Barack Obama

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Obama had decided, with "regret but also with certainty," that his top commander in Afghanistan had to be sacked for the insubordination that he and his staff had displayed in a Rolling Stone article. "I welcome debate among my team, but I won't tolerate division," Obama said.

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On Thursday, President Obama stood in front of a skeptical Washington press corps -- and a skeptical American public -- and defended his administration's response to the BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill, saying, "I'm confident that people are going to look back and say that this administration was on top of what was an unprecedented crisis."

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President Barack Obama said the Gulf of Mexico oil spill should send an urgent signal to Congress to complete work on energy legislation, including rolling back “billions of dollars in tax breaks” for oil companies and fostering investments in alternatives to fossil fuels. “The catastrophe unfolding in the Gulf right now may prove to be the result of human error -- or corporations taking dangerous short cuts that compromise safety,” Obama said today in a speech at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. “But we have to acknowledge that there are inherent risks to drilling four miles beneath the surface of the Earth.” The spill began after an April 20 explosion aboard the Deepwater Horizon rig, which London-based BP Plc leases from Switzerland’s Transocean Ltd. The blast killed 11 and triggered leaks that, according to a government panel, spew an estimated 12,000 barrels to 19,000 barrels of oil a day into the ocean. Obama said the nation needs an ‘unprecedented effort” to develop

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Senior White House adviser David Axelrod told reporters earlier this week that he and President Obama agree. A nominee's sexuality "has no place in this process," he said. "It wasn't an avenue of inquiry on our part and it shouldn't be on anybody else's' part."

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“I am disappointed that an effort to ensure that oil companies pay fully for disasters they cause has stalled in the United States Senate on a partisan basis,” he said. “I urge the Senate Republicans to stop playing special-interest politics and join in a bipartisan effort to protect taxpayers and demand accountability from the oil companies.”

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President Obama praised the prospect of a final Senate vote today on new financial regulations that he said would "protect consumers, protect our economy, and hold Wall Street accountable." "Wall Street reform will bring greater security to folks on Main Street."

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WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama on Thursday will propose $634 billion in new taxes on upper-income Americans and cuts in government spending over the next decade to pay for his promised health-care expansion. The tax increases and spending cuts will be included Thursday in Mr. Obama's comprehensive budget blueprint, and signal his ambition to overhaul the health-care system, one of the main planks of his presidential campaign. The tax increases would raise an estimated $318 billion over 10 years by reducing the value of such longstanding deductions as mortgage interest and charitable contributions for people in the highest tax brackets. Households paying income taxes at the 33% and 35% rates can currently claim deductions at those rates. Under the Obama proposal, they could deduct only 28% of the value of those payments.

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President Obama said today he picked Elena Kagan for the Supreme Court because she can lead and build consensus among justices who are often divided on tough cases. "Elena is widely regarded as one of the nation's foremost legal minds," Obama said in announcing his pick at the White House. He also called Kagan "a trailblazing leader," and noted that this would the first time the high court has three female members at the same time.

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Obama criticized the Arizona law and said he would ask the Justice Department to study it for potential civil rights violations. Yet he, too, acknowledged the past failure to grapple with the issue effectively, predicting "misguided efforts" in other states "if we continue to fail to act at the federal level."

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What I think is a mistake is when we start having local law enforcement officials empowered to stop people on the suspicion that they may be undocumented workers. Such hard-line remedies are an affront to the nation's values

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When asked in an interview with the New York Times whether the United States was winning the war in Afghanistan, Obama said bluntly, "No.'' He said the United States should shift its approach. "If you talk to Gen. [David H.] Petraeus, I think he would argue that part of the success in Iraq involved reaching out to people that we would consider to be Islamic fundamentalists, but who were willing to work with us because they had been completely alienated by the tactics of al-Qaida in Iraq. There may be some comparable opportunities in Afghanistan and the Pakistani region."

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"I authorized the additional troops because I knew it was necessary to stabilize the situation," said Obama, who was asked about the troop increase at a news conference during a visit to Canada, his first foreign trip as president.

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By 2025, we expect new spacecraft designed for long journeys to allow us to begin the first-ever crewed missions beyond the moon into deep space," he said. "We'll start by sending astronauts to an asteroid for the first time in history.

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Efforts to regulate Wall Street will not result in new public bailouts of banks

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Calling for a strong mechanism to regulate derivatives. Complex investment packages exist in the shadow economy and are enormously risky. We want to get that into daylight.