Last issue, ETS! began its comprehensive look at Barack Obama's cabinet-level appointments thus far, examining his inner circle, his environmental picks, and his financial team. This issue, we turn to Foreign Affairs and Security (generally awful), and to Social Services (generally pretty good). Here's to hope in the next four years--tempered with a strong measure of clear-eyed realism.

Foreign Affairs and Security

Dept. of Justice: Eric Holder will unquestionably be an upgrade over anything puked up for this post by the Bush administration; the former Clinton appointee opposes torture (now, anyway; in 2002 he urged the Bush administration to disregard the Geneva Conventions) and is generally more decent on civil liberties than his predecessors. (So are my living room drapes.) But in a measure of how deeply stench is rooted in both parties in DC, Holder has his own skeletons, ranging from his involvement in several dubious Clinton pardons (e.g., Marc Rich) to his post-Clinton private lawyering for corporate clients such as Chiquita, who he defended against accusations the banana giant funded Colombian paramilitary death squads that assassinated numerous union leaders. And don't expect Holder to, you know, prosecute any of the Bush era scofflaws, from Dubya on down. He might want to work for Chiquita again some day. Welcome to our very own banana republic. Grade: D+

Dept. of Defense: All of Obama's picks thus far have a certain odor of "Meet the New Boss / Same as the Old Boss." With Robert Gates, it's literally true.

It's a measure of how far the US has lurched to the right in the past three decades, and how radical most of the rest of Dubya's hires were, that Gates has been sold to the public as some sort of moderate elder/consensus-builder. (Twenty years ago people said the same things about Dick Cheney.) Gates' many years of crimes against humanity deserve their own article, but among other career lowlights, he spent 30 years in the CIA, where he was up to his neck in Iran-Contra as Deputy Director in the 1980s. Ever the Cold Warrior, in the late '80s he suppressed accurate intelligence which would have clued the CIA in to the imminent collapse of the Soviet empire. He was Bush Sr.'s CIA director in 1991-2, betraying the post-Gulf War Shia in Iraq and overseeing the disastrous US incursion into Somalia.

Gates served on the 2006 ignored-by-Dubya Iraq Study Group that basically recommended withdrawal from Iraq, and was apparently one of the firewalls that kept Cheney's zealots from convincing our Dolt-in-Chief to attack Iran. This proves Gates is not flat-out nuts. But it doesn't mean he's not a war criminal, past and present. And he's done nothing in his two years at DoD thus far to rein in the waste--of money and of lives--that defines the modern Pentagon. Grade: D-

State Department: A year ago, Barack Obama was promising to fundamentally change the shoot-first-ask-no-questions-ever approach to US foreign policy. Now, along with Gates, the most prominent face of the DC foreign policy apparatus will be Sen. Hillary Clinton, the unapologetic Iraq War backer who promised, in 2008, to "obliterate" Iran if given the chance to run America's foreign policy. Now she's the one charged with our country's, um, diplomacy, a skill she notably lacks (c.f. also health care reform). She'll also be running one of DC's biggest bureaucracies; judging from her presidential campaign, the worst-managed in modern presidential campaign history, that's not in her skill set, either.

Then there's her ethics train wreck--hubby's post-White House fiscal shakedowns of a who's who of the world's thugs and well-dressed criminals (bad enough when your wife is a sitting senator; now, such connections are unconscionable). This was undoubtedly a shrewd political appointment by Obama--better to have your enemies pissing out of your tent, et cetera. It comes at the cost of an appointment that, on its policy merits, really could not be worse. It's a downgrade from Condi Rice, and that's really saying something. (At least with Rice, Democrats were willing to call her on her lies.) The only training whatsoever that prepares Clinton for this job is her extensive experience, gained from eight years as junior senator from New York, in pandering to the New York City pro-Likud lobby. And with genocide in Gaza and an imminent Israeli election, isn't that timely?

Write this down: Within a year, max, Clinton will join her husband (and Rice) as being eligible for prosecution for war crimes. Grade: F-

Dept. of Homeland Security: As governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano has enraged and repulsed her homies, the far-right anti-Mexican vigilante group The Minutemen. That recommends her, especially since DHS includes in its sprawling bureaucracy both ICE and the Border Patrol.

Alas, once you get past immigration policy it becomes obvious how Napolitano, as a Democrat, got two terms in the same state that produced John McCain, Barry Goldwater, and Evan Mecham. She's backed the war in Iraq; a former federal prosecutor, she's also a proponent of the War on Drugs. The wild card is how she feels about warrantless spying, the PATRIOT Act, no-fly lists, and the other various civil atrocities DHS has perpetrated under the banner of 9-11. On that, the jury on her--and her new boss--is still out. She's notorious for her tolerance of the frequent excesses of America's Looniest Law Enforcement Leader, Maricopa County (Phoenix) Sheriff Joe Arpaio--but she's in a whole new league of prisoner abuse now. Grade: C-

National Security Advisor: Former NATO commander James Jones opposed the invasion of Iraq. Good for him. He also backed John McCain for President, and (now that the US is there) wants to "win" the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Somehow I don't get the sense that Barack Obama sold him on this job by telling him that we're getting out of Iraq and have already lost Afghanistan, too. Grade: D-

Director of Central Intelligence: Obama has drawn some flack from congressional Democrats for his pick of Leon Panetta to run the CIA. Dianne Feinstein and others wanted a CIA insider to get the job, as a way to boost morale and operational efficiency after the CIA was first trashed, then bypassed by Cheney allies (in favor of their own, cherry-picked pipelines, along with a massive expansion of Pentagon intelligence units) over the past eight years.

Of course, a high esprit de corps at the CIA poses its own problems (tendencies to bloody coups and genocides, for example). That aside, Panetta's not a bad pick. As a former Chief of Staff (under Clinton) he reviewed daily intelligence briefings for the President, and he also served (with Gates) in the Iraq Study Group. He also spent some time in intelligence as a congressman. This means he both knows his way around the intelligence community and has some obvious political skills and connections. At the same time, as an "outsider," perhaps he can bring in the fresh eye and depoliticized reexamination of paradigms that America's intelligence apparatus desperately needed after 9-11, but never got.

Incidentally, it was Panetta, pre-November, who, surveying the rubble that Dubya has left America in, noted that "The next guy, whoever he is, will be a one-term president--if he is lucky."

Hmm. Grade: B

Director of National Intelligence: It's true that almost every member of America's military and intelligence leadership is prosecutable for war crimes, but Adm. (ret.) Dennis Blair, Barack Obama's choice for the nation's highest intelligence post, is guiltier than most. The East Timor Action Network tells the story:

"As Commander-in-Chief of the US Pacific Command from 1999 to 2002, Blair was the highest ranking US military official in the region during the period of East Timor's independence referendum at the end of Indonesia's violent occupation. During that time he undermined the Clinton administration's belated efforts to support human rights and self-determination in the Indonesian-occupied territory and opposed congressional efforts to limit military assistance [to Indonesia]."

ETAN could have added that Blair also encouraged and reassured Indonesian leaders during the (once again) indiscriminate, genocidal Indonesian violence that accompanied the referendum. Given the need to repair the US intelligence agencies' international standing after eight years of committing, and encouraging allies to commit, extensive and gross human rights violations, the last thing we need is a nominee for our intelligence agencies (given their own sordid histories) with a history of encouraging allies to commit gross human rights violations. Grade: D-

United Nations Representative: After eight years of unbridled US contempt for the United Nations--the low point of which was Dubya's nomination of far-right zealot John Bolton, who favors abolishing the UN, to this post--at least Barack Obama has nominated for this job someone who believes it should exist. However, on matters of actual policy, Susan Rice is--by any measure of the term that doesn't use Bolton as its standard--a hawk, just like Clinton, Gates, Jones, and many of Obama's second-tier security appointments. And to think he won the presidency in large part because he was less of a militarist than Hillary Clinton. Grade: D+

US Trade Representative: What does Ron Kirk, former mayor of a city (Dallas) whose international trade is almost entirely in the oil economy, know about undoing the damage of free trade agreements? Answer: nothing. But that's not his job. Instead, under Obama--who campaigned against NAFTA while an aide reassured Canadian officials that Barack didn't really mean it--Kirk will be entrusted with putting a happy face on the same old anti-labor, anti-environment, anti-poor corporate regime. The mayor of Dallas should be just about right for that. Grade: D-

Social Services

Dept. of Health and Human Services: Former Senate majority leader Tom Daschle has not only been tapped to head HHS, but also will run a newly created "Office of Health Reform." He has been given this portfolio largely so that he can use his Capitol Hill experience to help shepherd comprehensive health care reform through Congress. Setting aside for the moment the fact that Obama's plan is well short of the universal single-payer system we really need, Daschle is a good choice for this task. Grade: B+

Dept. of Housing and Urban Development: Shaun Donovan, former New York City housing commissioner, earned his chops managing one of the few public housing agencies in the country that still attempts to serve low-income and poorer citizens (are you listening, SHA?). Moreover, under his leadership, by all accounts it did so relatively well. Obama will unquestionably bring more of a focus on urban policy than we've seen since the '60s, and Donovan--despite or because of his front line work away from the bureaucratic halls of DC--seems like a fine choice to implement it. Grade: A

Dept. of Education: The nomination of Chicago schools superintendent Arne Duncan has drawn relatively little scrutiny, partly because nobody knows who Duncan is--except outraged Chicago parents groups like PURE (Parents United for Responsible Education) who've battled him for years on his over-reliance on testing, his contempt for public input, his school closure process (is any of this sounding familiar, Seattle?) and his enthusiasm for charter schools at the expense of funding schools in less advantaged neighborhoods. Entrusting Duncan to fix the damage created by No Child Left Behind seems, well, implausible. Grade: D

Dept. of Labor: Rep. Hilda Solis of California was the last Cabinet position nominated by Obama (prior to Bill Richardson's withdrawal from Commerce, which at this writing remains unfilled). That tells you how much Obama cares about unions. Which is a shame, because Solis--the daughter of working-class union immigrants--has a solid pro-labor voting record (she was a force behind the Employee Free Choice Act) and a history of labor activism. After eight years of Bush appointee Elaine Chao, who believes all unions should be destroyed, Solis can't take office soon enough. Grade: A

Dept. of Veteran Affairs: To end this grim recitation on an upbeat note (we're all about hope, you know!), Gen. (ret) Eric Shinseki was Army Chief of Staff from 1999-2003. In 2003, he told Congress that "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" would be required to successfully occupy Iraq. For this entirely accurate apostasy, he was crucified by Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, and other civilian neocons. Shinseki was forced to take early retirement, his career destroyed by the Bush administration in a brutal warning to other military leaders not to question the Bush faith.

We know how that worked out.

Six years later, Barack Obama has nominated Shinseki to run the Department of Veteran Affairs. Can he run the department well? Of course. Is this an official apology from the United States Government to Gen. Shinseki for a bunch of venomous chickenhawk morons having destroyed an honorable man's career? No, but it's as close to one as he is ever likely to get, and it also tells other military brass that their professional expertise is once again respected. For this Obama deserves enormous credit. Grade: A+