Elena LaVictoire's Library tagged Obama →  View Popular

President Barack Obama has only been in office for just over nine months, but he's already hit the links as much as President Bush did in over two years.

CBS' Mark Knoller — an unofficial documentarian and statistician of all things White House-related — wrote on his Twitter feed that, "Today - Obama ties Pres. Bush in the number of rounds of golf played in office: 24.

Took Bush 2 yrs & 10 months."

OSLO (Reuters) - President Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for giving the world "hope for a better future" and striving for nuclear disarmament, in a surprise award that drew both warm praise and sharp criticism.

The decision to bestow one of the world's top accolades on a president less than nine months into his first term, who has yet to score a major foreign policy success, was greeted with gasps of astonishment from journalists at the announcement in Oslo.

The Norwegian Nobel Committee praised Obama for "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples." But critics -- especially in parts of the Arab and Muslim world -- called its decision premature.

While White House spokesman Robert Gibbs today refrained from telling reporters whether President Obama in his speech Wednesday night will set a deadline for passing health care reform, sources tell ABC News that in his private meeting with Democratic congressional leaders this afternoon the key word was urgency.

The president told House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., that it is important for them to pass health care reform bills soon, the sources said.

Both leaders told the president that despite the difficult rough and tumble of the legislative process in the last few weeks, they are optimistic that both the House and Senate can pass health care reform legislation.

WASHINGTON – The federal government faces exploding deficits and mounting debt over the next decade, White House officials predicted Tuesday in a fiscal assessment far bleaker than what the Obama administration had estimated just a few months ago.

Figures released by the White House budget office foresee a cumulative $9 trillion deficit from 2010-2019, $2 trillion more than the administration estimated in May. Moreover, the figures show the public debt doubling by 2019 and reaching three-quarters the size of the entire national economy.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the first time, more than
34 million Americans received food stamps, which help poor
people buy groceries, government figures said on Thursday, a
sign of the longest and one of the deepest recessions since the
Great Depression

Enrollment surged by 2 percent to reach a record 34.4
million people, or one in nine Americans, in May, the latest
month for which figures are available.

Aug. 6 (Bloomberg) -- President Barack Obama’s approval
rating is falling amid concerns about the U.S. economy and his
push to revamp the U.S. health-care system, a Quinnipiac
University poll shows.

Exactly half of the registered voters surveyed from July
27 to Aug. 3 by Quinnipiac said they approve of the job Obama
is doing, compared with 42 percent who disapprove. That’s down
from 57 percent approval and 33 percent disapproval in a poll
taken in late June, according to results released today.

Americans are upset about rising unemployment and worried
that health-care plans making their way through Congress will
add to the U.S. budget deficit, said Peter Brown, assistant
director of the Hamden, Connecticut-based polling institute.
The combination has helped drive down the president’s ratings.

A “willingness to give him the benefit of the doubt is,
among some voters, evaporating,” Brown told reporters in
Washington yesterday.