LaHood for Transportation? It Wasn't That Long a Stretch.

There was much surprise last week when President-elect Barack Obama selected outgoing Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.) for secretary of transportation. After all, LaHood isn't an expert on transportation matters.

His district is pretty rural and not known for having great transportation problems -- save for when Capponi's Restaurant in Toluca closes on the weekends and diners head down the road to Minonk. Won't hardly see a traffic light for miles.

And okay, so maybe his congressional district isn't a passenger rail hub. (If you ask Amtrak for an itinerary from Washington to Peoria, the largest city in his district, you're offered a 17 1/2 -hour train ride to Indianapolis and then a four-hour wait for a bus to take you on a four-hour trip to the bus station at the Peoria airport.)

On the plus side, LaHood is on the House Appropriations Committee, so he knows how to spend money, he defends earmarks, and he's no doubt been to O'Hare Airport, so at least he's got air travel experience.

Still, there had been chatter for a while that LaHood was thinking of setting up shop at a law firm here in Washington when his term ends next month. So when word spread last week that incoming White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel had called LaHood on Tuesday to offer him the job, the cognoscenti were taken aback.

But maybe they shouldn't have been. Obama did, after all, pledge to put Republicans in his Cabinet. We're told that when Obama and LaHood ran into each other on the House floor this past spring, LaHood went over to him and Obama said, "You're at the top of my list." Earlier, after Obama was elected to the Senate in 2004 and was planning to visit Peoria, he reached out to LaHood, who helped set up his schedule. Then there were those bipartisan lunches with Emanuel.

In retrospect, seems pretty obvious that LaHood was a solid contender for a top Cabinet post.

Taking a Shine to a Certain Shoe

Who says President Bush isn't doing what he can to help the economy? Well, the Turkish economy, anyway. Seems that shoe an Iraqi journalist threw at him last week has become a hot-ticket item, with orders for 300,000 pairs pouring in from Iraq, the United States and Iran, Bloomberg News reported.

The Turkish shoe manufacturer, Ramazan Baydan, said he may rename the brown shoe, called "Model 271," the "Bush Shoe" or "Bye-Bye Bush," and he's hired an agency to look into television advertising.

The new orders for the shoe are four times what he normally sells in a year for that model, he said, so the company is going to hire 100 more people to boost production. In addition to orders in the Middle East, Baydan said he's received a request for 4,000 pairs of shoes from a Maryland-based company called Davidson.

A Two-Year Tryout?

Many New York Democrats are much put out by the notion that Caroline Kennedy has decided recently that, well, it would be pretty neat to be a senator. So she'd like Gov. David A. Paterson to make her one.

The initial reaction to putting the late president's daughter in the Senate was routinely negative. Our favorite shot came from Rep. Gary Ackerman (D-N.Y.), who told a radio station: "I don't know what Caroline Kennedy's qualifications are, except that she has name recognition, but so does J-Lo. . . . I wouldn't make J-Lo the senator unless she proved she had great qualifications, but we haven't seen them yet." Ackerman later backed off, however.