President Obama yesterday declined to rule out legal consequences for Bush administration officials who authorized the harsh interrogation techniques applied to “high-value” terrorism suspects, saying the attorney general should determine whether they broke the law. Obama also said that if Congress is intent on investigating the enhanced interrogation practices, an independent commission might offer a better means to do so than a congressional panel, which he indicated is more likely to split along partisan lines than to produce constructive results. – from Washpo

As the image of Candidate Obama becomes murkier by the day the actions of President Obama bring into focus a man that was clearly not properly vetted during the campaign. Jennifer Rubin notes that cross over voters may be beginning to have second thoughts about President Obama because they are finally discovering who he is, which is “(not) the Agent of Change (but) the center of the swamp”. As voters learn more about this President they become less enthralled. We may be witnessing one of the quickest flameouts in political history. If the economy doesn’t turn significantly by the forth quarter of this year BO may become a lame duck by 2010 midterms. – from here

Elliott’s Hardware in Dallas, Texas, has offered former President Bush a part-time job as a greeter.

Making light of an advertisement that offered him a job as a store greeter, former President George W. Bush stopped by a Dallas hardware store Saturday morning and jokingly inquired about the position. The visit to Elliott’s Hardware on Maple Avenue, which store officials insisted was a surprise, drew the attention of about 100 customers, many of whom were attending seminars on organic gardening. – From Dallas Morning News

George W Bush has paid a jokey visit to a hardware store in Dallas, Texas, which offered him a job as a greeter. The former US president entered the Elliott’s outlet with his security detail saying “I’m looking for a job”, store manager Andrea Bond said. The owner of the Texas chain made the offer earlier this month in a letter published in a Dallas newspaper. – From BBC

Former President George W. Bush has visited a Dallas hardware store that earlier this month made him a lighthearted offer to work as a greeter. Andrea Bond, a manager at Elliott’s Hardware, says Bush walked into the store Saturday and quipped: “I’m looking for a job.” The store had published an open letter to Bush, inviting him to apply for a store greeter position. The tongue-in-cheek appeal appeared in The Dallas Morning News and its commuter-oriented sister publication, Quick. – From AP

For his first annual budget next week, President Obama has banned four accounting gimmicks that President George W. Bush used to make deficit projections look smaller. The price of more honest bookkeeping: A budget that is $2.7 trillion deeper in the red over the next decade than it would otherwise appear, according to administration officials. – from NYTimes

Former National Security Agency analyst Russell Tice, who helped expose the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping in December 2005, has now come forward with even more startling allegations. Tice told MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Wednesday that the programs that spied on Americans were not only much broader than previously acknowledged but specifically targeted journalists. “The National Security Agency had access to all Americans’ communications — faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications,” Tice claimed. “It didn’t matter whether you were in Kansas, in the middle of the country, and you never made foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.” – from The Raw Story.

Portraits of President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney that hang in federal buildings across the land will come down about noon Tuesday, which is when the outgoing administration officially comes to an end. “We’re going to try to get it as close to noon as possible,” said Kathy Lease, supervisory property manager for the General Services Administration in Cleveland. Once removed, the portraits will be destroyed. – from Cleveland

Everyday is business casual day in the Obama White House. Afterall, he’s the decider now.

It’s the same Oval Office. The same desk. Even the same curtains. But President Obama has already made one major change: Go through eight years of White House photos, and you won’t find one of former President Bush in the Oval Office without his jacket on. It wasn’t just a personal preference. In the Bush administration, it was a rule: Jackets in the Oval Office — and now, it seems, one of the first Bush-era regulations to get scrapped in the Obama White House. – From CNN

As Taegan Goddard writes, “It was a rule during the Bush administration that no one ever enter the Oval Office without a jacket.” And Politico’s Ben Smith muses, “Still unclear which press staffer will be the first to show up in flip-flops.” Though this change is no doubt trivial in the larger scheme of things, it at least signifies yet another example of a symbolic break with the past. Also, the Oval Office’s less stringent dress code could very well prove psychologically advantageous to visitors and aides alike by creating a more comfortable atmosphere in which to handle presumably stressful situations – - better to worry about major economic and foreign policies to right the American ship than about gratuitous sartorial punctilios. – From Huffington Post

President and Mrs. Bush are back in Texas, after spending the past eight years in The White House. President Bush said it is good to be home, and that he looks forward to his time out of office.