Bloggers at the White House, Changes in the Board Room

Garret Graff may be the answer to a Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! question in a few years, but today, the man behind the fisbowl DC blog is happy to be the first official blogger to receive press credentials to the White House press room (a dilapidated space, he points out in his first post). Seems his presence there created as much news as he covered. Or more.

Among the news emanating from Washington, meanwhile, is the appointment of John Bolton as the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, an organization Bolton has managed to disparage in recent years. In a similar vein, the former Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy asks a few pointed/disaparaging questions of Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice in a open letter in the Winnipeg Free Press.

In Iraq, conflicting stories of what happened when U.S. soldiers fired on a car carrying a recently freed Italian journalist to the Bagdhad airport, killing the intelligence officer with her. A Christian Science Monitor' reporter's first-person account of passing through U.S. checkpoints in Iraq has been picked up by bloggers. Also in military news, U.S. Army recruiters are having a hard time filling their quotas, reports CNN. So are reserve and National Guard units. Seems pesky parents want in on the process and are asking hard questions that 18-year-olds sometimes don't think about (been there, done that).

In the world of big business, burstiest person Harry Stonecipher, recruited as the IBM CEO charged with returning ethical behavior to the company, has been fired for having an affair with a female executive, while over at Sony, the first Westerner, Howard Stringer, has taken the reins at the Japanese electronics manufacturing company.

Technies are noting that the beta version of Google's Desktop Search is no longer in testing; it passed and already has been added to the regular Google lineup.

Being added to the shredder bin at today's No. 7 link (Shredding Demonstrations) are computers (click on "Shred of the Day"). How many times have you wanted to do THAT to a particularly obstinate, constantly crashing machine?

BLOGPULSE TREND GRAPH OF THE DAY: Even if they can't agree on a plan, people are definitely talking about Social Security reform more than any other domestic issue. (Gee, remember domestic issues? It seems so long ago...)