Taking care of business

A slew of cabinet confirmations comes through:

WASHINGTON, Jan 20 (Reuters) - The Democratic-led U.S. Senate began confirming new President Barack Obama's Cabinet on Tuesday, but it put off until Wednesday a vote on the designee for secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton.

In a single unanimous vote, the Senate confirmed Steven Chu as energy secretary, Tom Vilsack as agriculture secretary, Arne Duncan as education secretary, Ken Salazar as interior secretary and Janet Napolitano as secretary of homeland security. It also approved Peter Orszag as head of the White House budget office.

Clinton's held up until a Wednesday vote because, as mcjoan noted earlier, Sen. John Cornyn's craving a repeat of the worst of the 1990s, where we all get to be held hostage as the GOP digs through the Clinton finances again--this time culling through foreign donations to the Clinton Foundation, not a land deal in Arkansas.

Same shit, different decade.

And oh, yeah. In a direct strike at Bush's flurry of midnight regulations, there was this:

White House chief of staff orders federal agencies to halt all regulations pending review

One of President Barack Obama's first acts is to order federal agencies to halt all pending regulations until his administration can review them.

The order went out Tuesday afternoon, shortly after Obama was inaugurated president, in a memorandum signed by new White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel.

Not a bad day's work, considering it's Day Zero Point One and there were a few other events to attend to.

(Discussion about the rollback of Bush's midnight regulations is going on in Sahdad's recommended diary.)