This passage jumped out at me.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

Recall that earlier generations faced down fascism and communism not just with missiles and tanks, but with sturdy alliances and enduring convictions. They understood that our power alone cannot protect us, nor does it entitle us to do as we please. Instead, they knew that our power grows through its prudent use; our security emanates from the justness of our cause, the force of our example, the tempering qualities of humility and restraint.

It was a complete repudiation of the Bush presidency.

It was quite a spectacle, as it should have been, given the historic nature of the event. Millions of people descended on Washington D.C. to witness the swearing in of Barack Obama as our 44th President.

Obama and Chief Justice Roberts managed to flub the swearing in, but Obama rebounded nicely with a sober and forceful speech that called on Americans to put aside childish squabbles and get to the business of tackling the nation’s problems.

He made it clear that he’s ready to get to work.

This shouldn’t be a surprise, as George Stephanopoulos served with Rahm Emanuel in the Clinton White House. Nevertheless, Stephanopoulos makes some good points as he praises Barack Obama’ selection of Emanuel as Chief of Staff.

He brings a lot of strengths to the office.

He knows the White House. He served there for six-and-a-half years under President Clinton.

He knows Congress. He’s been a member of Congress now for four terms and risen to the number four Democratic leadership position on Capitol Hill.

He knows policy and he knows how to drive policies through the bureaucracy.

He’s also loyal. Obama has told associates he believes he’s “got his back.”

He’ll be a strong presence in the White House.

Emanuel has centrist instincts and understands the dangers of moving too far in one direction in part from the Clinton experience.

There’s been commentary from some Republicans arguing Emanuel is too partisan. But he’s also made a point of reaching out in the House to Republicans and building bridges. He’s had a series of bipartisan dinners over the last several years to build bridges with Democrats and Republicans.

He likely understands that successful presidencies build those centrist coalitions.

This makes sense. Emanuel is tough and abrasive at times, but Obama will set a clear tone for his White House. Emanuel will be a huge asset in managing Obama’s agenda in the House. He helped recruit many of the more moderate members, and he has an excellent relationship with Nancy Pelosi. He’s smart and talented, so he’s a great addition to the team.

Stephanopoulos also reports that “Obama chief strategist David Axelrod has accepted the position of Senior Adviser in the White House.” Axelrod ran a brilliant campaign, and he’ll be a great asset in the White House as well.

Now that the campaign is over, we’re hearing more about the Sarah Palin fiasco. Fox News has the goods – Sarah Palin didn’t know that Africa was a continent. She thought it was a country!

How many Republicans will defend her now that the election is over?

It looks like the Democrats will pick up another seat in te Senate.

Democrat Jeff Merkley has ousted Republican Gordon Smith from his U.S. Senate seat, The Oregonian projects.

Merkley, a five-term state lawmaker and former Habitat for Humanity director, took advantage of a surge of Democratic support to win a close, bitterly fought battle with Smith, who has served 12 years in Washington.

Neither candidate, however was willing to rule the race over until more votes are tallied.

“More good news,” said Matt Canter, spokesman for Merkley, “but we’ll just continue to watch the ballots come in and wait to claim victory.”

If this holds up it brings the Democrats up to 57.

Barack Obama beat John McCain among Hispanics by more than a 2-1 margin. This fact helps explain why Obama was able to thump McCain in New Mexico and Nevada by double digits and handily win Colorado as well.

This shouldn’t be a surprise. Watching the Republican convention, I was struck by the crowds at the convention. The words “melting pot” did not come to mind. This continued at campaign events in states like Colorado.

Republicans in Colorado pointed to other GOP mistakes.

“I have gone to a few Republican campaign events, and you don’t see a brown face or a black face in the crowd,” said former U.S. Sen. Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a Republican who retired in 2004.

“The Republican Party, they are not inclusive,” Campbell said.

He would not say which candidate campaigns he attended, but offered, “the last couple of statewide races.”

During the primaries, the pundits said Latinos would not support a black candidate. After the conventions, many of them stopped talking about the Hispanic vote. It turns out this was one of the most under-reported stories of this campaign.

The Republicans are in trouble if this trend continues.

For the most part, the pollsters did a very good job in this election. Barack Obama appears to have won the popular vote by six points, which pretty much matches the polling averages. Rasmussen got the percentages exactly right, and Nate Silver’s projection was also accurate. Even the polls that were off a little were very close on Obama’s totals.

This should not be a surprise. With few exceptions (like New Hampshire), the polls were pretty accurate during the primaries. The pundits needed to fill air time, so many of them had to speculate about the Bradley Effect, but we now see that it no longer applies.

It’s tempting for some of us to look at the election of the country’s first African-American president and conclude that our days of bigotry and inequality are behind us. Come January, a black man who anchored his campaign to the uplifting themes of unity and change will take office, a watershed moment in not only our country’s history, but the history of all humankind. Without question, this election stands as a promising sign for anyone who strives for equality and harmony, and believes that what unites us truly is greater than what divides us. But while it’s clear that the racial and gender divides (thanks to Hillary Clinton and, yes, even Sarah Palin) have narrowed as we head into 2009, the passing of gay marriage bans in California, Florida and Arizona shows that we still have a long way to go on the road to true equality in this country.

In the months leading up to election day, I posed the following question several times but never received a legitimate answer: How is banning gay marriage anything but discrimination? Why is it acceptable in the 21st century for someone to have their right to marry taken away because of their sexual orientation? For that matter, why is it acceptable for anyone to have any right taken away from them for any reason? Opponents of gay marriage claim they want to protect American families, but I’ve never understood what exactly that means. If the gay couple down the street was allowed to place a ring on each other’s finger and be recognized by the state as a married couple, would they then creep down to your house in the middle of the night and eat your children? Would they crash your weekly Family Game Night? Superimpose themselves into your family photos? Slash the tires of your minivan? Opponents also talk about protecting the sanctity of marriage and only allowing couples who can procreate to get married. If that’s the case, shouldn’t straight couples who cheat on one another or elect to not have children have their marriage licenses revoked?

The bottom line is that these bans on gay marriage are just another form of intolerance. Telling two gay people that they can’t get married is no different than telling an interracial couple that they can’t get married. Perhaps even more discouraging is the ballot measure that was passed in Arkansas prohibiting “unmarried sexual partners” from adopting children or serving as foster parents. The initiative applied to both opposite-sex and same-sex couples, but the intent here is crystal clear. Apparently it’s not enough to tell gay couples that they can’t get married; we also need to make it clear that they can never have a family, even when there are so many children in desperate need of a loving home.

I’m extremely hopeful that the election of Barack Obama will bring about a more open-minded approach to how we as a nation view the world and choose to legislate. After all, I’m not talking about “gay rights” here; these are human rights. Because Obama speaks so passionately about overcoming the bitter divisiveness that has fractured this country – black vs. white, men vs. women, democrats vs. republicans and, yes, gay vs. straight – many of us were hoping his message would help defeat the bigotry behind the initiatives in California, Florida, Arizona and Arkansas. Perhaps we got a little ahead of ourselves. Instead, it seems apparent that Obama won the White House on the strength of his economic message more than his social views. At the same time, the fact that so many young and first-time voters were so engaged in the election suggests that this more open-minded shift could be on the way.

Electing a transformational figure like Barack Obama looks like an encouraging first step, but that transformation is obviously still a work in progress.

Time to celebrate.

NBC calls Ohio for Obama.

Vote!

The final polls look great for Barack Obama. In many polls, his lead is expanding. I’ve been seeing Reverend Wright commercials all weekend through today. I wonder if these last-minute ads are hurting McCain instead of Obama.

Now if just comes down to turnout.

With his endorsement of John McCain, Dick Cheney gave the Obama campaign a nice gift to close out the campaign.

It’s embarrassing that the McCain campaign is clinging to Joe the Plumber in a final act of deperation. Mr. Plumber hit a new low when he agreed with a loon at a rally that the election of Barack Obama would lead to he death of Israel.

Shep Smith, one of the few voices of reason at Fox News, interviews Joe about his statement and unmasks him as a complete fool.

Hat tip – Andrew Sullivan.

Tom Friedman writes about the huge problems facing Iran now that oil prices have collapsed.

I’ve always been dubious about Barack Obama’s offer to negotiate with Iran — not because I didn’t believe that it was the right strategy, but because I didn’t believe we had enough leverage to succeed. And negotiating in the Middle East without leverage is like playing baseball without a bat.

Well, if Obama does win the presidency, my gut tells me that he’s going to get a chance to negotiate with the Iranians — with a bat in his hand.

Have you seen the reports that Iran’s president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is suffering from exhaustion? It’s probably because he is not sleeping at night. I know why. Watching oil prices fall from $147 a barrel to $57 is not like counting sheep. It’s the kind of thing that gives an Iranian autocrat bad dreams.

After all, it was the collapse of global oil prices in the early 1990s that brought down the Soviet Union. And Iran today is looking very Soviet to me.

As Vladimir Mau, president of Russia’s Academy of National Economy, pointed out to me, it was the long period of high oil prices followed by sharply lower oil prices that killed the Soviet Union. The spike in oil prices in the 1970s deluded the Kremlin into overextending subsidies at home and invading Afghanistan abroad — and then the collapse in prices in the ‘80s helped bring down that overextended empire.

This is an example of the tremendous leverage we get by destroying domestic demand for oil by switching to alternative fuels.

New ad from the Obama campaign.

Some of the polls have tightened a little, but most are holding steady and we have some outliers showing a huge lead for Obama. The state polls also look great.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign has finally started to talk about the economy, but they can’t even get that right.

If McCain had not opposed the Bush tax cuts in the past, and if he was proposing a flat tax, he might have some credibility on this idiotic charges of “socialism.” One wonders whether he really is senile. Also, when you add in the economic genius of Sarah Palin (she must have shaken hands with Mitt Romney), your argument looks even more ridiculous, given that Sarah Palin raised taxes on the oil companies in Alaska in order to redistribute the tax dollars to all Alaskans in the form of a check.

Of course, she’s too stupid to understand the irony here, and McCain has no trouble repeating any charge trumped up by his idiotic advisors. So, they continue to stomp around the country calling Obama names and revealing themselves as utter fools.

This campaign is a disgrace. Many conservatives have already come to that conclusion. Others are so blinded by their own idiology that they drink up the silly name-calling, hoping for a dramatic comeback. Fortunately, their numbers seem to be shrinking.

The polls looks grim, and it appears that some in the Republican Party are losing their marbles as they pull out all the stops in a desperate attempt to win this election. With this story, they may have reached a new low.

With Rove and Bush the Republicans have been peddling fear for years, and McCain and Palin have been more than happy to use the same tactics. It shouldn’t be surprising when some nuts in their party escalate the attacks to even more offensive extremes.

The most recent poll in Ohio has some interesting news regarding the issue of immigration.

Let illegal immigrants stay here.

That’s what 56 percent of Ohioans said in a poll conducted this month by the University of Cincinnati Institute for Policy Research — and people polled in Southwest Ohio topped that figure.

In this corner of the state, 60 percent said they favored a government policy that allowed undocumented immigrants to stay in the country and become U.S. citizens if they met unspecified requirements in a certain timeframe.

That puts Ohioans in sync with the rest of the nation, according to a Gallup Poll last year, said Eric Rademacher, the institute’s interim co-director.

If you only listened to Fox News, Lou Dobbs and talk radio, you would assume that the entire nation is outraged by the conecpt of earned citizenship for illegals (which some call amnesty). Last year many in the media assumed that this issue would be crucial in the 2008 elections. Yet we don’t hear anything about it.

All of the Republican candidates who tried to exploit conservative anger about immigration flamed out in the primaries. Even one-time “moderates” like Rudy Giuliani flipped last year and tried to demogogue the issue in order to get the Republican nomination. He got crushed in the primaries.

America is getting serious again. We’re going through tough economic times, so it’s harder for politicians to distract the electorate with side issues like Bill Ayers, guns and illegals.

The next president will have a huge opportunity to pass a common-sense compromise on this issue that beefs up border security and provides a rational method for illegals to earn the right to stay in this country. The political rewards from such a compromise would be significant as well.