Anyone who thinks that the “caustic reaction” from GOP senators on their meeting with Susan Rice yesterday gives Democrats any pause on a Rice nomination for Secretary of State, should think again, a Democratic Senate aide tells First Read.

Said the aide: “People are happy to fight for her. This is getting people’s back up. The general sense of the mood is this is ridiculous. She’s obviously qualified.”

“The aide also questioned whether Republicans besides McCain, Graham, and Ayotte would think this is a ‘smart fight to pick’ given Rice’s qualifications and that this would mean a ‘high-profile fight with a qualified African-American woman.’ As to the threat of holds from Ayotte and Graham, the aide said that if Rice is nominated and presents well at her confirmation hearing, there’s a ‘good chance cooler heads prevail’ and there would be more than enough votes to confirm her. That would make Ayotte and Graham’s holds ‘moot’ once it goes to a cloture vote, the aide said, because “either we have the votes or we don’t.'”

The Week: 5 reasons Republicans won’t stop bashing Susan Rice.

Forbes looks at the online petitions on the White House website and notes “some are sensible, some flirt with insanity, but all provide a
fascinating window into what some American want, as well as what they
want their government to do.”

The Economist: “It is a tiring business running a big chunk of the federal government. Mrs Clinton has racked up 918,375 miles on the job visiting 112 countries. Tim Geithner, the treasury secretary, has had to cope with a state of near-perpetual crisis since he took office four years ago. Leon Panetta, the secretary of defense, is running an organization of some 2m people and overseeing the war in Afghanistan at the age of 74. The Republican leadership of the House of Representatives is pursuing a legal battle with Eric Holder, the attorney general, who has ignored some of their subpoenas. All four have signaled, with varying degrees of clarity, that they are ready to move on–leaving vacancies in the four grandest cabinet jobs at the very least.”

A new Gallup poll finds President Obama’s favorable rating at 58%, his best in over three years.

He was more popular after his first election than he is now, with a 68% favorable rating just after the November 2008 election. His all-time high of 78% was measured shortly before his inauguration as president in January 2009.

Meanwhile, The Week notes losing “is never a great way to increase your popularity. But to an unusually vocal degree, Republicans are going out of their way to show Romney the door.”

President Obama aggressively defended U.N. ambassador Susan Rice, “using his first postelection news conference to pointedly rebut Republican charges that the diplomat misled the American public in the aftermath of the attacks in Libya,” the Boston Globe reports.

Bloomberg notes Obama’s “spirited defense” of Rice “has moved her a step closer to being named to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.”

First Read: “If you thought that Obama might decide to pass on nominating Susan Rice to be the next Secretary of State, think again. Yesterday’s confrontation might have been the best thing to happen to her chances of being nominated. The president is a pragmatist and is usually someone who likes to avoid confirmation fights for his appointees. But the more the GOP attacks Rice, the more dug in the White House and president might get.”

President Obama is considering asking Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) to serve as his next defense secretary, the Washington Post reports.

“Although Kerry is thought to covet the job of secretary of state, senior administration officials familiar with the transition planning said that nomination will almost certainly go to Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.”

Meanwhile, counterterrorism adviser John Brennan is a leading contender for the CIA job vacated by David Petraeus if he wants it.

NPR says that Erskine Bowles, who co-chaired up the president’s debt reduction commission, is a candidate to replace Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner in President Obama’s second term.

But “a more likely choice might be Jack Lew, the current White House chief of staff and formerly the president’s budget director.”

Wonk Wire: Who should be the next Treasury Secretary?

“I would like to see whether I can get untired.”

— Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in an interview with Gail Collins, on what she’ll do next year.

Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) bid to become Secretary of State may be in jeopardy, ironically, because of Kerry himself, BuzzFeed reports.

When Kerry ran for president in 2004, state Democrats “changed the law to for replacing retiring members, stripping then Gov. Mitt Romney of his ability to appoint a new members and putting in a place a special election process. Kerry obviously never needed a replacement, and perhaps fittingly, following the death of Sen. Ted Kennedy the new law resulted in the state electing Sen. Scott Brown, a Republican.”

“And with Brown on his way out thanks to Elizabeth Warren, he is considered an odds-on favorite to take a special election against the current crop of Democratic contenders.”

One option: Democrats could change the law back to allow the governor to appoint a successor.

After his victory speech, President Obama tried to call both House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) “but was told they were asleep,” the New York Times reports.

ABC News: “There is an unwritten tradition in Washington that cabinet secretaries all submit pro forma letters of resignation at the end of a first term for a re-elected president, but apparently it doesn’t really work that way. The last two-term president was George W. Bush and according to an official in the West Wing at the time, such letters were requested, but some secretaries had to be prodded to comply.”

Bloomberg claims that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, is emerging as the favored candidate to succeed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. However, many think Obama’s first move will be choosing a successor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

He also may need to find successors to Defense Secretary Leon Panetta, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper and U.S. Trade Representative Ron Kirk.

The Gallup tracking poll finds President Obama’s approval rate at 54%, his highest approval rating since November of 2009.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said he didn’t plan to write a book about his “first-hand experience of the financial crisis, the aftermath, and the politics of Washington” but joked that, “A lot of people are telling my story,” according to the Wall Street Journal.

“The comment came the same day former FDIC Chairman Sheila Bair’s memoir, Bull by the Horns, was released. Ms. Bair and Mr. Geithner spent years at war with each other over what to do during the financial crisis, and her book reveals many of their battles in detail.”

“I obviously am not a big fan of President Obama. I think he’s been one of our weakest presidents… I’d be hard put to find any Democratic president that I’ve disagreed with more.”

— Dick Cheney, in an interview with ABC News.

Business Insider: “The Team USA men’s basketball team had no problem with France today in their opening match of the Olympics, cruising to a 98-71 win. But the most eyebrow-raising highlight of the match may have come after the game when each member of the team, including coaches, walked over and gave Michelle Obama a hug.”

[Read more…]

The Justice Department’s inspector general found “at least seven instances of federal employees engaging in illegal attempts to hire family members at the agency,” The Hill reports.

“The report is the third investigation in less than a decade that has found numerous examples of illegal hiring practices, amounting to nepotism, within the DOJ.”

Very interesting: First Cameraman: Documenting the Obama Presidency in Real Time by Arun Chaudhary.

Reflections of the first official White House videographer from the early months of the 2008 presidential campaign and through the first two and a half years of the Obama administration.

Treasury Department officials “have been cited for soliciting prostitutes, breaking conflict-of-interest rules and accepting gifts from corporate executives,” The Hill reports.

“The revelations of unethical behavior at Treasury are detailed in little-noticed documents posted this month on governmentattic.org, which publishes agency responses to Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.”

“While it is not uncommon for departments within the executive branch to have personnel issues, it is unusual for these types of documents to become public. They provide a rare glimpse of internal probes within the Treasury Department, exposing different episodes of misconduct.”