White House

When the script writers elect to kill off a popular television series character with a suicide instead of a car crash, you know that somebody needs to make an exit that's fast -- and within budget. That's exactly what Kal Penn, a member of the ensemble cast that has helped make "House" such a hit for Fox, needed this week when he announced he is putting aside acting, at least for now, to become an associate director of the White House Office of Public Liaison.

Eugene Allen, who worked for more than three decades as a White House butler -- some of those years during an era of brutal segregation when he often had to use back doors despite his employer's rarefied address -- sat in the shadow of the Capitol dome Tuesday and watched Barack Obama become the first African American president of the United States. "I never would have believed it," said Allen, 89, sitting in an invitation-only area.

The Obama administration is expected today to unveil a council of religious and secular advisors that will guide decisions on faith-based programs for a broad range of domestic and foreign policy issues.

It is the Internet rumor that has been discredited but will not die: President Obama is not a naturally born U.S. citizen and therefore constitutionally is not qualified to serve. This week, months after the allegations first cropped up on the Web and talk radio, the White House and Hawaii officials addressed the rumor -- with the state's health director saying that she had reviewed the records in question and found that they verified Obama was born in Hawaii.

The identity of the first puppy -- the one that the Washington press corps has been yelping about for months, the one President Obama has seemed to delight in dropping hints about -- leaked out Saturday. The little guy is a six-month-old Portuguese water dog given to the Obama girls as a gift by Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts. Malia and Sasha named it Bo. Bo's a handsome little guy.

President Obama plans to nominate Sen. Judd Gregg as Commerce secretary today, the White House confirmed on the eve of the announcement as the New Hampshire Republican disclosed an apparent deal that would keep his seat out of Democrats' hands. "I have made it clear to the Senate leadership on both sides of the aisle and to the governor that I would not leave the Senate if I felt my departure would cause a change in the makeup of the Senate," Gregg said Monday in a statement.

With the Senate's approval Tuesday of a massive, $838-billion economic stimulus package, congressional negotiators launched into a high-risk race to come up with a compromise bill that could be delivered to the White House by the end of the week. It will be anything but easy. There are significant differences in the bill the Senate passed Tuesday and the one the House approved last month, not the least of which are the price tags. The House version is $819 billion.

The Internet age has spawned a new inaugural tradition: the incoming president wiping the White House website clean of almost all vestiges of the outgoing one. Immediately after Barack Obama became president Tuesday, www.whitehouse.gov underwent its own presidential transition. The main photo, of former President George W. Bush saluting a U.S. Marine crew member after returning from Camp David on Sunday, disappeared. In its place was a rotating series of photos and statements from Obama.

Santa Monica designer Michael S. Smith has won the commission to redecorate the White House living quarters for the Obama family. "He sounds like a wise choice, with his interest in traditional though not pedantic museum settings," said historian William Seale, author of "The President's House: A History." "What works best in the White House is someone who is immersed in the past and can design in a modern way." Recent presidents and first ladies have hired a designer from their home states.

If the Obama campaign represented a sleek, new iPhone kind of future, the first day of the Obama administration looked more like the rotary-dial past. Two years after launching the most technologically savvy presidential campaign in history, Obama officials ran smack into the constraints of the federal bureaucracy Wednesday, encountering a jumble of disconnected phone lines, old computer software and security regulations forbidding outside e-mail accounts.