Well, I don't have a TV, so I just got it off Political Wire...
But apparently Obama's chosen Penny Pritzker to be Commerce Secretary and Janet Napolitano for Homeland Security.
First, Napolitano:
An immediate repercussion of choosing Napolitano will be that Arizona Secretary of State Jan Brewer will assume the governorship. While she shares part of the same first name as Napolitano, she does not share the same party -- that's right, this leaves Arizona in Republican hands.
Local partisan politics aside, I'm sure she Napolitano will be praised as a strong and popular choice for Homeland Security, as she's a very well-regarded governor of a border state and a former prosecutor. Imaginably this endows her with enough executive prowess and feistiness to whip the bureaucracy into shape.
I believe she has a reputation for beinghawkish on immigration - for instance, successfully calling for national guard troops to be dispatched to the Arizona border. Many observers have cited this as reason for her popularity in Arizona.
Penny Pritzker has a rather different background. She's the billionaire heiress of the Hyatt hotel chain (heiress isn't meant derrogatively - she's done a great deal herself to manage and build the business) who has served as Obama's finance chair since Spring. I can only imagine that this pick will draw a whole lot of Mau-Mauing about a) elitism b) Chicago and c) favoritism. Judging by her Wikipedia page, the sub-prime mortage crisis might be thrown in - apparently the nature of the Hyatt chain has thrown her into tangential association with it. In any case, my sense is that with Prtizker we're probably not getting an economic populist I'd hope for in a commerce secretary, but it's hard to tell at this stage what her ideology may be. However, it probably is a choice that takes some initial flak to balance out the general praise Napolitano should receive.
Oh, and Rush Limbaugh thinks Pritzker coddles terrorists...
On a side note, both Pritzker and Napolitano are also associated with education - here's Pritzker talking about public education in Chicago. And Napolitano has gotten great reviews on education policy in her home state.
Anyway, would love to hear your thoughts about the choices...