“Well, the main thing is I just wanted to have a chance to publicly say thank you, because I think Hillary will go down as one of the finest secretaries of state we’ve had. It has been a great collaboration over the last four years.”

— President Obama, on why he did a joint interview on 60 Minutes with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

President Obama gets the bad lip reading treatment at the start of his second term.

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“As he heads into a second term with sweeping ambition in an era of gridlock, President Obama is assembling a new White House team that looks much like the old one, choosing familiarity over freshness even at the risk of insularity,” the New York Times reports.

“While aides played musical chairs, moving up and moving around to new positions, the overall continuity suggested that Mr. Obama felt no need to inject new energy into a team that brought him through re-election last year. Buffeted by one crisis after another, the president prefers to stick with the circle of advisers he has come to trust through four tumultuous years in office, wary of introducing new personalities after some unsuccessful experiments in his first term.”

President Obama “made a big gamble last January when he issued four recess appointments during a three-day break between meetings of the Senate — and with the court ruling Friday broadly undercutting his ability to make such appointments, he may have lost even bigger,” Politico reports.

Legal experts say the president “almost certainly did not anticipate the gamble going as spectacularly sour as it did Friday when a federal appeals court not only invalidated the three NLRB appointments but cut the heart out of the recess appointment power presidents of both parties have wielded for two centuries.”

Washington Post: “The issue seems certain to end up before the Supreme Court, which
ultimately could clarify a president’s authority to fill his
administration and appoint federal judges when a minority of the Senate
blocks consideration of his choices.”

The Daily Beast has the photo as President Obama left the inaugural platform.