Gaspard, who is besties with Cuomo, had a little meeting with Paterson last week. Paterson apparently neglected to decide on the spot to hand the the governor's mansion over to a legacy admission, and so, a week later, the White House arranged a front-page New York Times story on how the White House did not support this stupid incompetent unpopular Democratic governor of New York (half of whose staff is currently made up of Hillary Clinton vets).

And that was stupid. Because this is not Chicago and people do not take kindly to Rahm Emanuel muscling in on local matters. And Paterson would have to be an incredibly weak-willed and self-loathing politician to decide to step aside now. It's incredible to imagine that no one in the White House foresaw the Times gambit making the Governor dig in, but that appears to be what happened. And there is precedent:

Lloyd Grove, who's been around, remembers when Rahm tried this exact same tactic with a conservative Democratic senator in 1993. That little Senator grew up to be Richard Shelby, still a senator from Alabama, but now a Republican. (This tone-deaf approach to political hardball also suggests that Rahm is much better at whipping up support in the House than in the incredibly self-important and thin-skinned Senate.)

Because it looks like the Obama administration's trying to debunk the idea of a psychotic, power-crazed Jew, running around the White House, making decisions and deciding policy for the rest of the country. They don't want him to be seen as the Democratic Karl Rove, which, in all fairness, who would? The spin they're trying to deliver looks to be: Emanuel's role, while important, isn't a man-behind-the-curtains one, and also, that they're trying to make him softer, nicer, kinder, and seen as the hard-working guy they see him as. But they also don't want to completely tone down the stabby. While Rahm declined to be interviewed for his big New York Times profile treatment, plenty of his colleagues spoke on and off the record about him. The anecdotes in it are pretty juicy:

• The lede, which is the story about Blumenthal:

  "...Clinton wanted to hire Mr. Blumenthal, a loyal confidant who had helped her promote the idea of a "vast right-wing conspiracy" more than a decade ago. But President Obama's campaign veterans still blamed him for spreading harsh attacks against their candidate in the primary showdown with Mrs. Clinton last year. So Mr. Emanuel talked with Mrs. Clinton, said Democrats informed about the situation, and explained that bringing Mr. Blumenthal on board was a no-go. The bad blood among his colleagues was too deep, and the last thing the administration needed, he concluded, was dissension and drama in the ranks. In short, Mr. Blumenthal was out."

  
  

• A quote by Joel Johnson on the precarious of his role in the White House: "He's about to be tested; he's spinning a lot of plates over there and he breaks a lot of china," said Joel Johnson, a close friend and fellow veteran official of the Clinton White House.
  
  
• Rahm's relentlessly aggro nature, which is pounded into the profile time and time again. For example, Axelrod, on the record: "'The president has a zenlike quality,' said Mr. Obama's senior adviser, David Axelrod. 'Rahm is a pile driver.'"
  
  
• The aforementioned revelation that Rahm didn't get invited to Camp David: "When Mr. Obama invited longtime aides like Mr. Axelrod and Robert Gibbs, the press secretary, to Camp David recently, Mr. Emanuel was not included."
  
  
• Obama's visceral reaction to the Valerie Jarrett profile in the Times: "When a New York Times Magazine profile of Ms. Jarrett last month explored the old scratchiness, White House officials said the normally calm Mr. Obama erupted with anger."
  
  
• The attempts to define a softer, kinder Rahm: "While he remains a tough, foul-mouthed scrapper, he is more likely these days to give a dog dish to a senator who got a new puppy (as he did to Kent Conrad this summer) than send a dead fish to an enemy (as he did two decades ago as a brash young campaign aide)."
  
  
• And some nice trivia: Rahm's schedule. "Mr. Emanuel, 49, starts his day shortly after 5 a.m., when he swims at the Y.M.C.A. and then hits the House gymnasium to pick up intelligence from colleagues from his days in Congress. At 7:30 a.m., he gathers top White House officials in his office and meets the full senior staff in the Roosevelt Room at 8:15 a.m. He then sees the president alone in the Oval Office for 10 minutes, a private session repeated at the end of each day. Aides estimate he talks with 50 people a day by telephone and sends hundreds of e-mail messages. Phone calls often last a minute or two, just long enough to deliver a point or extract information. E-mail messages are often a word or two."

But is Rahm, the dog-bowl sender going to win out over Rahm, the Godfather-aping dead-fish gifter? Hopefully not, for the sake of the White House, and audiences of good political gossip like this. They need a guy who's going to keep getting the job done for them while being somewhat impervious - or at the very least, forgetful - of the risks to his own political career; it makes him dangerous. Meanwhile, White House reporters just need good material, and Rahm - so long as he stays on target - should keep delivering.

Now that Emanuel has successfully merged Endeavor, the agency he co-founded, with the venerable William Morris Agency, he has the opportunity to "fuck CAA," something that's been rumored to motivate him to get out of bed each morning. How will Emanuel do it? By controlling everything.

Ari Emanuel has made a bold calculation: in order to survive, talent firms are going to have to do more. They must stop being simple deal-makers, become "mega-agencies" – vast, multi-faceted companies with marketing departments, events divisions, and new media offshoots which help clients to leverage income from a wide variety of sources.

Agents will also have to take a more pro-active role in the actual creation of films, making them more likely to be called upon to "package" a production: attaching directors, producers, and actors from their own stable to a particular project, before selling it to the studios.

In such a business, larger firms boast a huge competitive advantage. CAA recently announced it will move into new territory financing new films. Taken to its natural conclusion, this could dramatically alter the sort of films that make it to cinemas.

Optimists, which Hollywood is never short of, believe that this represents the potential to produce a new "golden age" of film-making, where power is returned to creatives, instead of being stifled by studios. "Ari created his new firm because he knew he had to be big to be at the level where he could successfully do that," says a former colleague of Emanuel's. "It's a gamble, frankly, but if anyone can pull it off, he can."

Whether or not "packaging" and the ever-growing power of Hollywood talent management firms is a good or bad thing is open to debate, and frankly we're kind of torn on the matter, but for anyone to suggest, as the anonymous "optimists" cited in the article do, that the industry's progression toward mega-agencies is even remotely rooted in an idealistic desire to revitalize its level of artistic integrity is, well, just plain stupid.

The types of people who become agents are almost universally motivated by one thing—Money. And sex, but mostly money. Even more so than the people who work in studios, agents are driven by greed. Just ask anyone who's ever had an agent in Hollywood and we're pretty sure that they'll confirm that. Not that's there's anything all too necessarily wrong with that, we just felt compelled to address that ridiculous fantasy here and now.

Finally, with all this hype going around about Ari Emanuel, we're kind of eager to see how his inevitable downfall will play out. Will some renegade screenwriter step up to be the Joe Eszterhas to Ari's Mike Ovitz? Regardless, we give Ari's reign of terror somewhere between five and ten years, depending on how long his brother is working in the White House. Hollywood may be a town full of pricks, but it's a town with a history of taking down any one prick that dares to swell too much bigger than any of the others.

Ari Emanuel: 21st Century Hollywood Mogul [Independent]

Ari "has emerged in the last six weeks as the pre-eminent power player in a Hollywood that has often bemoaned the sunset of colorful moguls from an older generation...." What has he done in those six weeks, exactly? He merged his agency with William Morris and then fired everyone at William Morris.

But we all know that Ari is relentlessly ambitious and cutthroat—in fact we know this is true of the entire Emanuel family, even the doctor one. So what is really different? Why does it matter that Ari is threatening the co-chairman of NBC Entertainment "with personal ruin"? Surely he's done that a million times before?

"Nobody wants to be on the wrong side of Ari Emanuel, especially now that his brother is running the White House," said one television executive, who asked for anonymity to preserve harmony with him.

Oh, hah. Of course! Rahm is the most second-most powerful man in the country now, so all of show business belongs to his brother.

[Photo: Getty]

You will read it, and feel better about how Obama is not doing this or that quickly enough or even at all. Or, if you don't want to read it, because it is long or because something about Matt Bai bugs you, try Ezra Klein's summary. See? Don't you feel better about things now?

Ok. Now. You probably don't want to read Kevin Baker's essay in the upcoming Harper's, "Barack Hoover Obama," which is more or less the exact same observation, only presented less optimistically. And, specifically, it addresses the inkling of dissatisfaction we have each time we hear that Emanuel phrase repeated: don't you have, right now, a rather historic opportunity to redefine what the "possible" means?

No doubt, President Obama and his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, would claim that by practicing "the art of the possible," they are ensuring that "the perfect does not become the enemy of the good." But by not even proposing the relevant legislation, Obama has ceded a key part of the process-so much so that his retreat seems not so much tactical as a reversion to his core political beliefs.

A major theme of Obama's 2006 book The Audacity of Hope is impatience with "the smallness of our politics" and its "partisanship and acrimony." He expresses frustration at how "the tumult of the sixties and the subsequent backlash continues to drive our political discourse," and voices a professional appreciation for Ronald Reagan's ability to exploit such divisions. The politician he admires the most-ironically enough, considering the campaign that was to come-is Bill Clinton. For all his faults, Clinton, in Obama's eyes, "instinctively understood the falseness of the choices being presented to the American people" and came up with his "Third Way," which "tapped into the pragmatic, non-ideological attitude of the majority of Americans."
[...]
Just as Herbert Hoover came to internalize the "business progressivism" of his era as a welcome alternative to the futile, counterproductive conflicts of an earlier time, so has Obama internalized what might be called Clinton's "business liberalism" as an alternative to useless battles from another time-battles that liberals, in any case, tended to lose.

Clinton's business liberalism, however, is a chimera, every bit as much a capitulation to powerful and selfish interests as was Hoover's 1920s progressivism. We are back in Evan Bayh territory here, espousing a "pragmatism" that is not really pragmatism at all, just surrender to the usual corporate interests. The common thread running through all of Obama's major proposals right now is that they are labyrinthine solutions designed mainly to avoid conflict. The bank bailout, cap-and-trade on carbon emissions, health-care pools-all of these ideas are, like Hillary Clinton's ill-fated 1993 health plan, simultaneously too complicated to draw a constituency and too threatening for Congress to shape and pass as Obama would like. They bear the seeds of their own defeat.

So yeah, this is just more typical liberal whining about how the guy who never really pretended to be anything more than a mainstream liberalish Democrat has turned out to be a mainstream liberalish Democrat, but still: WE WERE PROMISED A STEALTH SOCIALIST!

[Photo: Pete Souza/The White House]

According to Isikoff, there was a "secret meeting" held at the White House yesterday to discuss Obama's treatment of the whole torture issue. Attending the meeting were the leaders of various unnamed human rights and civil liberties groups, as well as many key Obama administration officials—-Eric Holder, Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod—-which sort of indicated how serious the Obama people were taking it. The purpose of the meeting seems pretty clear—-Obama and company, according to Isikoff, reached out to the leaders of the various groups present and basically said, "Ok, what do we need to do to make you people happy so this will all go away." In fact, Isikoff quoted Obama as saying something along the lines of "(Attorney General) Holder is having to spend way too much time on this." The leaders of the groups present floated the idea that Obama should appoint some sort of "truth commission" to investigate everything fully, thereby taking the burden off of Holder and the Justice Department, but Obama shot that idea down, going on to say that he was "firmly against" any sort of investigatory committee. Another idea floated by the groups was for Obama to go after one key prosecution in the case (Dick Cheney perhaps?) in the hopes of obtaining "a trophy," a head for the troops to rally around, but Obama shot that idea down as well. At one point, one of the group leaders took a shot at Obama, saying that he was "allowing President Bush's policies to become his own." According to Isikoff, this pissed Obama off greatly, to the point where he was visibly shaken by the comment, "demonstrably not pleased" according to Maddow.

It should be noted that Maddow asked Isikoff how it was that he came to know the details of the "secret meeting" to which he responded, "it's called reporting." We love that guy.

It is curious that the Post couldn't land a single Republican to complain about Emanuel and his heavy-handed tactics. And it may actually undermine the story's point somewhat—if the GOP is too scared to offer routine criticism of the president's right-hand man for a newspaper profile, then clearly his vengeful habits haven't been completely exorcised. He's just become more discreet. And he's probably thrilled to have the Post calling him a namby-pamby valet. It's an information operation! The guy is that good.

But as the Post puts it, "Rahmbo" has taken a more conciliatory tack than many expected in corralling lawmakers to advance the Obama agenda. He was supposed to be a shiv-wielding maniac, but the Post takes a look at how he's actually been going about his job and found a polite, thoughtful, accommodating young man.

Republicans Peter King and Olympia Snowe stepped forward to sing Emanuel's praises—"He always takes my calls," Snowe said—and the Post couldn't find a single GOPer to badmouth him. The only critical quote is from Newt Gingrich, from the Today show last month, comparing Emanuel to H.R. Haldeman.

He's taken to sending batches of cookies to lawmakers to get them through late-night legislative sessions, and even lets a pussy like Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid push him around:

During a recent Senate debate, Reid asked Emanuel to lean on three Democratic holdouts. When Emanuel reported back with a single convert, Reid chastised him that "batting .333 isn't good enough for the major leagues" of Congress. Emanuel responded with a string of expletives but tried again and produced a second vote.

The old Rahm would have pushed Reid's eyeballs out with his thumbs for saying something like that.

Hah, yes, hooray—details from a federal indictment released Thursday tell the proud story of "Congressman A," our own Rahm Emanuel, and how Blago tried to block money meant for a school in Rahm's district. Then Blago told Rahm, Rahm, he said, you know what would be really super nice? If your brother Ari got some celebrities to throw a fundraiser for me!

Rahm's brother Ari is, of course, a famous agent, and he is played by famous poisoned actor Jeremy Piven on a tv show, so obviously he knows lots of famous people.

Prosecutors said a fundraiser was never held. The aide would not say whether Emanuel ever actually learned of the request.

Hah. No, of course not. We're guessing Rahm did know of the request, and we're guessing he ignored it, because it was probably best to just ignore the crazy things Governor Blago said.

Of course this is proof that Rahm Emanuel is corrupt and probably guilty of CRIMES, according to The Corner.

Begala joined with fellow ex-Bill-and-Hillary-Clinton aide James Carville in recent months to highlight Limbaugh's influence over the Republican party and general ridiculousness, like saying he wanted Barack Obama to fail. That much is agreed upon.

What's not nailed down — but reported convincingly by Politico — is that Begala coordinated his campaign with White House buddies like Rahm Emanuel, the chief of staff. He and the president's press secretary publicly slammed Limbaugh.

It was a terrible White House conspiracy, you see, to engage in, uh... politics. That's basically illegal for Democrats, right?

CNN anchor Cooper wanted to get to the bottom of things partly because Begala, a CNN "analyst," used his CNN time as part of his scheme. So Cooper put on his very serious squinty face while interviewing the strategist.

Begala, in turn, did his best impersonation of a dodgy, slithering Richard Nixon aide, because why not get yet another day of free press out of the Limbaugh bashing?

It's just smart flackery: When the news media discusses the non-scandal of Rahm Emanuel planning to make Rush Limbaugh the face of the Republican party, it just reinforces the idea that Limbaugh is the face of the Republican party, a story that would otherwise be dying off right now.

Besides, Anderson loves making that serious squinty face.

He went to see The Wrestler, in DC, at a regular person theater (Obama didn't invite him to the White House screening? We bet Rahm talks over movies all the damn time.) And then:

"The guy sitting next to Rahm — literally sharing an armrest with him — had a seizure of some kind," the moviegoer tells me. "Rahm used some vulgarities to impress upon the movie theater staff — who wanted to move the guy out of the movie theater so they could restart the film — that they should wait until EMS got there."

A lesser political mind would've convinced the staff to let the seizing man remain where he was until help arrived with politeness, but not our Rahm!

(We can't believe Ben Smith completely neglected to mention how Rahm's dangerous non-ideological centrism almost got this man killed when Republican paramedics balked at Rahm's supposedly bipartisan attempts to resuscitate the man, but that's your liberal media for you.)

Of course liberals are notoriously easy to piss off, and the people most able to piss them off are, strangely, other liberals. So this piece, in a liberal magazine about a Democratic Chief of Staff to a liberal president, written by a writer from another liberal magazine, is basically a big slap in the face to liberals everywhere. Because this "Letter From Washington" profile by Ryan Lizza is not sufficiently critical of its subject!

No, Lizza goes to Rahm's office, and interviews him, and faithfully transcribes things from those interviews, and goes to some of Rahm's colleagues for a little color and some insight into Rahm's in-your-face style, and there is some narrative stuff about how precisely Rahm (in his own telling) worked the stimulus in Congress. So, you know, it's a terrible travesty of a piece, according to Jane Hamsher and Glenn Greenwald.

The story didn't mention how Rahm is totally implicated in the Blagojevich case, and it didn't mention how Rahm is responsible for all the cabinet vetting problems, and Lizza totes just wants "access" to Rahm for his upcoming book on Obama's first year. Which, like, ok guys, we agree with all your criticisms of Rahm's radical centrism or whatever, and think he is indeed a self-aggrandizing dick, but you know this is a Letter From Washington profile piece, not, like, an actual commentary? That's just how those pieces "work," for the most part. Maybe it's not the best profile the New Yorker's ever run, but it was a pretty good read!

Not every story is the definitive take-down! It's actually totally OK that they didn't call Paul Krugman for comment after this bit:

"They have never worked the legislative process," Emanuel said of critics like the Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued that Obama's concessions to Senate Republicans-in particular, the tax cuts, which will do little to stimulate the economy-produced a package that wasn't large enough to respond to the magnitude of the recession. "How many bills has he passed?"
[...]
Now, my view is that Krugman as an economist is not wrong. But in the art of the possible, of the deal, he is wrong. He couldn't get his legislation."

The stimulus bill was essentially held hostage to the whims of Collins, Snowe, and Specter, but if Al Franken, the apparent winner of the disputed Minnesota Senate race, had been seated in Washington, and if Ted Kennedy, who is battling brain cancer, had been regularly available to vote, the White House would have needed only one Republican to pass the measure. "No disrespect to Paul Krugman," Emanuel went on, "but has he figured out how to seat the Minnesota senator?" (Franken's victory is the subject of an ongoing court challenge by his opponent, Norm Coleman, which the national Republican Party has been happy to help finance.) "Write a fucking column on how to seat the son of a bitch. I would be fascinated with that column. O.K.?" Emanuel stood up theatrically and gestured toward his seat with open palms. "Anytime they want, they can have it," he said of those who are critical of his legislative strategies. "I give them my chair."

Like, the reader does not have to unquestioningly accept Rahm's argument here, because its flaws are basically self-evident and it's a response to criticism, not an unprovoked attack. Readers are grown-ups! The New Yorker doesn't have to say "BTW Rahm suuuuuuucks even though he thinks he's sooo cool." Well, they can have Hendrik Hertzberg say that on a blog or something but it doesn't need to be included here.

In short, Liberals, we agree with you 100% on the politics here but man you gotta let shit slide sometimes.

In Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba's Communist Party, Castro writes:

WHAT a strange surname! It appears Spanish, easy to pronounce, but it's not. Never in my life have I heard or read about any student or compatriot with that name, among tens of thousands.

Where does it come from? I wondered. Over and over, the name came to mind of the brilliant German thinker, Immanuel Kant, who together with Aristotle and Plato, formed a trio of philosophers that have most influenced human thinking. Doubtless he was not very far, as I discovered later, from the philosophy of the man closest to the current president of the United States, Barack Obama.

It's deep and yet deeply loopy. Read it all!

They found this all amusing at TNR's The Plank, too.

We already knew Emanuel had the power to send Republicans over the bend. Who could have guessed Communists hated him, too? This is going to ruin shouty conservative pundit Glenn Beck's Obama-is-a-Communist campaign:

(Photo of Castro in 1959, the year Emanuel was born, via San Diego University)

The Unification Church-owned Washington Times reports that the same tax rule that nailed Tom Daschle could get Emanuel in trouble. Here's why: The White House chief of staff hasn't paid taxes on the lodging given to him by Rosa DeLauro, a Democratic Congresswoman from Connecticut, and her husband Stan Greenberg, a Democratic pollster who got rich after working for the Clinton White House.

The arrangement looked a little fishy. When Gawker raised questions about whether DeLauro and Greenberg's home was zoned for a rental, DeLauro revealed that she had not been charging Emanuel rent for the past five years. Accepting free rent from DeLauro may not have been a violation of House ethics rules, as long as Emanuel received a waiver from the House Standards Committee. He has not yet produced evidence of such a waiver — but whatever, he might get his wrist spanked.

Here's what has Emanuel-hunting conservatives excited: Even if the House okayed the free-rent deal, the IRS might still consider Emanuel's free rent to be what the tax agency calls "imputed income".

Imputed income is what caught Daschle. A lobbying firm for which he did consulting work provided him with a car and driver; he owed the IRS taxes on the value of that service, but did not pay the bill — around $140,000 — until this month, when the problem was caught in the process of vetting him as Barack Obama's Health and Human Services nominee. Under fire, he withdrew from consideration. Free rent, a perk often extended to corporate executives, is considered income under the same rules. But very few corporate execs get free rent in basements. So good luck with that, conservatives.

(Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images)

DeLauro gave a statement to the Hartford Courant after Gawker reported Emanuel's basement-dwelling habits:

I wanted to make clear: we have no separate apartment in our DC house, no rental apartment; all our bedrooms and living areas are part of the house and accessible. They are often used by close family and friends. In mid-November, I got a call from the DC zoning office indicating that somebody had lodged a complaint and asked to inspect the property, which we welcomed. My husband was there for the inspection, which was uneventful and we did not hear again from the zoning office.

Fair enough. For most of the past five years, while he has stayed with DeLauro, Emanuel was serving as a congressman — and there are no rules against members of the House of Representatives giving each other gifts.

But the house on Capitol Hill is also owned by DeLauro's husband, Stan Greenberg, chairman of Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, a pollster who got paid $4.5 million to do polling and strategy work for the Clinton Administration. DeLauro has said she and Emanuel are friends, and House ethics rules allow gifts, such as free lodging, on the basis of personal friendship. However, gifts over $250 in value require the advance, written approval from the Standards Committee. If such a ruling exists, DeLauro and Emanuel just need to produce it.

Oh, but then, Emanuel is now serving under the supposedly stricter ethics regime of the Obama White House. Free rent from a Democratic pollster? Something doesn't smell right — and it's not just that usual basement mustiness.

But forget about any breaches of minor ethics rules. So Emanuel crashed with DeLauro and Greenberg for five years for free — who cares? What this really tells us is how hopelessly inbred Washington is. We just wish Emanuel had gotten fancier digs in the bargain.

To think, there was a time when late-night comedians fretted that there wasn't anything funny about Barack Hussein Obama. (You couldn't even joke about his middle name without people accusing you of stirring up Islamophobia!)

That was before he became 44. The tightly controlled team which got him elected gave way to the usual cast of Washington goofballs, including some veterans of Clinton's leak-loving administration. Obama plays the straight man to these clowns, always frowning dourly and apologizing for their failings. Completists that we are, let's go through all the fun stories Obama has already given us:

Rod Blagojevich's corrupt attempts to pawn Obama's Senate seat didn't directly involve Obama. But they did remind everyone that Obama and his chief of staff, hunky ex-ballerina Rahm Emanuel, are Chicago politicians.

Bill Richardson withdrew from consideration for the job of Commerce Secretary after a financial scandal in New Mexico erupted. You'd think this would have come up somewhere between the start of the vetting process and Richardson shaving his postcampaign beard.

Speechwriter Jon Favreau groped a cardboard cutout of Hillary Clinton, raising questions of whether the boy wonder wordsmith was really just an eloquent frat boy.

Then it turned out he was dating Ali Campoverdi, a Maxim model turned White House assistant. Yes, he can act like the 27-year-old male he is.

The First Uterus became fodder for celebrity-magazine pages. Is Michelle Obama pregnant? Doesn't matter. The salient fact here is that America at last has a President and First Lady whom they like to imagine having sex.

Democrats returning from an eight-year exile gave an easy through line to revive all the scandals of the Clinton era. For example: Attorney General Eric Holder turned out to be the one who gave the nod for Bill Clinton's pardon of sleazy financier Marc Rich.

Tim Geithner didn't pay $34,000 in taxes, thanks to a tax loophole about which he delivered detailed testimony to Congress. They appointed him Treasury Secretary anyway. Why? Obama and the Senate both needed to move quickly to appoint someone whose job is to look like he's saving the economy.

Geithner was the last tax cheat Obama could afford, though. Would-be "performance czar" Nancy Killefer withdrew her name over a $946.69 tax lien for employment taxes she didn't pay for her household help.

It had already been revealed that Tom Daschle, who was up for Secretary of Health and Human Services had hadn't paid nearly $140,000 for a car and driver a lobbyist had lent him after he left office. Still, with Killefer gone, he lost his Cabinet job The real scandal here? Daschle and Killefer had tax problems endemic to the wealthy and powerful, reminding the public how out-of-touch Washington insiders run the show.

Save for an Esquire profile, this Barack-inspired office romance never made the national press. But the legal world has been atitter about Obama advisors Cass Sunstein and Samantha Power who romanced on the campaign trail. Not long before they became an item, Sunstein split with longtime girlfriend Martha Nussbaum. (Nussbaum and Sunstein were a power couple on campus at the University of Chicago Law School, where Obama also taught.) Power is now pregnant, gossip has it! Work-obsessed people falling in love on the job are always funny, precisely because they're pathetic and they know it.

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's Capitol Hill basement apartment (rented to him by Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro and pollster Stanley Greenberg turned out to be an illegal rental unit. Honestly, isn't breaking the law supposed to pay off more than that?

And we're aren't even three weeks into Obama's term! For the wagging tongues of Washington, Barack Obama really is That One — the president who brought hope and change to the once-moribund business of political comedy.

(Photos by AP and Getty Images; photo of Sunstein and Power by bettina_n)

That's what private investigator Joseph Culligan discovered after asking questions of D.C. officials. A zoning administrator responded to Culligan's inquiry and told him that DeLauro's house at 816 E. Capitol St. NE was listed as a single-family dwelling, and as such, could not be rented out.

Emanuel, who splits his time between Chicago and D.C., will not have this low-rent problem for very long. He's looking for a new home in Washington. Still, he should consider himself lucky if his firetrap of a residence is the worst dirt one can dig on him. Compared to Tim Geithner and Tom Daschle's unpaid tax bills, it's a lower-middle-class problem.

(Photo via Google Street View)

There will likely be charges of voter fraud. Unthinkably, we omitted Barnes from the initial lineup, until commenter superannuated_grad_student pointed out our error, and shared a delicious photo from Washingtonian. So we're granting her the title of Top Obama Hottie (Female) and Emanuel the title of Top Obama Hottie (Male). The runner-ups by gender: fratty speechwriter Jon Favreau and stunning foreign-policy advisor Mona Sutphen.

There will be more Obama Hotties to come; the president appoints approximately 5,500 positions. One hopes at least a few of them will challenge Emanual and Barnes in hotness.

Were other injustices done? Review the winners and file your complaints with the elections committee here.

(Photo fo Emanuel via Don't Be Chi; photo of Barnes by Matthew Worden/Washingtonian)

Almost tied for the lead: Rahm Emanuel and Melody Barnes. There are less than 7 hours before the polls close. Vote now!

New, more appropriate image reflecting Rahm's lead via Bus Your Own Tray

Your contestants:

Melody Barnes, domestic policy council director, is not only attractive but was also Ted Kennedy's lawyer, so you know she's good. (OK, technically, she was his chief counsel at the Senate Judiciary Committee for eight years.)
Tim Geithner, Treasury Secretary-designate, who is far too handsome to worry about his tax problems.

Deputy chief of staff Mona Sutphen has an exotic foreign-service background. Diplomat = sexy!

Reggie Love, Obama's personal assistant of hotness.

Susan Rice, future ambassador to the United Nations, will restore America's image — and our faith in the power of metallic colors.
Jon Favreau, the speechwriter who makes every college coed say "Yes, we can".

Desirée Rogers, a social secretary on everyone's calendar.

Peter Orszag, the budget master who's going to have to protect more than just his pockets.

Ellen Moran, the communications director who's a dead ringer for Dana Scully from the X Files.

Rahm "Rahmbo" Emanuel, and really, do we need to say more than "chief of staff" here?

Eugene Kang, 24, is special assistant to the president. Sure, he looks like kinda dorky, but he mounted a near-successful campaign for Ann Arbor city council.

Pulitzer-winning Harvard professor Samantha Power is an advisor to Obama — and married fellow staffer Cass Sunstein, 16 years her senior, in July.

Eric Holder, Obama's attorney-general designate, looks like he can deliver more than justice. Okay, he's a lawyer, but don't hold that against him.

Patrick Gaspard, the new White House political director, favors fall colors — election season!

Now vote! The polls are open through the end of Barack Obama's first day in office. Write-ins are allowed in the poll or in the comments.

(Photos by Nadav Kander/New York Times)

When speaking to a crowd at the New Republic's Inauguration party (everyone in the new White House will be reading that mag, he said), the Chief of Staff mentioned that his kindly old Jewish mother had other hopes for his life:

As a former ballet dancer, let me tell you: For all I’ve done, she still says, ‘You coulda been a dancer.’ No matter what I’ve done: ‘You coulda been a dancer.’ Which is what a Jewish mother instills in a child. A sense of failing at all times.

He promised that he'd do some proper jigging at the various balls and galas being held this week for his new boss, Barack Obama. Though he said his dancing would be "nothing worth watching." We beg to differ. Just look at his form in that photo.

Image via NYT