President Obama joins labor leaders today to welcome the new head of the AFL-CIO, and name a new advisor for manufacturing.

This Labor Day, the nation’s jobless rate is 9.7 percent, and Republicans argue the health reform plan Mr. Obama outlines Wednesday, requiring everyone to buy insurance, could cost millions more jobs:
“It’s complicated, it’s convoluted and [...]

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama said Monday the country still faces a “vast and complex” economic crisis and is pledging to work with business and labor to make things better.
In a Labor Day statement the White House released as he headed for a union picnic in Ohio, Obama voiced confidence that “working Americans will help [...]

WASHINGTON  – The patient isn’t dead yet.
A few more months of wrangling and indecision, and health care legislation to remedy America’s coverage and costs problem could be drawing its last gasps.
As Congress returns to work this week, President Barack Obama and lawmakers have three broad options – competing treatment plans for a patient whose vital [...]

WASHINGTON – The furor surrounding President Barack Obama’s upcoming address to the nation’s schoolchildren is “just silly,” his education chief said Sunday, and a conservative senator who led the Education Department in the first Bush administration suggested teachers make it a civics lesson.
Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s department has taken heat for proposed lesson plans distributed [...]

WASHINGTON  – Five months after President Barack Obama, with great fanfare, called for a world free of nuclear weapons, a crucial step toward that goal is running into resistance.
There is little indication Obama will have the votes he needs for a cornerstone of his nonproliferation efforts: Senate ratification of a nuclear test ban treaty. If [...]

WASHINGTON – The Obama administration on Thursday cut all non-humanitarian aid to Honduras over the ouster of President Manuel Zelaya, making permanent a temporary suspension of U.S. aid imposed after he was deposed in June.
The State Department made the announcement as Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was meeting with Zelaya. Spokesman Ian Kelly did [...]

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama will deliver a major address to Congress next Wednesday, confronting critics of his health care overhaul and trying to buck up supporters on an issue that has been slipping from his control under withering Republican-led attacks.
The speech will underscore an acceleration of Obama’s direct involvement in proposals to overhaul the [...]

WASHINGTON – The Republicans’ top negotiator on health care signaled Wednesday that bipartisan talks would continue despite White House suggestions that he and another GOP bargainer have not acted in good faith.
Jill Kozeny, a spokeswoman for Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, said the accusations were unjustified. She said Grassley and five other Senate Finance Committee [...]

WASHINGTON  – President Barack Obama says that while swine flu vaccine will be voluntary, the government will “strongly recommend” that people get it.
Obama was briefed Tuesday on the nation’s preparedness for swine flu by senior officials, including Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and Homeland Security Janet Napolitano.
He spoke afterward from the Rose Garden.
Obama [...]