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From a distance of three and a half years, the events of March 23, 2010, the day President Obama signed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, seem like something from another world. On that day, the Democrats who gathered in the East Room of the White House for the signing ceremony could barely contain their joy. They cheered, they laughed, they shouted, they pumped their fists, they wouldn't sit down. They chanted "Fired up -- ready to go!" as they had at Obama campaign rallies. When the president recognized Nancy Pelosi,the chant turned to "Nancy! Nancy! Nancy!"**snip**After an effusive...

Mr Kerry told the meeting in Istanbul that the US would provide Syrian rebels $123m in new, non-lethal aid. He said President Barack Obama was committed to a "democratic, unified, post-Assad Syria". More than 60,000 have died in the two-year uprising against Bashar al-Assad. Mr Kerry also announced that all aid from the 11 countries known as the Friends of Syria would now be channelled through the Turkey-based Free Syrian Army group headed by Gen Salim Idris. The meeting in Istanbul brought together the foreign ministers of countries opposing the government of President Assad. Mr Kerry said the meeting had...

Democratic National Committee chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz attempted a bit of deception Monday in an effort to criticize GOP rising star Marco Rubio ahead of his State of the Union rebuttal Tuesday night. But on this occasion, the press wasn’t falling for it. In a conference call Monday, Wasserman Schultz enlisted the help of Annette Capella, described by party officials as a “Medicare recipient from Florida,” to warn of the “extreme budget priorities,” they believe Rubio is likely to outline in his televised response to President Obama’s address. Capella gave a lengthy and unflattering statement about Rubio, a U.S. senator...

The top science reporter for NBC News raised questions Monday about Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s hospitalization, raising the possibility the blood clot causing isn’t linked to an earlier concussion. “It’s not exactly clear what is happening with Secretary Clinton’s health,” NBC News chief science and health correspondent Robert Bazell said “All we have is a statement from her office. The hospital isn’t saying anything and the statement from her [office] says that she had this blood clot that stemmed from the concussion and she’s being treated with blood-thinning drugs,” Bazell continued. “The problem is that usually when blood clots...

Since it now appears that the first two presidential debates did very much indeed have a resounding effect on the state of the race, Team O can’t afford to take any chances with Monday’s foreign-policy debate. Unfortunately, the Obama administration’s narrative on the president’s foreign-policy record has long been that all of those drone strikes and the death of Osama bin Laden have vastly deteriorated the strength and coordination of terrorism in the Middle East, and the attacks on the consulate in Benghazi and the death of four Americans on the eleventh anniversary of 9/11 put something of a damper...

"In 2008, I tried to only making promises that I could keep or work on keeping," President Obama said at a campaign event in Jacksonville today. "And I told you that I was not a perfect man and I wouldn't be a perfect president but I also told you that I would always tell you what I thought, I'd always tell you where I stood and most of all I would wake up every single day, every single day and spend every waking hour thinking about you."

US President Barack Obama said Saturday the United States needed to do more than just reclaim jobs lost to the recession, as he called for rebuilding the economy to make it secure for future generations. "Our mission isn't just to put people back to work - it's to rebuild an economy where that work pays; an economy in which everyone who works hard has the chance to get ahead," Obama said in his radio and Internet address. The comment came after new Labor Department statistics showed that the June jobless rate was unchanged from May at 8.2 percent, with 12.7...

I'm not great at math but I need someone to splane something. If the weekly unemployment claims far exceed the weekly job creation numbers, and they have for three years and by a considerable amount each week I believe, how come the unemployment rate goes DOWN????? Obama's new math. If he's right, I think the casino's have been screwing us all along. Just a thought.

President Obama has emerged from talks with Republicans about cutting the massive federal debt and thrown down the gauntlet, daring the GOP to oppose his plan for additional stimulus measures and tax hikes. A recipe for disaster: With the country still struggling to emerge from the deepest recession since the 1930s, Obama said Congress needs to take steps to bring down the 9.1 percent unemployment rate even as it weighs medium-term austerity measures. "There are more steps that we can take right now that would help businesses create jobs here in America," he said. Those measures likely would add hundreds...

Author Q&A: New book delves into Obama rootsBy Emily Cahn - 02/10/11 06:52 PM ET It’s the rumor that just won’t go away: President Obama is not a U.S. citizen. But in his book, The Obamas, which chronicles the history of the president’s Kenyan ancestors, former BBC journalist Peter Firstbrook writes that that rumor is baseless. Firstbrook spent a year traveling through Kenya learning about Obama’s family there, and calls the finished product a prequel to Obama’s memoir, Dreams From My Father. The Hill spoke with Firstbrook about the book and his experiences researching it. Q: The topic of your...

In speech after speech lately, President Obama has vowed to oppose a Republican proposal “to cut education by 20 percent,” a cut that would “eliminate 200,000 children from Head Start programs” and “reduce financial aid for 8 million college students.” Except that, strictly speaking, the Republicans have made no such proposal. The expansive but vague Pledge to America produced by House Republicans does promise deep cuts in domestic spending, but it gives no further detail about which programs would be slashed. So Mr. Obama has filled in his own details as if they were in the Republican plan. With the...

At the CNBC town-hall-style meeting, President Obama offered a little advice for members of the Tea Party movement who argue that the federal government has grown too big and powerful. The president said that sentiment was rooted in history, and called it a “noble tradition of being healthily skeptical of government. That’s in our DNA. … That’s a good thing.”But he critiqued the Tea Party candidates, saying they were failing to identify actual cuts in government services that they were willing to accept to force such changes in spending.Their message is, he said: “We’re going to control government spending. We’re...

Obama is increasingly resembling the errant husband, who, when caught in bed with another woman by his wife blandly asserts, "What woman? Who are you going to believe - me or the evidence of your own eyes?" Obama is asking Americans to ignore the evidence of their own eyes and believe him. After all, he is the President of the United States, which implies honor, integrity, and character. Or used to. Calling the president a liar is a serious charge. But either Obama is lying to America or he is seriously misinformed, which is even scarier. With a straight face,...

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President Barack Obama dismissed a recent poll showing that a third of Americans don’t know he’s a Christian – and blamed an online campaign of misinformation by his conservative enemies for perpetuating the myth that he’s a Muslim. “I can’t spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead,” Obama told NBC Nightly News anchor Brian Williams, sitting under a tent in a rain-soaked New Orleans, where he commemorated the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. “The facts are the facts. We went through some of this during the campaign — there is a mechanism, a network...

Obama says he ignored Beck rally He seemed intent on casting himself as above the political fray, saying he had more important work to do than to engage in the back and forth of the political “silly season.” For example, Obama said he did not watch any of Fox News Channel host Glenn Beck’s “Restoring Honor” rally Saturday on the National Mall. “It’s not surprising that somebody like a Mr. Beck is able to stir up a certain portion of the country. That's been true throughout our history,” he said. But “I’m making decisions that are not necessarily good for...

President Obama said Social Security is not in crisis and only modest changes are needed to keep it solvent. The president acknowledged at a small town hall gathering in Columbus, Ohio, Wednesday that the pension fund "has to be tweaked because the population is getting older" but said Republicans' plans to drastically overhaul the program are wrong. "Social Security is not in crisis," Obama said. "We're going to have to make some modest adjustments in order to strengthen it." Social Security has become a significant campaign issue during the August recess — Democrats have attacked the GOP,

"A year-old program granting movie studios tax breaks for filming in California has saved jobs and should yield two billion dollars in direct spending, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said. In a statement released Friday, the governor said the program was "creating and retaining tens of thousands of jobs and generating spending in California." "This is exactly why I fought so hard for tax credits in last year's budget," Schwarzenegger said. "Just the first two years of this incentive will generate two billion dollars in direct spending, with even more to come."

Despite President Obama's pledge for honest budgeting and billions of dollars in stimulus money spent to save teachers' jobs, the Education Department is asking for off-the-books emergency funding to keep local districts from laying off school teachers next school year. Education Secretary Arne Duncan sent Democratic lawmakers a request Thursday to pass a $26 billion emergency supplemental to fund up to 300,000 teachers' jobs that he says will otherwise be lost in the fall.

Under mounting pressure to rein in mammoth budget deficits, President Obama will propose in his State of the Union address a three-year freeze on federal funding that is not related to national security.... Although the freeze would shave no more than $15 billion off next year's budget -- barely denting a deficit projected to exceed $1 trillion for the third year in a row -- White House officials said it could save significantly more during the next decade.... The spending freeze would affect only about one-eighth of the nation's $3.5 trillion budget, the bulk of which is devoted to entitlement...