According to the NRA, the odds-on favorite for Attorney General under Obama is Eric Holder, who doesn’t believe that the 2nd Amendment guarantees an individual right to own firearms. He was a signatory to one of the anti-individual right amicus briefs during the Heller proceedings:

From the NRA-ILA:

Media reports say President-elect Barack Obama has selected Eric Holder as his Attorney General, and that Holder may already have accepted the offer. Holder, as Deputy Attorney General under Janet Reno during the Clinton Administration, said that the Second Amendment does not protect an individual right, but instead protects the right to have a firearm when serving with a militia. After leaving office, Holder stuck to that assertion when he signed Janet Reno’s brief to the Supreme Court in the Heller case, which stated, “The Second Amendment does not protect firearms possession or use that is unrelated to participation in a well-regulated militia.”

So it looks like the new AG is going to be a gun-grabber.

As an integral part of Obama’s practice of taking three or four sides to every issue, Austan Goolsbee is always there to offer alternatives. If some interest group doesn’t like the Senator’s announced position, Goolsbee will quickly toss out alternative ideas until something sticks.

The most notable dustup was last Spring, when Obama told voters in OH and PA that he would “take a hammer to NAFTA” if elected. The Canadian Finance Minister, David Emerson, wrily responded that “more knowledgeable observers should inform Mr. Obama that our country is the #1 supplier of energy to the United States….perhaps the Senator would prefer to buy oil from Hugo Chavez…”

Well, nobody ever said that the Canadians suffered fools easily.

Goolsbee was quickly dispatched to tell the Canadians to pay no attention to Obama’s public statements; that in fact, he just loves NAFTA and the Canadians! This clumsy back-channel manuveur quickly became public, and Goolsbee then spent a few months in the witness protection program.

He re-surfaced for the fall campaign, but with the same modus operandi. Asked by Larry Kudlow why Obama wanted to double the Capital Gains Tax–from 15% to 28%, Goolsbee informed us that the real number was actually closer to about 24$. Since then, that number occasionally drifts down to 20% in statements from team Obama.

Of course, with that kind of uncertainty created about how much investments will be taxed in an Obama administration, it’s no wonder that so few buyers are stepping back into the stock market after the recent sell-off. Markets are forward looking–as in the term “futures contracts”–and they don’t like what they see. Since they hate uncertainty, they obviously aren’t crazy about Obama.

Given this backdrop of equivocation, it will be interesting to see what new positions Goolsbee tries out tomorrow.