The most trusted name in news reports:

A major Bush rule gets scrapped by Obama

Russell Tice, who previously blew the whistle on the NSA warrantless eavesdropping, has more to say now that W has left the building. Invited to return for another Countdown appearance tomorrow, he seems to be prepared to list news agencies that weren’t in the “discard” pile but were instead in the “monitor” stack.

As I reported earlier, when Senator Reid spoke at Progressive Media Summit, he stated that he supported investigations of BushCo wrong-doing, even stating he was increasing the budget for such investigations. He specifically mentioned that Senator Levin would be doing some such investigation.

Alaska blogger and reporter Denis Zaki arrived in Emmonak yesterday evening. He attempted to attend a meeting this morning between State of Alaska and village officials, but Palin’s people wanted him out of the picture, so the village officials asked him to leave. Dennis is pissed.

Caroline Kennedy was a weak candidate from the start, and both New York and the Democrats stood to lose a lot of she choked in the Senate. Teddy’s health crisis yesterday offers her a graceful exit. If she truly does feel called to public service in politics, now is her chance to prove that she’s got what it takes by running for office.

David Paterson handled the whole situation quite artfully, and in the end did the right thing. Color me impressed.

Over at the Telegraph, Evans-Pritchard points out that UK banks have 4.4 Trillion dollars in foreign liabilities – twice the size of the UK’s entire economy.

We wrapped up our Senate adventures today by video taping five freshmen Senators — Jeanne Shaheen, Tom Udall, Mark Udall, Jeff Merkeley and Roland Burris — about where they stood on Employee Free Choice.   

Very interesting.  We will try to have the video up soon.

Slaves—men of West African origin branded with Christian monikers like Tom, Peter, Ben, Harry, and Daniel—helped build the White House. Three were on loan from its chief architect, James Hoban. Construction began in 1792, and slaves worked as sawyers, quarrymen, carpenters, stonemasons, brickmakers. Such was the fabric of the new republic:

Clinton’s got a lot of name recognition and is generally (but not universally) liked overseas. Her husband is, likewise, still very popular. Added to the goodwill Obama starts with, I hope she’ll be able to do some good in repairing America’s damaged reputation, and the source of that damaged reputation, America’s foreing policy.

In a thoroughly unsurprising move, Bush chose to make sure that Libby will continue to shield his own role in the CIA leak case rather than pay Libby back for taking the fall for Bush and Cheney.