Five days after the massive voter surge, President-Elect Obama is treading carefully on all kinds of foreign policy entanglements that have come up, and he’s displayed a sense of you can’t rush good shit in to replace some real bad shit.
Despite whatever the voters in the US said last Tuesday, the world remains one screwed-up place, made even more so by near-eight years of bad, bad, bad.

Obama’s boys are working feverishly to try and reverse some 200 of Decider George’s legal mines planted in the US during the last few years, some horrible, some worse than horrible, “policies on climate change, stem cell research, reproductive rights and other issues, according to congressional Democrats, campaign aides and experts working with the transition team.”

(Illustration found here).

One of our most-favorite, if not THE favorite pundit writing today is Frank Rich of the New York Times.
This morning he delivered a good one.
Some snippets:

• Our nation was still in the same ditch it had been the day before, but the atmosphere was giddy. We felt good not only because we had breached a racial barrier as old as the Republic.
  Dawn also brought the realization that we were at last emerging from an abusive relationship with our country’s 21st-century leaders.
  The festive scenes of liberation that Dick Cheney had once imagined for Iraq were finally taking place — in cities all over America.
  …
  So let’s be blunt. Almost every assumption about America that was taken as a given by our political culture on Tuesday morning was proved wrong by Tuesday night.
  …
  The actual real America is everywhere.
  It is the America that has been in shell shock since the aftermath of 9/11, when our government wielded a brutal attack by terrorists as a club to ratchet up our fears, betray our deepest constitutional values and turn Americans against one another in the name of “patriotism.”
  What we started to remember the morning after Election Day was what we had forgotten over the past eight years, as our abusive relationship with the Bush administration and its press enablers dragged on: That’s not who we are.So even as we celebrated our first black president, we looked around and rediscovered the nation that had elected him.
  “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for,” Obama said in February, and indeed millions of such Americans were here all along, waiting for a leader.
  This was the week that they reclaimed their country.

Read Rich’s whole posting here.
And what’s up?
Right now, the word is up — or at least the appearance.