Congress late Wednesday lowered the salary for the nation's top diplomat to keep Clinton's nomination from running afoul of the Constitution.

An obscure section on compensation for public officials, the Emoluments Clause, says that no member of Congress can be appointed to a government post if that job's pay was increased during the lawmaker's current term.

In other words, Clinton, D-N.Y., might have been ineligible to serve in the post because she was serving in Congress when Rice's salary was raised to its current level of $191,300. So late Wednesday, the House and Senate quietly rolled the secretary of state's salary back to $186,600, its level in January 2007 when Clinton began her second Senate term.

U.S. President-elect Barack Obama's administration will offer Israel a "nuclear umbrella" against the threat of a nuclear attack by Iran, a well-placed American source said earlier this week. The source, who is close to the new administration, said the U.S. will declare that an attack on Israel by Tehran would result in a devastating U.S. nuclear response against Iran.

A steep descent brings Clinton's plane to Charleston's hilltop airport. After an appropriate wait, she steps from the plane and pretends to wave to a crowd of supporters; in fact, she is waving to 10 photographers underneath the airplane's wing. She pretends to spot an old friend in the crowd, points and gives another wave; in fact, she is waving at an aide she had been talking with on the plane minutes earlier.

"There are many ways around this problem," CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin noted. "One is for Congress to vote a lower salary. Another way is for Hillary Clinton simply to accept a lower salary. Another way is simply to ignore the problem on the idea that no one has the right, has the standing, to sue to stop her from being secretary of state.

The selection of Hillary Clinton for secretary of state reveals that President-elect Barack Obama does not limit his lack of appreciation for the Constitution to just the First and Second Amendments...

...The Emoluments Clause in Article I, Section 6 of the U.S. Constitution provides: “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time.” On January 4, 2008, President Bush issued Executive Order 13454, which increased the “Emoluments” (salary) of the secretary of state position. Hillary Clinton, as an elected senator from New York at the time and with a current term of office that runs through the end of 2010, would seem to fall clearly within the definition of a “senator” under this clause.

The Holtzberg family from Crown Heights arrived in Israel at the end of the week, immediately after receiving news of the attack. The flight to Israel was organized within several short hours. Two of the brothers, who held invalid passports received emergency passports thanks to the efforts of Senator Hillary Clinton, who personally supervised the family's travel arraignments.

Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton issued this statement in the aftermath of the Mumbai attacks on Friday:

“My thoughts and prayers are with the victims and families touched by these acts of terror in Mumbai. We still do not know the full measure of this tragedy, which has taken the lives of Indian citizens, Americans, and others who had traveled to Mumbai from around the world. Two New Yorkers, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivka Holtzberg of Brooklyn are among those who have died, leaving behind their young son. The young couple had traveled from Brooklyn to manage a small Chabad house, welcoming Jews from India and elsewhere to learn, pray, and serve the community.

There could be no sharper a reminder, nor a more poignant call to action, than the brutal and heinous violence visited upon the Nariman House and the Holtzberg family, living and working in Mumbai on a mission of peace, scholarship, and spiritual guidance.

As those responsible are brought to justice, as we aid and support the victims and their families, as we work to defeat radical extremism and the terror it spawns, let us find strength in knowing that in the face of those who seek to take lives, there are those who seek to give hope and comfort. In the face of those who wish only to destroy, there are individuals like Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg and Rivka Holtzberg who travel great distances far from their homes to build a better world.”

Barack Obama said today that his team would combine experience with fresh thinking and his own vision for change.

"Understand where the vision for change comes from, first and foremost," he told reporters at his third press conference in as many days. "It comes from me. That's my job, is to provide a vision in terms of where we are going, and to make sure, then, that my team is implementing."

(Kippah tip: Jennifer Rubin)

...the president-elect, according to his more fervent campaign-season detractors, has a raft of unforgivable faults: He's a socialist, a Muslim, an actual love-child of Malcolm X. His birth certificate was missing, his book had been ghost-written by William Ayers, and his wife, "Mrs. Grievance," as a National Review cover dubber her, was perennially on the cusp of getting caught ranting against the white man. The only thing keeping the Illinois senator's infamy from going public is the quiescence of the liberal media. Perhaps you remember.

Whatever its effectiveness ahead of Election Day, the right-wing hate campaign made for a nice exercise in nostalgia. For eight years, opposition politics have mainly involved attacking the president for, like, things he's done or wanted to do in office----and not, say, secret religious view he holds or convoluted murders involving his wife. Now, after an administration in the wilderness, they were back--the conspiracy theorists, the paranoiacs, the fringe figures whose dubious relationships with the truth weren't enough to disqualify them from star turns in the right-wing media. The last Democratic president had spent his White House years in perpetual battle against well-funded crackpots peddling far-fetched theories, and now this one would, too. So much for change.

The clean-up crews were probably still sweeping confetti from Grant Park, in fact, when the first wave of paranoiac Obama-reaction hit the press: A run on gun-shops by disaffected red-staters convinced that the 44th president would do to the Second Amendment what Bill Ayers tried to do to New York City Police Headquarters. "He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force," Jim Pruett, a Houston-based radio-personality-turned-gun-dealer, told the New York Times.

Obama's political team may be trying to avoid another eight years of wrestling with presidential haters...

The Palestinians suffer sometimes from the irrational hope that America's support for Israel is mutable, and that the key to success is to bring about direct American pressure on Israel.

...Then, the secretary of state should speak to the Israeli Knesset, and lay out, in very clear terms, the U.S. vision for Israel's borders, and talk very specifically about the need to bring about the end of the settlement project, and the birth of a viable Palestinian state -- and to speak of that birth as a direct American national security interest (and a direct national security interest of the State of Israel).