by John McCormick

President Barack Obama departed O'Hare International Airport at 10 a.m. CST today, ending his first visit to Chicago as the nation's chief executive.

Air Force One took off to the west on a chilly, but sunny President's Day, bound for Andrews Air Force Base just outside Washington.

After a three-day weekend at home, Obama and his family were flying back to return to the White House and another week of work and school.

With their commute near the end of the morning rush, the Obama family took Marine One to the airport, landing at 9:46 a.m. Some operations at O'Hare were briefly stopped for the president's departure.

After shaking a few hands on the tarmac, the president walked up the stairs to the nation's most famous aircraft and turned around and waved briefly.

When the Obamas arrived Friday evening, they took a 15-minute chopper ride past Chicago's skyline to the South Side's Daniel Burnham Park, before a quick motorcade to their Kenwood neighborhood home. Today, they reversed the commute.

Before his trip to the airport, Obama spent about an hour working out at an apartment building near his home.

Obama's first weekend at home as president seemed to go without any major glitches.

by Mark Silva

We wrote here recently about the Moscow-eye view of the economic crisis in the United States, with our friends at Russia Today finding some glee, it seemed, in the hardships of the West.

But a correspondent in Kyiv suggests that the picture is not so pretty in Ukraine these days either.

'Everybody here is complaining about the "crisis,''' a friend of the Swamp writes via email.

"The word in Russian is almost the same as in English, but is pronounced 'creases,''' our friend reports, "which makes me smile, because it sounds as if the populace is upset about bad dry-cleaning.

"Can't somebody fetch an iron?''

by Mark Silva

Sun Valley, Swat Valley.

Things sure have changed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, notes Richard Holbrooke, seasoned diplomatic and Obama administration envoy to Kabul and Islamabad.

"It is absolutely clear that Iran plays an important role in Afghanistan," Holbrooke said in an interview on Sunday with Tolo TV, a private Afghan television network. "They have a legitimate role to play in this region, as do all of Afghanistan's neighbors."

At the same time, The New York Times reports from Kabul this morning, Holbrooke "passed up an opportunity to criticize Tehran about allegations -- some made by NATO officials -- that it has provided help to <strong>Taliban guerrillas in Afghanistan.

"I heard those reports," Holbrooke told his interviewer. "I talked to the military command about them. I did not have enough time really to get into the details yet, but I will get into it on future trips."

Holbrooke flew to India Sunday night after making his first visits to Pakistan and Afghanistan as bama's special envoy to the two countries, the Times notes: "While the situation in Pakistan remains grim, Mr. Holbrooke also said he was shocked by the problems he saw in the country, which he last visited a year ago.

"He said he was especially concerned that the Swat Valley, a onetime ski resort about 100 miles from Islamabad, had been seized by Taliban guerrillas, who blow up schools, assassinate police officers and beat -- or behead -- those who do not adhere to their strict version of Islam.''

"We are very concerned about Pakistan and stability," Holbrooke told Tolo TV. "I was stunned by the change in Pakistan since I was last there, and about the psychological effect that the fall of much of Swat had caused for the people of Islamabad, Peshawar and even Lahore."

The lift tickets must be fairly cheap these days.

(Photo of U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke with journalists after holding talks with Indian Foreign Minister Pranab Mukherjee in New Delhi, India, today, by Saurabh Das / AP)

by Frank James

Here's something I have to put in the why-didn't-I-know-about-this-before now? category. Graphic designer Jess Bachman has had a beautiful poster depicting the 2009 federal budget available for public consumption since last year. (He sells the poster on his website, WallStats.com.)

Bachman took President Bush's last proposed budget, pulled out the largest, most interesting areas of spending, then portrayed them as circles whose sizes are proportional to the the of the dollars allocated for them.

It's a visually arresting display that will cause many of us to never look at a federal budget the same way again.

Bachman was on a Microsoft Corp. show called Channel 10 talking about his poster. It's worth looking at to understand his approach. He also tells a great little anecdote about his appearance on Martha Stewart's TV show to talk about his poster. She was particularly interested in knowing what was allotted to Internal Revenue Service audits.

by Mark Silva

Bill Clinton says Barack Obama is "off to a good start.''

Clinton, who left his successor with a federal budget surplus, offers George W. Bush's successor high marks for winning a $787-billion economic stimulus one month in office - a spending plan that pushes an already swollen Bush-era federal deficit well past $1 trillion.

The former president, in an interview aired this morning on NBC's Today show, says the new president and his economic team have handled a controversial stimulus well - "given the fact that they had to do it in a hurry.''

The nation will get through the current economic crisis, Clinton says, suggesting that the stimulus will be "our bridge over troubled waters.''

by Rick Pearson and Janet Hook

U.S. Sen. Roland Burris tried Sunday to quell new questions about his controversial appointment, insisting he shouldn't be blamed for only recently detailing his conversations about the job with five close associates of disgraced former Gov. Rod Blagojevich.

The Chicago Democrat said he didn't provide a full explanation because nobody pressed the point during his sworn testimony last month to House lawmakers who impeached Blagojevich. He accused Republicans of playing politics by calling for an investigation into whether he committed perjury and even asking for his resignation.

But Burris' evolving explanation of what happened took another twist when he said federal investigators want to talk about his appointment to the Senate seat that Blagojevich was charged with trying to sell.

"What I understand is some of the agents have reached out to my lawyers," Burris said, adding "they want to meet with me."

Burris attorney Timothy Wright acknowledged Burris may be on a covert recording in the Blagojevich investigation but declined to explain the senator's comment about meeting with federal agents, saying "the FBI has not come to us and they're not asking us for anything."

Burris, a former attorney general, alternately looked nervous and feisty at a hastily arranged news conference in Chicago just a day before he was to embark on a statewide listening tour to meet the constituents he has represented for about a month. At times, Burris and his lawyer gave contradictory answers or no answers when pressed on whether he told the whole truth about his role.

Blagojevich's defiant selection of Burris, three weeks after the then-governor's arrest on federal corruption charges, set off a national political furor. Senate Democrats at first balked at seating Burris, but the veteran African-American politician portrayed himself as worthy successor to Obama with few if any connections to the scandal-plagued governor.

Yet Burris has been forced to gradually--and sometimes grudgingly--acknowledge deeper connections to Blagojevich and a growing list of contacts with former aides, lobbyists and campaign supporters for Blagojevich. On Sunday Burris argued that he was always forthright about his contacts, while seeking to brush aside the fact that the details spilled out over the course of weeks--with the most complete accounting coming weeks after he was sworn into the Senate.

by Peter Wallsten

Slowly over the past few weeks, some of President Barack Obama's most fervent supporters have come to an unhappy realization: The candidate who they thought was squarely on their side in policy fights is now a president who needs cajoling and persuading.

Advocates for stem cell research thought Obama would quickly sign an order to reverse former President Bush's restrictions on the science. Now, they are fretting over Obama's statement that he wants to act in tandem with Congress, possibly causing a delay.

Critics of Bush's faith-based initiative thought Obama had promised to end religious discrimination among social service groups taking federal money. But Obama, in announcing his own faith-based program this month, said only that the discrimination issue may be reviewed.

And Obama's recent moves regarding the trials of detainees have left some liberal groups and Bush critics, including the American Civil Liberties Union, feeling betrayed, given that Obama was a harsh critic of Bush's detainee policies when running for office last year.

The anxiety is also being felt in the labor movement, one of Obama's most important support bases. Some union officials and their allies are frustrated that at a critical point in negotiations over his massive stimulus package, Obama seemed to call for limits on ``Buy American'' provisions in the bill aimed at making sure stimulus money would be spent on U.S.-made materials.

Obama has been president for less than a month, and his liberal critics concede that the economic crisis has understandably taken the focus off their issues. But some of the issues in play were crucial to building excitement on the left and mobilizing grassroots support for Obama's candidacy.

"He made very clear promises, and he should live up to them," said Arthur Stamoulis, director of the Oregon Fair Trade Campaign, which received an unqualified "yes" from Obama on a campaign questionnaire last year when the group asked if he would support "Buy American" requirements. "The fact that he's hedging on this is not promising. He's catering much too much to the desires of Republicans who are not going to support the change that voters wanted."

See the story on Obama's supporters in Tribune newspapers and here in the Swamp:

Happy President's Day, a federal holiday and day off for many.

by Mark Silva

The college kids - okay, men and women - trying to sleep in this morning along Woodlawn Avenue on the South Side of Chicago were rudely awakened by the bullhorns of police calling on everyone to get outside and clear their cars from the street.

A motorcade was coming and going - President Barack Obama, at home for the weekend, was playing basketball with friends at the University of Chicago Lab School that his own kids had attended before moving to Washington. And later today, off to a friend's house to watch the NBA (AP photo by Lawrence Jackson.)

This isn't Crawford anymore.

Now, when the president goes home for the weekend, there is no brush to clear any more and none of the privacy of a remote Texas ranch. No more foreign leaders or the defense secretary arriving by helicopter without anyone outside noticing.

There is the city, no longer second - dinner on the town (Table 52 photo below by Terrence Antonio James, Tribune) basketball on the campus, and a traffic-stopping motorcade every time the commander in chief comes and goes.

And this president will be getting out of Washington a lot, the White House says - not at the pace of last week's four states in four days, but perhaps at least once a week. This week, it's Denver and Phoenix, for the stimulus bill signing and housing crisis strategy announcement.

It's "not about campaigning against Washington,'' Obama adviser David Axelrod said this morning on FOX News Sunday, "but part of his job is to stay is touch with the American people. And the White House can be a very suffocating place if you don't get out and talk to people...

"It's the reason the president wanted to keep his BlackBerry,'' Axelrod said. "It's the reason the president reads every day a sampling of letters that he receives and responds to them. He is determined to keep in touch with the American people who sent him here to do this job. And I think that you can't say that that is separate from doing the job; that is part of doing the job -- going out and meeting with the American people.''

By John McCormick and Stacy St. Clair, updated

The morning after a romantic Valentine's Day dinner out, President Barack Obama hit the basketball court Sunday to burn off a few calories and visit with some Chicago friends.

The presidential game, which lasted about two hours and was followed by a haircut at an apartment building near Obama's South Side home, was at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, according to a media pool report. No word yet on who he played with.

The game came after a Saturday evening meal enjoyed by Obama and his wife, Michelle, at a Gold Coast restaurant owned by Oprah Winfrey's one-time personal chef, Art Smith.

After a three-day weekend at home, the First Family is scheduled leave for Washington from O'Hare International Airport aboard Air Force One about 10 a.m. Monday.

Obama's basketball game was dissected on nation television on Sunday, when CNN's "State of the Union with John King" asked several NBA stars to review his moves.

"He's smart at the game," former Los Angeles Lakers star Earvin "Magic" Johnson said. "First thing up he's passing, nice post pass, nice set up, always looking for the other man."

by Frank James

Nouriel Roubini, the economist who warned of the financial collapse long before it happened, is making waves again, this time with an opinion piece he co-authored in the Washington Post in which he and fellow New York University economics professor Matthew Richardson argue that U.S. banks should be nationalized.

An excerpt:

The U.S. banking system is close to being insolvent, and unless we want to become like Japan in the 1990s -- or the United States in the 1930s -- the only way to save it is to nationalize it.

... Nationalization is the only option that would permit us to solve the problem of toxic assets in an orderly fashion and finally allow lending to resume. Of course, the economy would still stink, but the death spiral we are in would end.

by Mark Silva

On the eve of President's Day, ranking the 42 individuals who have occupied the presidency before now seems a fitting undertaking.

That's what "a cross-section'' of 65 historians have done, commissioned by C-SPAN to produce a Historians Survey of Presidential Leadership.

The results, released today, second the top finding of a survey conducted in 2000: Abraham Lincoln wins top billing for leadership.

George Washington comes in second, in this question of leadership, followed by Franklin Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt and Harry Truman. Ronald Reagan ranked No 10, behind Woodrow Wilson. George W. Bush drew 36, behind Hoover and Tyler. Bill Clinton: 15. Jimmy Carter: 25.

The survey was led by a team of advisers: Dr. Douglas Brinkley, Professor of History at Rice University; Dr. Edna Greene Medford, Associate Professor of History, Howard University; and Richard Norton Smith, Scholar in Residence at George Mason University. The team approved ten criteria, the same used in C-SPAN's 2000 Survey.

"Bill Clinton and Ulysses S. Grant aren't often mentioned in the same sentence - until now,'' Smith notes - with both boosted "significantly higher than in the original survey conducted in 2000. All of which goes to show two things: the fluidity with which presidential reputations are judged, and the difficulty of assessing any president who has only just recently left office.''

by Mark Silva

President Barack Obama will fly to Denver, the place where he accepted the Democratic Party's nomination last summer, to sign the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Act'' into law on Tuesday.

It's "as good'' a place "as any" to sign the $787-billion measure into law, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said on CBS News' Face the Nation this morning.

Watch for a lot of Obama's biggest initiatives in the War on Recession to carry datelines outside of Washington. And this one is big - with the signing, the White House spokesman noting, arriving in "just his fourth week in office.'' Even while Obama was campaigning for the measure last week, he conceded that it was imperfect -- even joking at one point on the road: What is one to expect? It's coming from Washington.

With the same alacrity, the president will turn his attention to the housing crisis, planning to announce his intentions the next day in Phoenix - with an overnight journey to two Western centers central to his party's campaign for broader appeal.

Of course, the bipartisan push that the president has made since inauguration is not going that well - only three Republicans in the entire Congress voted for the stimulus, CBS News' Bob Schieffer reminded Gibbs this morning. But the White House could not have passed the bill without the three Republican senators - Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins of Maine and Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania -- who backed it, Gibbs noted.

by James Oliphant

An effort to curb executive pay at the nation's most troubled banks, inserted at the last minute into Congress' mammoth economic stimulus bill, has sparked an outcry from financial services groups and others who warn the caps could harm the government's efforts to revive the economy.

During final negotiations on the $787-billion package last week, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) slipped in a provision to limit bonuses for executives at institutions receiving government bailout funds to a third of their salaries. And the bonuses could be paid only in stock irredeemable until the government was paid back in full.

President Obama is expected to sign the stimulus into law Tuesday in Denver. But the White House and Senate Democrats could clash later over the executive pay caps if the White House seeks a legislative adjustment.

The limits go beyond those advocated by the Treasury Department and came as a surprise to Wall Street. Financial services experts are particularly troubled that the caps apply not just to senior executives but to traders, investment bankers, fund managers and others compensated largely through performance-based commissions.

Dodd's provision also would apply to the more than 350 firms that have received money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program launched by the Bush administration in the fall. It would affect senior executives and as many as 20 of the highest-paid employees of a participating firm.

"We expected compensation restrictions on TARP company executives, but not on the sales force," said Scott Talbott, head of government affairs for the Financial Services Roundtable in Washington.

(Pundits interview President Obama aboard Air Force One. From left to right, E.J. Dionne, Washington Post; Bob Herbert, NY Times; Ron Brownstein, National Journal; the president, Jennifer Psaki, a White House staffer, Kathleen Parker, Washington Post Writers Group. Robert Gibbs, White House Press Secretary is in background. Chicago Tribune photo by Clarence Page, Chicago Tribune.)

by Clarence Page

ABOARD AIR FORCE ONE - If he was exhausted, he didn't show it.

Barack Obama had pushed to completion one of the most impressive, if lopsided, legislative triumphs in the first three weeks of any president in history.

Before he sat down with me and four other columnists late Friday afternoon on his first trip back home to Chicago aboard Air Force One, the House approved his $787 billion economic stimulus package.

(For a closer look at the Obama family's trip home aboard the world's most famous jetliner, see my blog, Page's Page later today.)

Despite vigorous outreach that included a bipartisan Super Bowl party at the White House, no Republicans voted for it, just as none approved its earlier version that cleared the chamber in January.

And while Obama chatted with us in the luxuriously furnished military version of a Boeing 747 somewhere over 30,000 feet the Senate began a vote that would approve the package with support from only three Republican senators.

Drama for Obama? No problem. He stepped into the conference room of the presidential jet as unruffled as a no-iron shirt.

by Frank James

What will the fallout be for Sen. Roland Burris from this new admission of his that the brother of former Gov. Rod Blagojevich asked Burris last October and November to make a campaign contribution to the former governor, requests Burris somehow failed to mention when he testified before an Illinois Senate committee last month?

As the Chicago Sun-Times broke today, Burris, who was appointed to the Senate by Blagojevich before the governor was impeached, convicted and forced from office, has filed an affidavit with Illinois officials acknowledging that he was indeed approached by Rob Blagojevich, the former governor's brother, for up to $10,000.

As the Sun-Times reported:

Burris -- who did not give money to the Blagojevich campaign fund in response to the previously undisclosed solicitation -- provided a copy of the sworn statement to the Chicago Sun-Times Friday in response to questions about his contacts with the Blagojevich camp about fund-raising.

Burris' statement offers the third version of events he has given about his discussions concerning the Senate seat, to which Blagojevich appointed him in late December, after Blagojevich was hit with federal corruption charges that included an allegation he tried to sell the Senate appointment.

by Mark Silva

Sarah Palin's favorite consignment shop has been forced to change its name - thanks to Palin.

The trouble started when Palin, ridiculed for a $150,000 shopping spree that the Republican National Committee underwrote for its vice presidential nominee, attempted to explain that these clothes were neither her idea nor her property -- that she, indeed, is a frugal shopper, telling FOX News last summer that her favorite shop is "a consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska, called Out of the Closet.''

That caught the attention of a chain of Los Angeles-based chain of thrift shops with the same name, a trademarked name.

Ellen Arvold, owner of what is actually a trendy, upscale Anchorage boutique, says she was served with a cease-and-desist letter from L.A.

As of today, the shop's fifth anniversary, it is known as Second Run.

"We don't have the resources to fight," Arvold explains. "We just decided to change the name. We really had no choice legally."

Ged Kenslea, spokesman for the AIDS Healthcare Foundation, which operates the Out of the Closet chain, says the Anchorage shop's name "wouldn't have landed on the radar'' if it weren't for the Alaska governor's comments

"We've invested a lot of time, energy and money or resources branding Out of the Closet, tied specifically to our HIV/AIDS mission to provide care and advocacy regardless of a patient's ability to pay," Kenslea explains, with thanks to the shop owner: "She was very gracious and agreed to change the name of her store."

Anchorage's Arvold says that Palin had sent a note from the campaign trail with a photograph of her wearing a pink Dolce and Gabbana jacket that she bought at the shop and "thanked us for the clothes, and apologized for all the flak we took...

"So that was really thoughtful of her,'' Arvold notes.

The Associated Press reported from Anchorage.

(This posting has changed from the original version.)

by Frank James

You don't have to be a Wall Street money magnet to be concerned about the unintended consequences from a provision tucked into the $787 billion economic stimulus bill that would limit executive pay.

Reports for a few days have said Sen. Chris Dodd placed in the legislation limits on bonuses and other compensation for senior executives whose companies receive federal money.

The New York Times has a report with a good description of the limits.

The pay restrictions resemble those that the Treasury Department announced this month, but are likely to ensnare more executives at many more companies and also to cut more deeply into the bonuses that often account for the bulk of annual pay.

The restriction with the most bite would bar top executives from receiving bonuses exceeding one-third of their annual pay. Any bonus would have to be in the form of long-term incentives, like restricted stock, which could not be cashed out until the TARP money was repaid in full...