1. Made demands to be a "free operator" in his position rather than a mere cog in the Obama wheel.

2. Has personal lobbying entanglements that, if the Administration lives up to its anti-lobbying promises, will mean that he will have to recuse himself from some of the work in his department.

3. Has a spouse who is apparently having to rearrange her professional life to permit Daschle to have the job.

Where do I get off this bus?

Watching the way that the Obama entourage is dealing with the Clintons is like being in a fun-house looking at all those distorting mirrors.

An aside: I noticed that two stories broke and were widely circulated yesterday. One - an "insult" from Al Qaeda in Afghanistan double-daring us to escalate the conflict - and two - the Iranians have enough nuclear material to make one bomb.

And so we have the media stoking the two festering boils left over from the Bush administration that Obama has expressed a deep interest in cultivating.

"strategic leaks by the Clintons"  vs "the transition office announced"

Any talk of "Drama Queen" Daschle? Of course not. His name is not Clinton.

Regardless of the truth, of the facts, it never matters.  IF it involves a Clinton, the press goes nuts, loses all sight of objectivity, fairness, professionalism and gets away with it.

I said this during the primaries...if even a tenth of the personal, sexist bashing aimed at Hillary was aimed at Obama in a racist way, or any of the others, heads would have rolled.

THIS IS ALL THE CLINTONS DOING.  They are boxing Obama in by telling the public they will cooperate and release whatever information the new administration wants.  WOW, those evil Clintons. How dare them say they will cooperate.  What a filty, low plot....cooperating.

I saw Kearns Goodwin speak two days after the election.  She gave her Team of Rivals speech and commented specifically on the coming Obama Administration.  It was a very romantic and engaging concept as she presented it.  I still can't get over the fact though that for all that effort that Lincoln made with his team of rivals he still had to win the Civil War through force rather than through political means; and in the end his rivals did get to him and almost achieved a coup.

In their public signals, the Clintons are trying to take the former president's activities off the table as an issue, in their view eliminating any excuses for Mr. Obama not to give Mrs. Clinton the job. Some in the Obama camp are bristling at what they see as strategic leaks by the Clintons aimed at boxing in the president-elect and forcing him to offer the post.

Which is very strange.  If you believe the Times's sourcing, what the hell does it mean to be "eliminating any excuses for Mr. Obama not to give Mrs. Clinton the job."?

To use your analogy: If I say (as I frequently do), "Israel must be held to account because it engages in an apartheid-like policy of suppression against the Palestinians that flies in the face of international law and common humanity," that would be a legitimate criticism. If I said "Israel is a bad place because it's run by Jews," that would be anti-Semitic.

NYT:  

In fact, all of the foreign policy jobs in the administration have been held up because of the uncertainty over the appointment of Mrs. Clinton. Once that's cleared up, Democratic aides said, the rest of the national security team will follow.

You know what's just as tiresome as these Huffington Post items with unnamed sources in "the Obama camp"? It's BTD's obsession with these tiresome, unattributed pseudo-quotes.