Clinton Met With Obama About Role In New Administration  —  A Democratic official confirms to the Huffington Post that Sen. Hillary Clinton met with President-elect Barack Obama on Thursday to discuss her role in the new administration.  —  Clinton's trip to Chicago, described in press reports as …

Bernie Sanders Joins Leahy In Demanding Ouster Of Lieberman From Chairmanship  —  Okay, we now have a second Senator who's stepped up and joined Senator Patrick Leahy in calling on Democrats to boot Joe Lieberman from his plum slot atop the Homeland Security committee.

“THE WAR IS OVER AND WE WON:” Michael Yon just phoned from Baghdad, and reports that things are much better than he had expected, and he had expected things to be good.  “There's nothing going on.  I'm with the 10th Mountain Division, and about half of the guys I'm with haven't fired their weapons …

Party Loyalist  —  Do you see the election results as a repudiation of your politics?  —  Our new president-elect won one and a half points more than George W. Bush won in 2004, and he did so, in great respect, by adopting the methods of the Bush campaign and conducting a vast army of persuasion to identify and get out the vote.

A Ticket to The Hague for Dick Cheney?  —  Gene Burns is one of the nation's most popular talk radio hosts.  For years he has dismissed accounts of torture; America, he has said, does not torture.  But last night, after watching Torturing Democracy and realizing that he had not understood …

Vote tally trend favors Begich for Senate  —  SENATE RACE: With Stevens strongholds still uncounted, leader isn't celebrating yet.  —  scockerham@adn.com  —  More than half the absentee and questioned ballots still to be counted in Alaska's U.S. Senate race come from areas of the state …

Court to rule on campaign films, judge recusal  —  The Supreme Court on Friday added five new cases to its decision docket for the current Term, including a test of the constitutionality of a federal campaign finance ban as applied to a critical movie about Sen. Hillary Clinton when she was running …

More Allegations of Misconduct in Alabama Governor Case  —  Next month in Atlanta, a federal court will hear the high-profile appeal of former Alabama governor Don E. Siegelman, whose conviction on corruption charges in 2006 became one of the most publicly debated cases to emerge from eight years …

Palin left out of RGA leadership.»  —  In the wake of the Republican Governors Association (RGA) convention this week in Miami, many GOP governors were reluctant to embrace Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) as the party's leader or presidential candidate for 2012.

Bailout to Nowhere  —  Not so long ago, corporate giants with names like PanAm, ITT and Montgomery Ward roamed the earth.  They faded and were replaced by new companies with names like Microsoft, Southwest Airlines and Target.  The U.S. became famous for this pattern of decay and new growth.

Michael Steele: ‘Obama campaign played the race card beautifully’ — Says McCain Should Have Hit Obama on Rev. Wright ...  Promising this would be “the first of a series of conversations” with bloggers, former Maryland LG Michael Steele held a blogger conference call today regarding his bid for RNC Chairman.

FDIC Loss Sharing Proposal to Promote Affordable Loan Modifications  —  Background  —  Although foreclosures are costly to lenders, borrowers and communities, the pace of loan modifications continues to be extremely slow (around 4 percent of seriously delinquent loans each month).

Obama gets the Clinton band back together  —  Here's how you can tell the campaign is over and the transition has begun: Barack Obama's aides now wear suits and ties, their desks are in the Federal Building on 6th Street in Washington, D.C.—and Clintonites are everywhere.

Dallas ISD faulted for using fake Social Security numbers  —  tdhobbs@dallasnews.com  —  Years after being advised by a state agency to stop, the Dallas Independent School District continued to provide foreign citizens with fake Social Security numbers to get them on the payroll quickly.

Campaign Bogeyman William Ayers Talks to ‘GMA’  —  'Good Morning America's' Chris Cuomo Grills '60s Radical Bill Ayers  —  William Ayers, the 1960s radical whose violent history became a focal point in the 2008 presidential election, said today that the Republicans unfairly “demonized” …

The Loss Of Individual Liberty  —  The challenge for this generation is to get it back.  —  Over dinner with Milton Friedman several years before he died, I offered the great man a compliment.  He refused it.  —  I had just re-read God and Man at Yale, the 1951 book in which William F. Buckley Jr. …

McCain Campaign Retrospective  —  I wrote a piece for the new issue on the McCain campaign, focusing especially on the endgame and the fight over Palin.  I know a lot of people are already sick of this stuff, but I wanted to talk to people in the campaign to satisfy my curiosity as much as anything else.

Obama Ties Automaker Rescue to Regulation  —  Top advisers to President-elect Barack Obama are helping to draft an auto industry rescue plan that would bring new government oversight, including the possibility of an auto czar who could ensure the money was being used wisely.

The High Cost of Harsh Words  —  Words have consequences.  Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, is learning that the hard way during a horrible week.  Seven teenagers were arrested and charged in the fatal stabbing last Saturday of Marcello Lucero, an Ecuadorean immigrant, on a street in the Long Island village of Patchogue.

Free the GOP  —  The Party Won't Win Back the Middle as Long As It's Hostage to Social Fundamentalists  —  Four years ago, in the week after the 2004 presidential election, we were working furiously to put the finishing touches on the book we co-authored, “It's My Party Too …