Information Security & US & Life & Love & Fashion & Hacking & Passion

President-elect Barack introduced retired Army Gen. Eric K. Shinseki as his nominee to head the Department of Veterans Affairs, bringing to his Cabinet a career military officer best known for running afoul of the Bush administration by questioning the Pentagon's Iraq war strategy.

Shinseki, a four-star general and 38-year veteran who retired shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003, appeared with Obama in Chicago at a news conference today commemorating the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attacks on Pearl Harbor. Obama said Shinseki agreed to join the incoming administration because "both he and I share a reverence for those who serve."

"When I reflect on the sacrifices that have been made by our veterans and I think about how so many veterans around the country are struggling even more than those who have not served -- higher unemployment rates, higher homeless rates, higher substance-abuse rates, medical care that is inadequate -- it breaks my heart, and I think that General Shinseki is exactly the right person who is going to be able to make sure that we honor our troops when they come home," Obama told NBC News' Tom Brokaw in a interview taped for broadcast today on "Meet the Press."

Shinseki was Army chief of staff when, during the run-up to the Iraq war, he publicly disputed the Bush administration's determination to invade with a relatively small force. To maintain the postwar peace in Iraq, Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" could be necessary. Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld reacted by telling reporters that the estimate "will prove to be high," and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz called it "way off the mark."

When Shinseki retired that summer, neither Rumsfeld nor Wolfowitz attended his farewell ceremony.

Three years later, Gen. John P. Abizaid, chief of U.S. Central Command and the main architect of U.S. military strategy in Iraq, told the same committee, "General Shinseki was right." And in January 2007, President Bush ordered tens of thousands of U.S. troops back into Iraq to stabilize and secure the country.

Notably, Shinseki led the Army at the same time that Gen. James L. Jones, Obama's pick for national security adviser, commanded the Marines. Both questioned Wolfowitz's presumptions, before the war in Iraq commenced, about how the fighting would go, and they argued that the Pentagon was being too optimistic in its planning and should prepare thoroughly for worst-case scenarios.

In a 12-page private letter he wrote to Rumsfeld in June 2003 just before stepping down as chief of staff, Shinseki said: "People are central to everything we do in the Army. Institutions don't transform, people do. Platforms and organizations don't defend the nation, people do. . . . Without people in the equation, readiness and transformation are little more than academic exercises." The letter was never publicly released; The Washington Post obtained a copy this August.

Military leaders and veterans advocates hailed Obama's selection of Shinseki, describing the nominee as a soft-spoken, dynamic leader who is widely respected by rank-and-file service members past and present.

Retired Army Gen. Colin L. Powell, who was President Bush's secretary of state at the time of the Iraq invasion, called Shinseki "a superb choice. . . . He is a wounded hero who survived and worked his way to the top. He knows soldiers and knows what it takes to keep faith with the men and women who went forth to serve the nation. He also knows how to run large and complex bureaucratic institutions. His is an inspired selection." Powell, also a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, supported Obama's election.

Shinseki, 66, was twice awarded a Purple Heart for injuries sustained in Vietnam.

Kori Schake, a fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution who served on Bush's National Security Council during the run-up to the war, said Shinseki is "a great choice. . . . Shinseki will be a terrific advocate for and leader of our Veterans Administration. He distinguished himself in caring for wounded warriors while chief of staff, and I'm certain he will serve veterans and the country well."

Microsoft says it's bringing in a former Yahoo search executive to lead its online push.

Microsoft Corp. (nasdaq: MSFT - news - people ) says Qi (pronounced 'CHEE') Lu will be president of its Online Services Group. He'll be responsible for search and online advertising, where Microsoft lags far behind the leader, Google Inc. (nasdaq: GOOG - news - people )

Lu worked for Yahoo Inc. (nasdaq: YHOO - news - people ) for a decade, and led an overhaul of its online search and ad platform that helped boost ad revenue. He left Yahoo when the company proposed using Google's advertising engine instead of its own.

Lu is filling a slot left vacant in July. One of the top internal contenders for the job, Brian McAndrews, will leave Microsoft. McAndrews was chief of aQuantive (nasdaq: AQNT - news - people ), an online ad company Microsoft bought in 2007.

Copyright 2008 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed

Editor's Note: Anthony J. Badger is Paul Mellon Professor of American History at Cambridge University and Master of Clare College. He is the author of "FDR: The First Hundred Days," "North Carolina and the New Deal" and "The New Deal: The Depression Years, 1933 --1940."

Anthony Badger says Barack Obama's administration could learn lessons from the New Deal.

CAMBRIDGE, England (CNN) -- Students here in Cambridge watched in horror in September 2005 as they saw lines of desperate people snaked round the convention center and the Superdome in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina.

In the past couple of months, they watched with admiration the lines outside polling stations both on Election Day and in the early voting states. They found it difficult to imagine that voters in Britain would be prepared to queue for hours to vote.

No American election in recent history has aroused such interest in Britain among old and young alike. Partly, this is the result of the compelling drama of the long drawn-out primary battles, partly the result of the feeling that, whichever candidate was elected, there would be an end to the "arrogant unilateralism" (Robert McNamara's phrase in Cambridge in 2002) of U.S. foreign policy.

Partly, of course, it was the powerful narrative of an African-American running for the White House. Each August I teach 35 American high school teachers about the civil rights movement for the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in the far-removed historic buildings of Clare College. This year they reported their students were unprecedentedly enthusiastic about both Barack Obama and the political process.

I expressed deep skepticism that an African-American candidate could win a southern state. They had more faith in southern voters and they were right and I was wrong. As I have told British audiences, it was a stunning achievement for an African-American candidate to carry Virginia for the Democrats when three white southerners -- Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Al Gore -- failed to do so.

Now that President-elect Obama is preparing to take office, I was interested to hear he is reading about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's first 100 days in office.

The situations in 1933 and 2009 do have similarities. In both cases, there is a discredited outgoing administration, a financial crisis, a lame-duck Congress which finds it difficult to act, a new President who is a talented communicator and has a popular election victory and large congressional majorities.

But 1933 was also very different from the situation that will face Obama in January. The Depression had been going on for four years. Between a quarter and a third of the industrial workforce was out of work. Farmers, who were a third of the workforce then, were desperate.

There were none of the stabilizers that exist now to protect ordinary Americans: no bank deposit insurance, no social security and the welfare and relief resources of private charities and local and state governments were exhausted.

The day FDR took office, the banks in New York and Chicago closed. The whole U.S. banking system ground to a halt.

The result was that Congress was desperate for bold leadership. Constituents let their representatives know that they expected them to support the president as if the country was at war.

When FDR proclaimed a national bank holiday and worked to reopen the banks, Republicans and Democrats supported him. The House passed the banking bill -- and they only had one copy of it -- in 43 minutes.

When Roosevelt addressed the nation on Sunday, March 12, it was a tremendous gamble. He told Americans it was safer to put their money back in the banks reopening the next day than to hide it under the mattress.

They believed him and the next day the money flowed back into the banks that had been allowed to open. There was no Plan B: If people had continued taking money out, absolute disaster would have followed.

Despite four months to prepare -- FDR was the last president to be inaugurated in March -- Roosevelt had no great template to put into effect when he took office. He seized opportunities. He used the banking proposals of holdover Republican officials at the Treasury and the Federal Reserve.

He proposed the National Recovery Act only after Congress threatened to pass share-the-work legislation that would have mandated a maximum 30- hour work week.

He only brought Harry Hopkins to Washington to set up a national relief program after existing appropriations relief allocation to the states ran out. He did not favor bank deposit insurance but accepted it. He accepted large public works spending reluctantly.

FDR had a penchant for quick-fix solutions for the economy like currency tinkering. But he also launched the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Tennessee Valley Authority, crop control programs for farmers, and regulation of the stock market and the banks, and he underwrote the refinancing of mortgage debt on a long-term basis.

Are there lessons for President-elect Obama? Perhaps there are several.

First, in the New Deal's industrial recovery programs, a provision for loans to businesses disappeared. As a result there was no mechanism for creating extra jobs in the private sector.

Perhaps Obama should preserve jobs in the economy by bailing out the auto industry.

Second, infrastructure investment works, as the New Deal's public works programs showed in highways, education, cheap electrical power and flood control.

Third, the first 100 days can be a window of opportunity to pass reforms that will not be possible later on, but complex structural changes -- like FDR's introduction of social security -- may have to wait. For Obama, health care reform may be one of those issues that has to wait.

And finally, responding to an economic crisis requires the ability to improvise, to work across the aisle and to take measures that might at first be at odds with your original plans.

Freddie Mac is already using taxpayer-funds to pull itself out of the red.

Government-backed mortgage lender Freddie Mac (nyse: FRE - news - people ) put in a request for $13.8 billion in aid from the Treasury Friday after it posted a larger-than-expected, $25.3 billion loss in the third quarter. The relief request is for the exact amount of negative stockholder equity, meaning liabilities that exceed assets, that the firm held at the end of the period. American taxpayers can expect to spend billions more to prop up the lender as the U.S. housing market continues to deteriorate due to falling home prices, rising unemployment, and widespread foreclosures.

This was the last straw for some investors who had stuck with Freddie Mac, even after losing their shirts when the the company was taken over by regulators. The McLean, VA firm lost 9.6%, or 7 cents, to 66 cents during morning trading in New York, leaving it at a 98.5% discount from its year-ago price.

The yawning quarterly deficit related primarly to $14.3 billion in write-downs on tax credits that can't be redeemed due to insufficient taxable income, as well as $9.1 billion in losses on investments and $6.0 billion related to troubles in the U.S. housing market, including foreclosure expenses and credit losses.

When it pulled the firm into receivorship, the U.S. government agreed to buy up to $100.0 billion in interest-bearing prefered stock investments if the mortgage giant's liabilities outweighed assets. In light of last quarter's defecit, Freddie Mac expects to have an extra $13.8 billion in hand by Nov. 29. On Monday, its government-sponsored sibling Fannie Mae (nyse: FNM - news - people ) said it would probably need some taxpayer cash too if it posted another substantial deficit in the fourth quarter. (See "Fannie Mae's Tax Hit")

John McCain is running in one of the worst environments ever for a Republican presidential nominee. The senator from Arizona has not been in front in any of the 159 national polls conducted over the past six weeks. His slender hopes for winning the White House now depend on picking up a major Democratic stronghold or fighting off Obama's raids on most of the five states President Bush won four years ago that now lean toward the Democrat. He also must hold onto six other states that Bush won in 2004 but are considered too close to call.

Two factors cloud the final weekend projections. The first is how voters ultimately respond to the prospect of the first African American president in U.S. history, a force that could make the contest closer than it appears. The other, which pushes in the opposite direction, is whether Obama can expand the electorate to give him an additional cushion in battleground states.

Obama leads in every state that Democratic Sen. John F. Kerry won four years ago, which gives him a base of 252 electoral votes of the 270 needed to win. He also has leads of varying sizes in five states Bush won: Iowa, New Mexico, Virginia, Colorado and Nevada. Were he to win all of those on Tuesday, he would claim the presidency with 291 electoral votes.

The tossup states include traditional battlegrounds such as Ohio, Florida and Missouri, as well as North Carolina, Indiana and Montana, which have been firmly in the Republican column in the past. They account for 87 electoral votes, and if Obama were to win several of them, his electoral vote total could push well into the 300s.

In Senate races, Democrats, who control 51 votes, are closing in on a filibuster-proof 60-seat majority. Three GOP-held seats whose Republicans are retiring -- in Colorado, New Mexico and Virginia -- appear almost certain to go to Democrats. In five other states -- Alaska, Minnesota, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Oregon -- incumbent Republicans are seriously threatened. To get to 60, Democrats would have to win all those seats, plus one of three other competitive races: in Georgia, Kentucky and Mississippi.

In the House, Democrats look to repeat their gains of two years ago, when they picked up 31 seats and took control of the chamber. On Tuesday, they could add 25 to 30 seats to that majority, which would bring them to their highest number since 1990, when they had 267 seats. Ten Republican-held seats lean toward Democrats, and two dozen are viewed as tossups. Five Democratic-held seats are considered up for grabs.

Of the 11 gubernatorial races, only three are competitive. Democratic Attorney General Jay Nixon has the advantage over Rep. Kenny Hulshof in Missouri, where Republican Gov. Matt Blunt is not running for reelection. Two other races in states held by Democrats are considered tossups.

In Washington, Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire, who won a controversial victory four years ago, faces a tough rematch against businessman Dino Rossi. In North Carolina, where Democratic Gov. Mike Easley is term-limited, Lt. Gov. Bev Perdue and Republican Pat McCrory, the mayor of Charlotte, are in a race that is too close to call.

These projections are based on interviews by a team of Washington Post reporters with strategists in both parties, the presidential campaigns, state and local officials, and other analysts. The projections also include an analysis of a wealth of polling data on individual races and states.

In the Washington Post-ABC News daily tracking poll, Obama currently holds a nine-point national advantage, topping McCain 53 to 44 percent. The poll started after the last of the three presidential debates, and Obama's margin has held between seven and 11 points throughout.

More than half of all voters in the Post-ABC poll say the economy is their central voting issue, and Obama has been the main beneficiary of that focus. He has a double-digit edge on the question of which candidate is better able to handle the economy, and he has had even wider leads as the one who is more in touch with the financial problems people face.

NASHVILLE, Tennessee (CNN) -- A new national poll suggests Barack Obama is widening his lead over John McCain in the race for the White House.

Sen. Barack Obama leads Sen. John McCain by 8 points, according to CNN's latest poll.

1 of 2

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll out Monday afternoon suggests that the country's financial crisis, record low approval ratings for President Bush and a drop in the public's perception of McCain's running mate could be contributing to Obama's gains.

Fifty-three percent of likely voters questioned in the poll say they are backing Obama for president, with 45 percent supporting McCain.

That 8-point lead is double the 4-point lead Obama held in the last CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll, taken in mid-September. Watch why the economy is hurting McCain

Monday evening's CNN national Poll of Polls -- incorporating our new CNN survey, as well as new tracking numbers from Gallup and Hotline taken October 3-5 -- shows Obama leading McCain by 6 points -- at 49 to 43 percent.

President Bush may be part of the reason why Obama's making gains. Only 24 percent of those polled approve of Bush's job as president, an all-time low for a CNN survey. See the latest polling

"Bush has now tied Richard Nixon's worst rating ever, taken in a poll just before he resigned in 1974, and is only 2 points higher than the worst presidential approval rating in history, Harry Truman's 22 percent mark in February 1952," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland.

And that's bad news for McCain, because the poll suggests a growing number of Americans believe the Republican presidential nominee would have the same policies as the current Republican president. Fifty-six percent say McCain's policies would be the same as Bush, up from 50 percent a month ago.

The financial crisis also appears to be contributing to Obama's increased lead in the poll. Sixty-eight percent are confident in the Democratic presidential nominee's ability to handle the financial crisis, 18 points ahead of McCain, and 42 points ahead of Bush.

More Americans appear to have an unfavorable view of Gov. Sarah Palin, and that may also be helping Obama in the fight for the presidency. Forty percent now have an unfavorable view of Palin, up from 27 percent a month ago and from 21 percent in late August, when McCain surprised many people by picking the first-term Alaska governor as his running mate.

"A majority of Americans now believe that Sarah Palin would be unqualified to serve as president if it became necessary, and her unfavorable rating has doubled," Holland said.

Another hurdle for the Arizona senator is expectations. Six in 10 questioned in the poll predict that Obama will win the November election.

The poll was conducted Friday through Sunday, just after President Bush signed the $700 billion federal bailout into law. By a 53 percent to 46 percent margin, Americans oppose the bill.

"One in five might have supported a different bill, but one in three believe that the government should have stayed out of the crisis completely and let the markets attempt to recover on their own.

"A majority think that the bailout package will not prevent the economy from going into a deep and prolonged recession -- but they turn thumbs-down to another bailout package if this one does not work. Only one in five would support more assistance beyond Friday's $700 billion package," Holland said.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corporation poll was conducted by telephone on October 3-5. The survey questioned 1,006 people. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus 3.5 percentage points.

Just 9 percent of those surveyed rated the economy as good or excellent, the first time that number has been in single digits since the days just before the 1992 election. Just 14 percent said the country is heading in the right direction, equaling the record low on that question in polls dating back to 1973.

More voters trust Obama to deal with the economy, and he currently has a big edge as the candidate who is more in tune with the economic problems Americans now face. He also has a double-digit advantage on handling the current problems on Wall Street, and as a result, there has been a rise in his overall support. The poll found that, among likely voters, Obama now leads McCain by 52 percent to 43 percent. Two weeks ago, in the days immediately following the Republican National Convention, the race was essentially even, with McCain at 49 percent and Obama at 47 percent.

As a point of comparison, neither of the last two Democratic nominees -- John F. Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000 -- recorded support above 50 percent in a pre-election poll by the Post and ABC News.

Last week's near-meltdown in the financial markets and the subsequent debate in Washington over a proposed government bailout of troubled financial institutions have made the economy even more important in the minds of voters. Fully 50 percent called the economy and jobs the single most important issue that will determine their vote, up from 37 percent two weeks ago. In contrast, just 9 percent cited the Iraq war as their most important issue, its lowest of the campaign.

But voters are cool toward the administration's initial efforts to deal with the current crisis. Forty-seven percent said they approve of the steps taken by the Treasury and the Federal Reserve to stabilize the financial markets, while 42 percent said they disapprove.

Anxiety about the economic situation is widespread. Just over half of the poll respondents -- 52 percent -- believe the economy has moved into a serious long-term decline. Eight in 10 are concerned about the overall direction of the economy, nearly three-quarters worry about the shocks to the stock market, and six in 10 are apprehensive about their own family finances.

Two weeks ago, McCain held a substantial advantage among white voters, including newfound strength with white women. In the face of bad economic news, the two candidates now run about evenly among white women, and Obama has narrowed the overall gap among white voters to five percentage points.

Much of the movement has come among college-educated whites. Whites without college degrees favor McCain by 17 points, while those with college degrees support Obama by 9 points. No Democrat has carried white, college-educated voters in presidential elections dating back to 1980, but they were a key part of Obama's coalition in the primaries.

The political climate is rapidly changing along with the twists and turns on Wall Street, and it remains unclear whether recent shifts in public opinion will fundamentally alter the highly competitive battle between McCain and Obama. About two in 10 voters are either undecided or remain "movable" and open to veering to another candidate. Nevertheless, the close relationship between voters' focus on the economy and their overall support for the Democratic nominee has boosted Obama.

Among white voters, economic anxiety translates into greater support for Obama. He is favored by 54 percent of whites who said they are concerned about the direction of the economy, but by just 10 percent of those who are less worried.

The survey also found that the strong initial public reaction to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain's running mate, has cooled somewhat. Overall, her unfavorable rating has gone up by 10 points in the past two weeks, from 28 percent to 38 percent.