Who's Who.

• Author: THREADGILL, SUSAN
• Position: Powerful members of George W. Bush's White House staff

If you have shared our curiosity about whether Karen Hughes would be able to defend her White House turf against the veteran Washington operator, Margaret Tutwiler, the answer is now clear. Hughes is still in the White House and Tutwiler is being dispatched to Morocco as ambassador. Surely this is a honor for Tutwiler, the innocent will say. And it is, but it's also a victory for Hughes. Getting a rival out of the White House, regardless of where, is better than having her inside the tent where her advice to W. might prove more sagacious than yours.

Speaking of getting rid of rivals, did Karl Rove and Karen Hughes exile Joe Allbaugh? Remember, this is the fellow who all during the 2000 campaign had been described as the third member of Bush's Texas triumvirate. But he's not a member anymore. He's not even at the White House. Instead, he's the new director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Although that's no slouch of a position and definitely indicates he has the confidence of the president, he's still not in the White House, and that's where the power people usually want to be.

By the way, Allbaugh and his wife bought a McLean townhouse from Lynne and Dick Cheney. The $690,000 residence should be an improvement over Allbaugh's first home in Oklahoma which, according to The Washington Post's Sandra Fleishman, the Allbaugh family abandoned after his mother discovered a rattlesnake in a dresser drawer.

We hear that there's a Clinton-type sex scandal lurking in the recent past of one of the new Bushies. We won't tell, but we're just mischievous enough not to mind if the guilty party sweats a bit over the possibility that someone else might.

And if you weren't already convinced that W.'s priority will not be tough regulation, consider the appointment of John Graham as head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, which has the power to review all government regulation. Graham has been the head of the Harvard Center For Risk Analysis. Ah, you say--a respected academic, perhaps even a closet liberal. Not exactly. The Center, not unlike W. and his party, gets 60 percent of its budget from companies like Alcoa, 3M, Exxon-Mobil, Monsanto, Pfizer, DuPont, and Dow Chemical. An example of its research is a study sponsored by AT&T that concluded, according to The New York Times, "That the hazards of talking on a cell phone while driving were relatively small."

If you suspect the new Bush administration of tilting right, your...