Thank you, readers!

Pay it forward and bring Megan with you!

I am a new reader to this blog - about two weeks. And in those two weeks, this blog as well as the FP site in general has become one of my favorite places to visit online. Thanks for all the interesting posts and insightful information.

Yes, whoever chooses these pics does a great job.

Your new job sounds interesting.

Sorry to see you go!

Good luck to you Carolyn--and don't forget to write the occasional post on Hillary's worldly adventures. There are many more of us around who are interested in the SoS ever since Hillary took the reigns. So, hope you gals and guys at the FP won't let Us Faithful Hillary readers down....
Hope FP's Madam Secretary grows....commensurate to the influence world-wise exerted by Hillary Rodham Clinton's important new job! Thx....

I'd be curious to get FP's take on this report out of www.americanthinker.com:

"Barack Obama is centralizing power in the White House, marginalizing Hillary Clinton and the State Department, while offering ever-clearer signs that Israel’s status as a close American ally is imperiled. Beneath what appears to be obscure bureaucratic maneuvers lies an apparent significant shift in America’s Middle East policy.

President Obama plans to order a sweeping overhaul of the National Security Council, expanding its membership and increasing its authority to set strategy across a wide spectrum of international and domestic issues.

The result will be a "dramatically different" NSC from that of the Bush administration or any of its predecessors since the forum was established after World War II to advise the president on diplomatic and military matters, according to national security adviser James L. Jones, who described the changes in an interview. "The world that we live in has changed so dramatically in this decade that organizations that were created to meet a certain set of criteria no longer are terribly useful," he said.

Jones, a retired Marine general, made it clear that [b]he will run the process and be the primary conduit of national security advice to Obama, eliminating the "back channels" that at times in the Bush administration allowed Cabinet secretaries and the vice president's office to unilaterally influence and make policy out of view of the others."

Is anybody here? Hello! We need to know what color pantsuit Hillary is wearing today!
It better not be another black one! Bring back the bright colors, Hillary!
We want the pantsuit rainbow!

Dear Carolyn O'Hara,

first of all: Great Job, I loved your blog - All the best for the future!

I am a german reader and your blog was the best option to get detailed information about Madam Secretary. Up to the present. Who will continue your work? Thx....

What's up with that?

since no one's posting, here's Hillary's schedule today:

http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/appt/2009appt/02/116454.htm

Come on!!! I just started reading this blog 2 weeks ago too and have read it every day since!!
Some one has to take this over...it has been an incredible link to what HRC is doing and what they are saying about her. PLEASE....

Consider the source (Dick Morris) but for what it's worth:

"Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton is finding that her job description is dissolving under her feet, leaving her with only a vestige of the power she must have thought she acquired when she signed on to be President Obama’s chief Cabinet officer.

Since her designation:

Vice President Joe Biden has moved vigorously to stake out foreign policy as his turf. His visit to Afghanistan, right before the inauguration, could not but send a signal to Clinton that he would conduct foreign policy in the new administration, leaving her in a backup role.
Richard Holbrooke, the former Balkan negotiator and U.N. ambassador, has been named special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan. He insisted on direct access to the president, a privilege he was denied during much of the Clinton years.
Former Sen. George Mitchell, D-Maine, negotiator of the Irish Peace Accords, was appointed to be the administration’s point man on Arab-Israeli negotiations.
Samantha Powers, Obama’s former campaign aide, who once called Hillary Clinton a “monster,” has been appointed to the National Security Council as director of “multilateral affairs.”
Gen. James L. Jones, Obama’s new national security adviser, has announced an expansion of the membership and role of the security council. He pledges to eliminate “back channels” to the president and wants to grow the council’s role to accommodate the “dramatically different” challenges of the current world situation.
Susan Rice, Obama’s new United Nations ambassador, insisted upon and got Cabinet rank for her portfolio, and she presumably also will have the same kind of access to Obama that she had as his chief foreign policy adviser during the campaign.
So where does all this leave Secretary of State Clinton?

While sympathy for Mrs. Clinton is outside the normal fare of these columns, one cannot help but feel that she is surrounded by people who are, at best, strangers and, at worst, enemies. The competition that historically has occupied secretaries of State and national security advisers seems poised to ratchet up to a new level in this administration.

Hillary’s essential problem is that she is an outsider in the current mix. She was the adversary in the campaign, and Rice and Powers — at the very least — know it well, having helped to run the campaign that dethroned her. Can they — and she — be devoid of bitterness or at least of normal human trepidation? Not very likely.

The fact is that the power of the secretary of State is not statutory, nor does it flow from the prestige of the post’s occupant. Former Gen. Al Haig, once supreme commander of NATO and chief of staff to President Nixon, found that out when he was undercut as secretary by the White House troika of Mike Deaver, James Baker, and Ed Meese.

Bill Rogers, Eisenhower’s attorney general and Nixon’s California confidant, found himself on the outs from the moment he became secretary of State, with Henry Kissinger soaking up all the power through his direct access to Nixon as national security adviser.

The power of the secretary of State flows directly from the president. But Hillary does not have the inside track with Obama. Rice and Powers, close advisers in the campaign, and Gen. Jones, whose office is in the White House all may have superior access. Holbrooke and Mitchell will have more immediate information about the world’s trouble spots.

So what is Hillary’s mandate? Of what is she secretary of State? If you take the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Pakistan out of the equation, what is left? One would have to assume that the old North Korea hands in the government would monopolize that theater of action. What, precisely, is it that Hillary is to do? The question lingers."

And for this she gave up a Senate seat?

http://www.newsmax.com/morris/Hillar...10/180124.html

This is not the Yahoo Gazette . It's Newsweek / Wash post etc and they are teeming with suitable people...what does it take to type in Hill's schedule with some links until they choose someone else ? IMO, the inactivity is odd.

"When Barack Obama came to Germany as a candidate last year, he stood before an adoring crowd of hundreds of thousands and promised to tear down 'the walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic.'

Vice President Joe Biden's three-day trip to Munich that ended Sunday struck the same note, but with a harder edge: In return for tearing down the walls caused by controversial Bush administration policies, the U.S. would expect tangible help dealing with an array of foreign policy problems, he said.

'America will do more, but American will ask more from its partners,' he said in a speech that was warmly received but might have had some European officials privately longing for the Bush administration's tendency not to expect much, if anything, of Old Europe.

Biden did not return to Washington with any intriguing public promises of new help in Afghanistan from European leaders, like German Chancellor Angela Merkel and French President Nicholas Sarkozy, or on stopping Iran's nuclear program from Russia's Deputy Prime Minister Sergei Ivanov.

Sitting beside Biden prior to their hour-long meeting Sunday, Ivanov declared Biden's offer 'to press the reset button' on U.S.-Russian relations that had become badly strained by the end of the Bush years a 'very positive' development.

But their hour-long meeting produced no apparent breakthroughs.

There wasn't even a chance meeting with Ali Laridjani, the speaker of Iran's parliament, who was attending the conference but skipped Biden's address."

(...) "The decision to send Biden to deliver the administration's first major outline of its foreign policy was an unusual one. Usually, the Munich Security Conference, where he gave his speech Saturday, is attended by the U.S. Defense Secretary and senior Pentagon officials and officers. Biden's presence so soon after the new administration took office elevated the importance of the event.

Not everyone was impressed with his speech. 'It seems to me this is sort of vintage Biden. It's kind of a mish-mosh of platitudes and some really troubling comments interspersed with a dash of superciliousness,' said Frank Gaffney, founder and president Center for Security Policy, a conservative defense think tank."

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0209/18577.html