Michelle Obama 'Cat Woman:' Halloween

by Mark Slva

Among the three most closely watched off-season elections - including an open governor's race in Virginia that the Democrats apparently are poised to lose despite the efforts of President Barack Obama there - none is more peculiar than the contest in New York State's remote and farflung 23rd Congressional District.

Some of the Republican Party's biggest names - including Sarah Palin - handed their support to not the moderate, pro-abortion rights Republican in the race, but to a Conservative Party candidate. And, in a district that hasn't elected a Democrat since the Civil War, the Republican candidate today, four days before the election, announced that she is standing down - all but assuring that the Democratic candidate will fail there on Tuesday.

Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who had stood by the GOP's candidate, along with Newt Gingrich, today called Republican Dede Scozzafava's suspension of her campaign in New York a "selfless act.'' It will, he said, enable voters in the 23rd district to "unite around a candidate who shares Republican principles and will serve the interests of his constituents in Congress by standing in opposition to the liberal policies of President Obama and Speaker Pelosi.'' (saying, essentially, that the GOP's candidate was not that person.)

So the RNC today endorsed the Conservative Party's candidate, Doug Hoffman. "Doug's campaign will receive the financial backing of the RNC, and get-out-the-vote efforts to defeat (Democrat) Bill Owens on Tuesday,'' Steele said in a statement issued by the RNC today.

The stage is set for Tuesday's elections: At least a two-out-of-three defeat for the Democrats on the ballot one year after Obama was elected president.

(Republican N.Y. Assemblywoman Dierdre Scozzafava and Conservative congressional candidate Doug Hoffman debated in Syracuse earlier this year. (Photo above by Heather Ainsworth, / AP)
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by Mark Silva

On a warm and drizzly Halloween, President Barack Obama and several players took their weekend game indoors today - with a morning outing to Fort McNair for two hours of basketball.

The president's motorcade left the White House at 10:07 a.m. EDT - on this final day of EDT for the year, we're sorry to say here in the Swamp, where tonight we are switching over to EST, Eastern Swamp Time.

Obama wore his usual White Sox cap on this day of Game Three of a World Series which could have been almost as good as world peace if this Nobel Prize winner had had his way.

The president left Fort McNair at 12:18, precisely two hours after arriving. He was preceded by nine other hoop players, most wearing shorts and high-tops. He wore black running pants and a jacket and carried a red sports drink.

The party included Reggie Love, his aide and frequent basketball partner, and close friend Marty Nesbitt.

"You guys are closer than usual," the president said to a slightly wet pool of reporters on the way out - a greeting? Or a shot across the bow from a president who has chafed lately about the public getting a little too close to his personal time.

There were no women in this basketball party today. The president, who included the first woman in his golf game as president last week - also his 24th as president - has maintained that his all-male basketball is not sending any message. It's just a game -- "bunk,'' he called criticism of a recent congressional game on the White House's home court.

The president was back at the White House by 12:30 pm., with thanks to Rich Wolf of USA Today for his rainy pool duty.

Time to carve some pumpkins, Swampsters. And don't forget to set your clocks back tonight before turning in -- but try to keep them in the current century, ye gadflies.

(Photo of Marty Nesbitt and President Obama by Susan Walsh / AP)

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, pointing to the turnaround in the nation's Gross Domestic Product reported this week as a measure of a recovery underway, says today that it will take time to rebuild the sort of economy that provides for sustainable growth.

"As I've said many times,'' Obama says in his weekly radio and Internet address, "it took years to dig our way into the crisis we've faced. It will take more than a few months to dig our way out. But make no mistake: That's exactly what we will do.

"For the economy we seek is one where folks who need a job can find one and incomes are rising again,'' the president says. "The economy we seek is one where small businesses can flourish and entrepreneurs can get the capital they need to plant new seeds of growth.''

Yet, while the Obama administration credits the economic stimulus bill enacted in February for much of the increase in the GDP during the third quarter -- the president's chair of the council of economic advisers, Christina Romer, said this week that there may not have been an increase in GDP without it -- House Republican Leader John Boehner maintains today that the stimulus "isn't working" and that Democrats are preparing to pile another costly burden on the nation's problems with a runaway health-care bill.

"The "stimulus" bill isn't working. Unemployment is rising,'' Boehner (R-Ohio) says in the weekly Republican address today. "The debt to be paid by our kids and grandkids is exploding. And now, Speaker Pelosi's 1,990-page government takeover of healthcare?

"Enough is enough,'' Boehner says today. "Breaking the bank and taking away the freedoms Americans cherish is not the answer to the challenges we face.''

See the president's address above, the Republican leader's below, and read the texts of both below the jump. And, as the president says at the close of his address today:

"Happy Halloween.''

by Mark Silva and Christi Parsons

As the Obama administration begins an unprecedented publication of lists of people who have visited the White House on its Web-site -- yes, philanthropist George Soros has dropped in -- a senior adviser says President Barack Obama was "furious" ito learn that the Democratic Party had offered big donors a chance to meet with senior policy makers.

"There was one offering, or one brochure, or one communication from the Democratic National Committee, in the beginning of the year, and they had a line in there about access to senior policy makers,'' senior adviser David Axelrod says in an interview that National Public Radio's Weekend Edition is airing Saturday morning. "No one was more furious about that, when he learned about that, than the president himself. And he learned about it from a press clipping."

As the new owners of the Chicago Cubs are settling in, Axelrod, whose boss is a bigtime White Sox fan, also is asked what it will take for the Cubs to improve their game.

"You know we've explored this, and we don't know that we can do that by Executive Order,'' the Chicagoan says. "It would probably take an act of Congress and there is a real conflict on the Hill about whether to help the Cubs."

The White House, claiming "a major milestone in government transparency,'' says today that it has processed "110 disclosure requests from September that yielded nearly 500 visitor records. All of these are now available on the White House website in accessible, searchable format for anyone to browse or download. Consistent with our earlier announcement that we will only release records 90 days or older, this first batch covers the period of time between January 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. Future batches will be posted on an ongoing basis.''

See our account of the first list-dump on a Friday afternoon here:

by Mark Silva

At this juncture where unemployment is nearing 10 percent but a recession that started in December 2007 may be ending with the report this week of Gross Domestic Product on the rise again, who is more responsible for the state of the economy today, President Barack Obama or former President George W. Bush?

58 percent say Bush.

18 percent say Obama.

What's this? The result of a new poll from MSNBC or The Daily Kos? Nope, it's from a poll run by:

FOX News.

Now, Democrats, of course, are far more likely to blame Bush than Republicans are, the FOX survey finds. But it is the self-styled independent voters surveyed -- who blame Bush over Obama by a margin of about six to one - who tip the balance of the findings of this poll. More in the survey say they personally are worse off this year than they were last year than those who say they are better off, the poll finds, and most blame Bush for the current state of the ecoomy.

For some time now, Obama has been talking about the "mess'' that he inherited. Lately, he's been asking people to help him "mop" it up. And he has joked that critics accuse him of using a "socialist mop.'' The White House, we all know, has been at odds with FOX News over its alleged "bias,'' but they're lkely to like the findings of FOX's survey about who is responsible for the mess -- if not some of the other findings:

by Mark Silva

There's just one thing about being president that has really annoyed him, President Barack Obama says:

The flak he caught for taking his wife to New York City for a Broadway play and dinner, a campaign promise kept.

"People made it into a political issue," Obama tells the New York Times Magazine, in an interview about the first family's marriage featured in Sunday's magazine.

"If I weren't president, I would be happy to catch the shuttle with my wife to take her to a Broadway show,'' the president says, voicing dismay about the criticism he fielded for that Saturday night out with his wife, "as I had promised her during the campaign, and there would be no fuss and no muss and no photographers.''

The first couple's Broadway date -night included seats at August Wilson's Joe Turner's Come and Gone at the Belasco Theater on W. 44th Street,

When veteran actor Roger Robinson accepted a Tony Award a week later for his peformance in the revival of Wilson's play, he made a point of acknowledging the Broadway show's star ticket-buyer, Obama, which led the emcee of the Tony Awards show, Neil Patrick Harris, to suggest to producers in the audience at Radio City Music Hall that they might consider a presidential theme for shows: "Barack of Ages... or "Night at the Oprah'' or "Obama Mia'' - or, maybe not.

Presidents travel by motorcade - 15 vehicles long on most days - and when they fly they fly an Air Force jet. Now, Washington has a certain cultural aspect to it, but it has no Broadway - so keeping that promise of dinner and a play also meant a couple of motorcades and a flight. (On that particular Saturday night at the end of May, however, the president flew a smaller model of Air Force One to New York, leaving the jumbo jets at Andrews Air Force Base.)

Of course, the first couple created as much of a stir when they climbed into a car - and motorcade -- on a Saturday night earlier this month to celebrate their 17th anniversary, and first in the White House, at a nearby Washngton restaurant. They dined at the Blue Duck Tavern in the West End of Washington, between Dupont Circle and Georgetown.

"Taste cannot be controlled by law,'' Thomas Jefferson is said to have said -- it says so at the Blue Duck Tavern's Web-site. (See the flap it stirred here in the Swamp.)

"The notion that I just couldn't take my wife out on a date without it being a political issue was not something I was happy with,'' the president says about that earlier Saturday night on Broadway in the Times magazne interview.

These "date-nights'' are a tradition for the first couple. But First Lady Michelle Obama, who sat with her husband for the Oval Office interview, says that marriage does not necessarily become easier just because a couple moves into a mansion with servants and security at every turn.

"The strengths and challenges of our marriage don't change because we move to a different address," she says n the interview, allowing that everyone faces "bumps" along the way, and indeed "they are continuous..''

by Mark Silva

The FOX News Channel is not only the most-watched cable TV news channel. It's also the most ideological, in the view of Americans surveyed on the subject.

Nearly half of Americans surveyed -- 47 percent -- say they think of FOX News as "mostly conservative,'' according to a poll conducted by the Pew Research Center.

Only 24 percent say they see FOX as neither conservative nor liberal.

At the same time, many view CNN and the three major broadcast TV networks as mostly liberal, yet about the same percentages say they are neither liberal nor conservative.

Somewhat more say MSNBC is mostly liberal -- 36 percent -- than those who say it is neither in particular -- 27 percent.

"The perceptions of those who regularly tune into these news networks are similar to those of the public,'' reports Andy Kohut, Pew Research Center president.

Nearly half (48 percent) of regular FOX viewers say the network is mostly conservative. About four-in-ten (41 percent) of the regular viewers of CNN describe the network as mostly liberal and 36 percent of regular MSNBC viewers say the same about that network.

Pew's latest News Interest Index survey, conducted Oct. 23-26 among 1,001 adults comes in the midst of a feud between the White House and FOX, with the White House likening FOX to an arm of the Republican Party, and FOX maintaining that it is a news network which also features opinionated commentators.

The feud has been good for business at FOX.

The Pew survey finds the public evenly split in its view of cable news hosts "having strong opinions about politics." About four-in-ten (42 percent) see this as a good thing, while an identical percentage sees it as a bad thing. See the full report.

by Mark Silva

"Nazi Pelosi!'' a heckler called out today, as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi unveiled the Democratic leadership's plan for health-care legislation in Washington.

On a street corner a few blocks from the White House the other day, a young protester stood with a table and some placards, including an oversized photograph of President Barack Obama wearing a clipped, Hitler-esque moustache.

For all the furor that the debate over proposals for health-care reform has created, the worst of it may be the contention that, somehow, the leaders of Congress and the president of the United States are walking in lockstep with the fascists who tried to overrun Europe and killed six million Jews in the process.

Yet that suggestion has surfaced on the posters of protesters, on conservative Web-sites and on cable television - where FOX News Channel's Glenn Beck has hoisted blackboards alleging some sort of fascist conspiracy behind the White House's plans to insure millions of Americans who lack coverage for health care - and on talk radio, where Rush Limbaugh found amazing similarities between the logo of the White House Office of Health Reform and a symbol of Hitler's Nazi Party.

"Adolf Hitler, like Barack Obama, ruled by dictate,'' Limbaugh has said.

"If's fascism,'' Beck has said of the administration's agenda. "The groundwork is being laid right now.''

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee recently called out House Republicans for going "way too far" in comparing Democratic healthcare reform efforts to Nazism. A tweet had appeared in the National Republican Congressional Committee's offcial Twitter feed that recommended a "Funny Video: Moonbattery: Hitler Reacts to ObamaCare Maneuvers.''

(The tweet was retracted. The video, above, lives on.)

"House Republicans have gone way too far, DCCC spokeswoman Jennifer Crider said in a statement released earlier this month. "The NRCC's despicable promotion of a video comparing Speaker Pelosi's effort to reform health insurance in America to Adolf Hitler's extermination of millions is a shocking new low that must be condemned.''

"Nazi Pelosi! Nazi Pelosi! You'll burn in hell for this!" a protester with a bullhorn yelled at the House speaker today as she unveiled the leadership's health-care plan.

Pelosi didn't miss a beat in responding:

"Thank you, insurance companies of America."

This is hardly the insurance companies of America, however, that have debased a debate over health-care to a level where American political leaders are likened in public to the most evil man of the 20th Century - if not modern-times.

The Christian Newswire reports today on a submission from Randall Terry, the radical abortion-protester and founder of Operation Rescue, that he and two other activists who maintain that Democrats want the government to pay for abortions with their health-care bills were arrested after shouting: "Nancy Pelosi, you will burn in hell for this!" and "We won't pay for murder!"

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama gave serious consideration to picking Hillary Rodham Clinton as his running mate - surprising even his own campaign advisers with his seriousness - but worried about Bill Clinton.

"Obama was clearly thinking more seriously about picking Hillary Clinton than (adviser David) Axelrod and I had realized," David Plouffe, the manager of Obama's presidential campaign, writes in a forthcoming book. "He said if his central criterion measured who could be the best VP, she had to be included in that list."

Although Obama considered his erstwhile rival in the Democratic Party's primaries throughout the summer of 2008, he ultimately eliminated her name from the list in early August, fearing, according to an account in Plouffe's book appearing in excerpts in Time magazine, that there "were just too many complications outweighing the potential strengths."

"I think Bill may be too big a complication,'' Plouffe quotes Obama as saying. "If I picked her, my concern is that there would be more than two of us in the relationship."

Ultimately, the president-elect named the then-senator from New York as his secretary of state - a relationship which also has been complicated by former President Bill Clinton's continuing presence on the international stage, with his Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative.

In Plouffe's book, The Audacity to Win, the president's campaign manager also reports on the crisis that emerged with the incendiary remarks of Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, coupled with the controversy surrounding Chicago power broker Tony Rezko.

"The Wright story broke on a Wednesday and exploded across the media landscape the next day,'' Plouffe writes. "We decided Obama had to take questions about ( Wright) head-on on Friday, in a series of lengthy national cable interviews.

"There was one not-so-minor complication. He was already scheduled to do editorial boards that Friday afternoon with both Chicago papers about Tony Rezko, two hours each, no holds barred. Given no choice but to address Wright as soon as possible, we decided we would do a round of TV interviews on him directly after the Rezko boards,'' Plouffe recalls.

"It shaped into quite a day, like having your legs amputated in the morning and your arms at night. The question was whether we would still have a heartbeat at the end of the day.''

by Mark Silva

It's not often that we get to post a photograph of Yogi Berra here in the Swamp, but the baseball legend brought a couple of noteworthy guests with him to the field of the 2009 World Series opener with the Phillies and Yankees -- first win, Philadelphia.

"A nickel ain't worth a dime anymore,'' Berra has said.

That and: "Baseball is ninety percent mental. The other half is physical."

And, as he has asked: "If people don't want to come out to the ballpark, how are you going to stop them?"

All without a TelePrompTer.

by Mark Silva

Most Americans believe that a solution to the nation's problems in race-relations will eventually be resolved - a level of optimism that is essentially unchanged from a year ago, just before the election of the first African-American president, Barack Obama.

In fact, the reading on this question, as measured by the Gallup Poll, rests at about the same level recorded when Gallup first asked the question in December of 1963. Fifty-six percent of those surveyed see hope - 55 percent did four decades ago.

"In short, despite all that has happened in the intervening decades, there is scarcely more hope now than there was those many years ago that the nation's race-relations situation will be solved,'' writes Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of The Gallup Poll. "Still, the similarity between attitudes in 1963 and 2009 masks a good deal of movement on this measure in the intervening years.

Among black Americans surveyed, optimism about an eventual solution to race-relations problems actually has decreased since last summer - from 50 to 42 percent.

The all-time low in Gallup's measure of hope for improved race relations - 29 percent - was recorded in October 1995, shortly after a Los Angeles jury acquitted O.J. Simpson of murder. By last summer, Newport notes, "when there was general recognition that a black man, Barack Obama, would receive the Democratic nomination for president, the percentage of Americans believing in an eventual solution to the race problem had risen to 58 percent.

The day after Obama's electoral victory over Republican John McCain, the percentage of Americans voicing a positive view on the race-relations question jumped to 67 percent.

"Now, about a year after Obama's election, optimism that a solution to the country's race problem will eventually be worked out has settled back down to 56 percent,'' Newport reports. "This certainly remains higher than in a number of previous years, particularly at points in the 1990s. But the current reading is not significantly improved from the sentiment that prevailed in more recent years prior to Obama's election.

While the majority of white Americans are optimistic about a solution to race relations, the majority of blacks surveyed are not. "Blacks are decidedly more pessimistic about equal job opportunities for blacks than are whites,'' Newport adds.

by Noam N. Levey and Janet Hook and updated again at 1:35 pm EDT

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, unveiling the House's plan for a compromise on health-care legislation today, said the bill will offer new insurance for tens of millions of Americans and lower costs for those who already have coverage.

The plan represents a compromise among various interests in the House, the speaker said -- though Republicans have sharply rejected it. It also will lead to a planned House vote and position House leaders for negotiations with Senate leaders crafting their own health-care plan.

"Here we are, for nearly a century, it's really over a century, leaders of all political parties... have called and fought for health care and health insurance reform,'' said Pelosi (D-Calif.) "Today, we are about to deliver on the promise of making affordable, quality health care available for all Americans.''

Pelosi maintained today that the House leadership's compromise will make health care more affordable for the middle class and secure for seniors. The bill offers health insurance for an additional 36 million Americans, she said - offering coverage for 96 percent of all citizens - and its cost over 10 years, under $900 billion, will not increase the federal budget deficit.

"The drive for health-care reform is moving forward,'' Pelosi said.

"This is an idea whose time has come,''' said Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), the House majority leader, promising to keep a promise of "integrity of this progress by making this bill's full text available on line.'' It will be online for 72 hours before House members are asked to vote, he said.

"This is an idea whose time has come,'' Hoyer said.

Paving the way for a crucial vote on healthcare legislation in the next two weeks, the compromise unveiled by House Democratic leaders today would create a nationwide government-run insurance plan but omit what many liberals consider the key to cost control.

According to senior lawmakers and aides, the so-called public option in the new compromise would not dictate what the plan can pay hospitals, doctors and other providers. Instead, the federal government would have to negotiate rates with providers, much as private insurers do.

Pelosi and her lieutenants made that concession in hopes of winning over conservative Democrats. Many of those lawmakers fear that payments based on lower Medicare rates -- the formula Pelosi originally supported -- would not be enough to sustain providers in rural areas.

While a coalition of Democrats has been assembled to support the speaker's compromise, Republicans remain opposed.

"The American people have spoken. Speaker Pelosi and House Democrats have ignored them,'' House Republican Leader John Boehner said today. "Through the month of August, the American people let Members of Congress from both parties know that they didn't want a government takeover of health care...

"But instead of listening to the American people, Democrats hid behind closed doors and came back with a bill designed to appease the liberal special interests,'' said Boehner (R-Ohio.) "Three things about Speaker Pelosi's health care bill are already clear: it will raise the cost of Americans' health insurance premiums; it will kill jobs with tax hikes and new mandates; and it will cut seniors' Medicare benefits.

"The fact that it weighs in at nearly 2,000 pages - more than 620 pages longer than the government takeover of health care Hillary Clinton proposed in 1993 - is as good an indication as any of just how costly and unsustainable Speaker Pelosi's proposal is. ''

by Don Lee and updated

The U.S. economy expanded at an annual rate of 3.5 percent in the third quarter, unofficially marking the end of the worst recession since World War II.

The growth reported today by the Commerce Department for the three months that ended Sept. 30 snapped four straight quarters of economic contraction and was driven largely by a rebound in consumer spending supported by the federal stimulus package and improved business spending that included a revival of homebuilding..

The increase in the gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced in the country, is the evidence most economists have said is needed to declare victory against the recession.

But today's preliminary report doesn't mean the economy is in good shape. Its expansion in the third quarter only partly offsets its dramatic 6% decline last fall and winter. A number of forecasters are predicting weaker expansion in the fourth quarter and in the early part of 2010.

And the country's unemployment rate, which reached a 26-year high of 9.8 percent last month, is expected to remain high for some time

Peter Morici, an economics professor at the University of Maryland, said the economy needed to have an annual growth rate of 3% or more over at least three quarters to add enough jobs to bring down unemployment.

"I don't see a rosy picture," he said before the GDP figure was released.

Although a recession is commonly defined as two or more straight quarters of GDP decline, economists rely on the National Bureau of Economic Research, a private, nonpartisan research group, to mark the beginning and end of business cycles. The bureau, which considers GDP and employment data as primary factors in determining a recession's length, said the latest recession began in December 2007.

The White House said it sees evidence of an impact from the $787-billion economic stimulus act approved by Congress in February in the newest quarter's report.

by Christi Parsons and updated at 3 pm EDT

President Obama traveled overnight to meet the flag-draped caskets of 18 Americans killed in military service this week, the height of the bloodiest month for the U.S. in the war in Afghanistan.

In an unannounced trip in the middle of the night, the president went to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware by Marine helicopter to be present for the arrival of the bodies of the fallen troops.

The solemn visit was the first of its kind for Obama, and comes as he is withdrawing troops from Iraq but contemplating a troop increase in Afghanistan. Earlier this week, Obama spoke to sailors and aviators at Jacksonville Naval Air Station in Florida, where he promised that he would count the full cost of war before deciding to send more military into harm's way.

"Obviously it was a sobering reminder of the extraordinary sacrifices that our young men and women in uniform are engaging in every single day -- not only our troops, but their families as well,'' Obama said later today, at the White House. "And so Michelle and I are constantly mindful of those sacrifices.

"And obviously the burden that both our troops and our families bear in any wartime situation is going to bear on how I see these conflicts,'' said Obama, deliberating over the way forward in Afghanistan. "It is something that I think about each and every day.''

The administration this year lifted a longstanding ban on media coverage of the return of fallen service members. Obama was accompanied by a small pool of White House reporters who were on duty overnight.

The service members returning overnight were the seven Army soldiers and three Drug Enforcement Agency agents killed when their MH-47 Chinook crashed at Darreh-ye-bum, and eight soldiers killed when their STRYKER personnel vehicle was struck by an IED blast in the Arghandab River Valley.

Both incidents occurred on Monday, and were part of the toll in the deadliest month for the U.S. in Afghanistan.

Obama met privately with the families of the dead at a chapel on the Delaware base around 3 a.m EDT.

by Mark Silva and updated at 8:15 pm EDT

The president had his war cabinet in at the White House this week, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff are coming Friday, but today another combatant apparently stopped by the West Wing:

Michael Clemente, senior vice president at FOX News Channel.

Mediaite reports that, while terms of any agreement between these feuding parties "are still emerging,'' the meeting was to seek a "truce" between both sides.

Clemente and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs met in Gibbs' office at the White House complex, and Clemente later met with his Washington Bureau.

In the heat of battle, Clemente had said publicly: "The door remains open and we welcome a discussion about the facts behind the issues."

U.S. News & World Report reported that White House officials "don't expect to fire another shot in the battle unless Fox strikes first."

Gibbs dd not respond to our own query about the meeting, but a source told Politico that FOX's own marching orders are to "continue doing what we're doing - reporting the news, asking tough questions and providing analysis/opinion on shows like O'Reilly, Beck and Hannity."

by Mark Silva

Old saying:

"He who spends time passing trivial legislation may find himself out of time to read health-care bill.''

Confucius?

No, Flake.

Rep. Jeff Flake, Arizona Republican, explaining his vote today against a congressional resolution, HR 784, "honoring the 2560th anniversary of the birth of Confucius and recognizing his invaluable contributions to philosophy and social and political thought."

But remember: He who plays basketball with President Obama no necessarily play ball on health-care bill.

Caucus.

GOP caucus.

by Mark Silva

"The Pentagon is not the kind of place that can turn on a dime,'' says Defense Secretary Robert Gates, hailing the signing of a defense-spending bill that targets wasteful spending and unneeded weapons. "It will take more than a single budget to get where we need to be.''

Nor can American society turn on a dime.

Ask the parents of Matthew Shepard, the Wyoming college student killed over a decade ago because he was gay. They attended the signing of a defense bill today that also adds gay Americans to those protected from hate crimes under federal laws.

"After more than a decade... of delay, we have passed inclusive hate-crimes legislation that protects victims from violence based on what they look like, who they love, or who they are,'' President Barack Obama said at the bill signing this afternoon. "I promised Judy Shepard... that this day would come. I'm happy that she and her husband Dennis could join us at this event.''

The $680-billion defense billfor fiscal 2010, which includes $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but leaves out $2 billion for F-22 fighter jets that the Pentagon didn't want and bars a lot of no-bid contracting that has run up prices for other work, is a first step toward reform of a waste-laden Defense Department, Obama and Gates said today.

"I have always rejected the notion that we have to waste billions of dollars of taxpayers' dollars to keep this nation secure,'' Obama said.

"This bill isn't perfect,'' he said. "There are still more cuts we need to make... fights we need to win.... (but) there were a lot of people in this town who didn't think it was possible... who were certain we would get steamrolled... Today, we're putting an end to some wasteful projects that some lawmakers have tried to kill for years.''

The bill takes a stance against no-bid contracts and entrenched lobbyists "pushing weapons that even our military says it doesn't want or doesn't need,'' he said. " At a time when we're facing two wars and an increasing deficit, it's inexcusable. It's unconscionable.''

Both the spending bill and the hate-crimes legislation attached will be hailed by the White House as elements of change that Obama promised with his election as president.

"We have proved that change is possible,'' the president said at the signing. "It may not come quickly or all at once, but if you push hard enough, it does come quickly.''

by Mark Silva

As health-care legislation enters the "trust us'' stage - where it's not so much the hundreds of written pages of bills under debate as it is the vote-clenching concepts, such as the "public option,'' that frame a deal - the public apparently places the greatest faith in President Barack Obama and the least in the GOP.

Trust in Obama to change the nation's health-care system is running at 55 percent who say they have a great or fair amount of trust in the president on this, according to the findings of a Gallup Poll.

Trust in the Democrats running Congress - now embroiled in a deal-cutting bid to get legislation to the House and Senate floors - runs at 48 percent. Trust in Republicans in Congress, complaining that the entire process is moving too swiftly, runs at 37 percent.

"There is a notable difference in degree,'' Gallup notes. "A significantly higher proportion of Democrats than Republicans generally trust their own party's leaders on the issue. Eighty-six percent of Democrats trust Obama and 81 percent trust the Democrats in Congress; by contrast, 61 percent of Republicans trust the Republicans in Congress.''

Plus: "Fewer than four in 10 political independents have much faith in either political party in Congress on healthcare reform; however, the majority of independents do trust Obama.''

"While Republicans do not trust the president much more than they trust congressional Democrats on healthcare, political independents do see him in a more positive light,'' Gallup notes. " This helps lift Obama above the fray, earning him the trust of the slight majority of Americans.''

The findings come from a survey of 1,521 adults, conducted Oct. 16-19, with a possible margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

by Mark Silva

The White House maintains that it hasn't offered special treatment for political donors, following a report today that the president has "quietly rewarded scores of top Democratic donors with VIP access to the White House.''

High-dollar fundraisers have been promised access to senior White House officials in exchange for pledges to donate $30,400 to the party personally or to bundle $300,000 in contributions from other donors heading into the 2010 midterm elections, according to internal Democratic National Committee documents obtained by The Washington Times.

One top donor told of a birthday visit to the Oval Office. Another was allowed use of a White House-complex bowling alley for his family, according to the newspaper's report. Bundlers closest to the president were invited to watch a movie in the basement of the presidential mansion.

A contribution "doesn't guarantee a visit to the White House - nor does it preclude it,'' Robert Gibbs , the White House press secretary, told reportersd today.

The White House plans to start releasing the names of all visitors to the White House under an agreement reached in August, said Gibbs -- a quarterly review of the past months' visits that will start in December. The Democratic National Committee has not accepted contributions from registered lobbyists since Obama was the party's nominee and insisted on that, Gibbs added, maintaining that the administration has set the toughest rules on lobbyist influence to date.

"There are only a couple of people I know who used the White House bowling alley,'' said Gibbs, and he isn't aware of any guests getting a night in the Lincoln Bedroom -- a perk which the Clinton White House made infamous. (Some of the guests who stayed there during Clinton's days were still donating to Clinton pal and ex-DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe during his campaign for governor of Virginia this year.)

Obama invited his top New York bundler, UBS Americas CEO Robert Wolf, to golf with him during the president's Martha's Vineyard vacation in August, the newspaper reported, and "at least 39 donors and fundraisers also were treated to a lavish White House reception on St. Patrick's Day.''

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, who has spoken often of "the arc of history,'' today honored one of the men who paved a path for the president's own historic election.

The president conferred the Congressional Gold Medal on former Sen. Edward W. Brooke, the first African American elected to the Senate by popular vote.

With Brooke, 90, seated behind him in the Capitol Rotunda, the president joined ranking Republican and Democratic lawmakers in granting an award "bestowed by this body of which he was an esteemed member, presented in this place where he moved the arc of history, surrounded by so many, myself included, who have followed the trail that he blazed."

Brooke, a Republican from Massachusetts, served two full terms, from 1967
to 1979, during which he promoted racial equality and worked to increase the minimum wage and low-income housing.

He was born in Washington, D.C., in 1919 and graduated from Howard University before serving in the Army during World War II. He earned a law degree from Boston University.

"America's greatness lies in its wondrous diversity,'' read a statement by Brooke in the ceremony's program. "Our magnificent pluralism has made our country great. Our ever-widening diversity will keep us great."

(President Barack Obama is pictured in the Rotunda of the Capitol during a ceremony for former Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke, seated at right, awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Photo by Alex Brandon / AP)

by Mark Silva

"You lie,'' the lawmaker yelled at the executive.

Sound familiar?

So may the executive's response:

A common, if rough, insult ending with "you.''

But this is not what you may think it is. This is a reported exchange between the governor of California, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and a state legislator whose bill the governor vetoed.

San Francisco Assemblyman Tom Ammiano had sponsored a bill which passed unanimously granting the Port of San Francisco financial power to redevelop a former shipyard for a new neighborhood known as Pier 70.

Ammiano also had made something of a scene at a Democratic Party fundraiser early this month in San Francisco at which Schwarzenegger, a Republican, had been invited by former San Francisco mayor and Assembly speaker Willie Brown, a Democrat. This surprised many, in light of the heated budget wars between the governor and legislature.

Ammiano could be heard invoking the cry of Republican South Carolina's Rep. Joe Wilson at President Barack Obama's address to a joint session of Congress - "You lie'' - as others heckled Schwarzenegger's brief speech. After the governor left, Ammiano took the stage with a rambling criticism of Schwarzenegger for a variety of offenses -- among them the governor's vetoes of bills that would have legalized gay marriage.

When the governor's office delivered a veto-message for Ammiano's own port bill a few days later, on Oct. 12, there appeared to be an unmistakable hidden message within: Reading the first letter of each line of the letter's two main paragraphs:

"My goodness. What a coincidence," a shocked, shocked Schwarzenegger spokesman Aaron McLear is quoted by the Associated Press as saying. "I suppose when you do so many vetoes, something like this is bound to happen."

""Kudos to the governor for his creative use of coincidence," replies a humbled Ammiano spokesman, Quintin Mecke. "You certainly have to have a sense of humor in politics. Unfortunately, this humor came at the cost of the Port of San Francisco."

Of eight bills which Ammianos sent to the governor's desk this year, Schwarzenegger has vetoed six -- five of them after the Oct. 7 heckling incident. Still, Ammiano's spokesman says his boss wants to move on: "We will call it even and start with a clean slate with the governor from here on out.''

And we thought things were getting out of hand in Washington.

(Photo of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger at a women's conference at Long Beach Convention Center this week, by Toby Canham / Getty Images.)

by Mark Silva

Think about the field of potential Republican candidates for president in 2012 - pollsters have been asking people lately what they think of the field.

The survey at hand does not include Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker from Georgia who has told C-SPAN's Washington Journal that he is going to give this question some more thought in February.

"We are going to reach out to all of our friends around the country,'' Gingrich says. "And we'll decide, if there's a requirement as citizens that we run, I suspect we probably will. And if there's not a requirement, if other people have filled the vacuum, I suspect we won't."

Which suggests that Gingrich may well defer to Tim Pawlenty, the governor of Minnesota, who says he is thinking of running for president, or Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who invested a lot of his own money in a campaign last year and gives every indication of positioning himself for another run, or Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas who ran and his own show on FOX News now, or Sarah Palin, the former governor of Alaska who drew a $1.25 million advance for memoirs that will be published in November, with a rollout by Oprah Winfrey on the eve of publication.

So what do 1,038 Americans surveyed think about the field - a sample sufficient to give CNN and Opinion Research Corp. a high degree of confidence in results that could be as much as 3 percent wrong one way or the other? (The survey was conducted Oct. 16-18.)

More people have an unfavorable opinion of Palin - 51 percent - than those who hold a positive view of the GOP's 2008 nominee for vice president - 42 percent.

Only 3 percent say they have never heard of her, however, which is pretty good for someone who was unknown nationally 15 months ago. On the other hand, in early September of 2008, coming out of the Republican National Convention on Sen. John McCain's presidential ticket, 57 percent had a good impression of Palin, 27 percent negative. So she clearly has suffered from many months of exposure on the national scene.

Nearly two thirds of those surveyed say Palin is "not a typical politician'' -- a handy attribute for a campaign these days -- and say she is "a good role model for women.'' A majority say she cares about the needs of people like them - 56 percent - and say she is honest and trustworthy - 55 percent.

But here's a hitch: Just 29 percent say the former half-term governor who quit midway is qualified to be president.

Romney, it appears, has held up fairly well with the wear.

by Mark Silva

Only Congress can produce a bill authorizing $680 billion in national defense spending and extending the protections of federal hate-crime legislation to gay Americans.

President Barack Obama will get to sign both today in one stroke, but will hold separate ceremonies honoring the occasion.

The hate-crime measure was added to the bill authorizing defense spending in fiscal 2010. With its provisions aimed at curbing waste in spending, the president says the legislation proves that "change is possible'' in "eliminating business as usual.'' (It also authorizes another $130 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.)

The addition of gay Americans to those protected by the hate-crimes legislation is the first major change to the law since its passage in 1968 in the aftermath of the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King. The law was created for people who are attacked because or ace, religion or national origin.

The expansion of the law to cover people who are attacked because of sexual orientation, gender or gender identity will enable the Justice Department to prosecute crimes in places where local laws don't offer the same protections. With 7,624 hate-crimes recorded in 2007, almost one in five were based on sexual orientation, according to the FBI.

The provision is named in honor of Matthew Shepard, a Wyoming college student killed in 1998 because he was gay, and James Byrd Jr., a black man dragged to his death the same year year behind a pickup truck in Texas.

There were 7,624 hate-crime incidents in 2007, almost 17 percent of which were based on sexual orientation, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

by Mark Silva

Tonight on CNN, the cable network where the White House communications director first called cable-dominating FOX News an "arm of the Republican Party,'' a senior White House adviser maintained that FOX indeed is biased.

: "So do you think FOX News is biased?'' CNN's Campbell Brown asked Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to the president.

"Well, of course they're biased,'' Jarrett said. "Of course they are'' - though it didn't take her long here to qualify that comment.

"OK,'' Brown asked, "Then do you also think that MSNBC is biased? (We didn't hear her ask the question about CNN, which is trailing in the latest ratings as FOX has gained steam with a White House feud that's been good for business)

"Well, you know what?'' Jarrett said. "This is the thing. I don't want to... actually, I don't want to just generalize all FOX is biased or that another station is biased.... I think what we want to do is look at it on a case-by-case basis. And when we see a pattern of distortion, we're going to be honest about that pattern of distortion. ''

The White House has been "very public about their feelings about FOX News,'' Brown noted. The president himself said, during an interview with CNBC earlier this year, that there is one TV network in particular that has a practice of running critical stories about him - and they have quite a "megaphone.''

"What we're saying is, is that we want the public to understand what's going on,'' Jarrett told Brown. "When we saw the kind of distortions this summer, particularly directed at seniors, over health care reform, it was really outrageous.

"And I think what the president said in his message before Congress is, we're going to speak directly to the American people and make sure that they understand the truth,''she said. "And so, certainly, if we see somebody distorting the truth, we're going to call them on the carpet for that.

"But we don't want to take our focus away from the core issues that are so important to the American people. Now, when there's all that chatter and distortion and false information, we have to disseminate -- we have to distinguish between truth and fiction. ''

But it's only FOX that the White House has singled out, Brown suggested.

by Mark Silva

"The mood in America may be blue,'' Democratic pollster Peter Hart, who conducted a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll with Republican pollster Bill McInturff, tells the survey's sponsors, "but the attitudes toward Washington are jet black."

While the president's approval rating holds at a low of 51 percent in this poll, the public's attitude toward the GOP has dimmed - with a growing percentage saying they prefer to keep Democrats in control of Congress in next year's midterm elections.

And the public's view of the economy is dim as well, with a growing percentage saying they don't believe the economy has hit bottom yet - and the public divided on Obama's handling of the economy: 47 percent voicing approval, 46 percent disapproval.

Support for a surge in U.S. forces in Afghanistan has grown in this survey - up to 47 percent in support and 43 percent opposed, a reversal from last month's 51 percent opposition and 44 percent support for more troops there.

Yet most support the president's delay of a decision over deployment of thousands of added troops until Afghans resolve their presidential election on Nov. 7 - 58 percent agree with that. Just 43 percent say they support sending 40,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, as Gen. Stanley McChrystal has recommended. Yet 62 percent say the generals should take precedent over the president in this decision.

Rated on his personal characteristics, 61 percent of those surveyed approve of Obama, but on a professional rating of how he the president is doing in getting his many goals accomplished, just 43 percent approve.

"Obama the man does well,'' says NBC's Chuck Todd reported tonight. "Obama the president, there are some questions.''

by Paul Richter

t's become almost the conventional wisdom in Washington that the best way to fight the Taliban is to expand Afghanistan's weak national army. Today, a prominent former diplomat said that approach may be entirely wrong.

George P. Shultz, who was secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan, told an audience at the Carnegie Endowment on International Peace that the West may be making a big mistake trying to build a national army, rather than strengthening the militias of the local leaders who have always run the place.

Afghanistan is a "bottom-up" country with a scattered population that has never been held together by a strong central government, Shultz said. And while the West wants to build up the army and national police to fight off the insurgency, the local leaders - sometimes called warlords -- only see the national army as a challenge to their authority, he said.

Shultz argued that the only time in this decade when the U.S. enjoyed success in Afghanistan was during the invasion of 2001, when U.S. forces made common cause with some of the regional tribal groups and ousted the Taliban government.

While the government in Kabul is now "getting all the attention" from the West, he said, Afghanistan's allies might be smarter to try to build up local fighting forces, then link them in a common effort against the insurgency.

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama is getting "toward the end'' of a review of the war strategy in Afghanistan that will lead to word about the way forward in an eight-year-old war that delivered its most deadly month this month -- eight Americans died today.

The president, who has held several meetings with his senior national security and military advisers, including one with Cabinet members at the White House on Monday, will hold a meeting with the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Friday. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the chief U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, is seeking thousands of additional troops in a deployment of 68,000 that already was boosted by 21,000 this year.

"The decision will come in the next several weeks or in the coming weeks, as we've said,'' White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today aboard Air Force One. " But truthfully, I don't know when that will be. And I think the president is in the process of evaluating, as we've said, where we are, and we'll make a decision in due time.''

The Afghans will hold another round of presidential election voting on Nov. 7 to settle the outcome of a vote marred by fraud in the first round. The Obama administration insists that it needs a strong "partner'' in Afghanistan, the government of President Hamid Karzai facing criticism for corruption.

And Obama will leave for an international trip -- the annual summit of the Asia Pacific Cooperation -- on Nov. 11. He will be gone for more than a week, with stops in Japan and South Korea, China and Singapore. Yet the White House wouldn't signal today if a decision on Afghanistan will be announced before that journey.

"It could be before,'' Gibbs said, "it could be after.''

But the meeting with the Joint Chiefs at the White House on Friday is among the last steps in Obama's decision-making.

"We're getting certainly toward the end of that, yes,'' Gibbs said. "That's probably getting toward the end of it. Again, I think the president will take some time after these meetings to think through what he's heard, what we've all learned, and evaluate this process, both what's best for our country, what's best for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and for the region as a whole.''

by Mark Silva

A little more insight into why Sarah Palin was able to resign as governor of Alaska last summer: The advance for that forthcoming memoir of hers was $1.25 million.

Going Rogue -- or Going Rouge as satirists have dubbed it -- will be out Nov. 17. Palin, the 2008 GOP nominee for vice president, stepped out of office in July.

A disclosure statement released today about Palin's finances from Jan. 1 to July 27, when she resigned as Alaska governor, shows she received $1.25 million from publisher HarperCollins for her memoirs. She refers to the payment as a "retainer.''

It's likely that Palin will make more after publication. Going Rogue jumped to No. 1 on Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble.com after HarperCollins announced that it had advanced the release date of 1.5 million copies by several months. The book is No,. 6 on Amazon now, and 11 at Barnes & Noble.

Palin will make an appearance on The Oprah Winfrey Show the day before the book's release.

The Associated Press contributed.

by Mark Silva

The White House's war with FOX News has been good for business - at FOX.

The October ratings are in at the cable news channel that the Obama administration loves to hate, and it's not only the conservative commentators there who fared well in a month of war of words with the White House - Glenn Beck, Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity and company.

The news shows also have run strong, according to the ratings from Nielsen Media Research: cable program rankings.pdf

FOX is on track for its best year yet, Nielsen shows, both in total viewers for the day and during prime-time, while October proved to be the worst month this year for both rivals CNN and MSNBC. Among the cable news channels, FOX has run No. 1 for 94 months, since January 2002.

FOX viewership is up 9 percent and 14 percent among adults since the feud with the White Hosue started. For the record, that increase in the ratings is measured after Oct. 11, the day that Anita Dunn, the White House communications director, went on CNN and accused FOX of being "an arm of the Republican Party,'' which offered new fuel for Beck's campaign against the White House.

Beck had been at odds with members of the administration for some time, and the president had refused to appear on FOX News Sunday when he was making the rounds of Sunday news shows. He'd said in June he had issues with FOX -- though Obama maintains that he's not losing a lot of sleep over this war.

Beck had his best month of the year, the ratings show. And Special Report with Bret Baier and FOX Report with Shepard Smith ranked among the top 5 cable news programs. Baier and Smith recorded their best month of the year among the critical 25-54 age-group of viewers.

And in October, during prime time, Nielsen found FOX ranking fourth among all cable channels - behind ESPN, TBS and USA. MSNBC ranked 26th in prime time, CNN 28th in prime time: Cable network rankings.pdf

Over at MSNBC, where commentator Keith Olbermann has called Beck "the worst in the world,'' Olbermann had his worst month of the year among the 25-54 crowd. So did Rachel Maddow, who, along with Olbermann, also was labeled a "sick puppy'' by former President George H.W. Bush. And over at the all-news no-bull CNN, Anderson Cooper 360 had its slowest month of the year among 25-54ers.

Nielsen, by the numbers, in prime time:

-- FNC: 2,157,000 in P2+ (560,000 in A25-54)
-- CNN: 664,000 in P2+ (186,000 in A25-54
-- MSNBC: 699,000 in P2+ (234,000 in A25-54)

by Christi Parsons

ARCADIA, Fla. -- President Barack Obama declared today that a "consensus is building" around climate-change legislation and characterized opponents as preoccupied with the past instead of a "clean energy future."

Standing on the edge of a large solar-power farm, Obama urged the Senate to pass a measure that caps carbon emissions -- and to set aside arguments that it would harm the economy and costs jobs.

"The closer we get, the harder the special interests are going to fight," Obama said, with the sun glinting off acres of Florida Power and Light Co. solar panels behind him as he spoke to the utility's employees. "It's a debate between looking backward and looking forward."

The visit coincided with an announcement by the Obama administration that it will invest $3.4 billion in stimulus funds to modernize the nation's energy grid. Some 100 private companies and utilities will receive grants of up to $200 million each to help build a nationwide "smart grid" meant to improve energy delivery and boost the use of renewable energy sources.

Obama administration officials say the projects also will create tens of thousands of new jobs in the near future, while updating the way that Americans feed their need for energy.

But as Obama made his way to the field -- and then afterward toward another political fundraiser -- Republican critics complained that the president was taking a public relations tour on behalf of his economic stimulus program that provides the grants.

"He's on what appears to be a PR swing to try to boost up his own popularity to move legislation and policies that the American people don't want, don't need," said Rep. Connie Mack, a Florida Republican.

(President Barack Obama tours the DeSoto Next Generation Solar Energy Center in Arcadia, Fla., above, photo by Gerald Herbert ./ AP)

by Mark Silva

Will the "cap and trade'' legislation that the House has passed and the Senate is weighing cost people money?

"Yes sir,'' says one of the Senate sponsors, Sen. John Kerry.

The cost of inaction, he says, is far worse.

The debate over what the United States can do about curtailing global warming is underway this week in the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.

The legislation would cap the greenhouse gases that power plants and major manufacturers emit, with a goal of reducing emissions 80 percent by mid-century. It narrowly cleared the House, with the help of a handful of Republicans, including Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois.

"Are there some costs? Yes sir, there are some costs," said Kerry (D-Mass.). While an array of studies show that restricting greenhouse gases will lead to higher energy prices, the senator told the committee today, "none of them factor in the cost of doing nothing."

The Senate's Democrats aren't finding as many willing players among Republicans, and some of the Senate's Democrats have their own demands on legislation which the White House has allowed is unlikely to be finished this year.

"Cap and trade is very expensive,'' said Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), at today's hearing. This is something the American people can't tolerate and I don' think they will.''

While Inhofe challenges the basic science behind the climate change which sponsors are attempting to address, Kerry maintains that voluntary action will not contain the carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases being trapped in the atmosphere - a cause of dangerous warming of the earth, according to many climate scientists.

"Not taking action is more expensive," Kerry said. "America's leadership is on the line here.''

by Mark Silva

The rollout of Sarah Palin's book, Going Rogue, has inspired more than Oprah Winfrey, who will feature the former governor of Alaska on the eve of the publication of her memoirs. It also has inspired some cynics.

Going Rouge is the title of a couple of works coming out the same day.

One is a collection of essays with a title and cover that mirror and mimick the title and cover of Palin's forthcomiming memoirs with a paperback release scheduled the same day, Nov. 17, Going Rouge: An American Nightmare.

This is clearly not the authorized version of Palin's memoirs.

The real version was penned in San Diego with a collaborator, Lynn Vincent, whose most recent collaborative success has become a best-seller with movie rights.

For the past 10 years, the San Diego Union's Diane Bell notes, Vincent has been working for Christian-based World Magazine.

Going Rouge is the work of Richard Kim and Betsy Reed, two editors of the liberal weekly, The Nation. It includes essays by Nation regulars Katrina vanden Heuvel, Naomi Klein, and Katha Pollitt.

It's the first release from OR Books, a startup founded by John Oakes and Colin Robinson that "embraces progressive change in politics, culture and the way we do business.''

It will be sold online.

By comparison with another title, however, the Nation writers' venture is likely to remain somewhat more flattering than this yet other iteration of Going Rouge:

The other is a self-published coloring book by cartoonist Julie Sigwart and political satirist Micheal Stinson: Going Rouge: The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring & Activity Book. It includes a page with lipsticks and pigs and caricatures of Palin in fishing gear, with a gun, a saw, an ax and a bomb.

Palin, the 2008 Republican candidate for vice president, has developed her own following for a memoir that's getting a far more sizeable printing than these mockingbird editions -- 1.5 million for the rollout from HarperCollins, which The Oprah Winfrey Show will be featuring on the afternoon of Nov. 16.

by Mark Silva

In campaigns, there are ads and there are ads.

And then there is Facebook.

In the underdog campaign of Democrat Creigh Deeds in Virginia, trailing his Republican rival, former state Att'y Gen. Bob McDonnell, in the race for governor in the opinion polls heading into the Nov. 3 election, President Barack Obama has lent his support on several fronts.

Obama has raised money for Deeds, he will campaign for him this afternoon at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., an area with a sizeable African-American population in a state where Obama was the first Democrat to carry a presidential contest since Lyndon Johnson's election in 1964, and the president is stumping on Facebook.

The Democratic National Committee, which has pumped money into Deed's campaign, has launched a Facebook ad targeting millions of Virginia Facebook users, concentrating on voters in Richmond, the Tidewater and Northern Virginia.

The Obama ad is appearing on the Facebook pages of Virginia residents 18 and older and who are Facebook fans of the president, live within 50 miles of Norfolk, Richmond or Fairfax or are attending various Virginia colleges and universities.

by Mark Silva

In pursuit of the White House, we noted some time ago, George W. Bush first campaigned throughout Iowa with the same pledge that he voiced at the 2000 Republican National Convention: "I will swear to uphold the honor and dignity of the office to which I have been elected."

In retirement from the White House, Bush says he tried.

The former president, who has joined a popular business motivational speaking circuit, told his first audience in Fort Worth, Texas, on Monday that he had tried during his two terms as president to bring "honor and dignity to the office.''

"Every single day, I was honored to be your president by bringing honor and dignity to the office," Bush said, noting the role that religious faith has played in his presidency. "From a personal perspective, I don't see how you can be president without relying upon an almighty."

Advising the crowd that popularity is "fleeting,'' the retired president suggested that they stick to their principles and live each day to the fullest.

"It's so simple in life to chase popularity, but popularity is fleeting, it's not real,'' Bush told his audience.

And what an audience: Bush addressed a collection of about 11,000 people at the "Get Motivated" business seminar at a convention center. He plans to appear at another session in San Antonio in December.

Bush, who has retired to Dallas, was the headliner at an event that also featured his former secretary of state, retired Gen. Colin Powell, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani.

The Fort Worth-Star Telegram reports that tickets sold for $225 at the door - and there was no word from the sponsors what the former president was paid for his debut as a motivator.

by Mark Silva

The president picked up another $1.5 million for his party's congressional and Senate campaigns last night at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel, where about 150 people paid a minimum $500 ticket for one event and about 300 bigger donors -- $30,000 per couple -- had dinner at a second event.

In the midst of a campiagn fundraising swing that has carried him from San Francisco to New York, and from Boston to Miami, the president was repeating a line that appeared to have a stronger wind behind it with the Senate majority leader's concession to a key liberal demand for the health-care legislation under debate: A public option.

"I am absolutely confident we are going to get heath care done by the end of this year,'' President Barack Obama told his audience in Miami Beach. "We have to take the long view on this process,'' he said, alluding to the many goals of his administration.

"We are closer than we have ever been to passing healthcare reform,'' he said. But he added, "It's not going to get easier from here on in. It's going to get harder.''

About 200 protesters gathered across the street from the hotel with a wide range of
complaints, raning from healthcare to immigration to the president's golf game. The crowd included Haitians calling for asylum, anti-abortion activists, gun rights advocates and opponents of toppled Honduran president Manuel Zelaya.

The Republican National Committee welcomed Obama to Miami with a TV ad, with a narrator voicing these words:

"Miami welcomes President Obama and Vice President Biden to our city. Since you're spending a lot of your time raising campaign dollars instead of meeting with us, we have some questions for you.

"You told us that a massive new spending program would help the economy and be good for jobs. Our community has lost jobs, and now unemployment among Hispanics is nearly 13 percent. Where are the jobs? When will things get better?

"Now, you say we need to overhaul our health care system. Where is the money going to come from? Will you really cut funding for Medicare to pay for it? How can that be good? That's really going to hurt our seniors.

"Big federal spending programs, no improvement in jobs, and Medicare cuts. That's just not good enough. We can't afford for things to keep on this way. Mr. President,'' the ad asks, "is this the best you can do?''

(Photo of President Obama at a Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee fundraising dinner in Miami Beach last night by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images)

"We want it both ways," says Wayne Fields, a professor of cultural studies at Washington University in St. Louis. "We want a leader that's humble and certain. We want a leader who is learning but gets it right every time."

He is speaking of the president's proclivity to step up and 'fess up when he or someone around him messes up. Jennifer Loven of the AP has a take on "Candid Obama'' this morning that's worth a look:

By JENNIFER LOVEN
AP White House Correspondent

"I wish that we had come back with better news from Copenhagen," President Barack Obama said a few weeks ago after an unsuccessful trip across the ocean to try to snag the 2016 Summer Olympics for Chicago.

It wasn't the kind of happy spin that politicians typically come up with after a failure.

Call it a breath of fresh air or a turnoff. Either way, the man in the Oval Office is making a habit of confessing, apologizing, revealing and regretting.

Don't mistake it: Team Obama doesn't miss many chances to try to put its actions in a favorable light. The president's frank talk turns out to dovetail nicely with that effort. It's a tool he uses to lessen negative fallout from bad news by pre-empting criticism and draining energy from controversy.

Still, it's also a genuine Obama personality trait, all the more notable because his predecessor, George W. Bush, was parodied for a reluctance even to utter the word "mistake."

When Bush was asked at a 2004 news conference to name his biggest error since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, he puffed out his cheeks, stammered and stalled, and then ventured: "I'm sure something will pop into my head." If it did, he didn't choose to share it.

There is a long tradition of presidents and their aides taking a hands-off "mistakes were made" approach in the blame game.

With Obama, though, it was apparent early on that "I was wrong" comes easier.

By Christi Parsons

JACKSONVILLE, Fla.-- As pressure builds on the administration to pick up the pace of its Afghanistan war strategy review, President Obama countered critics with a trip to a Navy base today to declare he will not "rush the solemn decision" of sending the American military into harm's way.

On one of the bloodiest days in the war to date, Obama praised the 14 Americans who died in helicopter crashes in Afghanistan today and promised to present a "clear mission" and "defined goals" for those whom he may call on to continue the fight against al Qaeda and its allies.

"I won't risk your lives unless it is absolutely necessary," Obama told a crowd of about 3,500 assembled from each of the armed services, gathered in a hangar to see the president this afternoon. "And if it is necessary, we will back you up."

Around the country, Republicans are ratcheting up criticism of the president, whose ground-up review of the war strategy has taken up much of the fall without a defined end-point in sight. Some critics warn the president risks projecting weakness, while others raise the possibility that domestic politics may be coming into play.

Obama has said he is getting close to making decisions about strategy and possible troop increases, and suggested that he has strategic reasons for keeping them to himself until after a new Afghan government is chosen.

A run-off to test the results of thenation's recent fraudulent election is expected Nov. 7 - a point when the White House hopes that international security forces will have a credible, trustworthy partner with which to do business in the region.

But rather than answering his critics in Washington, Obama concluded a morning meeting with war advisors in Washington and headed for the Jacksonville Naval Air Station to deliver the message to people in uniform.

"While I will never hesitate to use force to protect the American people or our vital interests, I also promise you this--and this is very important as we consider our next steps in Afghanistan:

"I will never rush the solemn decision of sending you into harm's way," Obama said. "Because you deserve the strategy, the clear mission, the defined goals and the equipment and support you need to get the job done. That's the promise I make to you."

(President Barack Obama, pictured above, at the Jacksonville Naval Air Station today. AP Photo by Phil Coale)

by Noam N. Levey and updated with reaction

Fueling momentum behind the push for a new government insurance plan, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) said Monday that his healthcare bill will include a compromise that would create a nationwide "public option," while giving states the option to "opt out" of such a plan.

"The public option is not a silver bullet, (but) I believe it's an important way to ensure competition and to level the playing field for patients with the insurance industry," Reid told reporters.

"Under this concept, states will be able to decide what works for them."

Reid sent the proposal to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be analyzed Monday, a key step before he can bring a bill to the floor for debate.

Reid's decision does not settle the debate roiling Democratic ranks over how to create a government insurance plan that would give consumers who don't get coverage through their employer an alternative to plans offered by commercial insurers.

The so-called "opt-out" compromise is still two votes shy of the 60 he needs to overcome a Republican filibuster, according to a senior Democratic aide on Capitol Hill.

And while expressing a preference for the so-called "opt-out" proposal Monday, others continue to push for an alternative, known as a "trigger," that would establish local public options around the country only if commercial insurers do not provide affordable plans to consumers.

That plan is being championed by Sen. Olympia J. Snowe of Maine, the only Republican to back the Democratic healthcare campaign.

With a 60-40 majority, which includes two independents who caucus with Democrats, Reid has to hold all his members or pick up Republicans to head off a filibuster.

Senate Republlican Senate Mitch McConnell rejected the proposal as part of a larger, also unacceptable plan:

"While final details of this bill are still unknown, here's what we do know: It will be a thousand-page, trillion-dollar bill that raises premiums, raises taxes and slashes Medicare for our seniors to create new government spending programs,'' said McConnell (R-Ky.) "That's not reform. So, wholly aside from the debate over whether the government gets into the insurance business, the core of the proposal is a bill that the American public clearly does not like, and doesn't support."

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) said: " Whether you call it a public option, an opt-out, a trigger, or a co-op, the fact is all of these proposals put us on the path to government-run health care. Forcing Americans off of their current health coverage and onto a government-run plan isn't the answer, but that's exactly what the Democrats' plan would do."

by Mark Silva

Fill 'er up, with Blly Beer.

There's been a certain climate change since Jimmy Carter came to Washington as president, leaving behind a younger brother Billy and a dispensary of hometown wisdom at his gas station in Plains, Ga. But it will cost more than peanuts to preserve the place.

Bllly Carter is gone, but his gas station lives on. And now the old station is poised to join a federal protectorate of historic landmarks.

The House today is weighing plans to roughly double the size of a National Park Service site honoring President Carter, in part by making the Billy Carter Service Station Museum an extension of the presidential historic site in Plains.

As Congressional Quarterly explains it, the plan will add about 30 acres to the current Carter presidential site, at a cost of $17 million over five years. That includes about $10 million for land-buying.

The gas station served as an informal headquarters for the national press during the 1976 and 1980 presidential campaigns. Billy Carter died of pancreatic cancer in 1988 at the age of 51. Jimmy Carter's current home, set back from the road with gates and woods, and his modest childhood home near a roadway, already are already part of the site.

by Mark Silva

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid faces a tough reelection contest back home in Nevada. He faces a liberal wing of the Democratic Party upset with compromise on what the White House and others consider an essential element of health-care reform.

A public option.

Reid (D-Nev.) also faces a 60-vote coalition of Democrats and independents that might be able to get a bill out of the Senate over the objections of Republicans, who have no interest in the public option, with some Democrats saying they won't accept a plan without it.

A public option.

Reid, who has scheduled a 3:15 pm EDT statement today, will announce his support for establishing a government-run health-insurance program allowing states to opt out, Bloomberg News is reporting, citing a Democratic aide as a source.

"Reid's move gives new momentum to the so-called public option as Congress considers the biggest changes to the U.S. medical-care system since it created Medicare, the health program for the elderly, in 1965,'' Bloomberg's James Rowley notes. "The government-run plan, which would compete with private insurers, is among the most divisive issues in the health-care legislation. It has drawn opposition from every Senate Republican and some Democrats in the chamber.''

Politico's Glenn Thrush cites sources as saying that Reid spoke with "virtually every member of his 60-member caucus this weekend'' and "currently has between 56 and 57 votes for the opt-out, which is being pushed by Sen. Charles Schumer.''

Reid has been canvassing the members of his 60-vote filibuster-blocking ranks as he melds the legislation that has emerged from two committees.

Maine's Sen. Olympia Snowe, the only Republican demonstrating a willingness to compromise with Democrats on a bill, has said she would vote against taking a bill with a public option to the floor. Snowe leans toward a "triggering'' plan allowing for a public option only if private insurers fail to lower premiums after time.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has championed the public option and maintained that a bill cannot pass the House without it, has told reporters that she "didn't think there's much problem" with allowing states to opt out of the government-run plan.

New impetus today for a public option -- for states to opt out.

by Mark Silva and updated with a correction

What a president does for recreation, of course, is his own business, but it is a casualty of life in the White House that presidential recreation also becomes the public's business.

The question arises as conservative Internet channels today are abuzz with President Barack Obama's golfing -- his 24th game as president logged on Sunday. It took Obama's predecessor, George W. Bush, nearly three years to log that many golf games.

CBS News' Mark Knoller, who keeps a faithful count of presidential travels, delivered a report by Twitter on Sunday, as the president put in a day of golf at Fort Belvoir: "Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24. Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months."

(The documentarian of presidential travel previously has advised us that Bush spent more than a year of days at his ranch in Texas during two terms, and more than a year at the presidential retreat at Camp David -- not the Bush family compound at Kennebunkport, as earlier suggeted -- it was more than a month in Maine. Christmas vacations and summer holidays racked up serious time, as did many weekend jaunts.)

But then, following the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq in the spring of 2003, Bush gave up golf. ""I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in- chief playing golf,'' he explained. "I feel I owe it to the families to be as, you know, to be in solidarity as best I can with them, and I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal...

There had been that unfortunate moment when, club in hand, Bush had said: "We must stop the terror. I call upon all nations to do everything they can to stop these terrorist killings... Thank you, now watch this drive.''

When Bush's knees dictated that he give up jogging, he turned to mountain-biking with a passion -- tearing up the paths of nature preserves and military bases with a fervor that left partners in the dust. (The former president is pictured biking with Tour de France champion Lance Armstrong in a White House photo here.)

When Bush went biking in the privacy of his remote ranch, there was no way of knowing how often he rode the trails. But Knoller graciously shares with our Washington Bureau today a count of those times when the president, press pool in tow, left the White House with a mountain bike: Bush mostly rode around the Beltsville, Md., Secret Service Training Facility, but also biked at Fort Belvoir and a few times at Marine base Quantico.

By Knoller's count: 140 days of bike outings from the White House.

When a president goes golfing, the public sees little of it -- only the ritual comings and goings of the president from the White House, such as the long afternoon spent Sunday at Fort Belvoir, out of the White House shortly after noon, back by about 6:30 pm.

Obama had his good friend Dr. Eric Whitaker with him on Sunday -- the two are pictured above warming up at a course in Hawaii before Obama's inauguration (photo by AFP / Getty Images). He also had his domestic policy adviser, Melody Barnes, along for the day -- the first time that a woman had joined the president's golfing party this year.

Obama plays basketball too (see White House photo above), and has turned the tennis court at the White House over to hoops. His wife, Michelle Obama, laments that he usually beats her at tennis.

So he golfs, he jumps, he serves -- all in the name of recreation.

But then, who's counting?

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, who has acknowledged that "the road ahead will be difficult'' in Afghanistan, is meeting again this morning with a war cabinet: Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Secretary of Defense Rpbert Gates, National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones and others -- another in a series of meetings the president has been holding about the way forward in the war.

The president plans to address Marines and sailors today at the Jacksonville (Fla.) Naval Air Station en route to a Democratic Party fundraiser tonight at the Fontainebleau Hotel on Miami Beach.

Yet the White House has signaled that a decision about the recommendation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal to deploy some 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, after the president authorized 21,000 new forces earlier this year, may still be weeks away -- Obama has suggested that even if they make that decision before the Nov. 7 runoff for presidential elections in Afghanistan, they may not announce it before that juncture in Kabul's demonstration of its ability to serve as a "partner'' with the U.S.

"The road ahead will be difficult,'' Obama said in early May, following a meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai, whose nation's electoral commission has concluded that election fraud deprived him of a majority in reelection, requiring another round of voting, and the president of Pakistan (see the video above.)

"There will be more violence, and there will be setbacks,'' Obama said then. "But let me be clear: The United States has made a lasting commitment to defeat al Qaeda, but also to support the democratically elected sovereign governments of both Pakistan and Afghanistan. That commitment will not waiver. And that support will be sustained..

"The United States has a stake in the future of these two countries,'' he said on May 6. "We have learned, time and again, that our security is shared. It is a lesson that we learned most painfully on 9/11, and it is a lesson that we will not forget.''

On March 27, following his decision to deploy 17,000 and then 4,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, and in defining the challenge in Afghanistan as "an attainable objective,'' the president said (see the video below): "I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future...To achieve our goals, we need a stronger, smarter and comprehensive strategy."

McChrystal has offered that strategy. After eight years of war, it comes with a more than half-again boost in U.S. forces in Afghanistan. The president is weighing it.

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has accused the administration of "dithering'' with the decision. White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs has responded: "What Vice President Cheney calls dithering, President Obama calls his solemn responsibility to the men and women in uniform and the American public. I think we've all seen what happens when somebody doesn't take that responsibility serious.''

Abdullah Abdullah, the challenger to Karzai's election who made rounds of Sunday talk shows over the weekend, said: "I do share General McChrystal's assessment. He's a military general, he's a professional person. He's known for his professional capabilities, and he knows Afghanistan also, very well.

"But at the same time, this is one part of the strategy,'' he said on CNN's State of the Union. "Additional troops -- we should have been in a position eight years down the road not to call for more troops, but for lesser troops. We are not there. Why? Because of the failures of the current administration in Afghanistan. Any success for the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan will depend on the credibility of your partner, on the legitimacy of your partner.

"So, hopefully, this runoff or the second round elections, whenever it takes place, will provide the United States and the international community with such a partner. There is no doubt that the partnership has not been working quite well in the past, in the past few months or few years. So, that one element missing, I don't see a successful strategy in Afghanistan.''

by Mark Silva

Less than one year into office, people already are starting to think about President Barack Obama's presidential library.

At the University of Chicago.

It has something to do with all the Nobel Prizes (more than 80) that people affiliated with the private university have claimed - including the president, who taught constitutional law there, has a home blocks from campus and has won the 2009 Nobel Prize for Peace during his first nine months as president.

It's admittedly early to be thinking about all of this - the presidential library of the president's predecessor, the George W. Bush library, hasn't even opened yet at Southern Methodist University in Dallas. But Bloomberg News reports that potential sponsors already have contacted the Obama White House about thinking of the university as a permanent home for his papers.

An administration official says the White House has been approached several times by University of Chicago officials but has not engaged on the topic "because it is too soon,'' our friend John McCormick reports for Bloomberg. And the head of the University of Chicago says he's studying the benefits of having a presidential archive and museum associated with the campus.

"We are trying to understand the situation as best we can now," University of Chicago President Robert J. Zimmer told Bloomberg. "Until the president really wants to talk about it, has some kind of direction that he's thinking about, we really feel more specific questions are premature."

Dr. Eric Whitaker, one of Obama's closest friends and an executive at the university's medical center, says he asked Obama about the inauguration and the response was cool. "He didn't know if that would be something he would want to do," said Whitaker, adding that Obama talked about the possibility of a "virtual" library that would avoid paying "homage" to him.

Obama seemed more interested in some sort of advocacy center, along the lines of what Jimmy Carter (Nobel Peace Prize 2002) has done at the Carter Center in Atlanta, says Whitaker, a basketball buddy of the president who joined him and others on the golf course Sunday.

Benjamin Hufbauer, a University of Louisville professor and author on presidential libraries, sees the University of Chicago as a natural. Obama taught constitutional law at the school from 1992 to 2004; his Kenwood neighborhood home is within walking distance of campus; and his children attended the university's Lab School before moving to Washington. First lady Michelle Obama was a vice president at the medical center.

Hufbauer, author of "Presidential Temples, How Memorials and Libraries Shape Public Memory," says there typically is little open talk during the presidents' time in office about planning these places. That doesn't mean they aren't conferring with their closest advisers, however. He cited President John F. Kennedy's library. ""By 1962, he was already well into the planning of it," he says.

For the full story on Obama library talk, see Bloomberg.

by Mark Silva

We're sure it's only a coincidence that today, as the presidential motorcade rolled away from the White House for an afternoon of golf on a spectacular fall day -- just days after the president found himself explaining his all-male congressional basketball game at his home court -- a woman was among the president's golfing partners.

The first as president, the White House says.

Melody Barnes, domestic policy adviser to the president.

The first golf party left the White House for Fort Belvoir at 12:23 pm EDT and arrived at the Virginia Army base at 1:04 It was a crisp, beautiful fall day, the leaves turning.

Obama wore a black, short-sleeved shirt. Barnes wore a baseball cap and dark, long-sleeved shirt. The White House trip director, golf regular Marvin Nicholson, loaded the clubs.

At first, the White House suggested this wasn't a first for the president. Then, spokesman Bill Burton allowed: "He golfed with women on the campaign trail,'' but not in office until today, with Barnes.

They made a day of it. The motorcade returned to the White House at 6:35 p.m.

The foursome, for the record: Obama, Barnes, Nicholson and Obama friend Eric Whitaker, the physician who is an executive vice president at the University of Chicago.

Barnes, who carted her clubs away, had no comment on the game.

With thanks to our observant pooler, Lynn Sweet of the Sun-Times.

by Mark Silva

In "the race to the top,'' no child will be left behind, we're assured, but a lot of low-performing teachers - as measured by the poor performance of their students - may be

The government has set aside $4.5 billion, as part of the $787-billion economic stimulus, to spur public schools toward better achievement. As states compete for grants under the "Race to the Top'' program, they are being held to a standard that took root during the Bush administration, with its requirements that schools demonstrate yearly progress, and has blossomed in the Obama administration, which also is setting measurements for progress.

And for both the No Child Left Behind initiative that Bush won during his first year in office and the Race to the Top initiative that Obama's Department of Education is sponsoring in his first year, that means more student testing. It's a clear indicator of the common goals at work that Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and school reformer, and former president's brother, has heartily endorsed the work that Obama's education department is doing.

It has also, as the Associated Press reports in an analysis of a blossoming partnership underway in Washington, spawned a new joke:

"The real secretary of education is Bill Gates.''

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has become the biggest player in the school reform movement, spending around $200 million a year on grants to elementary and secondary education, the AP's Lbby Quaid and Donna Blankenship report. But now the foundation is taking "unprecedented steps to influence education policy, spending millions to influence how the federal government distributes nearly $5 billion in grants to overhaul public schools. The federal dollars are unprecedented, too.''

Since Obama secured the money as part of the economic stimulus to spur schools that are failing their students, the Gates Foundation has offered grants of $250,000 apiece to help states apply for the money - " so long as they agree with the foundation's approach.'' The administration and foundation share common goals: Paying schoolteachers based on the performance of their students, and that means testing, encouraging charter schools that operate independently of local school boards; and establishing a common academic standards adopted by every state.

The big teachers' unions are at odds with some of these goals. They complain that standardized testing has run amok. The Obama administration has directly confronted a constituency that has been a longtime ally of the Democrats, those teachers' unions.

by Mark Silva

As a Nobel Peace Prize winner and Chicago White Sox Fan, would President Barack Obama rather see world peace or the White Sox win the World Series?

"That's a tough one,'' said First Lady Michelle Obama, running the paces of Jay Leno's 10@10 questions last night. "I think if you would ask him, he'd say he'd probably prefer world peace, but he probably wouldn't mind a World Series bid too... But I think he'd choose world peace.''

No. 8 question: The president's most annoying habit?

"Ooh, we don't have enough time,'' the president's wife replied. "He has no annoying habits, right Jay?.... He's perfect,'' she said, and then, after pausing, added: "But you know what, when he beats me at tennis, that gets to be pretty annoying, and he beats me quite often.''

And what is it that the first lady whispers in the president's ear following his speeches, Leno asked?

"I usually ask him did he take out the garbage," she said.

Settling in at the White House, the first lady says the first dog, Bo, celebrated his first birthday with a party in Rose Garden earlier this month. The Portuguese water dog feasted on a cake shaped like a dog house and made of veal.

""We had a really sweet celebration," the first lady told the host of The Jay Leno Show. "We had party hats."

There was one thing that Leno could not pry out of Obama, however: Her daughters' plans for Halloween costumes - "You need security clearance for that,'' she said.
.

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, touting health-care reforms which he maintains will make it easier and more affordable for small businesses to provide health care for employees, pitches it as part of an overall admninistrative strategy plan to spur small business.

Republican critics say his plans will choke small businesses with taxes.

"This country was built by dreamers,'' Obama says in his weekly radio and Internet address today. "They're the workers who took a chance on their desire to be their own boss.

"The part-time inventors who became the fulltime entrepreneurs. The men and women who have helped build the American middle class, keeping alive that most American of ideals - that all things are possible for all people, and we're limited only by the size of our dreams and our willingness to work for them,'' the president says. "We need to do everything we can to ensure that they can keep taking those risks, acting on those dreams, and building the enterprises that fuel our economy and make us who we are.

Sen. Mike Johanns of Nebraska delivers the Republican response today, with a warning that Americans will face higher taxes with a plan being negotiated behind closed doors..

"True health-care reform should reduce what you're paying and make it easier'' to obtain care, Johanns says. "That should be a no-brainer.''

Instead, he says, "your premiums will go up... You'll be forced to buy health insurance the government mandates. And if you refuse, you'll be hit with a fee.''

At a time of near-10 percent unemployment, he says, "many families are working hard to put food on the tables.... '' Yet a costly bill is being negotiiated "behind closed doors'' that will drive costs up for everyone. "It is shameful,'' he says, with "a select few'' negotiating a bill that wlll drive costs higher. "Hundreds of pages filled with backroom deals.... are not the answer.''

See the president's address above, the senator's response below, and the text of both addresses below the fold, here in the Swamp:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, doing a fair amount of fundraising for his party and campaigning in critical races as Election Day 2009 nears, will head to Florida next week to raise money for the Democratic Party's Senate and congressional races.

South Florida is a bountfiul source of party money. The president will address a fundraiser in Miami and spend the night there Monday. On Tuesday, it's on to Norfolk, Va., the center of a sizeable African-American population in a state that will hold a hard-fought gubernatorial election on Nov. 3. The Democratic candidate is trailing the Republican in a state that Obama became the first Democrat to carry a presidential race since 1964.

Along the way, Obama will stop in a Republican-dominated region, speaking at Jacksonville Naval Air Station on Monday, the place where Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama's rival in the 2008 election, was stationed after returning from Vietnam and five and a half years as a prisoner of war in Hanoi. Former President George W. Bush also used the nearby Mayport base to deliver one of his preparatory speeches for the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.

The White House has cautioned about expecting anything about the administration's decisions on the strategy for the way forward in Afghanistan in Obama's address at Jacksonville Naval Air Station on Monday, however.

"He will make his decision on Afghanistan at the right time,'' spokesman Bill Burton said aboard Air Force One today, en route to an appearance at MIT and a fundraiser for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick. "I wouldn't over-read anything into the remarks that he's delivering on Monday, other than he wants to thank the brave men and women of the United States Armed Forces for the hard and courageous work that they do.''

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama did not deserve to win the Nobel Prize for Peace, the way most Americans surveyed view the surprise prize -- only the third Peace Prize for a sitting president of the United States.

Yet a lot of people are glad he did: 46 percent.

A strong majority surveyed by the Gallup Poll -- 61 percent -- say the president does not deserve the prize that he will travel to Oslo to pick up on Dec. 10. The Nobel Committee said it was awarding the prize to Obama for creating a new environment in international affairs, placing diplomacy ahead of conflict and seeking global nuclear disarmament and control over climate change.

""Not surprisingly, reaction to the awarding of the prize is partisan, although support for Obama's receiving the prize among Democrats is perhaps not as large as might be expected,'' writes Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll.

Obama himself said that he did not deseve a prize that placed him in the company of so many "transformative'' figures in world history, but would accept it as a "call to action.'' He has vowed to donate the $1.4 million that comes with the prize to charity.

A USA Today/Gallup Poll conducted about a week after the announcement on Oct. 9 did not ask Americans whether they believe that the award may ultimately be deserved, or whether it was appropriately given in anticipation of the potential of the Obama administration's peace efforts. The question was whether Obama "deserved" the award. Americans said no, by a roughly two-to-one margin.

As partisan as the divide in opinion of the prize is, just 59 percent of the Democrats surveyed said the award is deserved, compared with the 84 percent of Democrats who in the same survey approve of Obama's job performance. Independents and, in particular, Republicans are highly likely to say Obama did not deserve to win the prize.

Obama's overall job approval in the latest Gallup Poll daily track reported today stands at 54 percent, a few points up from a low of 50 that he reached earlier this week and three times before since late August. The president had gotten a bit of a "speed bump'' from the prize, his approval reaching 56 percent in the days following its award.

The prize findings come from a survey of 1,521 adults conducted Oct. 16-19, with a possible margin of error of plus or minus 3 points.

(President Barack Obama is pictured above in the Oval Office on Oct. 9 before stepping out to the Rose Garden to address the winning of the Nobel Prize for Peace. (AP Photo by Alex Brandon)

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin has issued an endorsement in the special election to replace a Republican congressman in an upstate New York district that hasn't elected a Democrat to Congress since the Civil War.

That would be the Republican, right?

Wrong, that would be the Conservative Party candidate, in a hard-fought three-way contest that has torn the GOP over a question of what values it will uphold as the party attempts to rebuild and regroup.

The problem for the Republicans, in the 23rd Congressional District of New York, is that the Republican candidate supports abortion-rights and same-sex marriage.

That wasn't enough to stop Newt Gingrich, the former Republican House speaker, from endorsing the Republican candidate.

But it was enough to stop Dick Armey, the Tea Party organizer and former House Republican Majority leader, from backing the GOP's candidate, complaining that his party cannot become "Democrat lite.''And now it's enough for Palin, the Republican Party's 2008 nominee for vice president, to step up for the Conservative candidate, Doug Hoffman, over the Republican, Dede Scozzafava, in New York.

"Political parties must stand for something,'' Palin writes at that Facebook page of hers that has become a forum for the former governor of Alaska to build her own base - followers numbering about 950,000.

"When Republicans were in the wilderness in the late 1970s, Ronald Reagan knew that the doctrine of "blurring the lines" between parties was not an appropriate way to win elections,'' Palin wrote in a Notes entry on her page last night. "Unfortunately, the Republican Party today has decided to choose a candidate who more than blurs the lines, and there is no real difference between the Democrat and the Republican in this race. This is why Doug Hoffman is running on the Conservative Party's ticket.

"Republicans and conservatives around the country are sending an important message to the Republican establishment in their outstanding grassroots support for Doug Hoffman: no more politics as usual.''

Palin, too, is sending a message: With her own memoirs, Going Rogue, ready for release on Nov. 17 - and a rollout for the book on The Oprah Winfrey Show scheduled on the eve of publication - the GOP's Palin is revealing that something may be more important to her than the GOP itself.

Palin and Armey - how does that sound for a third-party national ticket in 2012 drawing on the fervor of the Tea Party movement the way that the Conservative candidate for Congress in New York's 23d is rallying a conservative base outside of the major two-party lines?

(Photos above, top to bottom: Sarah Palin is pictured above on the day in July that she gave her farewell address in resigning as governor of Alaska. (AP Photo by Al Grillo) Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey (R-Texas) listened during a taping of NBC News' "Meet the Press" in April. (Photo by Brendan Smialowski / Getty Images). Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.) addressed the World Affairs Council in Fort Worth, Texas, this week. (Photo by Joyce Marshall / Fort Worth Star-Telegram/MCT). And Armey and Gingrich are pictured together, when they were more politically aligned, in a 1996 photo by Dennis Cook / AP).

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, citing a global competition for development of clean-energy alternatives to oil, insisted today that the United States must win that race and called on Congress to enact legislation also intended to curb climate change.

"The nation that wins this competition is going to be the nation that leads the world,'' Obama told an audience at one of the nation's premier research universities in Massachusetts. "And I want America to be that nation - it's that simple.''
Obama praised "a legacy of innovation'' that "taps into something that is essential about America.

"Even in the darkest of times that this nation has seen, it has always sought a brighter horizon,'' the president told his audience at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, Mass. "We have always been about innovation. We have always been about discovery. That is part of our DNA.''

Obama was touting MIT's development of "cutting- edge clean-energy technology.'' He toured an MIT lab demonstrating wind, solar and batter power before delivering an address to an expected audience of about 750 in the Kresge Auditorium.

"There is no silver bullet,'' Obama said. "There is going to be a lot of debate about how we move from an economy that is importing oil to one that is exporting clean energy... There are going to be all kinds of debates, both in the laboratories and on Capitol Hill.''

The president has pressed for passage of an energy bill in Congress. The House this year narrowly approved a "cap-and-trade'' plan to curtail the greenhouse gas emissions of manufacturers and power-generators blamed for contributing to global warming. The Senate now is advancing a plan of its own.

"We are seeing a convergence,'' Obama said. "The naysayers, the folks who would pretend this is not an issue, they are being marginalized... There are those who would suggest that moving to clean energy will destroy our economy.... We're going to have to work on those folks.

"But understand that there is also another myth that we are going to have to dispel... That's the idea that there's nothing or little that we can do. It's pessimism.''

The president also coupled some party business with his trip to MIT: Obama was headlining a campaign fundraising reception for Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick in Boston this afternoon and was planning to join Sen. Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) at a fundraiser this evening in Stamford, Conn.

Both Democrats face tough reelection contests in 2010, and can benefit from the president's fundraising power. Obama put that influence to work in New York City this week, raising money for the Democratic Party and for the campaign of a Democratic candidate for an upstate New York congressional seat.

by Mark Silva

Annie Liebovitz has captured the images of some of the most famous people in the world -- and she has covered Barack Obama before, putting him on the cover of Vanity Fair. Her portrait of the president on inauguration day filled the March cover.

Today, the White House released its first official family portrait of President Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama and daughters Sasha and Malia Obama.

Liebovitz on the job.

The picture was taken on Sept. 1 in the White House's Green Room.

The photographer's relationship with the first family goes back to 2004, when Obama was running for the Senate, Vanity Fair says. She snapped his family at the campaign headquarters, long before he was running for president.

by Mark Silva on Thursday and updated today, 8:30 am EDT

Republicans are accusing the Obama White House of an offensive offensive strategy for confronting its critics -- which lately include FOX News Channel's most vocal commentators. The White House says it's simply trying to keep the record straight.

And Chicago-based friends of the president take exception to that "Chicago-style politics'' charge that the House Republican leader leveled at President Obama -- "cracks at my city,'' friend and adviser Valerie Jarrett calls it.

Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, on the Senate floor, has accused the president of reviving the old "enemies list'' of Nixon days , this from a guy who served the Nixon White House as a young man. Those enemies include the insurance industry.

And now House Republican Leader John Boehner says the White House's attack tactics are nothing short of "Chicago-style politics.''

"The White House and congressional Democrats know that their liberal special-interest agenda is not very popular,'' Boehner (R-Ohio) said at his weekly press briefing on Thursday. "And now they are following a familiar pattern: when you can't win an argument based on the facts, launch vicious political attacks.

"This Chicago-style politics is shutting the American people out and demonizing their opponents,'' Boehner asserted.

"They are writing the health care bill in secret, even though the president called for all of this to be out on an open table and have C-SPAN cameras in the room,'' he said. "Instead, Democrats are targeting those who don't fall immediately in line - the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, doctors, Fox News.

"The administration promised during the campaign that they were going to usher in an era of 'post-partisanship' in here in Washington,'' the House Republican leader said, "but what they are doing is flat-out despicable."

Jarrett, one of the president's closest advisers and a friend from Chicago, was in Chicago this morning, where she told MSNBC's Morning Joe -- see the video above -- that the White House is trying to be "clear and direct '' with the public with a goal of passing health-care legislation this year.

"We're not going to let distortions get in the way of delivering health care to the people,'' said Jarrett, asked about Boehner's comments. "It's not an attack, it's nothing other than trying to speak directly with people, so that they understand what's in the bill'' and health care is passed this year.

Asked on-air by the editor of Oprah Winfrey's O magazine about the meaning of Chicago politics - and if it entails responding when attacked, Jarrett said: "That's exactly right. I'm home in Chicago (this morning). I really don't like people taking cracks at my city. I love this town.''

by Mark Silva

Finally, the taxpayers have an army of federally financed lobbyists of their own looking out for -- uh, the banks.

Citigroup Inc., which has yet to repay $45 billion in federal bailout assistance, has more lobbyists than any other company registered to try to shape legislation regulating the financial industry, Bloomberg News has found in Senate records.

Our old friend Jonathan D. Salant and colleague Lizzie O'Leary report that "the New York-based bank, 34 percent-owned by the U.S. government, is listed as a client by 46 of the 1,537 lobbyists who filed with Congress to work on President Barack Obama's push for rules to limit financial risks and impose stricter consumer protections.

Them and what army?

Forty four hred advocates for the American Bankers Association, 41 for Prudential Financial Inc., and 29 for Goldman Sachs Group Inc.

"Altogether, lobbyists for companies, business organizations and financial industry groups outnumber, by 25 to 1, the 58 who registered to represent consumer groups, unions and other proponents of tougher regulations,'' Bloomberg reports.

"We're like Luke Skywalker and they're like the empire," says consumer lobbyist Ed Mierzwinski, (sounding a bit like Republican Sen. John McCain during the 2000 presidential campaign -- he said that about himself and George W. Bush in the Michigan primary.) Mierzwinski works for the Boston-based U.S. Public Interest Research Group.

Some people at outside firms hired by Citigroup are working on issues other than the regulatory overhaul, according to the bank's chief in-house lobbyist, Nicholas Calio.

"Obama and White House aides have gone on an offensive during the past week, criticizing banks for fighting new regulations so soon after taxpayer bailouts helped them through an economic meltdown,'' Salant and O'Leary note.

"You would hope after American taxpayers stepped in to save these companies from a disaster of their own making they would be deploying their army of lobbyists to strengthen and not thwart financial reform," senior Obama adviser David Axelrod told the Blooomberg crew. At some point, Axelrod said, industry lobbying and campaign contributions may cause a "tremendous backlash" from the public.

See Bloomberg's full report on the bailed out bank and its lobbyists.

by Mark Silva

Waterboarding is one thing.

But the Bee Gees? And Nine Inch Nails?

Saturday night Head-banging taken to a new level: A coalition of rock musicians, including Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (pictured here) and Tom Morello, formerly of the band Rage Against the Machine, has joined in a Freedom of Information request to learn what loud music may have been used in the torture of detainees at the U.S.-military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - a practice which the Obama administration, intent on closing Guantanamo, says no longer exists.

"The fact that music I helped create was used in crimes against humanity sickens me," Morello said in a statement. "We need to end torture and close Guantanamo now."

A coalition of musicians, including Reznor, R.E.M., Pearl Jam, Jackson Browne, Rise Against, Rosanne Cash, Billy Bragg and the Roots has announced they are joining the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo They also have initiated a formal protest of the use of music in conjunction with alleged torture at Guantanamo.

Retired Gen. Robert Gard, a critic of the Bush administration's practices at Guantanamo, says: "I sympathize for the musicians whose music was used without their knowledge as part of the Bush administration's misguided policies."

Sympathize with the musicians?

by Mark Silva

The "decider'' is becoming the motivator.

George W. Bush, a born-again, indefatigable optimist who served two terms as president of the United States, two as governor of Texas and one as managing partner of the Texas Rangers, will take the stage at an all-day motivational forum in Fort Worth next week -- the start, apparently, of a new, motivational speaking career for the 43rd president.

The daylong session on Monday sponsored by Get Motivated! will feature an all-star lineup of motivational speakers: Former Secretary of State Colin Powell -- whom Bush's own defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, motivated right out of the State Department -- NFL Hall of Famer and Pittsburgh Steelers quarterback Terry Bradshaw, motivation czar Zig Ziglar, and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani -- whom Florida's Republican voters motivated right out of the 2008 GOP presidential primary contest.

Bush is the headliner of the business