by Mark Silva
With the Senate's 60-39 vote to proceed to debate, after Thanksgiving, on a health-care bill that the president is seeking by year's end, the debate of the 2010 midterm elections has been joined:
For the Democrats, in control of the White House and Congress, the congressional elections will [...]
President Barack Obama's public approval stood at 69 percent in the days after his inauguration in January, shown above, and reached a new low of 49 percent this week in the Gallup Poll's daily tracking surveys.
by Mark Silva
Public approval of the job that President Barack Obama is [...]
by Mark Silva
As the Senate nears a vote on advancing to debate over health-care, Republicans are holding ground against a bill which they insist will only grow the government and raise taxes.
They don't accept the $848-billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office has placed on Senate' [...]
by Mark Silva
As the Senate nears a vote on advancing to debate over health-care, Republicans are holding ground against a bill which they insist will only grow the government and raise taxes.
They don't accept the $848-billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office has placed on Senate' [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, returned from a weeklong tour of Asia where he is promoting "a new era of American engagement," says the continent holds promise for Americn exports that can spur new jobs at home.
"Asia is a region where we now buy more goods and" [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama is home.
Home, where the hard work is.
With stops in 20 nations behind him, said to be the most ambitious international itinerary of any first-year president, Obama faces the closing innings of a domestic policy year in which he insisted upon a sweeping health-care reform [...]
by Mark Silva
Sarah Palin was box office on FOX News this week - handing Sean Hannity one of his highest-rated shows.
Someone else drew a crowd at FOX this week, too: President Barack Obama.
While Hannity's audience of more than 4 million viewers with the author of Going Rogue aboard at [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama says he "probably won't'' be reading Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, so radio's Mark Levin asked Palin: Has she considered sending him the TelePrompTer edition?
"You know what,'' Palin replied, laughing, "when I heard that, though, I thought, good, at a moment like this in'" [...]
by Mark Silva
The White House is pushing back on the alleged "fiction'' of jobs created or saved under the $787-billion federal timulus bill - particularly what it views as the fiction surrounding reports that Recovery.gov, the official online accounting of where all the money is going, listed all sorts" [...]
by Mark Silva
The House's health care bill, we were reminded, weighed in at over 20 pounds. The Senate's bill, we're told, is bigger than War and Peace.
Both of them also offer health care for millions of Americans uninsured.
And Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has a prescription for' [...]
by Mark Silva and updated with FOX apology
FOX has done it again, and this time, once again, FOX says its misplay of the wrong crowd video was another regrettable mistake.
Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin's book tour and the crowd she is drawing' [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, with 20 nations in his passport this year, stepped on to the Great Wall of China this week.
"It gives you a perspective on a lot of day to day things that don't amount to much...It's majestic,'' the president said. "It reminds you of' [...]
by Mark Silva
Sarah Palin, author of Going Rogue, says the Army psychiatrist, a Muslim, accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, should have been "profiled'' before the shootings.
" I certainly do,'' Palin says in an interview that will air on FOX News' Hannity this evening,' [...]
by Michael Muskal and Mark Silva
Sen. Robert C. Byrd's tenure as the longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history was marked today with praise but also questions about the senator's health.
"I look forward to serving you for the next 56 years and 320 days," the ninth-term Democratic senator from West [...]
by Michael Muskal
Atty. Gen. Eric Holder today defended the Obama administration's decision to try professed terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court and denied the move would give Mohammed a propaganda forum.
"At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we" [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, who made closing of the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within one year a priority on Day One of his presidency, allows that January's deadline for closure of the controversial facility will come and go.
"We are on a path and a process" [...]
by Mark Silva
As people line up around the block in Grand Rapids for the debut of Sarah Palin's national book tour, the popular author will probably have to count one reader out:
President Barack Obama.
"Obviously, Sarah Palin has attracted a lot of attention,'' Obama said of the" [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, "very close'' to a decision about deploying troops in Afghanistan - a strategy that must provide for an "endgame'' as well as a way forward - maintains that he is "absolutely confident'' about getting a health-care bill, calls the planned trial of 9/11 plotters" [...]
by Mark Silva
A lot of questions have been posed in the health-care debate, with a lot of nuance: Americans have been asked if they approve of the president's handling of the issue, or congressional handling of the issue, if they think reform will make things better, make things [...]
by Mark Silva
Sarah Palin, embarking on a natonal book tour with her Going Rogue memoirs, has one word for the way that President Barack Obama is handling the economy:
"Backassward.''
That's how the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice" [...]
by Richard Simon
The Democratic-controlled Senate today thwarted an effort to block spending for upgrading facilities in the United States for housing prisoners transferred from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a move that Illinois officials feared could have complicated efforts to place detainees at a prison in their state.
The measure was defeated [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
The Obama administration promised "transparency'' in the accounting of that $787 billion in economic stimulus spending.
Jonathan Karl and his eagle-eyed colleagues at ABC News saw right through it: In the case of those 30 jobs created or saved and $761,420 spent in Arizona's'" [...]
by Mark Silva
In New York, which suffered the most shocking brunt of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there is a certain division of opinion over playing host to a criminal trial for the mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and some accomplices.
Forty-five percent [...]
by Mark Silva
The president of the United States is a long way from home, but there's nothing like a state dinner in the Great Hall of the People to lift one's spirits.
There was [...]
by Mark Silva
FOX News had to go to China to get President Barack Obama.
When the traveling president sits for a round robin of television news interviews in Beijing, FOX's Major Garrett says he'll be in the loop of five that get 10 minutes apiece with the president.
Garrett "tweeted'' this'" [...]
by Mark Silva
The new American diplomat to China had some fairly undiplomatic things to say about expertise in the field of Chinese relations with the United States.
"Don't mistake me for being an expert, because I've been here for three months,'' said U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman, the former Republican governor" [...]
by Mark Silva
Lou Dobbs, who helped build CNN, says there was no room left for his "advocacy'' journalism at a network seeking "neutrality.''
"CNN decided to go one way, and ultimately it became clear to CNN management and myself, that we were going to go different directions,'' Dobbs, who" [...]
by Jim Puzzanghera
For more than 15.4 million people, the "Making Work Pay'' tax credit enacted as part of the $787-billion economic stimulus package could turn out to be a Making You Pay Back tax credit.
That's the finding of a government watchdog report about the tax credit, which provides" [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
"Our life has become kind of a reality show,'' says Sarah Palin, author of Going Rogue, who suggests that in the last couple of months she has fielded all sorts of offers "coming our way, some bizarre things.''
In the context of a moose-eating family from [...]
by Mark Silva
Sarah Palin has a book, Going Rogue.
Hillary Clinton has a book, It Takes a Village.
But on the eve of the release of Palin's memoirs, a day in which Palin is appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Clinton is traveling through China [...]
by Jim Tankersley
Of course Steven Chu - Cabinet secretary and Nobel Prize-winning physicist - has a Facebook page.
And of course Chu, like pretty much everyone with a Facebook page, has used it to share some highlights of his latest travels with his more than 9,000 online friends.
But [...]
by Mark Silva
In its most recent $1-billion loss, General Motors sees progress.
Yet, with the report today that GM has lost $1.2 billion since leaving the protection of federal bankruptcy courts in July, the Republican National Committee chairman finds "further proof that President Obama's economic experiments are wrong for" [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
In the new debut of Sarah Palin, whose first round of national media interviews didn't turn out so well, the Republican from Alaska readily acknowledges how far things went South in her talks with CBS News' Katie Couric.
Palin appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show [...]
by Mark Silva
One of the nastiest stories that the media kept "making up'' about Sarah Palin was the unfounded suggestion that the former governor of Alaska and permanent "first dude'' were breaking up.
The Republican confronted rumors about an alleged [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, fielding some questions in his first visit to China, was asked: "What's the main reason that you were honored (with) the Nobel Prize for Peace? And will it give you more responsibility and pressure to -- more pressure and the responsibility to promote" [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, fielding some questions in his first visit to China, was asked: "What's the main reason that you were honored (with) the Nobel Prize for Peace? And will it give you more... pressure and the responsibility to promote world peace?''
"In terms of the burden' [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
It is billed by early readers as a blend of redemption and revenge, with a certain measure of pay-back for those campaign strategists who insisted that Sarah Palin stick with the script in John McCain's campaign for president, accusing her, with a complaint that' [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama has bowed to royalty, with a greeting for the Japanese emperor that erases any doubts about what the president's posture was -- remember that bow to the Saudi king that was not really a bow?
And some people are falling over backwards today.
' [...]
by Mark Silva
Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, a Republican who hopes to claim the Senate seat that President Barack Obama once held, advances his party's argument against Obama's health-care initiative in a weekly party address today focusing on other alternatives for easing the cost of health care.
"First," [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, who has warned the public against "jumping to conclusions'' in the alleged killings of 13 and woundings of 29 more at Fort Hood, Texas, by an Army major and pyschiatrist and Muslim said to have declared that God is great before opening fire" [...]
by Christi Parsons
A near-empty prison in rural Illinois has emerged as "a leading option" to house suspected terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an Obama administration official said Friday.
As they work to shutter the controversial detention center, federal officials are talking to [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, delivering the first major public address of his Asian tour, told an audience in Tokyo -- Saturday morning there, Friday evening here in Washington -- that the United States "will always stand on the side'' of those who support human rights.
Speaking on" [...]
by Mark Silva
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker and purveyor of the GOP "Contract With America'' that helped his party win control of the House after President Bill Clinton's election, says GOP chairman Michael Steele has started work on a new framework for 2010 that he is calling" [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
Was Anita Dunn, the outgoing communications director of the White House, speaking for herself when she called FOX News "an arm of the Republican Party'' on a rival cable news network's program, or was this something that Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and political'" [...]
by Mark Silva
Here's a new variation on the Washington revolving door: Anita Dunn, the White Communications director, is leaving the White House. And Dunn's husband, Bob Bauer, is moving in as White House counsel.
It was one of Washington's worst-kept secrets that Greg Craig, President Barack Obama's chief counsel, was [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama has been called the first urban president.
Adolfo Carrion is the first White House director of urban affairs.
The former borough president from New York and schoolteacher is overseeing a White House policy of ensuring that investments "reflect the reality of modern urban America.''
"What's true [...]
by Peter Nicholas
President Obama sought today to reassure Japan that he views the country as an equal partner and that the United States will strive to lessen the disruption caused by military forces housed on Japanese soil.
After a private meeting with Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama, the two leaders held [...]
by David G. Savage and Josh Meyer
The plotters of the 9/11 attacks on New York City and Washington will be tried as terrorists and criminals in a federal court in New York, the Obama administration will announce today.
Five men, including Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, have been held for [...]
by Peter Nicholas
TOKYO -- President Obama has touched down in Tokyo, the first stop on a week-long trip to Asia in which he will try to expand markets for U.S. exports and reestablish America's role as a leader in the Pacific Rim.
Obama left Washington on Thursday for the flight [...]
by Mark Silva
Rep. Marsha Blackburn, a Republican from Tennessee and the first woman elected to Congress in her district, also serves as chairwoman of the songwriter's caucus. There is a growing choir of discontent with Washington among the public, she says.
Blackburn was among the Republican congressional leaders at the [...]
by Mark Silva
With about 25 legislative days left until Christmas, Peter Orszag, the president's budget director, was asked today if the White House still expects delivery of a health-care bill by year's end.
"That's the goal and I think we will get there,'' Orszag said at a conference of political," [...]
by Mark Silva
There will be an oral history of the Bush administration.
It will be carried out by the scholars in Virginia who conducted oral histories of the Clinton and Carter administrations and the Reagan and earlier Bush administration.
Former President George W. Bush, who is building his own presidential library, [...]
by Mark Silva
There will be an oral history of the Bush administration.
It will be carried out by the scholars in Virginia who conducted oral histories of the Clinton and Carter administrations and the Reagan and earlier Bush administration.
Former President George W. Bush, who is building his own presidential library, [...]
by Mark Silva
Afghanistan is not Sweden, says Army Gen. David Petraeus. Nor is it Vietnam, or Somalia.
It is a place, however, where an effective counter-insurgency working in hand with the building of governmental institutions can have the impact that the United States wants to have in thwarting the threat [...]
by Mark Silva
Comedy Central's Jon Stewart, who approaches politics with no joke, had called out FOX News Channel's serious Sean Hannity for showing video of a much larger "TEA Party'' protest conducted in Washington on Sept. 12 in talking about a much smaller Capitol rally recently.
Hannity called back last" [...]
by Mark Silva
Sen. Jack Reed, Democrat from Rhode Island and a West Point graduate, was fresh from a meeting at the Pentagon this morning when he was asked about the decision that President Barack Obama faces about troop deployments in Afghanistan.
"He has to do this in the context" [...]
by Mark Silva
Sen. Jack Reed, Democrat from Rhode Island and a West Point graduate, was fresh from a meeting at the Pentagon this morning when he was asked about the decision that President Barack Obama faces about troop deployments in Afghanistan.
"He has to do this in the context of" [...]
by Mark Silva
As President Barack Obama nears a decision about the deployment of new U.S. military forces in Afghanistan, the American public appears sharply divided:
Just 42 percent support an increase in U.S. troops -- 35 percent at the level that the American commander in Afghanistan has [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
Arguably the most conservative voice in a high-profile time-slot at a cable news network that bills itself as a purveyor of "no bias, no bull,'' Dobbs announced in his evening news broadcast that he is leaving --" [...]
by Mark Silva
If one chapter has ended in Sarah Palin's life, it probably has run about 80 pages.
That's part of the intel from early reads of Palin's memoir, Going Rogue, ready for bookstores next week, with a kickoff on The Oprah Winfrey Show and book-tour starting in [...]
by Christi Parsons
On a day when Americans acknowledge the service of veterans past, President Barack Obama today told members of the military currently serving around the world that he will honor their work with a commitment to the "hard work of peace."
Speaking to veterans and their families at a [...]
by Michael Muskal
A group of Republican senators has revived the traditional remedy for dealing with an elected government reluctant to leave: Impose term limits.
Term limits date from the days of the Colonies and have had mixed results. Often, the individual in office matters less than the continuation of [...]
by Mark Silva
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appears to be getting ready to count to 60 on health care.
The Democratic leader has laid the groundwork for the critical test vote on advancing a health-care overhaul in the Senate. The Hill reports on the filing of a motion to introduce [...]
by Mark Silva
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid appears to be getting ready to count to 60 on health care.
The Democratic leader has laid the groundwork for the critical test vote on advancing a health-care overhaul in the Senate. The Hill reports on the filing of a motion to introduce [...]
by Mark Silva
Here's another sign that something is happening among independent voters this year:
Republicans have edged ahead of Democrats by a margin of 48-44 percent in the latest measure of how registered voters say they are inclined to vote in the midterm 2010 House races.
In the so-called generic [...]
by Mark Silva
John Allen Muhammad, the urban sniper who terrorized an entire region around the nation's capital with random shootings in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., that left 10 dead seven years ago, died by lethal injection in Virginia tonight.
Virginia's governor, who personally opposes capital punishment on religious grounds, [...]
by Mark Silva
John Allen Muhammad, the urban sniper who terrorized an entire region around the nation's capital with random shootings in Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C., that left 10 dead seven years ago, died by lethal injection in Virginia tonight.
Virginia's governor, who personally opposes capital punishment on religious grounds, [...]
by Mark Silva
Months ago, when Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made her rounds of the State Department to voice her commitment to new diplomacy, she also stopped at the U.S. Agency for International Development to voice her commitment to aid and development.
"This is not going to be easy,''" [...]
by Christi Parsons
President Obama today praised the contributions of the 13 people who died in last week's shooting spree at Ft. Hood, Texas, and vowed justice for their murders.
In an address at a memorial service for the dead, Obama promised both fair treatment and penalty for the person who [...]
President Barack Obama delivered this speech at Ft. Hood today:
"We come together filled with sorrow for the thirteen Americans that we have lost; with gratitude for the lives that they led; and with a determination to honor them through the work we carry on.
This is a time of" [...]
by Noam N. Levey
A decade and a half after his healthcare overhaul campaign collapsed, former President Clinton came to Capitol Hill this afternoon to rally Democratic senators to back the healthcare legislation now making its way through Congress.
by Mark Silva
While various members of Congress attempt to sort out whether the mass murder at Ft. Hood, Texas, was an act of terrorism or madness, former Sen. Max Cleland, an extremely wounded and decorated veteran of the Vietnam War, says the Texas slaying fits his definition of [...]
by Mark Silva
News reports to the contrary, the White House said today that President Barack Obama has not made a decision about the way forward with troop deployments in Afghanistan.
The president plans another in a series of meetings on Wednesday with his top military and national security [...]
by Mark Silva
Anita Dunn is stepping out at the White House.
And Dan Pfeiffer is stepping up.
Dunn, the White House communications director who created something of a stir when she asserted on CNN recently that FOX News is an "arm of the Republican Party'' and" [...]
by Mark Silva
As President Barack Obama weighs the U.S. military's options in Afghanistan, the White House is getting some unsolicited advice from someone who knows the territory:
Former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev, who oversaw the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan 20 years ago and says today that [...]
by Mark Silva
Try getting this song out of your head, today:
"The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
When the skies of November turn gloomy.''
" [...]
by Mark Silva
The "Going Rogue'' book tour starts in Grand Rapids.
The day after Sarah Palin's memoirs are published, which is the day after Palin appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show to promote the book.
Which means Monday on Oprah, Tuesday on bookshelves, Wednesday in Grand Rapids.
by Mark Silva
In the roiling mix of political crosswinds that may come to characterize the 2009-2010 elections -- in which a Republican quit one congressional race to campaign for the winning Democrat, and in which the president's party was turned away in the two gubernatorial elections held -- [...]
By Mark Silva
At each juncture in the development of the health-care legislation, it seems, something has been added, or subtracted, solely for the purpose of getting the bill out of a gate.
In the House, Democrats demanded a so-called "public option,'' a government-run insurance program for those who" [...]
by Mark Silva
At each juncture in the development of the health-care legislation, it seems, something has been added, or subtracted, solely for the purpose of getting the bill out of a gate.
In the House, Democrats demanded a so-called "public option,'' a government-run insurance program for those who" [...]
by Mark Silva
As the president prepares for another international trip, while pressing for passage of a "cap and trade'' energy bill back home, the Republicans on the House Natural Resources Committee are preparing to send some postcards.
No stamps required on the Internet, where the Republicans are tracking" [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, delaying a 10-day trip to Asia by a day so that he can travel to Fort Hood, Texas, on Tuesday to take part in a memorial for those killed in the shooting spree there, also will be taking his time with a decision about [...]
by David G. Savage
The Supreme Court justices sounded today as though they are inclined to limit the use of life prison terms for young criminals who are not involved in a murder.
At issue was whether it is cruel and unusual punishment to tell a young teenager he [...]
by David G. Savage
The Supreme Court today cleared the way for the execution of Beltway sniper John Allen Muhammad.
Scheduled for execution Tuesday evening in Virginia, Muhammad was convicted of masterminding the sniper-shooting rampage that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area in the fall of 2002. Sixteen people were [...]
by Mark Silva
Rep. Anh "Joseph'' Cao, the one Republican who voted for the House's health-care legislation near midnight Saturday, said he had let the White House know he was on board: "I called the White House and said I could possibly support the bill."
The president had" [...]
by Mark Silva
Big Bird is throwing a birthday party.
And he is inviting some very special guests.
We don't mean Oscar the Grouch.
We mean Michelle Obama, the first lady, who plans to help celebrate the 40th anniversary of the children's television program on Tuesday with an appearance' [...]
by Mark Silva
There's a little joke that Sen. Orrin Hatch likes to tell about the so-called ''public option'' in the health-care legislation that passed the House by a vote of 220-215 over the weekend.
"One big joke in Washington is, if the government ends up running health care," [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
The great Republican rift, the one that opened like a chasm in the 23rd Congressional District of New York, is sliding South:
The Club for Growth, the conservative Political Action Committee that plowed television advertising money into the New York congressional race for a [...]
by Mark Silva
With the election of Barack Obama, the first African American to serve as president, an overwhelming majority of Americans believed that race relations in the United States would improve.
Most still do.
But only 41 percent of those surveyed say relations have improved since Obama's election in November 2008, [...]
by Mark Silva
It was the "end of an era," those elections conducted last week, according to Saturday Night Live's account of the way its writers figure that FOX News Channel's writers see and report it.
FOX will be quick to note that it is the No. 1-rated cable [...]
by Mark Silva
220-215.
The first full vote on the health-care reform that President Barack Obama is demanding from Congress by year's end arrived late last night in the House.
"Let's keep making history,'' the president told supporters in a Democratic Party email that went out after the" [...]
by Noam N. Levey and James Oliphant
With a historic floor vote looming on their healthcare bill today, House Democratic leaders secured an 11th-hour compromise late Friday night to settle a long-simmering debate over how to restrict federal funding for abortion.
The deal appeared to clear the way for a vote [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama, who has ordered feeral flags lowered to half-staff until Veterams Day for the soldiers killed and wounded in an Army psychiatrist's rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, honors the fallen, their families and their comrades today in a weekly address that also honors the [...]
by Mark Silva
Those East Coast media who are always "making things up'' may not be the best friends of Alaskan Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president, but Palin is expected at one of the Washington media's most elite gatherings:
by Jim Tankersley
Perhaps nothing illustrates the challenges of government efforts to curb global warming more than the chain of events that unfolded this week on opposite sides of the Atlantic.
In Washington, the Senate environment committee approved sweeping limits to the United States' emissions of the heat-trapping gases scientists blame' [...]
by Mark Silva and updated
The president today ordered flags flown at half-staff until Veterans Day in respect for 13 killed and 30 wounded in a shooting rampage at Fort Hood, Texas.
"We don't'" [...]
by Peter Nicholas
At least one Democratic political strategist has gotten a blunt warning from the White House to never appear on Fox News Channel, an outlet that presidential aides have depicted as not so much a news-gathering operation as a political opponent bent on damaging the Obama administration.
Political [...]
by Mark Silva
President Barack Obama plans a stop today at Walter Reed Army Medical Center, where some of the most wounded casualties of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being treated -- and where the Army psychologist accused of killing 13 and wounding 30 at Ft. Hood, [...]
by Don Lee
The nation's unemployment rate surged to 10.2 percent in October, reaching double digits for the first time in 26 years, the Labor Department reported today.
The unexpected sharp increase, from 9.8 percent in September, came as employers dropped 190,000 workers from their payrolls last month. That was larger [...]
by Mark Silva
As the House prepares to take the first vote Saturday on the health-care legislation that President Barack Obama is seeking by year's end, most Americans say they'd be happy with Congress taking more time to either work out minor problems or major changes in the bill.
A slim' [...]
[...]