From last night’s All Stars.

On Obama tapping Judd Gregg for commerce secretary:

Really, the job is not really worth a pitcher of warm spit, to quote a famous vice president years ago. It a second- level job in the cabinet. It doesn’t have a lot of influence.
Ask yourself who was the commerce secretary in the Bush administration. Nobody can tell you. The only one who is remembered historically is Herbert Hoover.
Now, it might be that Gregg, looking at an upcoming reelection campaign in two years, thinking that his state has been trending Democratic as the southern part of New Hampshire becomes a colony of liberal Massachusetts, that he may lose. And so he wants a graceful exit. That’s possible.
What I think Obama’s calculation is clear–it gets him — it looks as if he’s reaching across the aisle again. Secondly, it weakens the Republicans because whoever substitutes on the Senate side is going to be a weaker candidate in 2010 and, also, probably less conservative.
And, thirdly, perhaps he thinks that he’s going to do a grand compromise next year or at the end of the stimulus, in which there is going to be a commission and an agreement on curbing entitlements.
And for that, perhaps, he wants to have a Republican on the team who can make an argument to conservatives and Republicans, because it will probably include a hike in taxes, and he would need a Republican on his side in that argument.

On Daschle’s failure to pay taxes:

I think, look, Democrats are the ones who preached all of last year that paying high taxes is patriotic. Well, only if you pay them.
And the other — it was Jim DeMint, the senator from South Carolina, who said that of course Democrats like higher taxes. They all know that in the end they aren’t going to pay them.
With Daschle–it might have been unintentional, but it’s hardly as if he was lent a pickup on Saturday night to take his date to a movie. This is a year — two years with a Cadillac and a driver.
But the real loser here–Daschle will be confirmed. The loser is Obama. He doesn’t walk on water. He is not the guy who is going to reform America.
And with all of these — the Geithner affair, Bill Richardson, and now the nonpayment of taxes with Daschle, the sheen on the clean Obama administration is already off.