For a while there this afternoon, President-elect Barack Obama’s immensely talented chief speechwriter, 27-year-old Jon Favreau, might have been pondering how to address that question.

That’s when some interesting photos of a recent party he attended — including one where he’s dancing with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of secretary of state-designate Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, and another where he’s placed his hand on the cardboard former first lady’s chest while a friend is offering her lips a beer — popped up on Facebook for about two hours. The photos were quickly taken down — along with every other photo Favreau had of himself on the popular social networking site, save for one profile headshot.

Asked about the photos, Favreau, who was recently appointed director of speechwriting for the White House, declined comment. A transition official said that Favreau had “reached out to Senator Clinton to offer an apology.”

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Obama has chosen Senator Hillary Clinton as the new Secretary of State, confirming weeks of internet and UK rumors.

Hillary Clinton on Monday vowed to make the United States a new “force for positive change.”

“The American people have demanded not just a new direction at home, but a new effort to renew America’s standing in the world as a force for positive change,” Clinton said after being nominated to the post of secretary of state by president-elect Barack Obama.  Clinton vowed to “reach out to the world again” after eight years of President George W. Bush’s administration and promised to give “this assignment, your administration and my country, my all.”

“America is a place founded on the idea that everyone should have the right to live up to his or her God-given potential. It is the same ideal that must guide America’s purpose in the world today,” said Clinton. Her nomination requires Senate confirmation, which is an all but foregone conclusion at this point.

Obama said that Clinton’s appointment as top diplomat was a “sign to friend and foe of the seriousness of my commitment to renew American diplomacy and restore our alliances.”

That and a sign of “change,” of course.  Nothing says “change” quite like picking a Clinton.

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For months, the soprano headlined Clinton’s, D-N.Y., campaign appearances as Dion’s “You and I” served as the former first lady’s campaign theme song.  Of course, one problem with this as a song choice is that it was originally written to be the theme music for AIR CANADA - not helping the socialist “ring” to her campaign that Hillary can’t seem to shake off.  “High above the mountains, far across the sea,” bellowed Dion over loudspeaker after loudspeaker.

“I can hear your voice calling out to me, Brighter than the sun and darker than the night, I can see your love shining like a light,” the Canadian songstress would sing as the aspiring American president took or departed the political stage.

The song played on, from Iowa to South Carolina, without missing a beat.  But, now, only the sounds of silence can be heard from the Clinton camp’s Celine CD.

Instead on the trail these days, Big Head Todd and the Monsters are in and their “Blue Sky” is seemingly the campaign’s favorite as the New York Senator enters and exits the stage.

The Clinton camp had no response when pressed by ABC News to explain why the sudden change from chick-favorite Vegas-anchored Dion to the masculine, Colorado-native Monsters.

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Clinton campaign spokesman Mo Elliethee admitted that the campaign had planted the question and said it would not happen again.

“On this occasion a member of our staff did discuss a possible question about Senator Clinton’s energy plan at a forum,” Elliethee said.

“However, Senator Clinton did not know which questioners she was calling on during the event. This is not standard policy and will not be repeated again.”

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Once the presidency was over, there was no room for Socks any more. After years of loyal service at the White House, the black and white cat was dumped on Betty Currie, Bill Clinton’s personal secretary, who also had an embarrassing clean-up role in the saga of his relationship with the intern Monica Lewinsky.

Clinton’s treatment of Socks cuts to the heart of the questions about her candidacy. Is she too cold and calculating to win the presidency? Or does it signify political invincibility by showing she is willing to deploy every weapon to get what she wants?

Clinton wrote a crowd-pleas-ing book Dear Socks, Dear Buddy: Kids’ Letters to the First Pets, in which she claimed that only with the arrival of Socks and his “toy mouse” did the White House “become a home”.

Being Clinton, she also lectured readers that pets are an “adoption instead of an acquisition” and warned them to look out for their safety. (Buddy, the chocolate labrador, it should be noted, bounded into a road soon after leaving the White House and was promptly run over.)

The financial sleaze that dominated the final Clinton years is also making a comeback. After Norman Hsu, one of Clinton’s biggest campaign “bundlers”, was exposed as a fraud, it emerged last week that waiters, dishwashers and street pedlars in New York’s Chinatown have been handing over $1,000 and $2,000 sums to her campaign – some with genuine pride, others because they were ordered to do so by neighbourhood bosses.

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He added: “If Senator Clinton becomes the Democratic nominee, at some point she will begin to receive national security briefings that will include sensitive information. At such a point, continuing to keep Berger on board as a key advisor, where he might have access to sensitive material, would be beyond incomprehensible.”

The Clinton campaign declined to comment.

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Sen. Hillary Clinton scored with a Democratic audience last night by contradicting her husband’s belief that a terrorist could be tortured to foil an imminent plot - but what observers didn’t know is she was contradicting herself, too.

“It cannot be American policy, period,” Clinton (D-N.Y.) told debate moderator Tim Russert, who asked if there should b

e a presidential exemption to allow the torture of a terror chieftain if authorities knew a bomb was about to go off, but didn’t know where it was.

When Russert revealed ex-President Bill Clinton advocated such a policy on a recent NBC “Meet the Press” appearance, Hillary Clinton won huge applause from the Dartmouth College audience with a deadpan comeback:

“Well, I’ll talk to him later.”

She may have to give herself that talk, too.

Last October, Clinton told the Daily News: “If we’re going to bepreparing for the kind of improbable but possible eventuality, then it has to be done within the rule of law.”

She said then the “ticking time bomb” scenario represents a narrow exception to her opposition to torture as morally wrong, ineffective and dangerous to American soldiers.

“In the event we were ever confronted with having to interrogate a detainee with knowledge of an imminent threat to millions of Americans, then the decision to depart from standard international practices must be made by the President, and the President must be held accountable,” she said.

Clinton’s campaign did not immediately respond to numerous requests for comment on the eye-popping contradiction.

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Clinton’s campaign, one of several Democratic committees that Hsu raised money for or donated to, also has decided to increase its screening of major fund-raisers, requiring them to submit to the extraordinary additional step of a criminal background check, campaign aides said.

The dramatic return of all Hsu-raised donations was aimed at ending a controversy that awakened comparisons to Bill Clinton’s 1990s fund-raising scandal and renewed scrutiny of others major fund-raisers and donors inside Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign.  The fact that a foreign national can buy so much access to the former first lady and presidential contender should be alarming, although this does seem to be only the tip of the iceberg.

Sen. Clinton “simply didn’t want to have to keep answering questions about a bundler whose background is now clearly in question,” a senior adviser said, speaking only on condition of anonymity.   Note that the response is not that she thought anything was wrong, just that she didn’t want to have to keep answering questions.

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