Fortune Watch

President Barack Obama pressed Congress Monday night to urgently approve a massive economic recovery bill, using the first prime-time news conference of his presidency to warn that a failure to act “could turn a crisis into a catastrophe.”

With the nation falling deeper into a long and painful recession, Obama defended his program against Republican criticism that it is loaded with pork-barrel spending and will not create jobs.

“The plan is not perfect,” the president said, addressing the nation from the East Room of the White House. “No plan is. I can’t tell you for sure that everything in this plan will work exactly as we hope, but I can tell you with complete confidence that a failure to act will only deepen this crisis as well as the pain felt by millions of Americans.”

When the stimulus bill passed the House, not a single Republican voted for it. On Monday an $838 billion version of the legislation cleared a crucial test vote in the Senate by a 61-36 margin, with all but three Republican senators opposing it.

Obama said the federal government was the only power that could save the nation at a time of crisis, with huge spending outlays and tax cuts that he contended could save or create up to 4 million jobs.

“At this particular moment, with the private sector so weakened by this recession, the federal government is the only entity left with the resources to jolt our economy back to life,” Obama said.
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Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama made history by becoming the first ever African American to be nominated for the role by a major political party.

Barack Hussein Obama II was born on August 4, 1961 in Hawaii. His mother, Ann Dunham, a white American from Kansas, met his Kenyan father, Barack Obama I, while they were studying together at the University of Hawaii at Manoa. His parents separated when Obama was two, and he barely knew his father, who died in an automobile accident in 1982.


In 1967, Obama’s mother married Indonesian Lolo Soetoro, and the family moved to Jakarta, where Obama lived until he was 10. He has a half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng.

Obama moved back to Hawaii in 1971 and lived with his maternal grandparents until he graduated from high school in 1979. A graduate of Columbia University, he entered Harvard Law School in 1988, where he served as the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review.

First elected to the Illinois Senate in 1996 Barack Obama served as an Illinois state senator for seven years before he was elected to the US State Senate in November 2, 2004.

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A friend of mine is an unabashed and very sane Obama supporter (not Obamabot in the slightest). When I asked him why he bought the t-shirt, he said:

It’s all in good fun. Win or lose, this presidential election season is just full of grade-A entertainment!

Presidential politics is serious business!

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New polls gave Hillary Clinton fresh hope yesterday, as she chased White House rival Barack Obama, on the eve of two primaries which could shape the end-game of their marathon battle.

Clinton and Obama face voting contests today in North Carolina and Indiana, the next steps in their battle for the Democratic presidential nomination to take on presumptive Republican nominee John McCain in the November election.

The Democratic rivals set off on last minute campaign swings through Indiana and North Carolina, which hold primaries today which offer Obama the chance to finally knock Clinton out, or for her to ignite a comeback.

Obama and Hillary renewed their battle over gas tax relief yesterday in a late push for support on the eve of critical presidential showdowns in North Carolina and Indiana.

The candidates, embroiled in a grueling nominating struggle that has split the party, wooed working-class voters and launched new television advertisements attacking each other ahead of today’s votes.

For the first time in three months, the former first lady led her rival in the survey of national Democrats, by seven percentage points. Two weeks ago before the latest storm over Wright hit, Obama was up 10 points.

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