Summary: In his January 20, 2009 inaugural address, President Barack Obama promised to “begin to responsibly leave Iraq to its people” and forge “a hard-earned peace in Afghanistan,” the two wars he inherited from President George W. Bush. President Obama’s promise to end the war in Iraq is on the agenda for the first full day of his presidency, January 21, 2009, when the new commander in chief meets with top national security aides and senior commanders.

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Summary: President George W. Bush presided over the weakest eight-year span for the U.S. economy in decades, according to an analysis of key data, with economists across the ideological spectrum increasingly viewing his two terms as a time of little progress on the nation’s thorniest fiscal challenges. Specifically, the number of jobs in the nation increased by about 2 percent during Bush’s tenure, the most tepid growth over any eight-year span since data collection began seven decades ago. Gross domestic product, a broad measure of economic output, grew at the slowest pace for a period of that length since the Truman administration. And Americans’ incomes grew more slowly than in any presidency since the 1960s, other than that of Bush’s father George H. W. Bush.

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Summary: By actually putting into practice the Neo-Conservative theories of pre-emptive war and unilateralism, George W. Bush demonstrated their failure more persuasively than could the most articulate progressive critic.

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Summary: In an interview on Fox News Channel’s “FOX & Friends,” U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), talking about the state recount in the Coleman-Franken Senate race, besmirched the integrity of Minnesota’s election system by alleging that “a lot of irregularities occurred during the voting process.”

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Summary: British foreign secretary David Miliband says the phrase “war on terror” — though capturing the urgency of the situation immediately following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — is ultimately “misleading and mistaken,” because it gives the impression of a unified, transnational enemy embodied in the figure of Osama bin Laden and al-Qaida.

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Summary: Iranian demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags and chanting “Death to Obama,” burned photographs of Barack Obama in Tehran as they protested against America’s inaction over Israel’s Gaza offensive. Iranian demonstrators have often burned effigies or pictures of U.S. presidents, but this appeared to be the first time Obama’s picture had been defaced, a week before his inauguration as president.

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Summary: President-elect Barack Obama says his administration will not compromise its ideals to fight terrorism, adding at a press conference to announce his CIA and national intelligence nominees, Leon Panetta and Adm. Dennis Blair, that he has told them to honor the Geneva Conventions.

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Summary: Anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada al-Sadr has called on the Iraqi resistance to stage “revenge operations” against American forces to protest Israel’s Gaza offensive.

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Summary: Iraq remained the deadliest country for media workers in 2008, followed by India and Mexico, although the number of deaths was down sharply from the previous year. A total of 109 journalists and support staff in 36 countries died while covering the news in 2008, down from 172 in 2007, largely due to a decline in the number of media workers killed in Iraq.

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Summary: Year-end “honors” for U.S. Rep. Michele Bachmann that couldn’t be accommodated in the December 31, 2008 Minnesota 6th Congressional District Year in Review. … Comparing the U.S. decision to hasten elections in Iraq with the Bush administration’s support for a vote in the Palestinian territories that was won by U.S. foe Hamas in 2006, Iyad Allawi, a former U.S.-installed prime minister of Iraq, said that despite repeated warnings, U.S. officials blindly foisted a Western-style democracy on Iraq, helping plunge it into sectarian bloodshed and a political morass.

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