President Obama is reaching across party lines Monday to host a bipartisan "fiscal responsibility summit" as the government tackles the seemingly contradictory tasks of controlling a soaring federal deficit while spending the country's way out of a deep recession. The summit is intended to be the starting point for a "frank discussion" on the long-term fiscal problems facing the country, White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Friday. "The summit is the first step in the process of beginning to ...

An Afghanistan native living in California has been arrested and charged with lying to federal authorities, including trying to hide a trip he took to Pakistan to visit Osama bin Laden's security coordinator. The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey, released Friday, also suggests that six in 10 support the economic stimulus package that Obama signed into law Tuesday. Obama's approval rating stands at 67 percent in the new poll. That's down 9 percentage points from the most recent CNN poll, which ...

Hours after the lowest point of his boss's first two weeks in office, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs ended the first chapter of the Obama presidency and launched the second. At the end of his morning staff meeting — where his team had gathered to discuss the handling of issues from the first fortnight, including Tom Daschle's unexpected failure to join the Cabinet because of tax-compliance problems — Gibbs reminded members of his team what they had come to Washington ...

More than 30 years ago, a special Senate investigation peered into abuses that included spying on the American people by their own government. The findings by Senator Frank Church's committee, drawn from testimony spanning 800 witnesses and thousands of pages of government documents, revealed how powerful government surveillance tools were misused against the American people. For instance, the FBI's COINTELPRO operation spent more than two decades searching in vain for communist influence in the NAACP and infiltrated domestic groups ...

On a winter evening in early 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first black performer to win an Oscar, a best supporting actress honor for her performance as Mammy, the servant in "Gone With the Wind." She accepted her award at the Academy Awards ceremony at the Coconut Grove, a nightclub in Los Angeles' Ambassador Hotel, where she was seated in the segregated section at the rear of the room. Though her win was played as a sign of progress for ...

The U.S. Catholic Church's crusade against the Freedom of Choice Act has all the hallmarks of a well-oiled lobbying campaign. A national postcard campaign is flooding the White House and congressional offices with messages opposing FOCA, and the Catholic bishops have made defeating the abortion rights legislation a top priority. In the most recent effort to stop the bill, Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia sent a letter to every member of Congress imploring them to "please oppose FOCA." There ...

Afghanistan became President Obama's war on Tuesday, when he ordered two more U.S. combat brigades into the fight. He will send 17,000 combat troops to join the 36,000-strong U.S. force already in the theater. The fact that the units now ordered to Afghanistan had originally been slated for Iraq underscores the new Administration's shift in priorities. The reinforcements include about 8,000 Marines from Camp Lejeune, N.C., who should be in Afghanistan by late spring, and a 4,000-strong Army ...

Diplomacy will play a bigger role in U.S. efforts in Afghanistan in future even as the Pentagon announced a significant troop increase, President Barack Obama said Tuesday in an interview on Canadian television. "I am absolutely convinced that you cannot solve the problem of Afghanistan, the Taliban, the spread of extremism in that region solely through military means," Obama told journalist Peter Mansbridge as part of a wide-ranging interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. "We're going to have to use ...

The Right screams that it's a witch-hunt, the Left complains it's a cop-out, and President Obama wishes it would just go away. But Senator Patrick Leahy isn't about to drop his proposal for a Truth Commission to investigate wrongdoing in the Bush Administration. "We would be making bad mistake, for history's purpose, if we walk away from this," the Vermont Democrat told TIME. The President has said he would look at Leahy's proposal, but that he was "more interested in ...

The U.S. Senate looks to be on track to pass a bill that sounds almost exactly like what President Barack Obama asked for last month. The measure — now heralded as $780 billion, down from $890 billion — will include about 40% in tax cuts and more than 80% of the spending will flood the faltering economy within the next 18 months. But with just three Republican votes, the bill falls well short of the bipartisan goal Obama worked hard ...