President U S

You have to give Rush Limbaugh a perverse kind of credit. At least when he is demonizing Barack Obama, fabricating Obama policies, blaming Obama for single-handedly causing the recession and the stock market crash, he doesn't pretend to be fair. Opening his first post-election rant against the president-elect, Limbaugh launched in with a certain relish. "The game," he told his radio listeners, "has begun."

Barack Obama entered the Oval Office for the first time Monday, meeting with President Bush to plan the transfer of power while his wife, Michelle, was escorted by the first lady through the Obama family's next home. Obama's visit to the White House, six days after his victory, was rich in symbolism as the incoming and outgoing presidents strode side by side along the colonnade. When they reached the Oval Office, Bush held the door for the man who will succeed him Jan. 20.

In the 1960s, Irving Wallace wrote a novel called "The Man," in which the sudden deaths of the president, vice president and speaker of the House bring to power a most unlikely occupant of the Oval Office: Sen. Douglas Dillman -- a black man. Thanks to the election of Barack Obama, a black president in Washington fiction will be no more exceptional than one in real life. "Before Obama, you wouldn't have gotten away with simply having a black president and having that on the periphery.

One of the few times Barack Obama lost his famous cool during the presidential campaign was the day photographers got too close as he walked his youngest daughter, who was dressed as a corpse bride, to a Halloween party near their Chicago home. "You've got a shot. Leave us alone," Obama barked.

The roster shaping up for the Barack Obama administration is starting to look a little familiar, with an ironic pattern emerging as one name after another is added to it. A striking number of new and potential team members can trace their professional history to the same political birthplace -- the administration of one President Bill Clinton. There's Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, of course, the former first lady now on track to become secretary of State. And Rep.

Malia and Sasha Obama are headed for the Washington-area private Quaker school that Chelsea Clinton attended, aides to the future first family confirmed Friday. The Obamas picked Sidwell Friends School, where Vice President-elect Joe Biden's granddaughters also attend. The school is known for its rigorous standards and for educating children from some of Washington's most prominent and wealthy families. It is also the alma mater of President Nixon's daughters and Al Gore's son.

When Nasser Baker's mother received a call from his school this month and began jumping and screaming, he thought she had seen a spider. But when he learned that his South Los Angeles charter school had chosen him as one of 12 students headed to Washington, D.C., for the presidential inauguration, 10-year-old Nasser started jumping up and down too.

A day after President Bush was nearly struck in the head by flying footwear at a Baghdad news conference, U.S. Secret Service officials faced questions Monday about how an Iraqi television reporter was able to hurl not one but two shoes at the president without the agents responsible for protecting him being able to move into the line of fire.

From Hollywood's perspective, there's a cloud over Barack Obama's inaugural. Now the question is whether the weather that day will simply be overcast or stormy. Obama's selection of Orange County mega-pastor and bestselling author Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his swearing in has hit liberal Hollywood in one of its sorest spots: the passage of Proposition 8, California's ban on gay marriage, which Warren strongly supported.

Locals here sometimes call Barack Obama a kamaaina, the Hawaiian word for native-born or one who has lived here for some time. Chicagoans, of course, think of him as a South Sider who often wears a White Sox cap. Both are correct, and both illustrate an increasing pull on the future 44th president by those who want to use his native-son status for marketing advantage. So far, Chicago seems to be winning the battle.