Alister Bull

The First Family swooped in for a swift spot of volunteering Wednesday at Martha's Table, about two miles from the White House, handing out turkeys and groceries to a fast-moving line of the local needy.

On the eve of Thanksgiving, first lady Michelle warmly greeted people and handed them bags of fresh vegetables - she's big on eating right - while leaning over to gently pinch the face of her youngest daughter, Sasha.

The eight-year-old was busy in the turkey stuffing department next to dad, President Barack Obama. Clad in a black zip-up jacket and open necked white shirt, Obama greeting people with a hearty "Happy Thanksgiving, How Are You," as he flashed wide smiles and industriously slipped pumpkin pies into food bags while simultaneously shaking hands. Eldest daughter Malia, 11, standing next to her mother, also seemed to be having a good time as she distributed packets of food.

The Obamas were joined by a dozen or so family and friends,  in town to share Thanksgiving with them at the White House, including Michelle's mother, Marian Robinson, as well as the president's half-sister Maya Soetoro-Ng and brother-in-law Konrad Ng.

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(Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Obamas hand out food on day before Thanksgiving in Washington DC Nov. 25, 2009))

President Barack Obama walked in the rain among the graves of U.S. casualties from the Iraq and Afghan wars at Arlington National Cemetery and took an unscheduled detour into section 60, a thicket of simple white headstones, to mark Veterans Day.

Underscoring the poignancy of the visit, Obama was due to hold a war council later on Wednesday as he tries to decide whether to send thousands more troops to Afghanistan, where U.S. forces experienced their bloodiest month in October.

The president, accompanied by first lady Michelle Obama, bent down briefly at the headstone of 19-year-old Specialist Ross McGinnis, who was awarded the United States' highest military decoration for valor, the Medal of Honor.

McGinnis was killed when he threw himself onto a grenade during a patrol in Baghdad in  2006.

The first couple, bareheaded and ignoring the miserable weather, spoke and shook hands with visitors they found by the gravesides, one of whom Michelle Obama hugged.

The president, confronted by fading public support for the war, is expected to decide in coming weeks about boosting U.S. troop levels in Afghanistan, even as he draws them down in Iraq.

His stop at a section of Arlington Cemetery in Virginia that is the burial ground for U.S. military personnel killed in Iraq and Afghanistan followed the somber Veterans Day ceremony at which Obama acknowledged the cost of fighting in both places.

"In this time of war, we gather here mindful that the generation serving today already deserves a place alongside previous generations for the courage they have shown and the sacrifices that they have made," he said.

More than 4,300 U.S. soldiers have been killed in Iraq and some 900 in Afghanistan.

Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Obama in Arlington National Cemetery to mark Veterans Day)

Economist James Hamilton was pretty offended by the rough treatment of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke last week at the hands of some U.S. politicians. But when he put up a defense of the Fed chief on his blog, he got an earful from readers who were critical of the U.S. central bank and suspicious over its role in the financial crisis and last year's bank bailouts.

Some members of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee quizzing Bernanke last week voiced outrage over the Fed's role in Bank of America's takeover of Merrill Lynch. They claim the Fed covered up pressure on BofA to swallow massive Merrill losses in order to protect the wider economy.

Hamilton said they were trying to turn Bernanke into a scapegoat.

"These interrogations reveal more about those doing the grilling than they reveal about Bernanke," Hamilton, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, wrote on his blog. "I see this as pure political theater, and I don't like it."

But some of his readers reckoned that the Fed chief, a former economics professor with whom Hamilton had corresponded in the past, is getting what he deserves.

"The question is not if the man is a good man. The question is, did he participate in a crime, the crime of knowingly help screw BOA shareholders out of millions?" argued one commentator. "I think he'd look good in orange. He can help the other inmates with their financial planning."

What's your take? Is Congress disrespecting Bernanke or did he have it coming?

ASPEN, Colo. - Republican presidential contender Sen. John McCain said on Thursday the recent sharp fall in the price of oil had been helped by the end of the U.S. federal offshore drilling moratorium.

"I think several factors have contributed to the recent drop in the price of a barrel of oil. I think the practice of conservation and the reduction in our demand has probably been a major factor," he told the Aspen Institute.

"I also don't think it was entirely accidental that the day that the president announced lifting the federal moratorium on offshore drilling, the price of a barrel of oil dropped."

Despite the decline in oil prices from record highs above $140 a barrel in July to around $115, gasoline prices remain a crucial issue in the election campaign, pinching Americans as they cope with falling house prices.

McCain's call for offshore drilling to boost domestic oil supplies, which he says will provide a bridge to a time when new, greener, energy technology is in place, has been slammed by critics who say it would be a disaster for the environment and not make any difference to oil prices.

The Arizona senator rejects this view, and on Thursday he reiterated his position that it could help straight away.

"I met with a group of independent petroleum producers in Bakersfield, California. They said, using existing facilities, you could have an immediate impact on our supply of oil. With exploration of known areas ... within a year or two, they could increase our oil supply," McCain said.

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BIRMINGHAM. Mich. - Searching for a few dollars more, Republican presidential hopeful John McCain ran into his Hollywood idol on the campaign trial in Michigan.

"I had a great thrill last night. I saw Clint Eastwood, a real hero of mine," McCain told customers at Kerby's Koney Island, a local diner, on Thursday about a fund-raiser the evening before in Birmingham, Michigan.

McCain spokeswoman Brooke Buchanan said that Eastwood, 78 but still one of the most macho movie stars around, was staying at the same hotel as the Arizona senator and asked to see him.

The Oscar-winning actor/director and former Republican mayor of Carmel, California, supports McCain and has appeared at his events in the past.

Eastwood spent an hour in McCain's suite, but Buchanan declined to say if he would be lending either his movie-making expertise or star-drawing power to the campaign.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.-Photo credit: Reuters/Fred Prouser (Eastwood arrives at screening)

LIVONIA, Mich. - Republican presidential hopeful Sen. John McCain said on Wednesday that his wife, Cindy, had become the victim of an overenthusiastic
supporter.

"An individual shook her hand very vigorously at the last event we were at and she has a minor sprain," McCain told a press conference during a day of fund-raising in this battleground state.

Cindy McCain was X-rayed at a local hospital and treated for the sprain.

Appearing beside her husband with her arm in a blue sling, she said she was absolutely fine.

"I shook hands with a very enthusiastic supporter and he got me the wrong way," she said.

The wealthy heiress of a large Arizona beer distributorship, Cindy McCain has been described as a well-coifed presence beside her husband on the campaign trail.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Brent Smith (Cindy McCain introduces her husband in Indianapolis on Feb. 22, 2008)

TEANECK, N.J. - Former Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Joe Lieberman slammed Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday over the Russian invasion of Georgia and said that the Democrat still wasn't experienced enough for the White House.
"We've got a real clear choice to make. And I say it respectfully to Sen. Obama because he's a gifted young man. But he's not ready to be president on Jan. 20th of 2009," Lieberman, of Connecticut, told a fund raising event for Republican hopeful John McCain.

"As the Russians move into Georgia as aggressors, and if you read the statements from the beginning, from Sen. McCain and Sen. Obama, one had a kind of moral neutrality to it that comes I think from inexperience.

"The other's -- Sen. McCain's -- was strong and clear and principled and put America where America always want to be, on the side of freedom," he said while introducing McCain.

Lieberman sits in Congress as an Independent after he lost the Connecticut Democratic primary election in 2006 but won actual re-election running as a third party candidate.

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- Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Lieberman applauds McCain)

YORK, Pa. - John McCain, teased as "that wrinkly, white-haired guy" by Paris Hilton, said on Tuesday he knew he wasn't connecting with young voters but urged them to give him a hearing.

"I need to do a better job ... with young voters in America and I want to reach out to them," he told a former Sen. Hillary Clinton supporter now pondering whether to support him or his Democratic presidential opponent Barack Obama.

The questioner said during the town hall meeting in York, Pennsylvania he wasn't sure what McCain stood for on issues like education that mattered to young voters.

"I would like to say 'tell all your friends, come to the next townhall meeting.' I'd like to meet and discuss with them ... especially those who are undecided in this election," McCain replied.

Bryce Wagoner, a 19-year still trying to make up his mind about who to vote for, said the Republican senator from Arizona
had not managed to ease his concern that social security would not be worth anything when he eventually retired.

"Everyone says that we need to fix it but nobody has a plan ... he didn't have any real solutions," Wagoner said.

McCain later swung by Manheim Central High School to watch football practice and continue courting the youth vote.

After suggesting that they run over the press corps clustered in the center of the field, McCain told the squad -- 15 times league champions since 1989 -- that "you win as a team or you lose as a team," before reminding them to study.

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Photo credit: Brian Snyder (McCain talks to veteran Steve Dunwoody at a campaign picnic in Maine)

ERIE, Pa. - Sen. John McCain said Monday the first thing he'd do if elected president is "call Tom Ridge to Washington from whatever vacation he's taking and get him to work."

Ridge, a former Homeland Security czar, is a potential vice presidential running mate, but if McCain was going to ask him to join the Republican ticket, he wouldn't wait until after the election to do it.
 
Maybe it was a coded way of saying a McCain-Ridge White House bid isn't in the cards, but that's not likely to cool speculation the former Pennsylvania governor might be tapped as vice president.
 
McCain was speaking off the cuff, and his words about Ridge as they campaigned in this battleground state were unmistakably warm.
 
"So many of the Greatest Generation came from the heartland of America. ... That is why I am honored to know a person like Gov. Tom Ridge, who had every opportunity after he graduated from Harvard not to go to Vietnam," McCain told a town hall meeting of workers at a General Electric plant.
 
"He could have found a doctor who'd give him a certificate that he had a bad knee. Instead he went and decided to serve his country in the Vietnam war," said McCain, who dined with Ridge and his wife, Michele, and daughter, Lesley, Sunday evening in an Erie waterfront restaurant.
 
With the Republican convention in the first week of September looming, McCain is running out of time to name his vice presidential pick.
 
Other potential McCain running mates include former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, South Dakota Sen. John Thune, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.
 
Democratic rival Barack Obama is expected to announce his vice presidential running mate ahead of the Democratic Party's nominating convention later this month.
 
His campaign has said it plans to announce the decision in e-mail and text messages to supporters.

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 Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (Ridge, right,  with Sen. Joseph Lieberman, center,  at a campaign event for McCain, left, in December)

ERIE, Pa. - After a week of slamming his opponent in a barrage of controversially negative advertisements, U.S. presidential hopeful John McCain spoke for more than 20 minutes Monday without mentioning Barack Obama by name once. 
 
His audience seemed to like it.
 
"I want to hear more about the issues, not bickering between the candidates," said Ron Holden, a locomotive assembly worker who listened to the Republican senator from Arizona address staff at a large GE Transportation plant here.
 
"I don't want to hear about what Obama's been doing from McCain and I don't want to hear about McCain from Obama," said Holden, a registered Democrat who said that he was undecided about which way he would vote in November.
 
McCain did aim one nuanced blow toward his Democratic rival, recalling Obama's comment about bitter small town Americans clinging to their guns and their church.
 
Obama's rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Hillary Clinton, had taunted him over the remark, saying it was evidence he was out of touch with heartland America. McCain gently took a leaf out of her playbook.
 
"You're going to seeing a lot of me in this state and we're going to be on the bus and we're going to go from town to town, and we're going to tell people that we know that they love the Second Amendment and cherish their religion, because they believe in America," McCain said.

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Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain at a July 21 campaign appearance in Maine)