President Obama just retook the oath from Chief Justice Roberts, just to clear up any lingering concerns.

White House Counsel Greg Craig just put out this statement …

“We believe that the oath of office was administered effectively and that the President was sworn in appropriately yesterday. But the oath appears in the Constitution itself. And out of an abundance of caution, because there was one word out of sequence, Chief Justice Roberts administered the oath a second time.”

From the press pool report:

At 735 pm, Roberts administred the oath of office again to obama in the map room. Robert gibbs said the wh counsel, greg craig, believes the oath was fine Tuesday, but one word was out of sequence so they did this out of a “an abundance of caution.”

“We decided it was so much fun…” Obama joked while sitting on a couch.

Obama stood and walked over to make small talk with pool as roberts donned
his black robe.

“Are you ready to take the oath?” Roberts asked.

“I am, and we’re going to do it very slowly,” obama replied.

Oath took 25 seconds.

After a flawless recitation, roberts smiled and said, “congratulations,
again.”

Obama said, “thank you, sir.”

Smattering of applause.

“All right.” Obama said. “The bad news for the pool is there’s 12 more
balls.”

Sarah Palin is whining about the media so much that even Newsmax is telling her to give it a rest.

Let me try to keep up with this. First the New York Post and the New York Times said Caroline Kennedy had bowed out of the New York race. Then NBC said: no, seems like it was a misunderstanding between Kennedy and Paterson (helluva a misunderstanding). Then they backed off and said: nope, she’s really out. Now the AP is saying she’s still in.

It is possible that all of this drama is part of a single, highly coordinated plan and constitutes the first withdrawal through self-immolation performance art.

Late Update: Here’s a more detailed run-down from Eric Kleefeld, who has the thankless task of reporting this nonsense as straight news.

After Chief Justice Roberts bungled administering the president’s oath of office, thus forcing the first presidential oath do-over in almost a century, I can see now that Republican incompetence is turning out to be the main theme of this administration, just like the last one.

Still more frightening, he apparently spent weeks practicing.

Hillary just made a triumphant arrival at Foggy Bottom. Cheering State staffers crowd what I guess is the main lobby there, and she’s making a short speech now. Looks like a campaign rally, such is the level of enthusiasm there for her.

For technology-saturated Obama staffers arriving at the 20th century White House is like going from Xbox to Atari, says Obama deputy flack Bill Burton. That and the day’s other political news in the TPMDC Morning Roundup.

Matt Cooper says military procurement reform is sexy. Really.

We’re going to be digging more into this today. But I wanted to flag this for you early. GOP senators are bottling up two of President Obama’s key environment appointees and appear to be gunning for Carol Browner, the enviro czar in the White House — an early skirmish over whether we’re going to see real action on global warming.

The latest poll shows the right making big gains in Israel ahead of next month’s election. And not just Likud, which this poll shows now again clearly in the lead, but Avigdor Lieberman’s rancid, far-right Yisrael Beiteinu party, which this poll shows winning an unprecedented 16 Knesset seats. Very dark.

I hear Obama’s going to appoint George Mitchell as his Middle East (i.e., Israel-Palestine) special envoy today. Sooner the better.