So here we are again.... Welcome to Altercation, 3.0. We began back in May 2002, when, Joan Connell, then the opinion editor of MSNBC.com, now online editor here at The Nation, asked me to create what would be the first blog created for and sponsored by a mainstream media organization. It rested there until September 2006, when it moved to Media Matters for America, where, again, we stayed for a while, before packing up at the end of 2008 and landing here.

For those of you keeping score, that's more than six and a half years of daily blogging. And for those of you who are not keeping score at home, well, I am. And I'm tired. And even though I've been known to lean on the weekly Pierce here, the occasional Lt. Col Bob there, Siva, every once in a while, and George Zornick more and more, of late, I'm tired. This blog is going to be an intermittent one, rather than a daily one, though I think you can probably depend on Thursdays and Fridays.

What's more, there's too much stuff happening right now to know where to begin. I mean, Economic apocalypse? Gaza? Caroline Kennedy? Blagojevich? Rangel? Richardson? Matthews/Morning Joe and Ann ******* Coulter? Just thinking about it gives me a migraine. I'm thinking we might do more music and movies and stuff than politics, at least for a little while, But before we do, well, here's something I'm thinking right now. Barack Obama has made two absolutely sterling appointments in the past few days (or has leaked them). One is Harvard Law School Professor Cass Sunstein, who is slated to become a top regulatory official, You can read about that HERE.

A second is Indiana University Law Professor Dawn Johnsen to head the Office of Legal Council. That's HERE. These are tremendously important and influential--if low-profile--positions and in reading these stories and they are being filled, literally, by just about the best people imaginable. Of course this is not true of all positions. It may not even be true of most positions. But when I noticed them, I could not help but hearken back to all those stories I read during the campaign about how similar were McCain and Obama's positions on so many issues--to say nothing of how cute Sarah Palin was and how scary Bill Ayers was. For goodness sakes, people, this is the stuff elections are actually about and there's just a world of difference between the kinds of people who will be running things under Obama than would have been true under McCain. (This was true of Gore and Bush as well, but someone whose name I won't mention kept insisting that there was not a "dime's worth of difference" between them and enough people bought to allow the Supreme Court to...well you know.) That's that, and let's drink to it.

Meanwhile, We have a new Think Again column HERE called "Mainstream Media Malpractice" and I wrote a new Moment column HERE called "The Secular Spirit of Judaism," though I'm not so crazy about that title...

Ok, that's all for today. We'll be back with Pierce and maybe some more mail tomorrow and we'll try to get things rolling.... Thanks for dropping by.