Pelosi No Longer Officially Male, And Other National Notes

--Jeb Bush will NOT run for US Senate in Florida, to replace retiring Mel Martinez in 2010. Free-for-all will now begin. Meg Whitman, eBay honcho and inner-circle Friend-of-Mitt, WILL apparently run for Governor of California in 2010, to succeed the term-limited Terminator. Best line so far (not mine): She'd be the best at auctioning off Senate appointments. Democrat Doug Racine WILL run for Governor of Vermont in 2010 in yet another attempt to get rid of the immovable Republican Jim Douglas. Chris Matthews's brother says the MSNBC gabmeister absolutely, positively will NOT run for Senate in Pennsylvania in 2010, but admits that he doesn't actually know that from Chris or anything.

--A group trying to recruit Mike Ditka to replace Blagojevich as Illinois governor argues that the coach "won't be afraid to kick corruption in the ass harder than da '85 Bears beat down da Patriots in da Super Bowl!" Why must they always remind us of the ones we lost?

--The US House of Representatives adopted official rules for the new session that (apart from other highly-criticized power-consolidating alterations) for the first time uses gender-neutral language. Not only will "chair" replace "chairman," but Speaker Pelosi will no longer be officially referred to as "he." Seriously. What year is this? The "he"s will be replaced by "the Speaker." This took 111 sessions to figure out?

--Speaking of women who get to boss around people in Washington... news is that Nancy Killefer, who learned how to boss businesses into shape at MIT's Sloan School and Charles River Associates, will be named today Barack Obama's "Chief Performance Officer." This is a new position Obama made up during the campaign. As I understand it, the CPO will go through all federal agencies looking for waste, redundancy, and ineffective programs.

--The RNC chairman (no need to be gender-neutral there) race continues to entertain. Yesterday's sideshow was ostensible Republican Party leader, aka the President of the United States of America, sending out his official spokesperson to blast five of the six candidates. Oh yeah, they're getting closer to becoming a united party every day, you betcha. This public admonishment was for admonishing Bush for the auto industry bailout, which five of the candidates -- all but Bush-selected incumbent chairman Mike Duncan, natch -- went out of their way to criticize the Prez for in their debate Monday. Meanwhile, those who bet on "none of these six clowns" are seeing their payout chances improve; the latest rumor is that Norm Coleman, now that he's officially lost his Senate re-election, will swoop in to take the chairman job. I find it hard to believe that Coleman will be done suing over the results in time for the Jan. 28 vote; on the plus side, Coleman has now proven that he can lose a winnable election, which appears to be the criteria the party is looking for.