powder to Mormons, Mormon blacklists, and points out angrily that the Hollywood liberals who would decry McCarthyism are employing the same methods against proponents of Prop 8.

Don’t compare Bush to Nixon, says Fox News journalist Chris Wallace to film director Ron Howard. Wallace was at a film screening for Howard’s new movie, Frost/Nixon, about the former president who resigned after the Watergate scandal. Wallace argued that Nixon’s crimes were motivated purely by personal political gain, while President George W. Bush’s (referring to rendition and waterboarding) were motivated by a desire to protect his country. So there.

Today's Michael Ramirez cartoon from Investor's Business Daily.

The current financial crisis has already cost more than World War II, writes financial blogger Barry Ritholtz, and that’s after adjusting for inflation. It’s hard to conceptualize $4.6165 trillion (Bloomberg reports it as $7.76 trillion), so try this: government bailouts, including the recent addition of Citigroup, amount to more than the cost of the Marshall Plan, the Louisiana Purchase, the race to the moon, the savings and loan crisis, the Korean War, the New Deal, the invasion of Iraq, the Vietnam War, and NASA combined.

But CEO’s with fat salaries are just a distraction. If every oil company executive worked for free, writes Thomas Sowell at National Review, it wouldn’t lower the price of a gallon of gas by a dime or the cost of a car by even one percent. It’s an age-old story in which politicians give us someone to hate and blame in order to grab more power for themselves. Example: pols pressure banks into lending to people that normally wouldn’t qualify and when the economy turns sour, they blame deregulation and call for greater government control. He’s not having it.

A Secretary of State Hillary Clinton should worry conservatives, argues Paul Mirengoff at Power Line. Many conservatives espouse America’s rights to resist international pressures and to protect its own self-government, and they are willing to project American power to do so. While Obama’s picks for national security so far have shown no great desire to shake things up, he still inclines toward moving America into the international mainstream, Mirengoff writes, and Clinton has shown no indication she’ll act as a counterweight to that.

The Holy Land Foundation is going down, and CAIR should go with it, argues Scott Johnson. HLF, a Muslim charity, was found to have given financial support to Hamas, which the U.S. lists as a terrorist organization. In two separate posts, one at Power Line and one at National Review, Johnson lays out why it is one of the government’s most significant cases against terrorist conspirators in the U.S. since 9/11, and applauds the government’s outing of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) as an un-indicted co-conspirator in the case.

At this rate, the Minnesota recount could drag on for months. Power Line blogger Scott Johnson has been following the recount, including state Senate hopeful Al Franken’s efforts to get some previously rejected absentee ballots back in the count. And he seems to be calling former Washington Democratic Party Chair Paul Berendt’s involvement in the process a “nightmare scenario.”

No need to discuss Barack Obama’s citizenship any more. Right Wing News blogger John Hawkins writes that he still receives e-mails asking why he has decided to stop writing about Obama’s legitimacy. Pointing to his post of a month earlier, he reminds those clinging to the belief that Obama is not really a citizen that the state of Hawaii has acknowledged they have a copy of his live birth certificate and that a newspaper clipping from 1961 proves he’s American. Discussion over.

Barack Obama won through media spinning and voter ignorance, or so seems to be the lesson of a popular video circulating on Youtube.