President Barack Obama addressed a joint session of Congress, offering a broad outline of a massive spending plan paired with $2 trillion in spending cuts over the next decade. “Now is the time,” he said, “to jump-start job creation, restart lending, and invest in areas like energy, health care, and education.”NPR.orgIt was announced that General Motors lost $30.9 billion last year; that U.S. GDP fell 6.2 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, exceeding the officially predicted 3.8 percent drop, and even the 5.5 percent drop economists had expected; and that the U.S. government will own up to 36 percent …

The House and Senate reached agreement on a $789 billion economic-stimulus plan, which President Barack Obama is expected to sign into law despite a lack of support from Republicans.New York Times“When Roosevelt did this,” said Representative Steve Austria (R., Ohio), “he put our country into a Great Depression. That’s just history.”Dispatch PoliticsThe Columbus DispatchAbraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin both turned 200.Washington PostAnglican hymns were sung at Darwin’s tomb in Westminster Abbey. A poll showed that 43 percent of Britons believe in creationism.Associated PressIn a speech at the Capitol, President Obama called Lincoln a “singular figure who in so many ways …

Barack Hussein Obama was sworn in as the forty-fourth president of the United States.NY TimesIn his inaugural remarks, President Obama attributed many of the nation’s problems to a “collective failure to make hard choices.” “Starting today,” he said, “we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and begin again the work of remaking America.” NY TimesFormer vice president Dick Cheney attended the inauguration in a wheelchair,NY TimesSenator Edward Kennedy had a seizure,CNNAretha Franklin’s voice cracked,CNNand Itzhak Perlman, Yo-Yo Ma, Gabriela Montero, and Anthony McGill performed with the aid of a backing track.MSNBC.comBoxing promoter Don King said that of all biblical …

Israel bombed Hamas targets in Gaza for three days, killing at least 300 people, 50 of them civilians, and blowing up a mosque and a television station. Palestinians seeking to flee into Egypt were turned back; a doctor at a Gaza hospital said that after 18 months of Israeli sanctions the lack of medical facilities made it better for a patient “to be brought in dead.” Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak said that the bombing, ordered in retaliation for ongoing rocket attacks by Hamas, would be “widened and deepened as is necessary,” and an area around Gaza was declared a …

An American cattleman. President George W. Bush announced a $13.4 billion bailout for General Motors and Chrysler. The bailout, which will make use of funds authorized by Congress in October for the rescue of U.S. financial institutions, requires among other things that the automakers sell their fleets of private aircraft. “I’ve abandoned free-market principles,” said Bush, “to save the free-market system.”New York TimesBreitbartPresident-elect Barack Obama called for an expansion of his economic recovery plan in order to save a half-million more jobs atop the 2.5 million he already hopes to save, at a total cost of $600 billion or $700 …

Caught in the Web, 1860. Federal agents arrested hedge-fund manager Bernard Madoff and charged him with running a $50 billion Ponzi scheme, possibly the largest in Wall Street history. Madoff faces a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison and $5 million in fines; he had hoped to distribute his last $200 million to friends, family, and favored employees before his arrest, but was turned in by his sons. SECNYTBloombergWSJNYTRepublicansenators killed a plan to loan $14 billion to American automakers, and the White House said it would consider other options to save the industry and as many as three million …

Doctors in Berlin announced that they had cured a man of AIDS by giving him transplanted blood stem cells from a donor naturally resistant to the virus; other researchers cautioned that the treatment was of little immediate use, and justified in this case only because the patient had leukemia. “Frankly,” said Dr. Robert C. Gallo of the University of Maryland School of Medicine, “I’d rather take the medicine.”NYTA German shoplifter with no arms stole a 24-inch television. “It’s hard to believe,” said a police officer, “that the sight of an armless man walking along with a giant TV clamped to …

Barack Obama was elected the 44th president, and first African-American president, of the United States, receiving 365 electoral votes in an election that saw perhaps the highest turnout among registered voters in a century. “If there’s anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible,” Obama told supporters, “tonight is your answer.” “The American people have spoken, and they have spoken clearly,” said John McCain in a teary-eyed concession speech. “What an awesome night for you,” President Bush said to Obama. “His choice, basically, is whether he is going to be Uncle Sam… …

Democrats were outvoting Republicans in all nine states that track the party affiliations of early voters, indicating a likely election victory for Barack Obama. George Mason University“It’s gonna get nasty,” Obama told a crowd in Missouri.CNNRepublicans claimed that Democrats were coercing dementia patients to cast absentee ballots,Des Moines Registerand fliers posted in black neighborhoods of Philadelphia falsely warned that voters with unpaid parking tickets would be arrested at the polls.APIt was reported that Obama‘s half-aunt Zeitun Onyango lives in a Boston housing project and is an illegal immigrant–a detail likely leaked by the Bush Administration against the procedures of the …

An American cattleman. On the 79th anniversary of the stock market crash of 1929, the Dow fell 312.3 points, closing below 8400. Chrysler announced that it would cut 25 percent of its salaried jobs, OPEC said that it was cutting oil production by 1.5 million barrels a day, and former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan declared that financial markets were engulfed in a “once-in-a-century credit tsunami” and admitted that he had “found a flaw” in his free-market ideology. “I don’t know how significant or permanent it is,” he said of his mistake. “But I’ve been very distressed by that fact.”The …

A Christian martyr. The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 777 points in one day after the House of Representatives failed to pass a Wall Street bailout plan, first put forth by President George W. Bush, that would have granted Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson up to $700 billion to buy, at any price, toxic mortgage-backed assets from financial firms. “It’s not based on any particular data point,” said a Treasury spokeswoman of the $700 billion figure. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”Wall Street JournalWashington PostForbes.comSenator John McCain announced that fixing the economy was more important than politicking, suspended …

Caught in the Web, 1860. After many years of increasing borrowing and at least thirteen months of evidence of an impending catastrophe, American financial institutions faced the worst credit crisis since the Great Depression. “The world,” explained Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, “no longer has the capacity to absorb fake U.S. dollars.”EconomistThe Wall Street JournalBloombergGlobal stock markets lost $3.1 trillion in four days, and American International Group (AIG), the world’s biggest insurance company and a leader in the $62 trillion credit-default swap market, was nearly bankrupted. “The private market has screwed itself up,” said Representative Barney Frank (D., Mass.), “and they …

Claiming that South Ossetian separatists had attacked its villages, U.S. ally Georgia sent troops to capture the city of Tskhinvali. Russia retaliated by sending ground troops into Tskhinvali, then into Georgia proper; Georgia claimed that hundreds of troops had been killed on both sides along with “huge numbers” of civilians. Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili described Russia’s troop actions as “the preplanned, cold-blooded, premeditated murder of a small country.”NYTimes.comItar-TassBloomberg.comThe Olympics began in Beijing, heralded on television by fake, computer-generated fireworks.All Headline NewsPresident George W. Bush told Bob Costas that China “is a big, important nation…it is important for this country to …

Caught in the Web, 1860. Senator “Uncle” Ted Stevens, the longest-serving Republican in the Senate and “Alaskan of the Century,” was indicted for seven felonies related to unreported gifts worth $250,000 from an oil-services company. The alleged gifts included a Land Rover, a Viking gas grill, and construction that doubled the size of his home. “There is a lot of comity on our committee,” said an unnamed Republican on the Senate Appropriations Committee. “I don’t think any of this is going to have an impact on his earmarks.” Anchorage Daily NewsPoliticoAnchorage Daily NewsWPA Department of Justice report found that senior …

Barack Obama began his week-long foreign tour in Afghanistan, where he met with President Hamid Karzai, and continued on to Iraq. There, he flew in a helicopter to the Green Zone with General David Petraeus. Before he left the United States, he was asked what he would say to foreign leaders. “I’m more interested in listening,” Obama replied, “than doing a lot of talking.”CNNNew York TimesPoliticoBBCJohn McCain went to a Yankees game and took a drive in a golf cart with former President George H. W. Bush. CBSSenator Joe Lieberman argued that the success of the “surge” policy made the …

The U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision seized the IndyMac Bank of California, worth an estimated 32 billion dollars, after the bank’s closure in the wake of mortgage industry collapse,AFPand the Bush Administration proposed a rescue package for ailing mortgage companies Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that would allow the Treasury to buy billions of dollars of their stock and lend them billions more to meet their short-term funding needs. The two companies’ total debt is estimated at $1.54 trillion.NYTimesAbu Dhabi bought New York City’sChrysler building for $800 million,GuardianUKand the Belgian brewer InBev planned to buy Anheuser-Busch for nearly $50 billion.AP …

Scott McClellan published a memoir about his stint as President George W. Bush‘s press secretary from July 2003 to April 2006. In the book, McClellan says that he does not believe that the Bush Administration “deliberately or consciously sought to deceive the American people” when it dispensed with “honesty and candor” in favor of launching a “political propaganda campaign” to justify the Iraq War. He also asserts that the media became the administration’s “complicit enablers” and that the president said that he did not remember whether he had ever tried cocaine at “some pretty wild parties back in the day.” …

Caught in the Web, 1860. The military junta in Myanmar put the official death toll from last week’s Cyclone Nargis (Urdu for “daffodil”) at 28,458, while foreign observers, taking into account that heavy rains were expected to continue, with malaria, tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and dysentery to follow, expected that as many as 100,000 people would die. Before distributing foreign-aid packages, the junta re-labeled them with the names of its generals; a referendum on a new constitution that will perpetuate the junta’s rule was not delayed. “Let’s go cast a vote,” sang two female pop vocalists on state-run television. “With sincere …

Hillary Clinton gained nine more delegates than Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania primary and challenged him to debate without a moderator. Obama, who declined, reportedly seemed “tired” and “brittle” campaigning in Indiana. “Seniors, listen up,” he said. “I’m getting gray hair myself. Running for president will age you quick.” New York TimesAPTelegraphJohn McCain’s campaign received a $1,000 discount on the rental fee for a public space for a fundraiser in Homewood, Alabama, along with $100 worth of free labor from the inmates of a local jail.Birmingham NewsAll three candidates taped messages for World Wrestling Entertainment’s “W.W.E. Raw”: Clinton declared herself …

Twenty U.S. soldiers were killed last week fighting across Iraq, and 1,300 Iraqi officers and soldiers were fired for poor performance. The Bush Administration said it was optimistic that many more refugees from the estimated 4.4 million people who had fled Iraq or had been “internally displaced” would be allowed into the United States. Since the war began the United States has accepted only 5,000 Iraqi refugees. Sweden has taken 34,000.ReutersIHTHillary Clinton and John McCain accused Barack Obama of elitism after Obama commented on the bitterness of working-class people in a speech at an expensive San Francisco fund-raiser. “They cling …