Sen. Al Franken is a contributor to a book urging LGBT youth not to commit suicide because of bullying. “It Gets Better: Coming Out, Overcoming Bullying, and Creating a Life Worth Living,” by columnist Dan Savage contains an essay by Franken as well as fellow politicians President Obama, Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, British Prime Minister David Cameron and celebrities Perez Hilton, Ellen Degeneres and Suze Orman. The book is based on a video project of the same name in which thousands of people have lent their voice in support of LGBT youth.

Franken isn’t the only Minnesotan to appear in the book. Mark Hanson, the presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, is also a contributor.

According to a press release from the ELCA, “Hanson’s essay was selected for inclusion by Dan Savage and Terry Miller, the founders of the project and the editors of the book. The two men launched the “It Gets Better” project when they created a YouTube video that reached out to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender youth facing harassment and bullying.”

In the U.S. Senate, Franken is the lead author of several pieces of legislation that would beef up national standards around bullying and include LGBT youth in bullying policies at the federal level.

Last week, Savage suggested that Republican politicians, such as former Gov. Tim Pawlenty, should participate.

“Who hasn’t made a video yet that you hope will?” TIME magazine asked Savage.

“Rick Santorum. Tim Pawlenty. Sarah Palin. Glenn Beck. The Minister of Britain, who leads the Conservative Party there, made a video, and we haven’t seen one from anyone on the right in the U.S. to even say, You’re 14 and gay. Don’t kill yourself,” Savage said.

Here’s video of Franken’s message to LGBT youth:

Here’s Bishop Hanson’s video:

Blogger-troublemaker-muckraker and sometime L.A. radio host Brad Friedman Wednesday nabbed Daniel Ellsberg for an interview. Ellsberg, the Defense Department analyst who leaked the 1960s Pentagon Papers exposing Johnson Administration lies tied to the war in Vietnam, has been in the news in the wake of the recent historic Wikileaks dump of hundreds of thousands of U.S. diplomatic cables. President Nixon targeted Ellsberg for assassination at the time but Americans overwhelmingly now see him as a hero whistleblower motivated by dedication to Constitutional democracy.

Ellsberg told Friedman that he disagrees with Wikileaks founder Julian Assange that Secreatary of State Clinton should resign for apparently encouraging diplomats and staff to spy on members of the United Nations. He also praised Assange as well as the suspected source of the leak, PFC Bradley Manning, who have been called respectively a terrorist and a traitor with many prominent figures calling for the assassination of Assange and the execution of Manning. Ellsberg called Manning a patriot and a hero.

Ellsberg also talked at length about revelations from the cable dump of covert bombing and assassinations by the U.S. in Yemen, covered up by Yemeni officials, the kind of serious policy action Ellsberg says the government is undertaking on behalf of the American people who have been unconstitutionally kept in the dark.

Firedman posted the transcript of the interview at the BradBlog.

Here’s Ellsberg on Manning:

ELLSBERG: I’m very impressed that Bradley Manning, the suspect in this, who has not been proven to be the source yet by the Army but if the Army’s –I should say the Pentagon and Army’s suspicions are correct then I admire what he did and I feel a great affinity for it, because he did say, allegedly, to the person who turned him in, Adrian Lamo, in a chatlog, that he was prepared, he was ready to go to prison for life or even be executed, he said, in order to share this information with the American people who needed to have it. And that’s the statement I said I’ve waited, in a way, for 40 years to hear someone make. I think it’s an appropriate choice for somebody to make. It’s not that they’re obliged to be willing to do that so much. That’s something a person has to decide for themselves very much. But I certainly think that when so many lives are at stake as in these wars or the new wars that may be coming at us, as in Yemen or even Pakistan, that to try to avert those is appropriate and to shorten them when they’re clearly hopeless and dangerous, as in Afghanistan.

[...]

Bradley Manning is not a traitor any more than I was. I’m sure from what I’ve read that he in fact is very patriotic, as I was. And indeed the charge of treason in our country, in our Constitution, requires aid and comfort to an enemy with whom you adhere. And adherence to an enemy to the disadvantage of the United States. I don’t think Bradley Manning or I intended at all to be disadvantageous to the United States. Quite the contrary. To do things, as I’ve said, to reveal truths that would reduce the danger that our policies are subjecting Americans to. And Bradley Manning, I’m sure, does not adhere to the Taliban or to al-Qaeda any more than I adhered to the Viet Cong, which was zero. So that charge is ignorant, let’s say, of what the term means in America.

And on Yemen:

ELLSBERG: One of these cases, of course, reveals that the Yemeni leaders, Saleh and his deputy and so forth, are assuring Petraeus that they were lying for us and lying to keep it from their own people that Yemen was being bombed by a foreign power, namely us. And of course that’s keeping it from the American people as well. We weren’t admitting that. And not only to keep it from the Yemeni people but to keep it from Americans because Americans, I think, do have a right to know who we’re bombing, who we’re at war with. Certainly Congress should be making that decision and has not been. Certainly. So our Constitution is being absolutely flouted on that, as is true in Iraq, for example. Or in Vietnam. So there have been some significant revelations, although on the whole these latest releases, large as they are in scale, haven’t yet proven as informative as the earlier ones on Afghan and Iraq. And they’re not, as I say, at the level of the Pentagon Papers. I wish they were. And yet there have been a number of significant revelations there. I mentioned one, that we were bombing …

FRIEDMAN: Yemen, certainly. Yeah.

ELLSBERG: … and that that was being concealed for us by lies to the Yemeni Parliament, which amount to lies by us, as well, to our own people. But another example, for instance, which is rather like some of the things in the Pentagon Papers, were the warnings by our former or recent ambassador to Pakistan, Anne Patterson, that our policy there of bombing, drone attacks and other attacks in Pakistan was, as she put it, counterproductive and dangerous. Meaning that it’s endangering a regime that, with all its faults, Pakistan, is less bad for us in the world and for Pakistan than what might well follow it if we destabilize it. And what we’re doing is destabilizing that regime. What that also means is that our policies are endan- in both Yemen and Pakistan, and Afghanistan– are endangering Americans at home.

The idea that these releases are dangerous I think conceals a very misleading and basically dangerous attitude. And that is that the only risks to Americans lie in telling the truth or exposing these operations, or in any degree of transparency. Now, there may be some risks, in some cases. There are risks in democracy, and there’s risks in openness. It’s not without any risk. Our Constitution, on the whole, relies on our taking those risks in order to be a democracy and to have, to avoid debacles like the ones we’ve just been mentioning. But what these critics don’t seem to recognize is that our current debacles in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Yemen, all these places, do not result from too much openness or too much transparency. They reflect the risks which were realized risks having to do with secrecy and silence and lies.

The silence about the lies that got us into Iraq, for example, or, and in general the decision-making that is getting us into these. Now, the case of Yemen, for example. Probably there are, there’s an argument to be made about whether we should be attacking supposedly Al-Qaeda cells in Yemen. At the same time, many people in the government, it has been leaked now, actually believe that those attacks will mainly be targeted with the help of Saleh, the ruler in Yemen, against people who have no relation to Al-Qaeda, people are opposing his regime for various good or bad reasons.

But even among the protesters, this woman stood out. Clad in a surgical mask for much of the day, she toted two signs with different anti-Obama messages on each side. She declined to provide her name.

“Obama supporters are ruthless,” she said in explanation. “They’ll go after people, they’ll search them down and they’ll make life hell for them.”

Among the slogans on her signs: “PUMAS for NObama.” For those with short memories of the 2008 presidential campaign, PUMA stands for “Party Unity My Ass” and was briefly touted as a movement of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters refusing to back the party’s nominee.

“I’m a disgruntled Democrat,” said the woman. “I want this administration out. They’re a bunch of thugs. Chicago politics.”

When asked what she meant by the phrase “Chicago politics,” she elaborated.

“They bring in communists,” she said. “They lie. They bring in terrorists, Bill Ayers. … And the media covers for him. The media are down on their knees in front of Obama sucking as hard as they can.”

The Inver Grove Heights resident is not at all assuaged by the fact that Clinton is now serving as Secretary of State in the Obama administration.

“It pisses me off,” she said. “I want her to leave. She’s going to run for New York governor and I will support her then. I want her out of that administration. That administration has got to go.”

She also carried a sign questioning whether Obama is an American citizen.

“His own grandma said he was born in Kenya,” she stated (erroneously). “His own grandma. And they won’t produce his real birth certificate. All they give us is the certificate of live birth from Hawaii. Anybody can get one of those if you live in Hawaii. You don’t have to have been born there. That’s all they’ve shown to us. And they won’t show us his college transcripts either.”

What did she hope to accomplish by coming out today?

“Showing them I’m not a mindless Obama-bot like all these other people who want an American Idol for president,” she said. “I believe in Amerca’s freedoms. I don’t like him going to other countries apologizing for us. I don’t like him almost spitting in the eye of our allies. He doesn’t care about Britain. He doesn’t care about Israel. And he goes and he bows to the King of Saudi Arabia.”

Elsewhere in Minnesota news this morning …

DULUTH: Sewage spews onto streets, into streams and Lake Superior. That happens sometimes when it rains; the feds have given the city a decade to fix it. [Duluth News Tribune]

ROSEVILLE: Republicans eye guv candidates at party picnic. An activist noted what they had in common: “They’re all conservative, and they’re all staying on message.” She forgot the obvious: They were all wet. [St. Paul Pioneer Press]

DULUTH: Hillary Clinton’s autograph enough to start work on controversial pipeline. Enbridge Energy will pump 19 million gallons of Canadian oil per day across Minnesota to Superior, Wis. [Bemidji Pioneer]

MINNETONKA: H1N1 flu shots are on the house. UnitedHealth Group says it will cover the cost of vaccines for people the government says should get them. [Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal]

MINNEAPOLIS: Gophers try out new football stadium. University of Minnesota students will get in free Saturday – sans breathalizer tests, one hopes — to watch an intra-squad scrimmage.  [Minnesota Daily]

TWO HARBORS: Mayor promises memorial to beloved tree. What’s left of the landmark “Honking Tree” after scoundrels cut it down last spring will provide material for its own monument. [Duluth News Tribune]

Photo: ESPN

One-time University of Minnesota football coach Lou Holtz now says he’s not mulling a run for Congress in Florida, as reported. If so, he’d be keeping a promise made in 1983 to the late Rudy Perpich, then governor of Minnesota, on WCCO-AM: “I assure you, I will have nothing to do with politics.”

Holtz had just taken the coaching job at the U of M at the time, and he was trying to live down appearances he had made in campaign ads for Sen. Jesse Helms, whose latest exploits then included filibustering a national holiday for Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

In two seasons, Holtz led the Golden Gophers to a 10-12 record, en route to more illustrious coaching gigs, including the University of Notre Dame.

Lending credence to the idea that he at least was interested in challenging first-term Democrat U.S. Rep. Suzanne Kosmas are meetings he had on the topic with Republican leaders in Washington, D.C., last week — not to mention his three donations of $500 each to the National Republican Congressional Committee in June.

Indeed, Holtz’s campaign donation history indicates that he strongly favors the right side of the political field — although his donations last year included $2,300 to Hillary Clinton in March. Holtz also gave then-fellow-71-year-old Sen. John McCain $1,000 in May.

Something he said as a TV sports commentator last fall in praise of Adolf Hitler as a leader was impolitic enough for him to later clarify that in his view, Hitler was bad — and that was good enough for ESPN.

“I won’t take responsibility … Somebody told me about Wikipedia, where people can put in whatever they want into, in my name. I tried to correct some of it … somebody decided I had a pet rooster, somebody else said I was an international opera talent, but I decided not to go into it, and you know what … this is bull.”

Mondale’s Wikipedia entry has apparently since been scrubbed of any poultry or operatic claims.

The interview — which focuses on Mondale’s views as an elder statesman and his new role as honorary Norwegian consul-general in Minneapolis — appears in the latest issue of Nordic Reach but took place on  June 4, the day after Barack Obama announced he’d clinched the Democratic nomination for president at the Xcel Center in St. Paul. That was the same day on which Mondale switched his own endorsement from Sen. Hillary Clinton to Obama — although on MySpace, the interviewer informs Mondale, Obama was already one of his top friends.

10. Friends of Todd

When Sen. Norm Coleman and Todd (but not Sarah) Palin rallied in Duluth in October, an ardent supporter carried this curious sign, captured on film by Paul Demko.

9. Meter remade

A hacked parking meter, spotted by Steve Perry during the Republican National Convention in St. Paul.

8. Spraygun

RNC police breaking out high-powered pepper spray aerosol cans, photographed by Jeff Severns Guntzel.

7. Anti-RNC Everyman

Vermin Supreme, the most ubiquitous RNC protester, photographed by Molly Priesmeyer.

6. Why we vote?

A discarded newspaper, photographed by Paul Schmelzer outside a north Minneapolis polling place on Election Day, may offer a glimpse at voter motivations in 2008.

5. With Rage on-stage

An eerily lit shot of crowds at the September Rage Against the Machine concert, by Tony Nelson.

4. RNC onlookers

A pair of protesters watch an RNC demonstration go by, by Mike Dvorak.

3. Ready

A phalanx of riot police at the Republican National Convention, by Tim Roman.

2. Franken foregrounded

Senatorial candidate Al Franken speaks at an Oct. 21 rally at the University of Minnesota as a well-known supporter looks on. Photo by Andy Birkey.

1. Keith Smith (before photo)

Our top photo of the year, shot by Paul Demko, shows 17-year-old protester Keith Smith just hours before he was reportedly beaten by police at the Republican National Convention.

To see more Minnesota Independent photos, visit our Flickr site.

More of MnIndy’s Best:

Ten most popular stories of 2008

Top videos of 2008

Top RNC tweets

I cast the first ballot of my life for the Republican congressman, a native of my hometown, Peoria, Ill., 10 years ago; he was then and still is a very popular Republican. The reaction of some of his former constituents — residents of Central Illinois — was positive as news spreads of his new job. Progressive and conservative political junkies agreed: LaHood is pragmatic and generally well liked.

LaHood has had a close working relationship with Obama, and especially with Obama’s chief of staff, Rahm Emmanuel. “Rahm Emanuel and I are very good friends,” he told the Galesburg Register Mail last week. “He and I had six or seven bipartisan dinners this year that I invited some Republicans and he invited some Democrats… Sen. Obama and I worked very closely together when we were putting the transportation bill together a couple of years ago… I think I have a great relationship with both of them.”

One relationship that might be strained around the cabinet table is with Secretary of State-to-be Hillary Clinton. LaHood was selected by the U.S. House to preside over the impeachment hearings of President Bill Clinton, mainly because of the trust he engendered in both parties. But he voted for all four articles of impeachment. Perhaps ten years is enough time to let bygones be bygones, but the figures that loomed large in one of America’s tawdriest times will likely be sharing a table in Obama’s administration.

While much more conservative than his Obama-cabinet contemporaries, he has been a staunch supporter of federal funding for Amtrak and is generally friendly to public transit.

“I think if we’re going to have a pot of money where we subsidize airlines and we subsidize the funding of highways, that we certainly ought to continue to subsidize Amtrak,” LaHood told a local paper in 2004.

LaHood voted with the Democrats to expand Amtrak over the objections of Bush and House Republicans in 2007. And it wasn’t the first time LaHood has bucked his party.

Notably, he rebuffed Sarah Palin’s racially charged campaign rallies saying that they didn’t “befit the office that she’s running for.” (LaHood’s parents were Lebanese and Jordanian, and as few outside Peoria know, a large number of Lebanese Christians settled in the Illinois River valley in the 1890s to avoid religious persecution).

Although he was first elected during Newt Gingrich’s Republican Revolution of 1994, he refused to sign the “Contract with America.” He did not agree that cutting taxes during a time of high deficits was a sound idea.

What little is known about about his transportation policies is fairly moderate in nature.

In 2005, he told the Peoria Journal-Star he opposed turning public transit over to private entities. “We’ve got a good Amtrak system in Illinois and I don’t think we want to destroy it by talking about privatization.”

He voted for the bipartisan Saving Energy Through Public Transportation Act of 2008 that promotes public transit and earlier this year he sponsored the Commuter Act which offers tax breaks to public transit commuters similar to the breaks already afforded to automobile commuters. He bucked Republicans and voted for the Big Three automakers bailout last week as well.

But transit supporters have expressed concern over his statements on high-speed rail: “I think it’s a bad idea, mainly because we don’t have the money to fund the routes that currently serve Illinois,” he said in 2004. Illinois at the time faced a $3.6 billion budget deficit. “I don’t think we can afford at this point, with the kind of deficits we’re running.”

As the old saying goes, “Will it play in Peoria?” Residents there, both Democrats and Republicans, find Obama’s pick a pragmatic one.

For a liberal take on LaHood, DailyKos is probably the best place to gauge opinion… and most commenters there are irate that Obama picked a Republican. But those who know LaHood and live in his district share little of that outrage.

“Though I haven’t ever voted for him because of his party affiliation, I think he’s generally been a fairly effective representative and about as good a Congressman as I could get in this strongly Republican Central Illinois district,” wrote contributor modemocrat. “In the times I’ve met him I’ve found him to be a fairly good guy, especially as Illinois politicians go.”

Modemocrats continued, “And I have to admit as an Illinoisan, as a Downstate Illinoisan, I’m delighted by this pick. Not just for regional pride but because I feel like my interests as an Illinoisan will be well-served while at the same time I don’t have to worry so much about political fallout for Obama that would come from him appointing some Chicago Democrat with shady connections or questionable dealings.”

For a take from a local conservative, I gave my mother a call. After years of sparring with her over politics, I know of no one more thoughtful — or more conservative — than Kathy Birkey.

“I’m very conservative. I’m a ‘dittohead’ and you can quote me on that,” she says joking about her taste for conservative talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

She says Obama made a good pick. “I think he is hard working, he’s honest, and I think he’s very fair,” she says of LaHood. “He’s a little more moderate than I prefer and he has disagreed with me many times.” But he is bipartisan, she says.

“He’d rather build bridges than die for ideology.”

Obama’s done okay with his cabinet selections so far, she adds.

“LaHood’s a little more middle of the road like the others Obama has selected. I’m impressed with it and I’m going to wait and see what happens.”

President-elect Barack Obama (Campaign Photo)

While liberal critics sound increasingly uneasy with President-elect Barack Obama’s nominations of centrist, Clinton-era Democrats to Cabinet positions, some are overlooking how Obama has also been assembling a tight progressive cadre to serve with him in the White House.

Progressive blogs are buzzing about Obama’s Cabinet picks, including big-name hires — and likely hires — such as Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.), Defense Sec. Robert Gates and New York Fed President Timothy Geithner, a protege of former Secretary Treasury Lawrence Summers under President Clinton, also an Obama economic adviser. To some irritated observers, these faces aren’t just a return to a previous time but an unwelcome move to the right of Obama’s campaign positions.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

“I know everyone is obsessed with the ‘team of rivals’ idea right now, but I feel incredibly frustrated,” said Chris Bowers, a progressive political consultant who blogs for Open Left. “It seems to me as though there is a team of rivals, except for the left, which is left off the team entirely.”

But Obama’s recent White House appointments include progressive voices in key positions. Their views strongly coincide with those progressives who are expressing concern about the president-elect’s Cabinet choices.

Consider the people Obama has selected to be his advisers on domestic policy and national politics, as well as his communications director. Other prominent progressive players, including labor and feminist activists, also will be members of his future White House staff.

In the past two weeks, Obama has tapped Melody Barnes, of the progressive think tank Center for American Progress, to serve as his domestic policy director; Patrick Gaspard, a political organizer for the Services Employees International Union, or SEIU, as his politics director; Ellen Moran, of the liberal fund-raising group EMILY’s List, which backs pro-choice women candidates, to run his communications shop; and Phil Schiliro, a former aide to Sen. Tom Daschle, to serve as the White House’s liaison with Congress.

As head of the Domestic Policy Council, Barnes will oversee national policy priorities. She will be responsible for developing two of Obama’s top priorities — health care and education reform.

Barnes has a history of strong ties to progressive causes. She was chief counsel to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) on the Senate Judiciary Committee from 1995 to 2003, working with the liberal standard bearer on civil rights and women’s health legislation. Before that, she helped craft the 1992 Voting Rights Improvement Act while assistant counsel to a House voting rights subcommittee.

In 2004, Barnes made her mark at the Center for American Progress by creating a program called the Faith and Progressive Policy Initiative, which seeks to identify the moral and ethical underpinnings in policy and develop progressive stands around them. She also founded the Women’s Health and Rights Program, which works on reproductive health and poverty issues.

As vice president of policy, Barnes went on to oversee all the center’s policy programs, including those related to poverty, the environment, energy and national security. Sally Steenland, a former colleague of Barnes at the center, described Barnes’ time overseeing these policy projects as a “perfect warm-up and dress rehearsal for what she will do at the White House.”

Steenland explained that Barnes’ ability to give all these wide-ranging projects adequate attention is a skill that will be critical at the White House, where she will have to juggle many policy priorities.

Those who have worked with Barnes say it’s unlikely that she will go into the White House with pet projects in mind. “She sees the connection between all the issues,” said Jessica Arons, director of the Center for American Progress’ Women’s Health and Rights Program, founded by Barnes. “All of those in some ways become one priority.”

David Sirota has been a member of the angry progressive chorus complaining about Obama’s Cabinet appointments. But when asked in an interview about the president-elect’s recent White House picks, he conceded that Barnes will be a strong progressive voice in the Obama administration.

Even so, he’s not convinced that these appointments carry the same heft as Cabinet jobs. Sirota contends that the White House responsibilities are more like selling policies than developing and implementing them.

“Whose job description is political salesmanship and whose job description is making and executing policy?” Sirota asked.

To underscore his point, Sirota pointed to the job of White House political director, which Gaspard will hold. Sirota contends that, most likely, his political job will not be that instrumental in developing and carrying out policies.

Gaspard, however, is a well-known grass-roots organizer who has worked on many progressive campaigns. As such, he could play an important role in an administration that prides itself on its bottom-up presidential campaign.

Before serving as Obama’s national political director during the general election campaign, Gaspard worked for the largest local union in the country, the 1199 branch of SEIU, an influential union representing thousands of health-care workers in New York. Local and state campaigns would “borrow” him from the union to run their ground operations.

“I think one of the reasons he came to work for the union is it definitely had a long-standing reputation for not just being an advocate for low-paid health workers,” said Jennifer Cunningham, former SEIU political director, “but a tradition of progressive issues outside of bread-and-butter union work.”

Cunningham said the union has worked on many campaigns for progressive candidates, as well as causes like global warming and affordable health care. In 2007, Gaspard lobbied for the expansion of the State Children’s Health Insurance Program, or SCHIP, that provides about 5 million children of low-income families with health-care coverage.

There’s another reason why Gaspard may be a power as White House political adviser. President George W. Bush’s chief political aide, Karl Rove, was instrumental in shaping key policies of the Bush era. Rove helped build the administration’s case to go to war with Iraq and played a pivotal role in politicizing the Justice Dept.

Gaspard will be joined by other long-time progressive activists, like Moran, the new communications team head. She was executive director of the EMILY’s List, which seeks to elect pro-choice women Democrats to office. A long-time Democratic player, she also worked on Sen. Tom Harkin’s 1992 presidential run and oversaw a $50-million campaign for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2000.

“[Moran] deserves tremendous credit for leading EMILY’s List this election cycle,” said the group’s president, Ellen R. Malcolm, in a statement, “as we elected the second-largest group of Democratic women in American history.”

Schiliro, another key progressive figure in the White House, will act as the go-between with Congress. Like Barnes, he worked for Daschle, who is expected to serve as Obama’s secretary of health and human services. Daschle has a liberal voting record in the Senate, particularly on health-care issues.

Schiliro also has strong ties to important members of Congress. He worked for Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who was chairman of the House oversight committee from 2006 through this year. Waxman’s committee was instrumental in shaking out a number of embarrassing and politically damaging scandals in the executive branch, including the U.S. attorneys firing scandal, the politicization of the Environmental Protection Agency and corruption at the government’s main contracting agency, the General Services Admin.

Waxman recently unseated Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.) to become chairman of the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.

Key progressive voices within the halls of the White House are piling up, but whether the picks will satisfy progressives is yet to be seen.

“It’s not a total shutout,” Bowers wrote this week, “but it isn’t enough.”

Laura McGann is the managing editor of the Washington Independent.

Hillary Clinton Photo: WDCpix

At a 9:40 a.m. press conference in Chicago, President-elect Barack Obama will name his National Security team and, most notably, Sen. Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State. According to The Swamp, other nominees will likely include:

Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, nominee for Secretary of Homeland Security; Eric Holder, for Attorney General; Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who will remain in his current position for at least one year; retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, for National Security Adviser; retired Adm. Dennis Blair, for Director of National Intelligence; and Susan Rice, for U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Some of these officials also are expected to appear at the news conference Monday.

To clear the way, former Pres. Bill Clinton has disclosed his previously private list of contributors “to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest with Mrs. Clinton’s duties as the nation’s top diplomat,” the New York Times reports. It’s one of many agreements Sen. Clinton has made with Obama; eight others — all voluntary and transcending legal requirements — include the former president incorporating his Clinton Global Initiative as a separate entity from his foundation and submitting his future business plans and speeches for White House review.

WCCO.com will livestream the press conference.