Helen Thomas retires

Veteran White House correspondent Helen Thomas will retire in the wake of a controversy that erupted when she said Israelis should "get the hell out of Palestine." Thomas, 89, has covered the White House since the Kennedy administration.

Freedom of the press*

President Barack Obama today is expected to sign the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act. From AP:

President Barack Obama plans to sign a law Monday intended to provide more protections for a free press around the world.

The law, known as the Daniel Pearl Freedom of Press Act, expands efforts to identify countries where press freedom is being violated. The law is named after Pearl, a Wall Street Journal reporter who was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002.

*UPDATE: After he signed the bill, Obama said the press was free to ask questions and that he was free to ignore them.

A little more sunshine

The White House will make public most of the names of people who visit the White House on political business. This is a change from the confidentiality policy of the Bush administration and comes in response to several lawsuits filed by Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington. USA Today

President Obama releases statement on Iranian protests

Statement from the President on Iran

The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.

As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.

Martin Luther King once said - "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice." I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.

Who's coming to dinner*

The White House Correspondents Dinner is tomorrow and the invitations have already gone out. If you think you have to be a White House Correspondent to attend, think again.

Fox News has Todd Palin. The Houston Chronicle has Alberto Gonzalez. CNN has Ashton Kutcher and Janet Napolitano. Sully Sullenberger chose to dine with the New York Daily News and George Lucas chose Fortune. ABC News has David Axelrod and Meghan McCain, among others, and the NBC News tables will include Samuel L. Jackson, William H. Macy, and Mike Myers.

Read the complete list of invitees to tomorrow's White House Correspondents Dinner here.

*Updated: Frank Davies at the Mercury News had a story about the tarting up of the correspondents dinner:

"It used to be a rock star at this dinner was the White House chief of staff, not Steve Tyler of Aerosmith," said Carol Joynt, a former TV producer who chronicles Washington society.

She has attended two dozen dinners and seen them evolve from low-key events where reporters chatted up government sources to a series of "circus acts," with strange juxtapositions of power and fluff. "It's become just a mashed-up free-for-all," Joynt said.

MediaNews plunked down $4,000 for a table. The guest of honor was Carol Williams, White House director of media affairs.

'Welcome to the new White House'

Change dot gov, indeed

White House University

The Washington Post looks at who Barack Obama has chosen for top staff and adviser slots and finds him leaning heavily on Ivy Leaguers and other striving academics. The Regular American conservatives worry the egg heads will break when the going gets tough and others fear policy-making will begin to feel like analytical research:

The libertarian University of Chicago law professor Richard Epstein, who is not related to Joseph Epstein, worries that the team's exceptionalism could lead to overly complex policies. "They are really smart people, but they will never take an obvious solution if they can think of an ingenious one. They're all too clever by half," he said. "These degrees confer knowledge but not judgment. Their heads are on grander themes . . . and they'll trip on obstacles on the ground."

Our last president held degrees from Yale and Harvard and yet he spurned his brain for a torrid affair with his gut. Eight years later, a return to the head sounds like a good idea to me.

Still, an overreliance on academics has its own dangers. The two cures are transparency and judgment. While think Obama's success will depend on his commitment to the former, an old Obama colleague thinks the president-elect will bring the former to the White House:

Douglas Baird, who hired Obama at the University of Chicago, noted that whizzes can also have too much faith in their answers. But he said Obama is confident enough in his own intellect to challenge others' conclusions. He recalled watching Obama hold his own with erudite faculty members.

"He goes into a faculty club filled with Nobel laureates, and he talks to them on equal terms -- there hasn't been anyone in the White House like that for a long time," Baird said. "So it's not as if, when he's given advice by powerful, smart people, that he'll get swayed from his core principles. And if you're confident you're going to stick to your own principles, then you might as well surround yourself with smart people rather than dumb ones."

Rumblings*

I hear the New York Times will make Peter Baker a White House correspondent. Baker recently jumped to the Times from the Washington Post after his wife, Susan Glasser, was kicked off the national desk.

*UPDATE: Alissa Rubin gets elevated to Baghdad Bureau Chief for the New York Times - she served as deputy bureau chief until today (11/7), when she joined us on "To The Point" to talk about the effect Obama's victory may have on negotiating a security agreement with Iraq.