From TIME’s Amy Sullivan:

Liberals are furious with Obama for asking mega-church pastor and evangelical Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his Inauguration. Conservatives are furious with Warren for accepting the invitation (just as they savaged him two years ago when he invited Obama to speak at his annual HIV/AIDS conference).

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Just in time to deal with the Madoff Mess. She’s got the qualifications and the chops. I love this exchange:

Schapiro has shown aplomb during 20 years as a Washington- based-regulator. When she became CFTC chairman 14 years ago, then-Chicago Board of Trade President Thomas Donovan said he wouldn’t be “intimidated by some

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Curtis Gans of the Center for the Study of the American Electorate has issued his final report on turnout in the 2008 election. Among his findings:

In all, 131,257,542 Americans voted for president in 2008, nine million more than cast their ballots in 2004* (against only a 6.5 million increase in eligible population).

The turnout

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In a letter to RNC Chairman Mike Duncan, former Speaker Newt Gingrich writes that he is “saddened” by the latest RNC ad campaign, which tries to link Barack Obama to the Blagojevich scandal:

I was saddened to learn that at a time of national trial, when a president-elect is preparing to take office in the midst of the worst

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The White House today played coy about prospects of an auto bailout. Here’s CBS’s inestimable Bill Plante trying to nail down an answer during today’s briefing with White House Press Secretary Dana Perino:

Q Just one more time. Why do you say, “if we decide to do it”?

MS. PERINO: Because I don’t have an announcement

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This is from the latest Obama pool report:

After the press conference at dodge academy, pe obama and vpe biden went upstairs for a 15 minute meeting with a group of 1st-4th graders–about a dozen.
After a few minutes of chit chat in which he asked the kids what they were studying–(when one child said “decimals” mr obama replied

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William Howard Taft, the last American president with facial hair, famously said that “every time I make an appointment, I create nine enemies and one ingrate.” (Or maybe it was “one ingrate and twenty enemies.”) We can assume that Taft’s mustache makes him an expert at such things, in the same way that Rod Blagojevich’s “toupee that is …

Good points all, Joe. (Though the fact that two of those Udalls were elected to the Senate this year suggests that we have not put dynastic politics entirely behind us). And I like your idea of thinking beyond political circles for these jobs. Another candidate I might add is Dr. Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic …

Not an obvious move.

By those dastardly folks over at The Page.

We’ll miss you, Jay!

The Obama transition office has just released the following statement:

“At the direction of the President-elect, a review of Transition staff contacts with Governor Blagojevich and his office has been conducted and completed and is ready for release. That review affirmed the public statements of the President-elect that he had no

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