GOP: '2012 yet? -- Visualize no liberals'

by Mark Silva

All they want to do is light a tree.

But the Obamas will have plenty of help on Thursday for their first lighting of the National Christmas Tree erected between the White House and Washington Monument.

Singer Sheryl Crow is booked to perform at the tree lighting.

So are Common, Jordin Sparks, Ray LaMontagne and Celtic Woman, as well as jazz musicians Brad Mehldau and Joshua Redman.

Oh, and the president and first lady will be there, too.

Until the sun goes down on the National Mall's boulevards.

(The Associated Press contributed. Sheryl Crow is pictured performing at the MLB All-Star Charity Concert under the Gateway Arch in July. (Photo by Erik Lunsford / St. Louis Post-Dispatch/MCT)

by Michael Muskal

The Senate began deliberations on its version of a healthcare overhaul today, with Democrats searching for a bill that will be supported by 60 senators.

Returning from the Thanksgiving holiday, the Senate slowly began the debate on President Barack Obama's centerpiece issue with the expectation that amendments and changes will be forthcoming in the weeks ahead.

We'll be "working on things, trying to improve it, taking out things," Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada said on the floor of the Senate today. "Democrats stand ready to do so. I hope my Republican colleagues will recognize that reality even if their party leaders deny it.

"So as we round the last turn on this journey, I renew my plea to this body, to senators, Democratic and Republicans: 'Let's discuss the specifics of this bill, not the whispers and wild rumors.' "

Republicans who rejected the bill that Reid wrote were not shy. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said in his opening salvo that the healthcare bill is "out of touch with the American people."

"Americans are beginning to see the truth beyond the rhetoric," McConnell said on the floor.

McConnell argued that the healthcare bill, pegged at $848 billion over 10 years, does not deal with issues wgucg Republicans consider more urgent, such as job creation in a tight economy.

Democrats argue that "history is calling," McConnell said. "I think they've got it half right. Someone is calling all right, it is not history but the American worker."

by Michael Muskal

The couple who apparently crashed a White House State Dinner got an invitation to another government event: The House Homeland Security Committee announced that it will hold a hearing this week on how they gave security the slip.

In a statement posted on the committee's website, Chairman Bennie G. Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, said he had requested that Tareq and Michaele Salahi testify before the panel.

Also asked to appear was Mark Sullivan, head of the Secret Service, which handles security for the White House. Sullivan has formally apologized for the incident, which he called an embarrassment to the agency.

"This is a time for answers, recognition of security deficiencies past and present, and remedies to ensure the strength of the Secret Service and the safety of those under its protection," Thompson said.

"This is not the time for political games or scapegoating to distract our attention from the careful oversight we must apply to the Secret Service and its mission. My confidence in the management of the Secret Service hangs in the balance," he said.

The hearing is scheduled for Thursday.

The Salahis, who were not on the official guest list, attended the State Dinner for the Indian prime minister last week and even shook hands with President Barack Obama and others on the receiving line. The couple reportedly were in the running for a reality television show.

by Christi Parsons and updated

Hours after issuing orders to launch his new strategy in Afghanistan, President Obama this morning began calling world leaders to tell them of his decision and ask for their assistance.

But Obama does not plan to disclose the number of new troops he will deploy to the war zone until Tuesday, when he plans to inform a bi-partisan group of members of Congress at the White House and then address the nation in a speech from West Point.

"He's not going to get overly specific" in his calls to world leaders, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters this morning. "If you call the embassy of France, they won't know the number either."

The president gave orders to military leaders to begin implementing his strategy Sunday night in the Oval Office. After informing top officials of his administration about his plans at about 5 p.m. EST, the president spoke by secure video conference from the White House situation room with Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of military forces in Afghanistan, and Karl Eikenberry, the U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan.

Obama this morning spoke with French President Nicolas Sarkozy, and planned to speak with Russian President Dmitry Medvedev over the noon hour. He planned calls to British Prime Minister Gordon Brown this afternoon and likely the leaders of Afghanistan and Pakistan later today.

Meanwhile, the president continues crafting an address to the American public that he will deliver in a televised speech Tuesday evening. Even as he announces a troop build-up, Obama plans to pair that with a message about the ultimate goal of turning the responsibility for a secure Afghanistan over to the Afghan people.

"You will hear the president discuss clearly that this is not an open-ended commitment," Gibbs said. "This is about what has to be done so the Afghans can secure their country."

by Mark Silva

Chelsea Clinton is engaged.

The only child of the former president and current secretary of state is engaged to be married to the son of a former congressman from Iowa and congresswoman from Pennsylvania: Investment banker Marc Mezvinsky.

The two were friends as teenagers and studied together at Stanford University.

The two live in New York, he employed by Goldman Sachs, she attending graduate school at Columbia University's School of Public Health.

Matt McKenna, a spokesman for former President Bill Clinton, confirmed the engagement today, the Associated Press reports.

Mezvinsky is a son of former Pennsylvania Rep. Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky and former Iowa Rep. Ed Mezvinsky, longtime Clinton friends. Ed Mezvinsky was released from federal prison last year after pleading guilty in 2002 to charges of bank and wire fraud.

Chelsea Clinton had campaigned widely last year for her mother's bid for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton, author of It Takes a Village (to raise a child) became secretary of state in the administration of President Barack Obama.

The AP contributed to this report.

by Mark Silva

Radio's Rush Limbaugh -- he of the "golden microphone'' and the potentially $400-million eight-year contract -- claims a listening audience of about 12 million.

Cable television's Glenn Beck -- he of the Communists-in-the-White House crusade on his own FOX News program, and actively involved now in assembling a team of his own experts and "radicals'' -- has pulled a viewership of about 2.5 million.

So it stands to reason -- a term not widely used in the context of conversations about the conversations that Limbaugh and Beck foster -- that more Americans would consider Limbaugh, pictured right, to be the nation's most influential conservative voice.

Limbaugh is the pick of 26 percent of those surveyed on this question, Beck just 11 percent, in a survey sponsored by CBS News' 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair magazine.

But, then Dick Cheney and George W. Bush pulled 62 million votes the last time they were on the ballot together and Cheney has maintained a high profile of high-octane criticism fior the Obama administration since leaving office on his birthday, Jan. 20. And there's a new Draft Dick Cheney for 2012 movement afoot.

So it's curious that Cheney is named by just 10 percent of those surveyed on this question of influential conservative voices in America.

And Sarah Palin, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president, and John McCain, the party's presidential nominee, pulled about 70 million votes last year.

So it's curious that Palin, the former governor of Alaska who has embarked on a three-week national book-signing tour with a sellout memoir, Going Rogue, drawing long lines at book stores, is named by the same number that names Cheney as No. 1 conservative voice: 10 percent.

For the Republicans, it may be even more telling that none of the top-four candidates for leading conservative voice is either a potential candidate for the White House in 2012 -- Limbaugh and Beck are big, but not that big -- or a candidate with a chance of winning the office. Cheney's daughter says he's not interested in that Draft Cheney talk. And 70 percent of Americans surveyed view Palin as unqualified.

It's also interesting that none of those named No. 1 is offered by a large percentage of people, suggesting again just how silent the vacuum of leadership in the party is heading into the midterm congressional elections.

If ever there was a time for a compelling conservative voice to step forward, one who could attract a following at the polls, this would appear to be it.

by Mark Silva

The Senate's post-Thanksgiving debate over health care gets underway this week against a backdrop of apparent deep public division and slight disapproval.

With the Senate poised to take up a health-care overhaul which the Democrats and independent allies have voted to advance to debate and which the Republicans have voted to block, the Gallup Poll today reports that 49 percent of Americans surveyed say they would advise their member of Congress to vote against a bill and 44 percent say they would recommend a vote for it.

The findings represent a turnaround since early October, when Gallup found that 51 percent of those surveyed favored a vote for a health-care bill and 41 percent said they opposed it.

The latest findings come from a survey conducted Nov. 20-22 by Gallup and USA Today as the Senate was acting to advance the bill to debate and reflect little change in attitude since earlier this month, after the House adopted its own version of a health-care overhaul offering insurance coverage to most of the uninsured and promising better coverage for those with insurance.

Independent voters are displaying a marked disapproval for a bill now. But "support among all three party groups has declined since the early October high falling by six points among Democrats, eight among independents, and 12 among Republicans,'' Gallup's Jeffrey Jones notes.'

Since the debate got underway this year, with President Barack Obama pressing for action on health care by the year's end, Gallup's surveys have never found "a strong public mandate in favor of passing a law this year,'' Jones notes. That October measure of 51 percent public support for a bill marked the high point in Gallup's polling.

Yet opinion is " far from settled,'' Jones notes.

by Mark Silva

In this tumultuous final year of the first decade of the 21st Century, we've found ourselves sorting through an extraordinary helping of fact, fiction and foolishness.

Fact: Unemployment in the United States surpassed 10 percent by the government's measure, the highest level of joblessness in a quarter century.

Fiction: The president of the United States is an alien.

Foolishness: Moose makes the best chili.

Sometimes, the convergence of fact and fiction makes for foolishness.

Fact is, the White House is one secure mansion -- anyone who has worked in or around 1600 Pennsylvania Avene knows the hurdles involved in getting inside the place. Fiction: It's impenetrable. This was made painfully clear this week by the foolishness of a Virginia couple dressing up for the evening and inviting themselves to a State Dinner.

The White House has released a photo, but what we'd give for a transcript of the conversation between President Barack Obama and his uninvited guests, Mchaele and Tareq Salahi, at the dinner, the first State Dinner of the Obama White House, held for Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India. Or their chat with Vice President Joe Biden.

The fact is, some jobs were created or saved as a result of the $787-billion stimulus that Obama signed into law after his first month in office, the administration's first attack at a recession understood to be the worst since the Great Depression. The fiction here involves the actual number of jobs, apparently.

The foolishness was supreme: A White House accounting of the jobs created or saved that listed them by congressional districts that don't exist.

The fact is, Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. The fiction has it that he came from Kenya. The foolishness involves how much time has been spent in all sorts of public forums -- including this one -- debating the contention of the "birthers'' that Obama is an alien.

In the clash of fact, fiction and foolishness this year, one longtime and esteemed anchor of the nation's news lost his job: Lou Dobbs left CNN after a long tirade against illegal immigration, which is a fact in this country, and dabbling wih the fiction and fantasies of the birthers, which was sheer foolishness.

Fact is, Obama is one hard-working president. A fiction which we've seen offered in these pages has it that he has taken 100 days of vacation already -- think about it, 300 days into office, 100 days of vacation. Let's see, there was that week at Martha's Vineyard, an occasional long weekend at Camp David. Uh. no.

Another fact is that Obama's predecessor spent more than a year at his ranch in Texas, counting the days, during his eight years as president. Fiction suggests that this was all time off. Presidents don't have much of it. Foolishness is debating any of this.

Facts: The surface temperatures of the world's oceans have increased. The Arctic ice cap has shrunk. Glaciers are melting into the sea. It's fiction to suggest that all of the carbon that human industry and trasnportation is pumping into the Earth's atmosphere has had nothing to do with climate change. A renowned oceanographer whom we know says that, in his decades of scientific research, he has never seen anything more real. It's foolishness to doubt the seriousness of global warming.

It's a fact that Sarah Palin is one popular Republican -- popular among a certain base of supporters, that is. It's fiction to suggest that most Americans view her as ready to step in as the next president of the United States -- some 70 percent view her as unqualified. It's foolishnessness to spend much time talking about the relative merits of moose versus cow as the main ingredient of chili -- yet Palin has taken us there, too.

It's also fun, some of this foolishness, when we get right down to it. There's a certain entertainment value to the assertion: "We eat, therefore we hunt.''

We readily admit to a certain appetite for playful banter, and we've fostered our share of it here during this tumultuous year, in The Swamp.

We also have a high and abiding regard for fact, and little patience for fiction outside the binding of a good Hemingway novel. Some call it censorship when we attempt to sort the fiction from the fact in the publication of comments here -- yet baseless fiction has a seemingly endless half-life on the Internet, and, with so many launching pads for mischief already out there in the ether we are loath to contribute to the global melting of common sense for which e-rumors deserve much credit.

Think of it as reality change.

We humans can do something about it.

by Mark Silva

Here's a conversation starter: "Draft Dick Cheney.''

An admirer of the former vice president filed papers today in Washington for a committee with a goal of getting Cheney to run for president in 2012.

"The 2012 race for the Republican nomination for president will be about much more then who will be the party's standard bearer against Barack Obama,'' says organizer Christopher Barron. "The race is about the heart and soul of the GOP.''

Barron calls Cheney, the former congressman and Defense Secretary in the first Bush administratiion who arguably was the most powerful vice president of all, who played a central role in the war strategies and national security initiatives of the second Bush admnistraton, who served two terms as vice president and served three other presidents in his time, the only member of the GOP "with the experience, political courage and unwavering commitment to the values that made our party strong.''

Barron, a Washington-based campaign consultant and lawyer, has toiled for a part of that party that hasn't easily won recognition from its leaders. Founder of CapSouth Consulting, he served as the national political director for the Log Cabin Republicans, "where he directed the organization's federal lobbying efforts and media relations.'' He is a frequent columnist and commentator.

There would seem to be support in some quarters for a Cheney bid, notes Barron, quoting Bill Kristol of the Weekly Standard as saying: "Of course, everyone's first choice for president in 2012 is Dick Cheney.''

Cheney has been outspoken in his criticism of the Obama administration, most recently accusing the president of "dithering'' in his decision about deployment of new forces in Afghanistan - a decision which the president plans to announce next week.

But then Cheney's own daughter Liz, who has been doing a lot of public speaking in her father's defense during this post-v.p. season of his discontent, allows that a candidacy at this stage in her father's life - he has suffered repeated heart attacks - is a tough sell. She told FOX's Neil Cavuto: "I have to tell you, he's my candidate. But I have yet to get him on board with the concept.''

"The Obama administration is playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette with the safety of Americans at home and abroad," Barron maintains. "He has refused to stand up to the tyrannical Iranian regime of Ahmadinejad, refused to listen to our military leaders on the ground in Afghanistan, and is bringing the mastermind of the 9/11 terrorist attacks to New York for a dangerous show trial."

Barron's group says it will work on building "grassroots support'' for a Cheney campaign in 2012. They've already got a Cheney T-shirt.

They've been going at this Draft Cheney idea on Facebook, too.

Maybe Cheney will start Twittering soon.

by Mark Silva

It's the pie.

Not the turkey.

Much as we loved the fresh hen we devoured today, it's the pumpkin pie awaiting us, after a three-hour cooling-off period perhaps, that makes the mouth water.

That must be what they were thinking at the White House today, where President Barack Obama and family had about 50 guests in for Thanksgiving -- no gate-crashers that we've heard of yet, assuming that they tightened the perimeter today.

Because not only did they serve this today at the White House, according to the White House: Turkey, Honey-Baked Ham, Cornbread Stuffing, Oyster Stuffing, Greens, Macaroni and Cheese, Sweet Potatoes, Mashed Potatoes and Green Bean Casserole.

They also served this:

Banana Cream Pie

Pumpkin Pie

Apple Pie

Sweet Potato Pie

Huckleberry Pie

Cherry Pie

The White House says the turkey and pumpkin pie are the president's favorites. The president pardoned a couple of turkeys at the White House this week, another tradition at this time of year. But pardon us this evening, if this sounded like a lot of pie for one table.

by Mark Silva

Today, on this day of a "distinctly American tradition,'' the president's tradtional weekly address arrives early.

"As much as we all have to be thankful for,'' President Barack Obama says in his address today, "we also know that this year millions of Americans are facing very difficult economic times. Many have lost jobs in this recession - the worst in generations...

"They are our family, our friends, and our neighbors,'' he says. "Their struggles must be our concern...

"The investments we have made and tough steps we have taken have helped break the back of the recession, and now our economy is finally growing again,'' the president says. But, while "the job losses we were experiencing earlier this year have slowed dramatically, we're still not creating enough new jobs each month to make up for the ones we're losing. And no matter what the economists say, for families and communities across the country, this recession will not end until we completely turn that tide.''

See the address above and read it below.

And then let's all step away from the computer and have a Happy Thanksgiving.

by Mark Silva and updated with the pardons

President Barack Obama hasn't pardoned any people yet -- demonstrating a definitely deliberative tendency in the exercise of his constitutional clemency power -- but today he let a couple of turkeys go.

The White House pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey, a high tradition that dates to President Harry Truman's time, played out on the North Portico today, where two turkeys -- one a stand-in for good measure -- were spared the holiday butcher's knives with a presidential sendoff to the ceremenonial task of riding in Disney's Thanksgiving Day parade.

The president pardoned a 48-pound bird named Courage, but not without noting that he'd just as soon eat "this sucker.''

The last president, who already was a lame duck when he pardoned his last birds, may have seemed a more natural fit for this fowl-excuse of an event, Bush of the brush-clearing Texas ranch persuasion. (See the photo of Bush below, by the AP's Gerald Herbert.) The citified Chicagoan who has moved into the White House may seem less suited for a hands-on experience with a wary turkey. But wait, Obama was a constitutional law professor, and there is an emerging legal field of animal rights.

Obama had daughters Malia and Sasha by his side, the two girls smiling wide as the president saluted the National Turkey Federation for donating this year's turkey, named Courage, from Goldsboro, N.C., and the alternate, named Carolina.

"Gobble, gobble,'' said Courage, interrupting Obama, who noted that Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson ate their turkeys.

"Thanks to the interventions of Malia and Sasha - because I was planning to eat this sucker - Courage also will be spared this terrible and delicious fate,'' Obama said.

"There are certain days that remind me of why I ran for this office,'' Obama said, "and then there are moments like this, when I pardon a turkey and send it to Disneyland.''

He went on to pardon Courage, before the first dog, Bo, got involved and "screwed up'' the pardon. -- "Is there an official gesture?''asked Obama, holding a hand up like a Star Wars warrior. "Courage, you are hereby pardoned, you will live in Disneyland.'' .

"He's like a large chicken,'' a daughter noted.

"He is like a large chicken,'' the father said. "I don't know about the haircut, though.''

(The ordinarily Rose Garden-picture-perfect ceremonywas moved to the cover of the portico on a mistiy morning on the eve of Thanksgiving, and is viewable, at White House's live-streaming Web-site.)

"I am humbled by the privilege that it is to serve, and I want to wish a Happy Thanksgiving to every service member at home or in harm's way,'' the president said, on a more serious note today. Tomorrow, he said, he and his family will "remember... this is a time when so many members of our American families are hurting... There is a long way to go and a lot of work to do.

"In more tranquil times, it's easierr to notice our many blessing... In times like this, they resonate more powerful,'' he said. "This is an era of new hardships and perils.. We are Americans, and for all this, we give our humble thanks... On this quintessential American holiday.''
.
In the actual constitutional pardon department, during two and a quarter centuries, only three presidents have proven slower than Obama in exercising their authority of executive clemency - granting either pardons or commutations of sentences to the convicted -- with thousands of applications pending at the Justice Department.

Our expert on this is P.S. Ruckman Jr, associate professor of political science at Rock Valley College in Rockford, Ill., who has noted that Obama recently passed Nixon with his reluctance to initial the first pardon -- Nixon, of course, got a pardon of his own later. The other four pardon ponderers were George Washington, George W. Bush and Bill Clinton, who created quite a stir with his final day's pardons.

by Jim Tankersley

President Barack Obama will attend the international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month, according to a senior administration official, a sign of the president's increasing confidence that the talks will yield a meaningful agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The White House will also announce today that the United States will commit, in the talks, to reduce its emissions of the heat-trapping gases scientists blame for global warming "in the range of" 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020, the official said. That's the target set out in the climate bill the House passed in June.

The president will address negotiators on Dec. 9, just after the opening of the two-week summit, on his way to pick up the Nobel Peace Prize in nearby Sweden. His speech will come ahead of planned visits by prominent heads of state from Europe and around the world, and before the talks are expected to reach their most frenzied pitch.

White House officials said the decision to attend came after productive climate discussions between Obama and the heads of China and India, two developing nations whose participation is seen as critical to any successful effort to avert catastrophic climate change.

Those discussions left the president optimistic that his presence in Copenhagen could seal a meaningful - though not legally binding - climate deal, meeting the standard that Obama previously set for his attendance at the summit, the officials said.

Environmentalists have pushed for Obama's attendance to add heft to the Copenhagen meeting, which was originally intended to produce a new climate deal to succeed the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Several nations key to the talks, including the United States and China, have conceded in recent weeks that negotiations have proceeded too slowly to produce a legally binding treaty in Copenhagen. Instead, those nations are now aiming for a sort of executive summary of a future treaty to be completed next year; that summary would nevertheless include critical issues such as emissions reduction pledges for individual nations.

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin is a celebrity.

And people are standing in lines to sign her book.

Only dead fish go with the flow, the Alaskan has said, explaining her surprise resignation as governor -- and some Trump perfume can go a long way in masking the odor.

Palin, too, has stood in line for celebs in her time.

"Twice,'' the former GOP vice presidential nominee tells Greta Van Susteren, in an interview airing in two parts on FOX's On the Record -- Monday night and tonight.

"Once with Herschel Walker,'' Palin says. "He came up to Alaska years ago to sign posters in a sporting goods stores. I drove through a snow storm to go see him."

"The other one was Ivana Trump,'' she explains. "She was at J.C. Penney in Anchorage, Alaska years ago selling a perfume.

"I happened to be in the store, stood in line, had her sign whatever she was signing and then turned around and there was a reporter asking me, why are you standing in line to see her? And I said, 'Because up here in Alaska, well, one, we -- a lot of us, you know, we smell like salmon' -- we'd just got off the salmon season -- salmon year round.

"Having someone like this in our presence, oh, gosh, we're just so honored, we're so flattered. And she (was) selling good perfume."

Of the three-week book-signing tour upon which she has embarked, Palin says she is "not tired yet. Nope. Having a ball...

by Mark Silva

"Dreamgirl,'' Chicago-style, in Washington:

The singing sensation from Chicago, Jennifer Hudson, has a date at the first State Dinner of the Obama White House tonight, according to her Arista Records.

The 28-year-old soul singer, catapulted to fame as a 2004 winning contestant on American Idol and securing her credentials in an Oscar-winning role with a show-stopping song in the 2006 film, Dreamgirls, is confirmed for the big show at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, the Washington Post reports.

This won't be Hudson's first performance for the Obamas. She sang the National Anthem at the 2008 Democratic National Convention, the mile-high event in Denver where Barack Obama was nominated for the presidency.

But this will be the first State Dinner for President Obama. The president and First Lady Michelle Obama will play host to India's Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Mrs. Kaur following a day of meetings and a press conference for the president and prime minister at the White House today.

The arrival of the first couple from India at the North Portico and toasts at the dinner will be open, the dinner closed to press.

The United States and India negotiated a nuclear arms arrangement on the watch of former President George W. Bush, who traveled to India to seal that deal with Singh. The U.S.has agreed to help India, which has never abided by the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, with technical assistance in the development of civilian power, in turn for India's agreement to contain nuclear weapon-making power to several facilities.

Hudson, one presumes, has a nuclear-powered performance ready for the president, prime minister and their guests. Gotta figure there will be a YouTube.

by Julian E. Barnes and Christi Parsons and updated

Key players in President Barack Obama's war team are getting ready to testify before Congress about Afghanistan, a sign that a decision about a new war strategy -- and announcement about troop build-up -- is coming soon.

The president will likely announce his decision on Afghanistan in a televised address, possibly as early as Tuesday, a senior administration official said this morning.

Tuesday is "a good candidate" for an address, the official said, although the White House has not decided if the president will actually speak from the Oval Office.

The first to testify on Capitol Hill will probably be Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, one government official said.

Army Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal and U.S. Ambassador Karl Eikenberry also have been told to prepare to testify soon after Obama's announcement.

Word of the preparations came after Obama met with his war council late Monday night, the tenth session in the president's war review. McChrystal has asked for 40,000 additional troops in Afghanistan, and Obama is considering whether to grant the request for forces.

More on the war preparations are here, in today's Tribune newspapers.

by Mark Silva

Chalk that new low point in President Barack Obama's approval rating at 48 percentage points. It turned a notch back to 49 points today.

In its path, the president's approval rating has scored an early term-low in a poll that has been watching him daily, and watching presidents before him since Harry Truman's time.

From a peak of 69-point approval in the days after inauguration to a low of 48 reported Sunday, Obama has set a range of public opinion in which to operate.

If he can hold the floor at 48, with Gallup reporting that presidents who have slipped below 50 have been able to pull out of that rut, at least momentarily, Obama will be moving forward with a significant base of support on which to build heading into his party's congressional mid-term elections.

If he can add a historic overhaul of health-care insurance to his dossier, he'll have all the more reason for optimism. If he loses health care, most likely, 48 will not be remembered as the valley.

Zero out the Zogbies, roll up the Rasmussens and hang out the rest of the outliers to dry. The Gallup Poll, with its daily pulse-takng and its decades of benchmarks, has told a tellng story through three-plus months of strenuous debate on an issue which the president has made his No. 1 domestic priority in his first year -- he's been running below 61-percent public-approval in the Gallup since mid-July.

The success or failure of his agenda will have everything to do with what that pulse looks like, and where his party will stand, about 10 months from how.

'"I have been assembling a team,'' says Glenn Beck, the television commentator. "I've begun to assemble a team of advisers... to talk to me about finance, and foreign policy and education and defense, social issues, energy and health care.''

And the crowd at The Villages, a vast community near Orlando, Fla., that is a favorite campaign ground for Republicans - and one of the stops along the route of Republican Sarah Palin's book-signing tour l-- oves it, cheering for the FOX News Channel celebrity at a rally held over the weekend.

Beck's Ark is lining up experts two by two on the issues, and teaming them with good, Jeffersonian "radicals:"

"I've found two really smart people in each category... and then I've coupled them with one rebel - one radical. I hear it's popular to be a radical now,'' he tells his audience. "But these radicals are not the kind of radicals that are wearing the Che T-shirts. These radicals are the ones wearing the Jefferson T-shiirts.

"I have those three people n each category meet with me, and we're devising a plan,'' Beck explains, allowing that it's going to take him "about a year to complete.''

Which means, he and his team will be ready for what?

by Mark Silva

With the Senate's 60-39 vote to proceed to debate, after Thanksgiving, on a health-care bill that the president is seeking by year's end, the debate of the 2010 midterm elections has been joined:

For the Democrats, in control of the White House and Congress, the congressional elections will be presented to the public as a question of fulfilling an agenda of progress and change and keeping "the party of no,'' the intransigent GOP, in check.

For the Republicans, the midterms will be presented as a chance to retake at least part of Congress from a government trying to take over more than health care, but also every aspect of life, with big-government, big-spending and taxation - "socialization,'' a leading Republican senator calls it.

If President Barack Obama is unable to sign a health-care overhaul into law by the mid-term vote, the GOP will be painting a picture of a president unable to work his will with his own party in control. If there is health-care reform and more to present at the polls in 2010, the GOP will be cast by the people in power as an obstructionist, no-solution party.

We could hear it in the words of the Florida Democratic Party, where one of the signal Senate campaigns is playing out: A 2010 contest featuring a popular Republican governor, Charlie Crist, whose own party is challenging him for siding with President Barack Obama on the first of the White House's spending sprees, the economic stimulus, and where the Democratic Party has weighed in with this volley for the Crist-appointee, the interim Sen. George LeMieux, who was among the 39 Republicans voting to block the health care bill from debate last night.

"Instead of standing with his constituents, Sen. LeMieux has decided to stand with the Republican 'Party of NO," which is offering no real alternatives and no real solutions,'' the Democrats wrote in an overnight email to their forces in Florida. "Sen. LeMieux's unwillingness to even discuss the issue of health insurance in our country--which has been on the minds of Floridians for many years--shows that neither he nor Gov. Charlie Crist are interested in fixing our broken health insurance system and are only interested in seeing Democrats and President Obama fail.''

We could hear it in Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele's response to the Senate vote, in which all the Republicans but the absent Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio voted against taking the health-care bill to debate - just as all the House's Republicans, except for Rep. Joseph Cao of New Orleans, voted against the House health bill.

"Make no mistake: this was not a free vote,'' Steele said. "A vote in favor of this procedural motion paves the way for the bill's final adoption, which would impose a government-run health care experiment on America that increases premiums, increases taxes, cuts Medicare and allows for taxpayer-funded abortions.

" President Obama, (Senate Majoirty Leader) Harry Reid and their liberal Senate allies will surely gloat and pat themselves on the back for winning tonight's vote in the dark of night during a rare Saturday session, while Americans were home with their families,'' Steele said. "But as they do, those moderate Democrats who voted for Harry Reid's bill will have to answer to their constituents."

That means November, 2010.

President Barack Obama's public approval stood at 69 percent in the days after his inauguration in January, shown above, and reached a new low of 49 percent this week in the Gallup Poll's daily tracking surveys.

by Mark Silva

Public approval of the job that President Barack Obama is performing has fallen below 50 percent for the first time in the Gallup Poll's daily tracking of opinion.

The 49-percent approval for Obama's performance, measured this week over a three-day average of surveys between Tuesday and Thursday, marks a 20-point decline from the 69-percentage point approval that Obama enjoyed in the days after his inauguration in January.

This also marks the fourth-swifted slide of a president's approval below 50 since Gallup started tracking President Harry Truman's performance. Other surveys have put the president's approval rating below 50 and others have shown his approval hovering in the low to mid-50s, but for consistency and comparison's sake, we've always favored the Gallup findings as a number that comes with benchmarks.

"Although the current decline below 50 percent has symbolic significance, most of the recent decline in support for Obama occurred in July and August,'' Gallup's Jeffrey Jones notes. "He began July at 60 percent approval.

"The ongoing, contentious debate over national healthcare reform has likely served as a drag on his public support, as have continuing economic problems. Americans are also concerned about the Obama administration's reliance on government spending to solve the nation's problems and the growing federal budget deficit.

"Of the post-World War II presidents, Obama now is the fourth fastest to drop below the majority approval level, doing so in his 10th month on the job. Gerald Ford dropped below 50 percent approval during his third month in office, and Bill Clinton did so in his fourth month,'' Jones notes. "Ronald Reagan, like Obama, also dropped below 50 percent in his 10th month in office, though Reagan's drop occurred a few days sooner in that month (Nov. 13-16, 1981) than did Obama's (Nov. 17-19, 2009).

He also notes this, which is another reason that Gallup's numbers are worth watching: "All presidents except John Kennedy dropped below the majority approval level at some point in their presidencies, and all recovered after the first time below this mark to go back above 50 percent approval.''

For more, see the full Gallup report,.

And forgive us, please, if the pace of postings in the Swamp slows this week for a much needed Thanksgiving week break.

The Swamp wishes a Happy Thanksgiving to all.

by Mark Silva

As the Senate nears a vote on advancing to debate over health-care, Republicans are holding ground against a bill which they insist will only grow the government and raise taxes.

They don't accept the $848-billion price tag that the Congressional Budget Office has placed on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's bill, and they don't buy the idea that it can cut the defict over 10 years by more than $120 billion.

"We are already experiencing record deficits and debt, and yet, this bill creates a massive expansion of government, growing the size of the federal government by over $2.4 trillion over ten full years of implementation,'' Sen. Mke Crapo of Idaho says in the Republican Party's weekly address today.

"When you take away the budget gimmicks used in the early years of the implementation that make the total cost look smaller, the truth is glaring and the Congressional Budget Office agrees: this plan will increase federal spending and health costs, not lower them. That means both you and the federal government will see costs go up.''

See the address above and read the text below:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, returned from a weeklong tour of Asia where he is promoting "a new era of American engagement," says the continent holds promise for Americn exports that can spur new jobs at home.

"Asia is a region where we now buy more goods and do more trade with than any other place in the world - commerce that supports millions of jobs back home,'' the president says in a weekly address today that was taped in Seoul, South Korea.

"It's also a place where the risk of a nuclear arms race threatens our security, and where extremists plan attacks on America's soil,'' Obama says, "And since this region includes some of the fastest-growing nations, there can be no solution to the challenge of climate change without the cooperation of the Asia Pacific.

" With this in mind, I traveled to Asia to open a new era of American engagement,'' the president says. "But above all, I spoke with leaders in every nation I visited about what we can do to sustain this economic recovery and bring back jobs and prosperity for our people - a task I will continue to focus on relentlessly in the weeks and months ahead.''

See the address above and read it below:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama is home.

Home, where the hard work is.

With stops in 20 nations behind him, said to be the most ambitious international itinerary of any first-year president, Obama faces the closing innings of a domestic policy year in which he insisted upon a sweeping health-care reform - by year's end, the president insisted.

Talk on Capitol Hill already has turned to a new deadline for passage of the legislation: The president's first State of the Union address in January, a fitting stage upon which to hail the health-care initiatives which he made the singular most important demand of his first year.

This isn't the only moving goal post: Obama, during his first days in office, vowed to close the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in one year. This week, he allowed that Guantanamo will take a little longer -- the closing promised sometime next year.

The sheer breadth of Obama's first-year agenda - health-care, alternative energy development, recovery from the worst recession since the Great Depression and the charting of a new course in Afghanistan while withdrawing American forces from Iraq - may defie the setting of hard deadlines. The depth of the partisan divide on Capitol Hill is another factor - as evidenced by an economic stimulus that passed without a single Republican vote in the House, a health-care bill that passed the House by 220-215, with but one Republican vote, an energy bill with "cap and trade'' limits on greenhouse gas emissions that cleared the House only with the help of a handful of Republicans, eight.

Of all this, only the economic stimulus has found its way into law so far, and the White House was having trouble this week accounting for where the money is going.

And as the sun rose in Washington today, with the president just returned from an eight-day trek across Asia at a time in which the international goals which the president has set appear no closer to achievement than they were at the start of this year, the American public's approval of the job that the president is performing stood at just 50 percent in the daily tracking of the Gallup Poll -- a floor which the president has seen several times since August.

Obama is home for the holidays -- no real political break, though.

He's getting grey, he acknowledged this week.

Near the end of 2009, the president maintains that he isn't even thinking of 2012 at this point - and says that he is content to let the chips fall where they may. He said this, in an interview with CNN:

"If I feel like I've made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it, and my, you know, poll numbers are in the tank because we've gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically I'm in a tough spot, I'll feel all right about myself,'' he said. "I'd feel a lot worse, if at a time of such urgency for the American people I was spending a lot of time thinking about how I could position myself to ensure reelection.

"Because if I were doing that right now, I wouldn't have taken on health care, I wouldn't be taking on things that are unpopular,'' the president said. "I wouldn't be closing Guantanamo. There are a whole series of choices that I'm making that I know are going to create some political turbulence. But I think they're the right thing to do, and history will bear out my theories or not.''

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin was box office on FOX News this week - handing Sean Hannity one of his highest-rated shows.

Someone else drew a crowd at FOX this week, too: President Barack Obama.

While Hannity's audience of more than 4 million viewers with the author of Going Rogue aboard at the start of her national book tour well exceeded the 2 million-plus turnout that the FOX evening news got with a long-sought Obama interview, both shows were ratings leaders for the No. 1 cable news network:

Hannity's ratings were his second-highest for the year, according to the Nielsen Media Research count, and he beat the network's top-drawing Bill O'Reilly, who had 3.868 million viewers Wednesday night.

Nielsen found that FOX News Channel's Hannity drew 4.2 million viewers with Palin's appearance - far surpassing the competition in the time slot: MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, with 957,000 viewers, and CNN's Larry King, with 835,000.

FOX's Special Report with Bret Baier, airing an interview of Obama conducted by FOX White House correspondent Major Garrett in China, drew 2.235 million viewers - a number which FOX will take as a sign of playng to a wide audience.

Baier's competition in the time-slot trailed, as it usually does in FOX's audience share of the cable news market - with CNN's Situation Room drawing 546,000 viewers and MSNBC's Ed Show drawing 495,000 viewers - Nielsen reported of the night's run of cable news viewership.

Palin told Hannity that the military should have used a little profiling in the case of Nadal Malik Hasan, the Army major accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, in a shooting rampage: "I say profiling in the context of doing whatever we can to save innocent American lives, I'm all for it, then."

And Obama allowed in his interview with Garrett that the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, won't be closed by the January deadlne he set -- but rather sometime next year.

"I'm not disappointed,'' Obama said. "I knew this was going to be hard, it's hard not only because of the politics, people I think understandably are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keeping terrorists out. ''

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama says he "probably won't'' be reading Sarah Palin's Going Rogue, so radio's Mark Levin asked Palin: Has she considered sending him the TelePrompTer edition?

"You know what,'' Palin replied, laughing, "when I heard that, though, I thought, good, at a moment like this in history, I'd rather that he be spending his time reading the next fiscal year federal budget. He better really dig into that, and start reining it in.''

Does she think, the host asked Palin on The Mark Levin Show -- one of the few media interviews that Palin was conducting at the start of her book tour -- if she had gone to an Ivy League school, rather than starting in Idaho and Alaska, and hung out in New York or San Francisco, she might be the "darling of the left.''

"I tell my dad that, "I say, Dad, if you would have just given me a backpack and a passport when I was 18 years old after graduating from high school and let me travel Europe...' she said. "You know what the rest of us did, we worked our butts off to get through school.''

As much as the Left tries to dismiss her, Levin suggested, they hang on her every word.

"I do wonder why they do... 'Dismiss it, man, move on,''' Palin said. "What color toenail polish is she wearing today?...That stuff cracks me up.''

How about that Newsweek cover photo of her in tights from her Runner's World shoot?

"Maybe that's what our society needs, is more of that revelation of that mainstream media and what their agenda is, let it be revealed,'' Palin told Levin, "and I have to be the person used as a tool, fine, let them do it.''

If she had to describe her philosophy, her "common-sense conservatism,'' what is that?

"I believe that history teaches us lessons, and we're idiots if we don't learn from history,'' Palin said, suggesting there is a lot to be learned from Ronald Reagan's handling of the economy and national security matters. "A common-sense conservative looks at history, finds out how did we screw up in history, how did we implement solutions and we go from there.''

by Mark Silva

The White House is pushing back on the alleged "fiction'' of jobs created or saved under the $787-billion federal timulus bill - particularly what it views as the fiction surrounding reports that Recovery.gov, the official online accounting of where all the money is going, listed all sorts of money going into congressional districts that don't exist.

At the same time, the White House is citing an odd statistic in noting that the government doesn't always get its numbers quite right the first time around.

Look at the numbers of jobs lost last year, the White House notes today: With payroll employment for 2008, the original take on the average monthly decline was 157,000. The revised average monthly decline was 230,000 -- "46 percent lower than original,'' notes a spokeswoman for the Recovery Act, reporting on the White House blog today.

"From the beginning, even before the data was collected,'' the administration's Liz Ozborn writes of the Recovery Act accounting, "administration officials said repeatedly that they did not expect the initial reports to be perfect, but certainly expected them to provide an unprecedented and largely accurate look at the Recovery Act at work - and they do.''

That should lend a lot of confidence in the numbers.

The administration blogs on the "FICTION: The reports recipients of Recovery Act funds filed are riddled with errors.''

The "FACT,'' it reports, is that "more than 130,000 reports were collected from recipients who were required to fill out 99 different data fields - that's over 12 million pieces of information collected directly from those putting the funds to work.

" Much has been made of incorrectly coded Congressional Districts, but that issue - which the Recovery Board has already fixed - affected about 1 percent of reports. And other potential over or under-counts of jobs you may have seen highlighted in the media amount to less than 5 percent of all reports.''

More from the White House on fact versus fiction:

by Mark Silva

The House's health care bill, we were reminded, weighed in at over 20 pounds. The Senate's bill, we're told, is bigger than War and Peace.

Both of them also offer health care for millions of Americans uninsured.

And Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch of Utah has a prescription for what the public should do if the Congress happens to pass all of this into law:

"Rebel.''

That was the word from Hatch this morning on cable news' FOX & Friends, as the Senate's Democratic leadership attempts to muster the votes by the end of this week to advance Senate Majority Harry Reid's health-care bill to a debate sometime after Thanksgiving.

"Thanks to the Senate's hard work,'' President Barack Obama said in a statement issued by the White House as he concludes his trek across Asia, "we're closer than ever to enacting solutions to these (health-care) problems. I look forward to working with the Senate and House to get a finished bill to my desk as soon as possible."

Reid's bill weighed in at about $850 billion over the coming 10 years, with the potential for cutting the deficit by more than $100 over that period, according to the Congressional Budget Office's look at the legislation. The $1.2-trillion bill which passed the House by a narrow vote of 220-215 is more costly, but also offers health insurance coverage to a somewhat greater percentage of uncovered Americans.

"I was particularly pleased to see that the Congressional Budget Office has estimated that the bill will reduce the deficit by $127 billion over the next 10 years and as much as $650 billion in the decade following, saving hundreds of billions while extending coverage to 31 million more Americans,'' Obama said.

"From Day One, our goal has been to enact legislation that offers stability and security to those who have insurance and affordable coverage to those who don't, and that lowers costs for families, businesses and governments across the country. ''

Hatch has another take on it:

by Mark Silva and updated with FOX apology

FOX has done it again, and this time, once again, FOX says its misplay of the wrong crowd video was another regrettable mistake.

Today, FOX News host Gregg Jarrett was talking about Republican Sarah Palin's book tour and the crowd she is drawing at the start of it - no small turnout, with some 1,500 people lining up early this morning for a chance to get into this evening's premier book-signing for Going Rogue in Grand Rapids.

"Sarah Palin continuing to draw huge crowds while she's promoting her brand new book,'' FOX's Jarrett told his viewers. "Take a look at -- these are some of the pictures just coming into us... The lines earlier had formed this morning.''

But it turns out that Happening Now had pulled some video of something that happened last year: Displaying video today from Palin's campaign for the vice presidency, on the ticket with the GOP's Sen. John McCain - which also drew considerable crowds, as shown today in video of a smiling Palin before an adoring campaign crowd.

"This was a production error in which the copy editor changed a script and didn't alert the control room to update the video,'' Michael Clemente, senior vice president of news at FOX, sad this evening. "There will be an on-air explanation during Happening Now on Thursday."

The unwelcome mishap follows soon on the heels of another FOX Pas - when the network's Sean Hannity ran video of a hugely attended TEA Party protest rally in Washington in September as Hannity was talking about a less-attended Nov. 4 rally outside the Capitol.

Comedy Central's Jon Stewart called out Hannity on that video, and Hannity apologized, on air, for what he called an "inadvertent'' error. Hannity has a book-tour interview of Palin on his show tonight, and we're betting Stewart's Daily Show crew will be watching.

So, as you might suspect, the No. 1-rated cable news network is taking today's mixing of videos quite seriously;

How seriously?

The Swamp hears tonight that it's highly like that serious disciplinary action will be taken for those responsible behind the scenes in the control room. News executives there consider this to have been a sloppy and unnecessary error.

New Thursday note: FOX made good on its promise to acknowledge the mistake and apologized for the mixup today: "We didn't mean to mislead anybody. It was a mistake, and for that we apologize.'' See it here:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, with 20 nations in his passport this year, stepped on to the Great Wall of China this week.

"It gives you a perspective on a lot of day to day things that don't amount to much...It's majestic,'' the president said. "It reminds you of the sweep of history. And that our time here on earth is not that long. So we better make the best of it.''

The president has a lot on his mind these days.

The way Republican Sarah Palin tells it, all the president has to do is listen to his general about deployment of additional forces in Afghanistan, and that will take care of that decision -- sort of like Harry Truman, had he only listened to Gen. Douglas MacArthur.

Obama isn't too happy about the leaks that have come out from the many decision-making meetings that he has held about the deployment.

"I think I'm angrier than (Defense Secretary) Bob Gates about it," Obama told CBS News' Chip Reid, in one of the network news interviews that he conducted in China. "We have deliberations in the situation room for a reason; we're making life and death decisions that affect how our troops are able to operate in a theater of war. For people to be releasing info in the course of deliberations is not appropriate."

"A firing offense?" Reid inquired.

"Absolutely," Obama replied.

As for his own physical health, he suggested, he's holding up fine.

"My weight doesn't fluctuate too much,'' the president said. " It goes in a five-pound bandwidth. It has for the last 30 years. Um, skipping meals, that's usually just a scheduling issue, but I'm eating fine and I'm sleeping fine.

"My hair is getting grey, and it is the butt of a lot of jokes from my wife as well as my friends,'' he said. " You just don't have a comparable set of circumstances - with two wars, a financial crisis as bad as anything since 1933, a host of regional issues that have to be dealt with, a pandemic.

"You have a convergence of factors that have made this a difficult year not so much for me, but for the American people,'' he said. "And so, absolutely that weighs on me, because whenever I visit Walter Reed or other military hospitals, I see the sacrifice young people are making. That is a heavy weight. But it's an extraordinary privilege, as well, and I wouldn't trade my job for anything."

Watch CBS News Videos Online

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin, author of Going Rogue, says the Army psychiatrist, a Muslim, accused of killing 13 and wounding 29 at Fort Hood, Texas, should have been "profiled'' before the shootings.

" I certainly do,'' Palin says in an interview that will air on FOX News' Hannity this evening, "and I think that there were massive warning flags that were missed all over the place, and I think that it was quite unfortunate that, to me, it was a fear of being politically incorrect to not -- I am going to use the word -- profile this guy, profile in the sense of finding out what his radical beliefs were.''

Palin, who is promoting her new memoir with a national book tour beginning in Grand Rapids this evening, tells FOX's Sean Hannity that her views about Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, held in the shooting spree that shocked Fort Hood, the Army and a nation are likely to get liberal "heads.. spinning.''

"Now, because I used the word profile, I am going to get clobbered tomorrow morning,'' Palin says in the interview, her first with a cable TV news network, the leading one in this case. "The liberals, their heads are just going to be spinning. They're going to say she is radical, she is extreme.

""But I say profiling in the context of doing whatever we can to save innocent American lives, I'm all for it, then."

(Pictured above, a man waiting in line for the signing of Sarah Palin's new book at a bookstore in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Photo by Bill Pugliano / Getty Images)

by Michael Muskal and Mark Silva

Sen. Robert C. Byrd's tenure as the longest-serving lawmaker in congressional history was marked today with praise but also questions about the senator's health.

"I look forward to serving you for the next 56 years and 320 days," the ninth-term Democratic senator from West Virginia said in a statement marking the occasion.

It was unknown if Byrd would be able to attend today's Senate session. The senator has been in and out of hospitals over the past several months.

Byrd, who arrived on Capitol Hill in January 1953 as a freshman member of the House, has spoken fondly of a time long past "when men ran for the Senate to be a senator. Not to become president, they ran to be a senator. And they loved the Senate.''

Byrd also has offered this advice to newcomers: "Do your work, do your work well, whatever committee you're assigned to, do your work with all your might and in time you will become on to be listened to.''

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) took to the floor this morning to praise Byrd's career.

"Friday is his 92nd birthday. And next week, Byrd writes in his weekly column, should be about Thanksgiving," Reid said. "What does he give thanks for this year? The privilege, he writes, of representing 'our great people in the United States Senate.''

Since June 12, 2006, Byrd has been the longest-serving senator. Later that year, he was elected to an unprecedented ninth term. Byrd has cast more than 18,000 votes and "despite fragile health that has kept him from the Senate floor during much of this year, has a nearly 98 percent attendance record over the course of his career," Reid noted.

Byrd's career has spanned 20,774 days. On Tuesday, Byrd tied the record set by Carl Hayden (D-Ariz.), who served in the House, then the Senate, from 1912 to 1969.

See some of Byrd's words above, and below the fold, courtesy of C-SPAN:

(Photo of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.) accompanied by longtime staffer Martha Anne McIntosh as he arrived on Capitol Hill on Aug. 6 by Susan Walsh / AP)

by Michael Muskal

Atty. Gen. Eric Holder today defended the Obama administration's decision to try professed terrorist mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court and denied the move would give Mohammed a propaganda forum.

"At the end of the day, it was clear to me that the venue in which we are most likely to obtain justice for the American people is in federal court," Holder told the Senate Judiciary Committee this morning.

The decision to try some of the accused terrorists in civilian court rather than before military tribunals has been criticized by Republicans who argue that it gives terrorists a worldwide stage for their views. The argument is especially acute in the case of Mohammed, who has said he was the mastermind behind the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and Washington in which almost 3,000 Americans were killed.

Mohammed and four others being held at the detention center in Guantanamo Bay will be tried in federal court in Manhattan, just blocks from where the World Trade Center's twin towers once stood.

Holder told senators that a civilian court was the proper place for the trial because the government had already successfully prosecuted more than 300 terrorists. Terrorists would have no more of a platform than they would have had in military proceedings.

"I have every confidence that the nation and the world will see him for the coward that he is," Holder said in televised remarks to the committee. "I'm not scared of what Khalid Sheik Mohammed has to say at trial -- and no one else needs to be either."

"We need not cower in the face of this enemy," Holder said. "Our institutions are strong, our infrastructure is sturdy, our resolve is firm, and our people are ready."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, who made closing of the U.S. military-run prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, within one year a priority on Day One of his presidency, allows that January's deadline for closure of the controversial facility will come and go.

"We are on a path and a process where I would anticipate that Guantanamo will be closed next year,'' Obama said in an interview with FOX News Channel conducted in China. "I'm not going to set an exact date, because a lot of this is also going to depend upon cooperation from Congress..

"I'm not disappointed,'' Obama said. "I knew this was going to be hard, it's hard not only because of the politics, people I think understandably are fearful after a lot of years where they were told that Guantanamo was critical to keeping terrorists out.

"So, I understood that that had to be processed, but it's also just technically hard,'' the president told FOX News' Major Garrett, in an interview with a news network with which the Obama White House has been at odds lately - a talk which FOX plans to air on Special Report with Brett Baier this evening. "I just think as usual in Washington things move slower than I anticipated."

The president, sitting for a round of American television network interviews after a tour of Asia that carried him to China, also bore some evidence of the economic concerns that his Chinese hosts were voicing during talks with President Hu Jintao and others in Beijing:

Speaking of continuing economic troubles at home, the president said: "I think it is important, though, to recognize that if we keep on adding to the debt, even in the midst of this recovery, that at some point, people could lose confidence in the US economy in a way that could actually lead to a double-dip recession...''

"One of the trickiest things we're doing right now, is to on the one hand make sure the recovery is supported and not withdraw a lot of money either with tax increases or big spending ...at the same time, making sure that we're setting up a pathway long-term for deficit reduction,'' the president said. "It's about as hard of a play as there is..."

He said this, too, about a U.S. unemployment rate that has reached 10.2 percent, the highest in 25 years: "Nobody's been more disappointed than I have to see how high the unemployment rate has gotten. And, I spend every waking hour, when I'm talking to my economic team, about how we are going to put people back to work."

by Mark Silva

As people line up around the block in Grand Rapids for the debut of Sarah Palin's national book tour, the popular author will probably have to count one reader out:

President Barack Obama.

"Obviously, Sarah Palin has attracted a lot of attention,'' Obama said of the Republican former governor of Alaska and 2008 GOP nominee for vice president viewed by some as a strong candidate for president in 2012 -- though not among 70 percent of Americans surveyed, according to a couple of recent news polls.

"She is going to do very well with this book,'' the Democratic president said in an interview with CNN's Ed Henry conducted in China and aired today. "She obviously has a big constituency in the Republican Party, there are a lot of people excited about her.''

Suggesting that he, himself, has not even given any thought to 2012 yet, the president said, "I do think it says a lot about our political process that 10 months after (the last election) we're already talking about it.'' (The timing of network interviews this week didn't afford Obama an opportunity to personally comment, however, on Palin's suggestion that he has everything "backassward'' on the economy.)

But, citing a load of policy briefing books that he has been reading lately, the presdent said he "probably won't'' be reading Palin's memoir, Going Rogue.

"I probably will not'' read the book, the president said in an interview with FOX News that the leading cable news network has been seeking for some time.

In the interviews with American broadcasters covering his trip through Asia, FOX's Major Garrett asked Obama about Palin's book, in a talk that FOX News Channel will air on Special Report with Brett Baier this evening.

"But I wish her well, you know,'' Obama said of Palin. "It looks like she's going to do very well without my readership."

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, "very close'' to a decision about deploying troops in Afghanistan - a strategy that must provide for an "endgame'' as well as a way forward - maintains that he is "absolutely confident'' about getting a health-care bill, calls the planned trial of 9/11 plotters in New York criminal court perfectly suitable and says he hasn't begun to even think about running in 2012 yet.

But he acknowledges the "political turbulence'' and the toll that "taking on things that are unpopular'' could take on his own prospects for reelection.

"if I feel like I've made the very best decisions for the American people and three years from now I look at it, and my, you know, poll numbers are in the tank because we've gone through these wrenching changes, you know, politically I'm in a tough spot, I'll feel all right about myself,'' he said. "I'd feel a lot worse, if at a time of such urgency for the American people I was spending a lot of time thinking about how I could position myself to ensure reelection.

"Because if I were doing that right now, I wouldn't have taken on health care, I wouldn't be taking on things that are unpopular,'' the president said. "I wouldn't be closing Guantanamo. There are a whole series of choices that I'm making that I know are going to create some political turbulence. But I think they're the right thing to do, and history will bear out my theories or not.''

The president said all this in an interview with CNN conducted in China as part of a round robin of interviews with cable news networks - CNN and FOX News alike - and the broadcast networks.

"We are very close to a decision,'' Obama said of his prolonged deliberation over deploying additional troops to Afghanistan. " I will announce that decision certainly in the next several weeks... ''

The president is weighing several considerations:

"We do have a vital interest in making sure that al Qaeda cannot attack us and that they can't use Afghanistan as a safe haven,'' he said. " We have a vital interest in making sure that Afghanistan is sufficiently stable that they can't infect the entire region with violent extremism...

"I am very confident that when I announce the decision, the American people will have a lot of clarity about what we're doing, how we're going to succeed, how much this thing is going to cost, what kind of burden does this places on our young men and women in uniform, '' the president said, "and most importantly, what's the end game on this thing, which is something that, unless you impose that kind of discipline, could lead to a multi-year occupation.''

After more than eight years of war in Afghanistan, Obama was asked if he wants to see American troops come home from Afghanistan before the end of his presidency. "My preference would be not to hand off anything to the next president,'' he said. " One of the things I'd like is the next president to be able to come in and say, 'I've got a clean slate...'

The president maintained that Att'y Gen. Eric Holder had made the call about trying Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and several accomplices held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, accused in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, in criminal court in New York, but allowed that he will be held accountable for it.

"I said to the attorney general, 'Make a decision based on the law,''' said Obama, noting that military commissions have been improved and are available for trial. "But I also have great confidence in our Article III courts, the courts that have tried hundreds of terrorist suspects who are imprisoned right now in the United States... This notion that somehow we have to be fearful that these terrorists possess some special powers that prevent us from presenting evidence against them, locking them up, and exact swift justice, I think that has been a fundamental mistake.''

But if something goes wrong, he allowed, he will be the one responsible for the decision.

"I always have to take responsibility,'' Obama said. "That's my job.''

by Mark Silva

A lot of questions have been posed in the health-care debate, with a lot of nuance: Americans have been asked if they approve of the president's handling of the issue, or congressional handling of the issue, if they think reform will make things better, make things worse, more costly or less costly.

But, as the Senate attempts to take a health-care bill to the floor as a test of the ability to began debate later this week, here's a simple question:

"Now thinking specifically about the health insurance plans available to most Americans, would you favor or oppose creating a public health insurance option administered by the federal government that would compete with plans offered by private health insurance companies?''

Fifty-six percent said yes to the "public option'' in the Nov. 13-15 survey conducted by CNN and Opinion Research Corp. That's the same number that CNN found at the end of August, as the public option was becoming the most controversial aspsect of the legislation.

Now that the House has narrowly (220-215) approved a health-care bill with a public option, and Senate leaders are advancing one with an option for a public option that states could opt-out from if they wanted, two-thirds of those surveyed say they oppose allowing states to prevent people from taking part in a public option if the government has one.

The survey of 1,014 adults, including 928 registered voters, carries a possible margin or error of plus or mnus 3 percentage points.

The Gallup Poll recently found softer support for a public option: 50 percent.

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin, embarking on a natonal book tour with her Going Rogue memoirs, has one word for the way that President Barack Obama is handling the economy:

"Backassward.''

That's how the former governor of Alaska and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee put it during a series of talks that Palin had with ABC News' Barbara Walters, in a segment that aired this evening on World News.

""I would start cutting taxes and allowing our small businesses to keep more of what they are earning, more of what they are producing, more of what they own and earn so that they could start reinvesting in their businesses and expand and hire more people," Palin told Walters. "Not punishing them by forcing health care reform down their throats; by forcing an energy policy down their throats that ultimately will tax them more and cost them more to stay in business. Those are backassward ways of trying to fix the economy."

"You do have a way with words," Walters noted.

"I call it like I see it," she said.

Palin also embraced the word that former Vice President Dick Cheneyhad for what Obama is doing with the decision about troop deployments in Afghanistan:

"Dithering.''

"To listen to (Gen. Stanley) McChrystal, to listen to the appointee that President Obama asked for the advice from," Palin explained, "McChrystal gave the president the advice and said, 'We need essentially a surge strategy in Afghanistan, so that we can win in Afghanistan.'

"And that means more resources, more troops there,''' she said. "It frustrates me and frightens me -- and many Americans -- that President Obama is dithering around with the decision in Afghanistan." (The candidate at the top of the GOP's ticket in 2008, Sen. John McCain, has said he is "past angry'' about the delay of an Afghanistan strategy.)

But Palin hasn't followed the charted course of the past Bush-Cheney administration and its national security advisers very closely, or for that matter that of the Obama administration, when it comes to the ongoing crisis in the Middle East.

by Richard Simon

The Democratic-controlled Senate today thwarted an effort to block spending for upgrading facilities in the United States for housing prisoners transferred from Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, a move that Illinois officials feared could have complicated efforts to place detainees at a prison in their state.

The measure was defeated on a mostly party-line vote of 57-43.

Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) proposed the restriction as an amendment to a spending bill for military construction and veterans programs, telling his colleagues, ``If you want terrorists here, then vote against this amendment.''

Opponents assailed it as an attempt to block the closing of Guantanamo Bay, a priority of President Obama.

Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), who has touted the jobs and other economic benefits that would be created by housing prisoners at a near-empty prison about 150 miles west of Chicago, read a letter on the Senate floor from Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. calling the closing of Guantanamo Bay ``in the national security interests of the United States.

"Al Qaeda has repeatedly used the existence of the facility as a recruitment tool,'' the Obama Cabinet members said of Guantanamo in their letter.'

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, contended the amendment would ``actually make us less secure by restricting our ability to improve security at facilities'' that house detainees transferred to the United States from Guantanamo Bay for trial.''

Durbin argued that the amendment would not prevent detainees from being transferred to the United States but would bar spending federal funds to tighten security in places such as New York City where several accused terrorists, including the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, are expected to go on trial.

``How much sense does that make?'' Durbin asked. ``If there is the need to upgrade security so they can be tried in a safe environment with no danger to the people of New York City, we want to spend that money.''

by Mark Silva and updated

The Obama administration promised "transparency'' in the accounting of that $787 billion in economic stimulus spending.

Jonathan Karl and his eagle-eyed colleagues at ABC News saw right through it: In the case of those 30 jobs created or saved and $761,420 spent in Arizona's 15th Congressional District.

There is no 15th.

The state has eight.

Connecticut has no 42nd either.

But the meticulous accounting of where all the stimulus money is going at recovery.gov included tallies for Arizona's 15th, Connecticut's 42nd and more.

The Recovery Board chalked up the misstatements to human error.

""We report what the recipients submit to us," Ed Pound, communications director for the board, told ABC News. The board collects declarations from recipients of the cash - state governments, federal agencies and universities.

""Some recipients clearly don't know what congressional district they live in, so they appear to be just throwing in any number,'' Pound explained. "We expected all along that recipients would make mistakes on their congressional districts, on jobs numbers, on award amounts, and so on. Human beings make mistakes.''

But Arizona's 86th?

California doesn't even have that many.

It's OK, though, there were no jobs created in the 86th, or the 40th.

ABC saw through the Recovery Board's transparency.

And now one congressman is seeing red:

Rep. David Obey (D-Wis.), chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, issued a statement demanding an update of the recovery.gov Web-site: "The inaccuracies on recovery.gov that have come to light are outrageous and the administration owes itself, the Congress, and every American a commitment to work night and day to correct the ludicrous mistakes...

"Credibility counts in government and stupid mistakes like this undermine it,'' Obey writes. "We've got too many serious problems in this country to let that happen.''

Obey's own Web-site touts the money spent in each of his district's counties.

House Republican Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio), repeatedly has been asking of the stimulus spending: "Where are the jobs?''

A spokeswoman for Boehner reported today: "We went to recovery.gov to find out how the state of Ohio - a state with 18 congressional districts - fared. Guess what we found: TEN congressional districts in the Buckeye State that DO NOT exist received stimulus money.''

We know, at least, where some of the money is going. Millions went into the development of the Web-site, in Washington, which has no congressional district.

by Mark Silva

In New York, which suffered the most shocking brunt of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, there is a certain division of opinion over playing host to a criminal trial for the mastermind of the attacks, Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, and some accomplices.

Forty-five percent of the New Yorkers surveyed say it's a good idea to hold the trial in New York City, while 41 percent call it a bad one.

Fourteen percent "just aren't sure,'' the Marist Poll reports.

While 47 percent of those surveyed say the location of the trial will not affect the likelihood of another terrorist attack occurring in New York City, "a significant proportion are concerned the trial will put a bull's eye on the city.''

Indeed, 40 percent believe the trial which the Justice Department plans to conduct in New York for several detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, will increase the possibility of another terrorist attack in the area, the Marist Poll has found.

At the same time, most New Yorkers -- 67 percent -- voice confidence that law enforcement officials will be able to handle the potential security risks associated with such a high profile trial in Manhattan. Only one in five lack faith in the cops.

This survey of 602 New York City residents was conducted on Monday, the day that New York Gov. David Paterson was publicly suggesting that the trial is not such a good idea. The poll carries a possible margin of error of plus or minus four percentage points.

Paterson was finding a little wiggle room today for his own criticism of the Obama administration's move -- following the president's less than subtle suggestion that the Democrat not seek another term.

Paterson had said on Monday that he'd prefer the trial not be held in the city. But appearing on a radio show today, he said the decision has been made and New York will assist the federal government any way it can.

"We don't need to spend a lot of time on this," the governor said on radio station WWRL. "The decision is made. That's the president's decision. We're Americans. We will follow the decision and we'll trust the president."

by Mark Silva

The president of the United States is a long way from home, but there's nothing like a state dinner in the Great Hall of the People to lift one's spirits.

There was no immediate word on what they were serving at the head table in Beijing, but the president appeared pleased with the service.

As for the secretary of state, however....

(Photos of President Barack Obama and state dinner dinner attendants above by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty Images) Photo of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Obama above by Feng Li / Getty Images)

by Mark Silva

FOX News had to go to China to get President Barack Obama.

When the traveling president sits for a round robin of television news interviews in Beijing, FOX's Major Garrett says he'll be in the loop of five that get 10 minutes apiece with the president.

Garrett "tweeted'' this from China: "I will interview POTUS on camera Wed am here in Beijing. 4 other networks will too. 10 mins per. Many had asked. Can say now.''

CNN senior White House correspondent Ed Henry also gets an interview with the president, which will start airing at 6 am EST Wednesday on CNN's American Morning.

Henry promises the president will address "important issues facing him back home such as health care and whether to send more troops to Afghanistan.''

When the president sat for a round of Sunday morning news shows not long ago to press his health-care agenda, FOX was cut out of a loop that included the major broadcast networks, CNN and Spanish-language Univision.

The White House has asserted that FOX is not really a news network in the traditional sense of a news network - the outgoing communications director at the White House has called FOX "an arm of the Republican Party.''

So perhaps the inclusion of Garrett in the Beijing talks with the president represents a new phase in U.S. relations with FOX News Channel, the media equivalent of détente.

Don't look for Obama to bow, however.

by Mark Silva

The new American diplomat to China had some fairly undiplomatic things to say about expertise in the field of Chinese relations with the United States.

"Don't mistake me for being an expert, because I've been here for three months,'' said U.S. Ambassador Jon Huntsman, the former Republican governor of Utah who indeed has expertise in foreign affairs and speaks Mandarin.

"I've come to the conclusion that 'China expert' is kind of an oxymoron,'' Huntsman told reporters at a press briefing in Beijing, where President Barack Obama was making his first appearance this week. "And those who consider themselves to be China experts are kind of morons.

"You take what you can, you learn what you can, and you begin to pull all the pieces together, and still it kind of remains sometimes a somewhat confused environment,'' Huntsman said. At the same time, he suggested, relations between the two nations are as good as they have been in three decades.

"The relationship formally reached its 30th year this year,'' he said. "And I'd have to say that having followed it off and on for a good many of those 30 years, the president stepped off the plane in Shanghai in an environment that I'd have to characterize as being really at an all-time high in terms of the bilateral atmosphere -- a cruising altitude that is higher than any other time in recent memory, thereby able to kind of sail above some of the wind shears and the storms that have typically been part of the bilateral relationship.''

But, then, he's only a China expert.

(Photo of U.S. Ambassador to China Jon Huntsman at a town-hall styled event with President Barack Obama in Shanghai on Monday by Charles Dharapak / AP).

by Mark Silva

Lou Dobbs, who helped build CNN, says there was no room left for his "advocacy'' journalism at a network seeking "neutrality.''

"CNN decided to go one way, and ultimately it became clear to CNN management and myself, that we were going to go different directions,'' Dobbs, who abruptly resigned as evening news anchor on the cable news network, said today, on NBC's Today.

Was it opinion in general, or perhaps his opinions, which CNN had grown weary of, Today's Matt Lauer asked Dobbs.

"Since I take it a little personally, perhaps it just mine,'' Dobbs replied. "They made it clear, they wanted the network to go middle of the road, neutral... I'm not a neutral guy.''

In his 27 years at CNN, he said, "no one ever tried to interfere with my editorial judgment.'' His audience wanted his analysis and opinion, he maintained. But the network insisted that "the issue is one of advocacy, neutrality'' at a network trying to hold the middle ground in an era of sharply opinionated cable news programming.

Asked about critics who contended that Dobbs was peddling hatred with his drumbeat of criticism for illegal immigration, Dobbs told Lauer: "If saying that people should absolutely be honoring our borders and ports as a sovereign nation, then forgive me.

"There is one logical syllogism that I can't overcome... You cannot substantively reform immigration law unless we control immigration.''

Dobbs was pressed for another political opinion, on Sarah Palin, enjoying a lot of coverage for the rollout of her memoirs, Going Rogue.

"She is certainly the frontrunner in terms of her popularity in the Republican Party,'' said Dobbs, calling the former Alaska governor the "de facto'' leader within her party, "staking out her territory'' now.

Would he vote for her?

"Frankly, based on what I've seen, personally no,'' Dobbs said. "I'm an independent... I think the woman had a brilliant address at the Republican convention last year.... Since then, she's left a lot to be - I'll put it this way -- desired as a person who is seeking votes.. But that's what this may be about, campaigning for votes like mine, that aren't persuaded at this point.''

by Jim Puzzanghera

For more than 15.4 million people, the "Making Work Pay'' tax credit enacted as part of the $787-billion economic stimulus package could turn out to be a Making You Pay Back tax credit.

That's the finding of a government watchdog report about the tax credit, which provides as much as $400 for individuals and as much as $800 for joint filers. It is the signature tax cut that President Barack Obama promised in his campaign and was delivered with much fanfare in February.

The problem: In order to maximize the credit's stimulative effect on the economy, withholding changes for taxpayers kicked in within days of Obama signing the legislation and taxpayers started seeing the changes in their paychecks in April.

In essence, the credit was "advanced to taxpayers through their wages by a decrease in federal income tax withholding" for the 2009 and 2010 tax years, according to the report by the Treasury Department's Inspector General for Tax Administration.

If too much of the credit was advanced, a person would end up having to pay the extra money back.

After analyzing 2007 tax return data, the Inspector General found that more than 15.4 million people could fall into that category this year. Among the reasons for having to pay back some of the credit are having more than one job or receiving pension or Social Security payments while still working.

The Internal Revenue Service maintains that the report overstates the problem. The agency noted that about three out of four taxpayers receive refunds on their tax returns each year, averaging about $2,700 each.

For most households, the withholding problem associated with the tax credit "means a reduced refund and not an out-of-pocket tax liability," the IRS said in a letter to the Inspector General.

by Mark Silva and updated

"Our life has become kind of a reality show,'' says Sarah Palin, author of Going Rogue, who suggests that in the last couple of months she has fielded all sorts of offers "coming our way, some bizarre things.''

In the context of a moose-eating family from Alaska - moose hotdogs, with cheese inside, is one of the favorites at home - where the estranged father of her grandson, Tripp, is warning her to watch her tongue because "she knows what I got on her,'' this, as the baby's daddy's own spread in Playgirl is making tabloid headlines, that could be saying quite a lot.

On this day that Palin's 1.5-million copy memoir makes its official debut after a weekend of pre-debuts in the press and on the eve of a three-week book-promoting tour, Palin tells of the travails of family life and the toll that political life has taken on all that on ABC's Good Morning America. (It doesn't help that Newsweek's new cover, drawing an exercise photo from a Runner's World shoot, portrays Palin as an object of something other than poltical interest.)

Palin, who has provided plenty of fodder for talk and comic shows and has steered fans to Glenn Beck's show at FOX, downplays talk of taking on her own talk show.

"I would not ever want to put my kids through such a thing," says Palin, who put her five children, including one pregnant at the time, through a walk across the stage at the Republican National Convention and two months of arduous campaigning on Sen. John McCain's presidential ticket, tells ABC's Barbara Walters in a series of talks starting today, continuing tomorrow and geting a full reprise on 20/20 Friday. Palin tells Walters: "Our life has become kind of a reality show."

Palin steers clear of questions about any presidential ambitions, but is ready with pointed questions about President Barack Obama's agenda, particularly his health-care reforms - and its purported "death panels''

Only three in 10 of all voters surveyed view Palin as qualified to serve as president -- both CNN and now NBC News have found this in their surveys.

So Walters asks Palin to rate Obama's presidency, "on a scale of one to 10.''

"Four,'' Palin replies

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin has a book, Going Rogue.

Hillary Clinton has a book, It Takes a Village.

But on the eve of the release of Palin's memoirs, a day in which Palin is appearing on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Clinton is traveling through China as secretary of state, Palin does not have what it takes to be president, most surveyed say.

But Clinton does.

Just 28 percent of those surveyed by the post-Lou Dobbs CNN and Opinion Research Corp. say Palin, the former governor of Alaska, is qualified to serve as president -- and 70 percent say she is not.

Speculation about Palin's potential interest in the 2012 Republican nomination, following her run at the White House with John McCain in 2008, has been spurred by the publication of a memoir filled with regrets about the conduct of McCain-Palin.

At the same time, only 50 percent of those surveyed see Vice President Joe Biden -- "can I call you Joe?'' Palin asked of him during their 2008 running mates' debate -- as qualified to serve as president. And 48 percent say he is not. Which could help explain that 71-vehicle motorcade that President Barack Obama rode into Beijing today.

(Obama seriously considered Clinton as a running mate, his campaign manager has told us -- see the book mentioned below -- but Obama worried about Bill Clinton.)

Yet Clinton, who was favored to win the Democratic nomination for president last year until someone from Chicago had the "audacity'' to hope -- and "The Audacity to Win,'' as campaign manager David Plouffe has entitled his own book -- is viewed by two-thirds of those surveyed as qualified to be president. The former first lady has the confidence of 67 percent of those surveyed, with 32 percent saying no.

Yet Clinton says she has no interest in running again.

As for the rest of the potential 2012 GOP pack, Palin may have some catching up to do with former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who won the GOP's Iowa caucuses last year -- and who, it turns out, will also be making his own appearance in Grand Rapids this week as Palin launches her book-tour there. Forty-three percent of those surveyed say Huckabee is qualified to serve as president.

And 47 percent say Mitt Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts who also sought his party's nomination in 2008, is qualified.

The Nov. 13-15 survey of 1,014 adults, including 928 registered voters, carries a possible margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

by Jim Tankersley

Of course Steven Chu - Cabinet secretary and Nobel Prize-winning physicist - has a Facebook page.

And of course Chu, like pretty much everyone with a Facebook page, has used it to share some highlights of his latest travels with his more than 9,000 online friends.

But because Chu is the U.S. Secretary of Energy, and he's on an official mission to India, his travelogue is a bit ... weightier ... than your average Facebook fest.

There's a dispatch, for example, that begins like this: "Today I have had the opportunity to meet with Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission Dr. Montek Singh Ahluwalia and other distinguished Indian leaders. We had productive discussions about the opportunities for partnerships between our two countries on clean energy technologies."

And there's this video:

The secretary posted it today, blending soothing intro music and slick shots of Indian scenery with some detailed talk about compressed natural gas, biomass power and emerging markets for wind and solar energy.

If it all gets a little technical for you, don't worry. You can always check out his photo gallery of the recent Solar Decathalon.

by Mark Silva

In its most recent $1-billion loss, General Motors sees progress.

Yet, with the report today that GM has lost $1.2 billion since leaving the protection of federal bankruptcy courts in July, the Republican National Committee chairman finds "further proof that President Obama's economic experiments are wrong for America.''

"Sadly, GM has not only failed to turn a profit since the president poured $50 billion of the taxpayers' dollars into GM's bankruptcy restructuring, but it has actually lost $1.2 billion,'' RNC Chairman Michael Steele said today.

The GOP chairman suggests that GM's losses, the government's "Cash for Clunkers'' program and the Democrats' health-care initiative are all part of one failed government experiment. The party chairman did not suggest, however, what might have happened if GM had gone bust, taking its chain of suppliers with it.

Steve Rattner, the so-called "car czar'' whom the administration tapped to oversee the auto industry under federal bailouts, told those attending a conference in Washington last week that GM would have taken Ford with it if it had been allowed to fail -- for the collapse of GM's suppliers also would have taken down Ford, which averted federal help.

Once the government was invested in GM's survival, replacing GM's CEO was an easy call, Rattner also said at the Bloomberg Washington Summit last week. The tougher call was picking someone from within the company's culture, which the company did in naming Fritz Henderson CEO.

"He's shown that he can manage," Rattner, who stepped down from the U.S. auto panel amidst his own business difficulties in July, said of Henderson. "Whether he can fundamentally change the culture of the company is another matter."

"We have significantly more work to do,'' Henderson said of the losses reported today, "but today's results provide evidence of the solid foundation we are building for the new GM.''

The GOP chairman wasn't impressed.

"As the Cash for Clunkers program clearly demonstrated, government interference in private industry doesn't help the companies involved. and ends up greatly costing the American taxpayer,'' Steele says. "President Obama and congressional Democrats believe increased spending and massive government regulation in private enterprise are best for the economy. Clearly they're wrong."

Clearly, however, GM sees something different in the $1.2-billion loss: Better performance that had reported in previous quarters, a sign, the automaker says, of turning the corner.

by Mark Silva and updated

In the new debut of Sarah Palin, whose first round of national media interviews didn't turn out so well, the Republican from Alaska readily acknowledges how far things went South in her talks with CBS News' Katie Couric.

Palin appears on The Oprah Winfrey Show today, on the eve of the formal publication of a book, Going Rogue, that has leaked like the Exxon Valdez before its scheduled release Tuesday.

The Democratic National Committee today is calling Palin's tour part of the "ongoing soap opera'' that is the GOP.

In her interview with Winfrey, Palin speaks of that interview with Couric early in Palin's campaign for the White House with presidential candidate John McCain.

"The campaign said, 'Right on. Good. You're showing your independence. This is what America needs to see and it was a good interview,'' the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee recalls of the CBS encounter. "

"And of course I'm thinking, 'If you thought that was a good interview, I don't know what a bad interview is because I knew it was a bad interview.'"

Levi Johnston, the estranged father of Palin's grandson, Tripp, apparently gets no mention in Palin's 400-plus page memoir. But Winfrey asked about him, wondering whether the boy's father will be welcome at the Palin home at Thanksgiving.

"That is a great question,'' Palin replies. " It is lovely that he would even consider such a thing, because of course, he is a part of the family. I think he needs to know that he is loved."

Before heading out for a cross-country book-tour off the beaten path of big cities, starting in Grand Rapids, Mich., this week, Palin also sat for an interview with ABC News' Barbara Walters, who apparently has not put Palin to the sort of test that ABC's Charles Gibson did when he asked Palin during the campaign about "the Bush Doctrine.''

Walters asks Palin about the anonymous McCain staffers who called her a "diva" and a narcissist after the campaign ended.

"For some people, this is a business," Palin replies, in the interview with Walters, excerpts airing on Good Morning America and Nightline on Tuesday, and in full on 20/20 Friday night.

"And if failure in this business was going to reflect poorly on them,'' Palin tells Walters, "they had to pack their own parachutes and protect themselves and their reputations, so they wouldn't be blamed.

" I'll take the blame, though,'' Palin says of that losing campaign. "At the end of the day, I know what the truth is."

"Sarah Palin's desire to settle old scores, while doing little to add to her credibility, does generously add to the on-going soap opera that is the Republican party,'' the DNC's Hari Sevugan said today. "We wish her the best of luck on her tour."

(Sarah Palin and her daughters, Willow, right, and Piper, left, are pictured during the taping of The Oprah Winfrey Show in Chicago. AP Photo /Harpo Productions, George Burns .Palin and ABC News' Barbara Walters are pictured in a photo by Steve Fenn / ABC, via AP.)

by Mark Silva

One of the nastiest stories that the media kept "making up'' about Sarah Palin was the unfounded suggestion that the former governor of Alaska and permanent "first dude'' were breaking up.

The Republican confronted rumors about an alleged divorce from husband Todd, seasoned snowmobile racing champion, commercial fisherman and oilfield hand, in the tabloids. Now she confronts them in her memoir, Going Rogue:

"That day in sunny Texas when the divorce rumors were rampant in the tabloids, I watched Todd, tanned and shirtless, take the baby from my arms and walk him back to the ranch house so Trig could nap while I made calls,'' Palin writes in the book, a copy obtained by NBC News and others in advance of its publication this week.

"Seeing Todd's blue eyes smiling, I chuckled,'' Palin writes. "'Dang,' I thought. 'Divorce Todd?'

"Have you seen Todd?''

(Photo of former Gov. Sarah Palin and husband Todd Palin at the announcement of her resignation in July by Bill Roth / Anchorage Daily News/MCT)

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, fielding some questions in his first visit to China, was asked: "What's the main reason that you were honored (with) the Nobel Prize for Peace? And will it give you more... pressure and the responsibility to promote world peace?''

"In terms of the burden that I feel, I am extraordinarily honored to be put in the position of president,'' Obama replied. "And as my wife always reminds me when I complain that I'm working too hard, she says, 'You volunteered for this job'... And so you -- there's a saying -- I don't know if there's a similar saying in China -- we have a saying: 'You made your bed, now you have to sleep in it.' And it basically means you have to be careful what you ask for because you might get it,'' he said, acknowledging that he had not asked for nor necessarily felt he deserved such a prize.

"I think that all of us have obligations for trying to promote peace in the world,'' the president said.

.At the "town-hall'' styled meeting in Shanghai, Obama got an introduction from the American ambassador to China, Jon Huntsman, a Republican from Utah fluent in Mandarin.

"I don't know what he said, but I hope it was good,'' Obama told an audience, laughing, at the Museum of Science and Technology in a city emblematic of the communist nation's acceptance of capitalist trade in the past few decades.

"The currents of history have steered the relationship between our countries in many directions,'' Obama said at the town hall session on his first trip to China. "Our world is now fundamentally interconnected,'' and that, he said, speaks to not only commerce, but also the urgency of personal freedom.

"America will always speak out for these core principles around the world,'' he said. "We do not seek to impose any system of government on any other nation, but we also don't believe that the principles that we stand for are unique to our nation. These freedoms of expression and worship -- of access to information and political participation -- we believe are universal rights. They should be available to all people, including ethnic and religious minorities -- whether they are in the United States, China, or any nation.''

Both Obama and his Chinese host, Party Secretary Yu Zhengsheng, remarked on the high-rises of Shanghai in their earlier public remarks there. General Motors is among the fixtures there, the party secretary said, and "the business of GM in Shanghai is pretty good'' -- sales up 40 percent over last year.

"I think that the fantastic performance here in Shanghai is definitely a boost to their business in the United States,'' he said.

"Absolutely,'' said Obama, whose own government owns much of the temporarily bankrupt company( GM left bankruptcy court protection on July 10) back home and forced out its CEO in the reorganization of the bailed-out automaker. "I think they can learn from their operations here in terms of increasing sales back in the United States.''

It's not the only American business situated there, the party secretary noted as reporters were led from the room during their brief statements.

In the town-hall session in Shanghai later, open to the press, the president told his hosts: "I am very sorry that my Chinese is not as good as your English, but I am looking forward to this chance to have a dialogue. ''

See the text of the president's town hall meeting, the questions he was posed and the answers he gave below the fold, here in The Swamp, (transcript and notations of audience reaction courtesy of the White House:)

by Mark Silva and updated

It is billed by early readers as a blend of redemption and revenge, with a certain measure of pay-back for those campaign strategists who insisted that Sarah Palin stick with the script in John McCain's campaign for president, accusing her, with a complaint that became the inspiration for her memoir's title, of Going Rogue.

Yet, days before the official release of Palin's book on Tuesday, the 2008 Republican nominee for vice president already is getting some push-back for the pay-back she is dishing out, with a book tour starting in Grand Rapids this week that is sure to look like push-back to the push-back for the pay-back.

And, for Palin, it will amount to one great pay-off.

Welcome to the Bulldog edition of The Swamp, the one that comes out the day before it says it's coming out. We've always had a certain love for the Bulldog - there is something urgent about a paper that arrives the day before it arrives, something that focuses the mind on deadline. In the interest of delivering an early look at the book that everyone's already looking at, and which a few readers have read and reported on, and in hopes of taking the better part of Sunday off, Sunday's Swamp is here already:

And in true Bulldog followup tradition we have an update this morning: Palin says the media are still "making things up.'' At her Facebook headquarters today, Palin writes: "They're now erroneously reporting on the book's contents and are repeating many of the same things they spewed during the campaign and afterwards.''

Taking note of all the news people said to be "fact-checking'' her book, she scoffs at "dedicating time and resources to tearing up the book, instead of using the time and resources to 'fact check' what's going on with (9/11 plotter Khalid) Sheikh Mohammed's trial, (House Speaker Nancy) Pelosi's health care takeover costs, (Fort Hood suspect Nidal Malik) Hasan's associations, etc. Amazing.... We'll keep setting the record straight, and we'll keep reminding some in the media that Americans are very tired of their non-objective reporting.''

The former governor of Alaska, who abrubtly resigned last summer in the midst of persistent complaints about her ethics, gets personal in the 413-page book that will make its real media debut on The Oprah Winfrey Show on Monday. She delves into the pain of teenage daughter Bristol's pregnancy which the world learned of with the Republican Party's nomination of a vice presidential candidate little known beyond Wasilla before that. But she steers clear in this book of her grandbaby Tripp's father, the estranged Levi Johnston, who has aired the Palin family's dirty laundry on television and shed his own underwear for Playgirl.

Her own high-priced, party-leased wardrobe, which had become a lightning rod for the Republican during the few months in which she campaigned with McCain, had been one of the points of contention between Palin and the campaign's strategists, she writes. Even her diet was a problem for strategists pushing Atkins Diet bars on her -- no Mooseburgers on the road ("We eat, therefore we hunt.")

If she spares the rod for Johnston, Palin lets loose on McCain's men. She writes bitterly of being barred from delivering her own concession speech on election night, how she'd been kept "bottled up" during the campaign and kept from being herself. She says she was prepped to give non-answers to Joe Biden in debate

Palin drew at least a $1.25 million advance for this book, ready months ahead of schedule with the help of a professional writer, Lynn Vincent, with a first printing of 1.5 million copies from HarperCollins and top billing on the prepublication sales lists at Amazon and other deals. The conservative NewsMax has gathered some copies, peddling them at deep discount and giving them away for free to subscribers.

"As you probably have heard, the AP snagged a copy of my memoir, Going Rogue, before its Tuesday release," Palin wrote in her Facebook Notes. "And as is expected, the AP and a number of subsequent media outlets are erroneously reporting the contents of the book,'' she wrote. "Keep your powder dry, read the book, and enjoy it! Lots of great stories about my family, Alaska, and the incredible honor it was to run alongside Senator John McCain."

All of which seems supremely fashioned to spur sales even more, with the AP's director of media relations maintaining that it has made a fair and careful pre-release account of the book. That following on Facebook is now near one million, close to double what it was when she resigned midway through her first term.

And Palin is engaging full-bore in current events, calling the Obama Justice Department's decision to try the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in criminal court in New York "atrocious.''

"Horrible decision, absolutely horrible,'' Palin writes on Facebook near the eve of her book tour. "It is devastating for so many of us to hear that the Obama Administration decided that the 9/11 terrorist mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, will be given a criminal trial in New York. This is an atrocious decision..... The trial will afford Mohammed the opportunity to grandstand and make use of his time in front of the world media to rally his disgusting terrorist cohorts. It will also be an insult to the victims of 9/11, as Mohammed will no doubt use the opportunity to spew his hateful rhetoric in the same neighborhood in which he ruthlessly cut down the lives of so many Americans....

" If we are stuck with this terrible Obama Administration decision,'' Palin writes, "I, like most Americans, hope that Mohammed and his co-conspirators are convicted. Hang 'em high.''

Palin, for her part, will be steering clear of New York on a three-week book tour starting in Grand Rapids and ranging from Bloomington, Minn., to Fort Bragg, N.C., before heading out West after Thanksgiving.

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama has bowed to royalty, with a greeting for the Japanese emperor that erases any doubts about what the president's posture was -- remember that bow to the Saudi king that was not really a bow?

And some people are falling over backwards today.

Our colleague, Andrew Malcolm, at Top of the Ticket, muses on the president's meeting with Japanese Emperor Akihito today, and suffice it to say that the article will light a brush fire of commentary stoked by the hot winds of the Drudge Report's headline.

See the Ticket's report there or read it here:

(And stick around for some comments below.)

The photo above is by Mandel Ngan / AFP / Getty, Reuters All of this brought to mind our snapshots from our trip to Japan with then-Vice President Dick Cheney, and his meeting with the emperor, in February 2007. Our own photos suffer from a certain lack of light in the ceremonial arrival room at the Imperial Palace in Tokyo and distance from subjects, but the closest we recall Cheney coming to a bow was that certain lean of his. These photos by Mark Silva:

by Mark Silva

Rep. Mark Kirk of Illinois, a Republican who hopes to claim the Senate seat that President Barack Obama once held, advances his party's argument against Obama's health-care initiative in a weekly party address today focusing on other alternatives for easing the cost of health care.

"First, we could start lowering costs by reining in lawsuits in America,'' Kirk says in the GOP's weekly address. "We are the most litigious country on Earth. Lawsuit reforms can save billions in health care costs alone.

"Second, Congress should grant the right to each American to buy coverage from any state in the union - especially if you find a plan that has a lower cost or is more flexible for your family or your small business.,'' he says. "Third, we should give states the tools to create their own innovative reforms that lower health care costs.''

Kirk, one of eight Republicans who voted with the Democrats on a "cap and trade'' energy bill in the House curtailing the emissions of greenhouse gases that contribute to global warming, voted with a party caucus that was nearly completely united against the House's health-care legislation -- only Republican Rep. Joseph Cao of New Orleans voted with the Democrats for a bill that cleared the House by 220-215.

Kirk, seeking the GOP's 2010 Senate nomination in Illinois, sides with fellow Republicans in calling Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's health-care bill a tax-and-spend spree. The Senate is expected to take a test vote next week to see if it can muster the 60 votes needed to advance its own bill to the floor.

""In the teeth of the great recession, the Pelosi bill would impose ten new taxes on the American economy.,'' Kirk warns. "The bill opens a new trillion-dollar entitlement just as our national debt tops $12 trillion. Ignoring the future needs of Social Security and Medicare, the bill creates a new massive spending program, supported by heavy taxes and cuts to senior health care.''

See the address above and read it below:

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama, who has warned the public against "jumping to conclusions'' in the alleged killings of 13 and woundings of 29 more at Fort Hood, Texas, by an Army major and pyschiatrist and Muslim said to have declared that God is great before opening fire on fellow soldiers at his base, today promised to find all of the conclusions necessary about not only a horrific crime, but also what might have avered it.

"As I said in Fort Hood, I am confident that justice will be done, and I will insist that the full story be told,'' the president said in his weekly radio and Internet address today. "That is paramount, and I won't compromise that investigation today by discussing the details of this case. But given the potential warning signs that may have been known prior these shootings, we must uncover what steps - if any - could have been taken to avert this tragedy.''

In a crime that inevitably reopens the fault lines of ethnic and religious tension exposed by the terroris of Sept. 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the president now is warning against the necessary public investigation of the Fort Hood massacre becoming a "political theater.''

" know there will also be inquiries by Congress, and there should,'' the presdient said today. "But all of us should resist the temptation to turn this tragic event into the political theater that sometimes dominates the discussion here in Washington. The stakes are far too high.''

See the address above and read it below:

by Christi Parsons

A near-empty prison in rural Illinois has emerged as "a leading option" to house suspected terrorists currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, an Obama administration official said Friday.

As they work to shutter the controversial detention center, federal officials are talking to Illinois officials about buying the Thomson Correctional Center, a maximum-security prison about 150 miles west of Chicago.

With Illinois Gov. Patrick Quinn and other key officials warm to the idea, federal prison officials have stepped up investigations into turning Thomson into a super-maximum facility with a unit for former Guantanamo detainees.

"This has emerged as a leading option," an Obama administration official said late Friday night, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the discussions.

The official wouldn't say how many of the detainees could transfer to Illinois, describing it only as a "limited number." The official also wouldn't say whether the administration envisions Thomson as the sole domestic prison for the former Guantanamo detainees.

Officials are contemplating the details--including how they would persuade Congress to change a law that bars Guantanamo detainees from the U.S. unless they're here for trial.

If Obama can manage that, the Illinois prison could figure prominently in the complicated matrix for closing the infamous prison. Guantanamo has become a worldwide symbol of unpopular U.S. anti-terror and detention policies, and ordering its closure was President Obama's first act in office.

The shutdown has proven easier said than done, however, mainly because of the difficulty of finding other places to incarcerate the more than 200 people currently detained there. The Obama ad