President Barack Obama is set to deliver his annual State of the Union address to Congress but most of the goals that he set in previous speeches. Some of the goals include reforming the immigration laws and meeting congressional leaders of both parties each month.

The president’s promises were broken because of congressional opposition as well as being overshadowed by other priorities. These are the realities of a government full of bureaucracy. The State of the Union is an opportunity for the president to state his case in front of both houses of Congress and on primetime TV.

Just like his predecessors, President Obama laid out a lot of promises that turned out to be fleeting because he can’t get the approval from congress. He also can’t follow-through on some of the promises that he started.

President Obama’s first term is nearing its end and it was characterized by a divided government. The Republicans also made it hard for the president to achieve anything. His State of the Union speech on Tuesday would probably include a new list of initiatives that the president would try to achieve before his term ends.

Last year, the president made his State of the Union address after an assassination try on Representative Gabrielle Giffords. He called for national unity, which has never happened because Washington engaged into one partisan dispute over another.

President Obama will soon decide on whether or not to keep a group of 1,200 National Guardsman currently deployed on the Mexican and U.S. borders to combat immigration violators. Funding for the mission is up in June.

The president is speaking on the issue with his upcoming trip to the area to talk about immigration reform.

The troops were authorized about a year ago after congressional Republicans and border state governors demanded that more be done to stop illegal immigration. The troops have authorization to help the Border Patrol with immigration enforcement operations in California, Arizona, New Mexico and Texas.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer has urged Obama to extend the authorization for the Guard deployment, as she believes it has helped significantly in reducing border violence and smuggling activity.

Brewer reported that the guard has been involved in activities involving 19,000 surveillance operations, 10,000 seizures of illegal migrants and 235 seizures of drug shipments, including more than 18 tons of marijuana.

The guardsmen are not allowed to directly engage in law enforcement on U.S. soil, but have instead been working as criminal analysts and on so-called entry identification teams, which help to find people who are trying to cross the border illegally.

There are more than 524 troops active in Arizona, 250 in Texas, 224 in California and 72 in New Mexico, with more than 100 additional troops from the border states serving in command and control positions.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told officials that the administration is taking an extension under consideration, but that the costs for such as deployment would be a concern. She added that no decision has been made as yet on whether or not to extend the deployment because it is yet to be determined who would pay for the Guard’s services.

Napolitano noted that the Congress has been asked twice to let the funds be made available to pay for the Guard, but that it was denied both times.
Some Republicans, who have also proposed cutting funding for border security in their 2o12 budget proposals for 2012, also have opposed spending the millions of dollars needed to keep the troops deployed.

There are people on both sides of this debate that agree the Guard mission has been successful and should be continued.

As time grows shorter, a government shutdown seems more and more likely, according to reports coming out of Washington. Even so, House Speaker John Boehner, who was fresh out of a White House meeting, said that Republicans and Democrats were somewhat closer to a deal to prevent it from happening.

Unfortunately, a mere 12 hours later, he was reporting that they were further apart than they had been the night before due to issues with fights over policy riders, and amendments to the agreement that weakened the EPA and denied federal funding for Planned Parenthood, NPR, and the implementation of the Obama health care reform.

While the two sides bickered over these and other matters, the budget still wasn’t getting passed. If there is no agreement by midnight tonight, and no continuing resolution, then there will be a partial government shutdown. That’s the bottom line.

It appears that negotiators in the House, Senate and White House are striving to keep that from occurring and are discussing some sort of face-saving compromise. However, no compromise can happen unless everyone involved can prove that he made as few concessions as possible and that the opposing side operated in bad faith. They were all doing this Thursday.

Democrats and Republicans have disagreed on what was said in some of the key meetings. While this sort of thing has happened before, it is unusual in a time when it’s the 11th hour before something like the possibility of a government shutdown.

Boehner has been asked if it is policy riders preventing an agreement and has said it wasn’t. He didn’t elaborate on the answer to the question, only saying that there were still some issues to be discussed and he couldn’t narrow it down at this time.

However, right after this Democratic leaders in the Senate called for a press conference to blame Republicans for holding the budget hostage over policy riders, so it would appear no one can make up their minds on these matters.
Republicans had proposed a one week funding measure that would have cut spending by $12 billion, funded the Department of Defense budget for the rest of 2011, and added just two policy riders—a ban on abortion funding in the District of Columbia, and a ban on funding to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay.

However, President Obama has said he would veto any continuing resolution. However, the Republicans wanted to put their party on record as funding the Department of Defense, and attacking the Democrats for being more concerned about getting their way with the budget than letting the military get paid on time.

Democrats responded to this bill with a motion to recommit. Had it been passed, the CSR would have funded the DoD, but not the government for the extra week, thus taking the “troop funding” issue off the table. However, the measure failed.

Later in the day, Rep. Michele Bachmann said she’ would endorse a brand new, clean Defense funding bill in the House, and Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas went ahead and introduced one in the Senate. These actions put House Republicans back to the same place they had been a day earlier, telling people that they’d passed a budget, and were ready to negotiate if the Senate would meet them openly.

The last continuing resolution passed with a number of Democrats joining the GOP; or else the bill would have failed. However, this time around that sort of thing doesn’t look probable.

So, the Republicans and Democrats were still at odds over the whole thing and were seemingly no closer to stopping a government shutdown. Only time will tell if the shutdown occurs, or if another CSR or an actual budget is passed.

Potential presidential candidate Donald Trump released his official birth certificate to ABC News this week after previously showing a certificate of live birth.

The document was issued by the New York City Department of Health and has been posted on the ABC News website. It shows that Trump was born at the Jamaica Hospital in New York on June 14, 1946. The same information had also been on the certificate of live birth he had presented earlier.

A Trump staff member stressed the differences between the live birth announcement and the birth certificate, saying that even though the two forms sometimes use the same words, that they are not the same at all. The live birth announcement merely says a child was born alive and reports that birth, while a birth certificate is official confirmation of a child’ identity and gives exact details of the birth and the surrounding circumstances.

For instance, a person wouldn’t be able to get a passport or a driver’s license with a certificate of live birth, while you can with an actual birth certificate. They stressed that the two should not be confused with the other.”

After Trump released his own birth certificate, he asked that President Obama to the same thing. Trump has been causing controversy the past few weeks by his questions about whether President Obama was actually born in the U.S.

Trump stressed that it only took him about an hour to get his own birth certificate and said that it doesn’t make sense that Obama couldn’t have managed this feat in four years of asking for it. He added that he couldn’t understand why Obama is making such as big deal out of the whole thing.

The controversy is over some groups not believing that the version of Obama’s official birth certificate that is available online is the right one or not.

2010 was a year marked by a heated debate on new health care reform and a slow-paced economic recovery. For the year, on average, only 47% of Americans approve of the way President Obama is fulfilling his duties. This data was released by the Gallup Organization, and shows a decline of 11% from the previous year.

The country’s most approving residents hail from Hawaii, where President Obama was born, and the District of Columbia, with approval ratings of 66 and 84 percent, respectively.

President Obama’s highest approval rating was garnered in the Northeast region, with five of the ten states most approving being Connecticut, Rhode Island, Massachusetts, Delaware and New York, with all coming in with at least a 54% rating.

The Western region contains half of Obama’s least approving states. Montana, Alaska, Utah, Idaho and Wyoming all came in with an under 40% rating, with Wyoming being the lowest at a paltry 28%.

Twenty of our fifty states gave the President an approval rating of within three points of our national average. This report gives us a good indication of where his most aggressive campaigning may take place leading up to the 2012 election. States where his rating was within a percentage point of our national average are likely to be battleground states. These include Nevada, Ohio, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Florida.

Two of the states that were crucial to Obama’s 2008 victory, Ohio and Wisconsin, could be more of a challenge in 2012, as approval ratings in both states came in at under 50%. Wisconsin saw a 10% decline from 2009, down to 48%, and Ohio fell 7%, down to a 2010 approval rating of only 47%.

Obama’s approval rating declined in every state, with Vermont seeing the largest drop, at 15%. The state of Mississippi saw the least decline, as approval for the Commander-in-Chief fell by only 5%.

According to a CNN poll, President Obama’s peak approval rating was 76% in February 2009. His lowest approval rating occurred in August 2010 at 41%, according to the Gallup poll. As a comparison, George W. Bush’s typical rating while he held the post stood at 49%, while John F. Kennedy’s rating stood at 70% while he inhabited the oval office.

The Wisconsin assembly, which is dominated by the Republicans, approved Gov. Scott Walker’s bill, on Friday morning. The bill limits bargaining rights for the state’s 170,000 public workers on the subject of wages. However, this is still held up by the 14 Senate Democrats who had left the state to prevent a vote on this account.

Republican Gov. Scott Walker is standing his ground, The Unions, theirs. The stalemate continues and the 14 Senate Democrats stay elusive. This issue has fuelled labor interests across the country and may snowball nationwide, as some Democrats feel.

President Obama, however, is yet to make his appearance. During his election campaign in South Carolina in 2007, he had said that he was proud to wear the “union label” and that he would put on a “comfortable pair of shoes” and “will walk on that picket line with you as president of the United States of America.”

The protests over collective bargaining rights drag on in Wisconsin, but President Obama has not walked “that picket line” yet. It seems that the Obama administration is sitting on the fence and weighing the pros and cons of him joining the fight.

One reason put forward by the White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett is that Wisconsin is not a national issue. But the President is said to have told a local reporter in Wisconsin that the collective bargaining issue seemed like “an assault on unions.”

The White House Press Secretary Jay Carney says the president’s remark, “an assault on unions” in the interview, was made so that he is heard on the issue. He chose not to say anything further on either the president’s 2007 campaign statement or his recent remarks made in the interview. Carney, however, said that “whatever shoes’ the President “is wearing, he is always standing with America’s working men and women, and America’s middle class.”

The US is heading towards an impending shutdown after March 4. While the Republicans want spending cuts to the tune of $ 100 billion the Democrats are only willing to go half way.

Yesterday, The House passed a spending plan for the remaining seven months of this fiscal year which included at least $61 billion in cuts from last year’s budget. Democrats, however, rejected the plan as impractical and one that impedes the economic recovery since it would make sweeping reductions to a wide array of programs ranging from health and education to the arts and sciences and energy.

Already fiscal 2011 spending levels are $42 billion less than what President Barack Obama seeks, according to Senator Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat. Senate Democrats offered their plan on Tuesday that asks for a one-month continuation of current allocations to stimulate the economic recovery. As a compromise, Majority Leader Harry Reid said that Democrats would be in favor of continuing with the current rates and are willing to cut down the increases that President Obama wants but the Republicans are not in a mood to oblige. It seems a difficult situation to resolve and if this standoff continues, a government shut down would be imminent.

Democrats would rather the Republicans continue to stand firm in their stand of pressing for deep cuts in federal spending that would lead to a potential government shutdown. They believe that like in 1995 when Newt Gingrich, the then Republican Speaker of the House wanted major budget cuts to be effected in Government spending on Medicare, public health, education and environment and with President Clinton vetoing the bill that Republican controlled Congress sent to him, the government had to shut down most departments. This led to huge losses as the government had to furlough many of its federal employees. Public opinion went against the Republicans and Clinton won a second time.

Barack Obama faces a similar situation and hopes to capitalize on these sentiments. In the final analysis, whether the Democrats or the Republicans win, the average American is in for some tough times.

Billionaire Donald Trump jumped into the world of Republican politics today, letting an excited group of people know that if he makes a Presidential bid, and he is the victor, that he’ll make sure America is a respected country once again.

Trump, a real estate developer and reality TV star, said he will make up his mind by June if he is going to add his name to the now crowded field of hopefuls attempting to beat President Obama.

Trump is a surprise addition to all the potential Republican hopefuls as he spoke out at a Conservative Political Action Conference. His words got plenty of applause and cheers from the audience, which will be the people who will have a big role in the grass-roots organization for the person who is eventually chosen as the 2012 GOP presidential nominee.

Trump told the audience that he was “well acquainted with winning,” and that it was “what this country needs now.” He didn’t agree with Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, a libertarian who ran for president in 2008, saying that he thought Paul was a “good guy” who had “zero chance” of being elected.

Many in the audience didn’t like Trump’s words about Paul and he got some boos from the group. Paul had many supporters in the audience who are out to help him win the CPAC presidential straw poll a second time in a row.

Trump had previously told Fox News in October that he was considering the presidential bid and announced he was a member of the Republican Party. During his CPAC speech, Trump spoke on many of the same things popular with other Republican conservatives. For instance, Trump said that is pro-life and against gun control.

What got Trump the most applause was his promise to get rid of the nation’s health care law and end Obamacare. He said he would replace it with a more sensible plan that wouldn’t make the country go broke and would be better for business people. He also vowed not to raise taxes if he gets elected.

Married GOP Congressman, Christopher Lee, a Western New York Republican, tendered his resignation because of the response he had made to an online personal ad on Craigslist.

The Gawker expose alleged that Lee attempted to arrange an extramarital affair online and they had access to the emails that he sent to the unidentified woman on the website. He, reportedly, sent a shirtless photo of his to the woman who had posted the ad on Craigslist, describing himself as a divorced lobbyist and “fit fun classy guy.” This indecorous behavior has cost him his seat in Congress.

Lee, who is married and has a son, has expressed deep and sincere regrets over this incident on his website. He said, “I regret the harm that my actions have caused my family, my staff, and my constituents. I, deeply and sincerely apologize to them all. I have made profound mistakes and I promise to work as hard as I can to seek their forgiveness.”

He also stated that he cannot “continue” to be distracted by the aberration that has happened, since the country and his constituency faces many challenges and therefore he chose to resign with immediate effect. An announcement on the floor of the House said, that Lee had resigned as of 5 p.m. on Wednesday.

The quick acceptance of Lee’s resignation evidences the fact that the GOP has zero tolerance for such improper behavior.

Christopher John Lee was elected to the Congress as the Republican candidate in April 2008. He was re-elected in November 2010 with 76 percent of the votes.

Gene Sperling, a former Bill Clinton bureaucrat is set to head the National Economic Council once again but this time, under the Obama administration. He will be appointed this Friday. Sperling had earlier headed the NEC during Bill Clinton’s second term in office.

President Barak Obama has reposed faith in him for his expertise in this area during the Clinton era, which had seen economic boom times. Sperling is a veteran who has battled the Republicans during his earlier term of office and this probably is the reason why Obama is relying on him.

The Obama administration has seen a staff shuffle of late and this one is the latest. Many observers believe that it is being done with an eye on the 2012 re-election campaign.

The recent resurgence of the Republicans on the health care and tax cut bills have motivated Obama to invigorate his political and economical teams to fight back.

The Obama administration is trying hard to dispel the negative impression created by his critics that the government is anti-big business and would be pursuing liberal economic policies that may hurt the big conglomerates.

It must be remembered that Sperling, as the deputy leader of the NEC during Clinton’s first term in office had experienced Bill Clinton being cornered by the Republicans, a situation that Obama now faces. As Director, during Clinton’s second term, the country saw a spurt in economic growth and balanced budgets that eventually led to a budget surplus.

He was an important negotiator in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) as well as a member of the US team that conducted the WTO accession talks with China.  His work with the Presidential Task Force, which has been  credited, largely for the revival of the American auto industry, his strong support to Obama’s efforts to give a fillip to small businesses and encourage hiring has been a key driver of the economy that is showing signs of recovery.

A man eminently suited for the position, he is well-known for his work ethics.