Plans for car czar dropped, Geithner and Summers to head auto panel; Levin questions delay as GM and Chrysler ready plans. (Detroit Free Press)

Obama faces test on whether to continue extravagant presidential copter contract with Lockheed or return to United Tech’s Sikorsky. (NYT)

Gray Lady profiles boss man Mr. Slim. (NYT)

Oil’s masters of the universe gather for week of events, parties in London; Conoco’s Mulva the guest of honor. (FT Alphaville)

Burris embarks on listening tour of Illinois in wake of fresh disclosures of improper Blagojevich communications. (Chicago Tribune)

The dominant analysis of Obama’s historic fundraising effort is that small donors carried the day. His campaign certainly inspired record-smashing levels of small donor support, but the feel-good story of Obama lifted to victory by a $5 army obscures the crucial role that traditional fundraising mechanisms and networks played in Obama’s campaign.

After all, Obama took in more money from Wall Street in the first quarter of 2007 than any other presidential candidate, an early boost from high finance that is often overlooked. This paved the way for consistently high Wall Street fundraising numbers. How did this come to pass?

Read more…

Continental Flight 3407 crashes into house near Buffalo, killing 49 people aboard and one on ground; NTSB investigates. (Buffalo News)*

Heeding Roubini, Times points to insolvency of banking system; Wall Street’s Peterson Institute concurs. (NYT)

SEC, IRS, FBI investigate possible Ponzi scheme; billionaire owner blames “disgruntled former employees.” (Bloomberg)

Director of National Intelligence Blair calls economic meltdown top threat to US security. (NYT)

Gregg ends Commerce bid, cites irreconcilable differences related to Census manipulation. (WaPo)

Baucus slips buyout tax break into stimulus bill, benefiting folks like this, this, and this. (WSJ)

* LittleSis has strong Buffalo ties; we would like to extend our condolences to the families and friends of the victims. -Ed.

Capuano breaks news to Stumpf et al: “America doesn’t trust you any more.” (AP)

Reid rolls Pelosi in stimulus negotiations? (Politico)

Sage confesses bafflement over mortgage market, justifies Fed’s inaction by insisting no one recognized bubble. (CNBC)

700 Merrill execs got million dollar bonuses on eve of BofA merger, Cuomo finds. (Bloomberg)

Under new management, Harvard’s endowment cut US equity holdings drastically in face of market instability. (NYT)

Wife of Madoff withdrew $15 million from brokerage before husband’s arrest. (CNN)

The FBI raids the lobbying firm of a former top Murtha aide; influence peddlers scramble for the exits. (WaPo)

Geithner plan draws sharp criticism, Dow plunges; supportive friend identified. (Bloomberg,WSJ)

Mack will pledge, Lewis will dodge, Pandit will promise, Blankfein will mourn. Committee will care? (FT)

Wal-Mart, taking advantage of the economic crisis, renews its effort to push into urban Chicago. (Reuters)

Citigroup execs Lew and Froman scored seven figure salaries and top spots in the Obama administration after their division lost big; Shelby notices. (NYT)

Robert Wolf, a member of Obama’s latest economic board, hails from a bank under federal investigation for a tax scam. (TPM Muckraker)

LittleSis is a latecomer to Twitter, and we’re still learning the ropes, but one thing is clear: microblogging makes nuanced argument difficult, but is quite effective for documenting simple facts and leads. What better model to mimic, then, for LittleSis’s much-needed analyst note system?

We’ve decided to modify Twitter’s format to make it more flexible for LittleSis analysts, thus feeding many birds with one worm:

1. Notes let analysts keep memos — public or private — that make their own research easier and more complete. Notes are more useful when concise, but aren’t limited to Twitter’s 140 characters.
2. Notes let analysts “alert” other analysts using Twitter’s @username format. Multiple analysts can be “alerted” within one note. A private note can only be viewed by its author and any analysts it alerts.
3. Notes can link to any combination of entity, relationship, and list pages using a simple markup. For example, @entity:1 will create a link to Wal-Mart Stores, whereas @entity:1[biggest company in the world] will create a link to the biggest company in the world. @rel and @list work the same way.
4. While notes are designed to the above needs, all of which LittleSis analysts have asked for, we encourage you to experiment with them and find new uses we haven’t thought of.

We hope the new note system, available as of this post, will strengthen the social layer on LittleSis, which is essential to keeping our data fresh, accurate, and relevant. Notes are still a work in progress, so let us know what you think!

PS: As you can see, we’ve also taken the opportunity to reshuffle our start page layout. Feedback about that is welcome too.

Obama has proven himself a genius when it comes to negotiating elite social networks and cultivating strategic relationships. Recent miscalculations aside, his political career has benefitted from some very fancy footwork, with plenty of lessons for the LittleSis community.

We have, at times, gotten an inside peek at Obama’s negotiations of various power circles. Case in point, this passage from a Vanity Affair article in March 2008, which describes a meeting between Obama and Emil Jones, the State Senate President:

“After I was elected president, in 2003, he came to see me, a couple months later,” Jones recalled, relishing the tale. “And he said to me, he said, ‘You’re the senate president now, and with that, you have a lot of pow-er.’ ” Jones stretched out the word, as if savoring the pleasure of it, and his voice became very quiet as he continued: “And I told Barack, ‘You think I got a lot of pow-er now?,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, you got a lot of pow-er.’ And I said, ‘What kind of pow-er do I have?’ He said, ‘You have the pow-er to make a United States sen-a-tor!’ ” Jones let out a soft, smoky laugh. “I said to Barack, I said, ‘That sounds good!’ I said, ‘I haven’t even thought of that.’ I said, ‘Do you have someone in mind you think I could make?,’ and he said, ‘Yeah. Me.’ ”

This isn’t Blago territory, and we don’t have a transcript, but…kinda creepy.

Note: due to some development delays, we’ll be rolling out a start page re-design later this week, not today as promised.

LittleSis for Washington insiders, in this week’s National Journal:

The biggest value LittleSis offers is not so much the details it provides but the ties it highlights. “In a city like Washington that functions off of connections … having an online Rolodexing system to figure out these connections is a valuable tool,” said Scott Goodstein, who served as the external online director for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

It’s interesting to see the site presented to an inside-the-beltway audience. I’m glad the article informed them that:

1. LittleSis is watching.
2. This will prove useful to insiders-looking-in.

The magazine is subscription-only, but the article is available here from Sunlight Foundation.

We’ve gotten a good response to the NameWire, so we are going to start publishing it daily, in a more prominent place on the front page, starting Monday. Let us know what you think of the name in the comments (and if you have other ideas). In the meantime, here’s another set of clips:

Aspects (limo & taxes) of Tom Daschle’s relationship with Leo Hindery end his HHS bid; Nancy Killefer withdraws over tax payment performance failures; Judd Gregg to Commerce. (Bloomberg, ABC)

President Obama and Treasury chief Tim Geithner are set to announce new caps on executive pay at Wall Street firms; JP Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon, defending bonuses, calls tough financial sector jobs “Vietnam.” (NYT, Reuters)

Wells Fargo cancels plans for a junket in Las Vegas in response to public outrage. (WSJ)

S&P drops California’s debt rating to the lowest of the 50 states as Governor Schwarzenegger and other legislative leaders grapple with a $40 billion budget deficit. (LA Times)

Blagojevich: “I’ve been wanting to be on your show in the worst way for the longest time.” (Chicago Tribune)

Today we’re testing out a feature that may appear on the LittleSis start page daily. Tentatively called the NameWire, it is a collection of quick summaries of major news stories with links to the LittleSis profiles of the people that appear in those stories. We see it as a way to offer relevant entrypoints into the content on the site.

Here are the day’s quick clips:

Dan Rooney’s Pittsburgh Steelers defeated Michael Bidwill’s Arizona Cardinals 27-23 to win the Super Bowl last night. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Arizona Republic)

Tom Daschle is “deeply embarrassed” about his $128,000 tax error; over the past two years he has earned $2 million at Alston & Bird, where he advised health care conglomerates like United Health. (The Guardian, WaPo)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Larry Summers may lift the National Economic Council “to a level of prominence unmatched since President Bill Clinton created the body in 1993.” (WSJ)

Sandy Weill, former chairman and CEO of Citigroup, has given up his rights to use the company aircraft. (WSJ)

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg has proposed $4 billion in budget cuts to address a funding gap caused by the financial crisis. (NYT)

Barbie-maker Mattel reported a nearly 50% nosedive in net income in the 4th quarter, and shares fell 16% in early trading. (Bloomberg)

Vermont governor Jim Douglas is in Washington to lobby fellow Republicans in support of the stimulus bill. (ABC News)