but from his short list, I'd go with John Hamre as my first choice, Robert Gates as a close second. I confess a bias toward career wonks in posts like this, and both of these men have come up through the ranks... Gates through the CIA and Hamre through the CBO. From a broader list of qualified candidates, I'd try to coax Peter Schoomaker back out of retirement for a second time to take the cabinet post.

mainly from his work in microeconomics and business cycles. I'm a bit surprised that you're a fan of his, though (and didn't know that). I'm troubled by his warning that a tendency among democratic peoples to elect "social democrats" will lead to a welfare state, corporatism, and, ultimately, a socialist economy through the back door (his book, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy). Most progressives would reject that warning as so much hyperbole or playing to the modern "progressive = socialist" rhetoric coming from the right. Your finding sympathy for a man who championed the notion that the "creative destruction" required by and created through entrepreneurship would be inevitably be stifled within a social democracy heavily invested in protecting a status quo is very surprising to me. But at the same time, I've talked to people who took Schumpeter as actually championing back door socialism rather than offering his book as a subtle criticism.

Coming from an engineering background, I really don't have a dog in the fight over how economics is "deified" compared to other social sciences. If I had it to do over again and had the ability to forsake all love of money, I'd give history a try. Economics is a whole lot of very hard math ultimately arriving at a guess, regardless of whether you're looking backwards or forwards through time. You can do that in history without all the math.

Answer the question: where will the detainee's go? It's one thing to have the high-minded rants of a candidate during a campaign but now what are the logistics of it? Saying one will close Gitmo so that they can distance their campaign from another is great politicking but now that is not the issue. The issue is where will those 255 detainee's go that are now held there. So, please answer the question and refrain my posting what you are clearly not knowledgeable of in regards to my political beliefs.

President-elect Obama is presently showing that for whatever he said on the campaign trail he may be willing to see the big picture now and his actions with the nominations for his cabinet are a good sign of seeking bipartisanship. That bipartisanship will be totally ruined if he shuts down Gitmo without a plan for what to really do with the detainee's and one of them comes back to haunt him by killing more Americans. In effect, that would destroy his Presidency, and as such I think he is taking a much more serious look at it. Also, since he has received his first full-blown national security briefing he has greatly reduced his rhetoric about how bad things were and about how Gitmo was a priority. Now I ask you and others here are you willing to house the detainee's? Are you in your passion willing to stick your neck out for the rights that you claim that they have when Obama's new AG has said that they fall outside the scope of the GC? Now it may be that Gitmo is gonna close but talking about it is one thing and doing it is another and without a detailed, and I mean fine detailed plan, it ain't gonna happen. So, I ask you again, where will the detainee's go?

Isn't that a little like asking a First Sergeant to take over command of a division? He may be very smart, very capable at what he does, very highly motivated, but he lacks the command experience and training required to really do that job. Karma, yes. Smart move? Not really.