Obama can’t actually appoint people to positions right now because he isn’t President yet, right? He is essentially announcing his intention to do so and then presumably on the afternoon of inauguration day he would sign a whole bunch of papers officially doing the nominating, right?

But I’ve also heard there will be confirmation hearings and such prior to January 20th. Not sure about the actual final votes on the nominations. How does that officially work if Obama does not yet actually have the power to nominate people to positions and won’t until he is inaugurated?

I realize that practically it needs to be arranged in such a way that the new cabinet can start working as soon as the new administration takes office.

But does anybody know the technicalities of exactly how they work this?

I once again am frustrated by a live news event on CNN, because they keep showing the stupid American CNN people instead of just switching full time to CNN-IBN which is doing a fine job with much more serious and knowledgeable people. In this case it may just be because they are local, but they still are better placed to talk about this than the US anchors. Dump the US anchors, and show us the locals, thank you.

Every time I see CNN International (which was on CNN overnight), or other “serious” international news coverage of events I am reminded of just how vapid the American version of CNN is these days, and it is annoying and sad.

(Note: The CNN International and CNN-IBI feeds are available online at the moment… here. I’ve switched to that for now.)

Just an update on election results. Almost everyplace in the universe has now reflected Obama’s win in Nebraska’s second district. But not CNN. And CNN is what I’m basing my charts on, so this annoys me. It looks like final results from Missouri are due around Tuesday. Hopefully CNN will reflect THOSE when they happen. If CNN still hasn’t reflected Missouri 24 hours after other people start officially calling it, then I’ll go ahead and call it. At that point if CNN still hasn’t reflected the change in Nebraska 2, I’ll put it in now. In both cases, I’ll try to go back and reflect both as of some sort of reasonable time based on when they were called by other sources.

Right around the moment I posted complaining about CNN not calling North Carolina yet, they did. I’m at work now though. I’ll update charts and such when I get home this evening. I have a modified time on the CNN Election map page of 15:29:48 UTC and will thus reflect the change accordingly in the graphs.

Note: Actually, that timestamp is the moment I last loaded the page. So apperantly, when I loaded it to check the map this morning, they had already called NC, I didn’t notice, and I posted complaining about it anyway. Or some such. But I know I had checked it a few minutes prior to THAT and they had not yet… so the timeframe is just about right. Between 15:15 and 15:30 this morning. At least that is my best guess at this point. If one of my readers has a better timestamp for when CNN called NC, please let me know.

Just heard MSNBC call it for Obama. Come on CNN…

I need to leave for work momentarily, so unless CNN decides in the next five minutes, I’ll need to wait to do any updates related to this until I get home again after work.