How are you dealing with the down market? Everyone I know is worried about it, trying his best to ignore it, or lying in bed with the covers over his head. I've tried a bit of all three and would love to hearhow you are dealing with the nation's economic implosion.

By Robert Schlesinger, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

So Hillary Clinton will reportedly be the next Secretary of State. It's a strong choice for reasons that Jack Farrell   wrote on Thomas Jefferson Street earlier in the week.

As with the Lieberman wrist-slap, it will be important to watch this as the spotlight moves on. What does the rest of the State Department team look like? Are they Clintonites or Obamacons? Part of the answer of course is that it's Obama's administration, so they're all Obamacons. But it will be interesting in terms of intra-administration politics.

Stay tuned.

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Preparing for the coming big debate about taxes, conservatives are scheming to redefine President-elect Barack Obama's proposed tax cuts as...welfare!

The murmur began toward the end of the 2008 campaign, when John McCain's supporters started whispering that Obama's tax plan was nothing but a big government giveaway to the loafing masses because it included refundable tax credits.

Now Newt Gingrich has picked up the charge, in a column in today's Wall Street Journal. Refundable income tax credits are naught but a federal dole in disguise, he says:

By Michael Barone, Thomas Jefferson St. blog

Interesting numbers from Scott Rasmussen. The generic vote for Congress since the election shows much smaller margins for the Democrats than they enjoyed before the election. Are voters saying, "Hey, now that we see how many Democrats there are in Congress, we're not sure we want any more"? If so, that buttresses a finding in Rasmussen's poll on the Georgia Senate runoff between incumbent Republican Saxby Chambliss and Democrat Jim Martin. Rasmussen shows Chambliss ahead by 50 percent to 46 percent (which was actually the rounded off percentages in the November 4 election, with Chambliss barely under the 50 percent mark). In addition, 52 percent (including 9 percent of Martin voters) say they're less likely to vote for Martin if it will give Democrats 60 seats in the Senate. Only 38 percent say they are more likely. This suggests that Chambliss stands to do better (a) if the Minnesota race is decided for Democrat Al Franken on or before December 2 or (b) if the Minnesota winner is undetermined December 2 than (c) if Republican Norm Coleman is declared the winner by that time. Since it seems like the Minnesota race will not be decided until well after December 2, it looks like the don't-let-them-get-60 argument will help Chambliss.

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street Blog.

If the MSM is to be believed, Sen. Hillary Clinton will accept President-Elect Obama's offer to become Secretary of State, sometime after Thanksgiving. Meanwhile, Democratic leaders in the Senate are finally paying attention to her vote-getting ability for the party, and are wooing her to stay in the Senate with promises of new leadership posts.

Should she stay or should she go? I think she will go but I wish she would stay.

I had a visit from my dead yesterday.

It is, perhaps, an occupational hazard for biographers. The dead come by and haunt you.

You show up at an archive, open a box of documents and meet them, in the graceful, hopeful handwriting of their youth; follow them through the tempests of their love affairs and their personal and professional triumphs, and meet their end with them, as they recount, in shaky scrawls, the terrors of old age and onrushing death.

Then you pack up their letters and crumbling photographs, send the box back to storage, and try to get back to your life. And most days you can. And some days you can't. Some days the dead won't go.

Yesterday it was Mary Field, a young woman who, in the earliest years of the 20th century, left a stifling, dull Midwestern home and a tyrannical father and went to Chicago to work as a social activist and join the ranks of early feminists. They called themselves "new women." She fell in love with Clarence Darrow, had an affair, broke it off, married another man, ruined her daughter's life, and died, well into my lifetime, old and lonely and terrified, calling Darrow's name.

Mary was in my thoughts yesterday, conveying the chill of mortality.

I fled work and hiked some miles in the last hours of daylight.

Well, there WERE three women prominently mentioned as Obama cabinet appointees until today. In one of the more bizarre episodes surrounding President-elect Obama's picks, one of his closest aides and top confidantes from way back, Penny Pritzker, pulled her own name out of the running for Commerce Secretary before the position had been officially offered:

By Bonnie Erbe, Thomas Jefferson Street blog.

Have we arrived at the point where we are gender-blind as well as race-neutral in American politics? This morning I had the pleasure of interviewing Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire who earlier this month unseated incumbent Sen. John Sununu (R-NH) whom she ran against and lost to six years ago.

Although I Googled her name and accomplishments, I could find no mention of the fact she's the first woman in U.S. history to be elected senator and governor—a major barrier broken, but overshadowed nonetheless by the euphoria surrounding President-elect Barack Obama's White House win.

In any event, I interviewed her for my PBS program, To the Contrary, and asked her about the historicity of her victory. She said: