Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th president of the United States, vowing to restore the nation's leadership in the world and calling on Americans to take responsibility for rebuilding the faltering economy together. "Our time of standing pat, of protecting narrow interests and putting off unpleasant decisions - that time has surely passed," Obama, 47, said in his inaugural address after being sworn in. "Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again the work of remaking America."

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Ten-year-old Nigel Sanders summed up the mood of black Americans when Barack Obama attended services at Washington’s Nineteenth Street Baptist Church last Sunday. “Martin Luther King walked so Barack Obama could run,” Sanders said to a 170-year-old congregation where slaves ...

Tagged with: Barack Obama inauguration Martin Luther King Jr.

Recently, hundreds of thousands of American households found an impressive cream-colored envelope in their mailboxes, marked “handle with care” in the bottom left hand corner. The return address: The Presidential Inaugural Committee, Washington, DC 20599. Upon opening, there it was ...

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A tough economy and the prospect of Cass Sunstein as regulatory czar may moderate the Obama administration’s wholesale elimination of President George W. Bush’s last-minute rules and the direction of U.S. health and safety policy. Transition officials and congressional Democrats ...

Tagged with: Barack Obama Cass Sunstein Congressional Budget Office economy George W. Bush jobs Office of Management and Budget Peter Orszag

The U.S. economy is in the throes of a deepening recession and needs a really big dose of fiscal stimulus to help stabilize it. What it doesn’t need is efforts by congressional Republicans to limit the size of the package ...

Tagged with: Barack Obama Ben Bernanke economy Federal Reserve John Boehner stimulus

There they stood, a breathing Mount Rushmore, or perhaps just the ghosts of Inaugurals past, present and to come. The three-person former presidents’ club came to the Oval Office at the invitation of its soon-to-be-member, President George W. Bush, and ...

Tagged with: Barack Obama Bill Clinton George W. Bush Jimmy Carter John Howard Mount Rushmore State Deparment

Some American business executives and Republican politicians, cautiously optimistic or in some cases dismissive about Barack Obama, still have their Washington villains: Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. They argue that while Obama may be a moderating influence, a liberal and ...

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Bruce Springsteen is trying to revive rock’s excitement. U2 wants to save the world. Jay-Z, Eminem and Dr. Dre are putting new life into rap. Phish and Blur are reforming. These veterans are looking over their shoulders at hotly tipped ...

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Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke warned that a fiscal stimulus won’t be enough to spur an economic recovery and that the government may need to buy or guarantee banks’ tainted assets to revive growth. “Fiscal actions are unlikely to ...

Tagged with: Barack Obama Ben Bernanke Federal Reserve Janet Tavakoli stimulus TARP

President-elect Barack Obama said reviving the U.S. economy will require scaling back on his campaign promises and personal sacrifice from all Americans. “I want to be realistic here, not everything that we talked about during the campaign are we going ...

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As capitalism staggers through its first globalized economic crisis, the costs won’t be measured only in dollars and cents. From newly rich Russia to eternally impoverished sub-Saharan Africa, social strains are threatening the established political order, putting some countries’ very ...

Tagged with: Barack Obama capitalism George W. Bush housing slump