This is Chris O Donnell bio, the man who was paid to guide a blind blind war veteran Colonel, Al Pacino in the Scent Of a Woman, he got my admiration from that movie. Chris O' Donnell is 40 years old now as he was born on June 26th, 1970 in Winnetka, Illinois, the son of Julie and William O'Donnell, Sr.

North Carolina's Outer Banks have gained a reputation as one of the most popular wedding destinations on the East Coast.

Kitty Hawk, NC (PRWEB) November 9, 2008 -- When Diane Lane and Richard Gere found love on North Carolina's Outer Banks in this year's hit movie romance, Nights in Rodanthe, they were not the first and won't be the last.

Photo Courtesy of Island Photography
Photo Courtesy of Island Photography

The Outer Banks has gained a reputation as one of the most popular wedding destinations on the East Coast. Miles of unspoiled beaches, luxurious vacation homes and resorts, talented wedding professionals, and a wealth of natural beauty have captured the hearts of thousands of couples who come here to be married each year.

"Those of us who live here know the romantic charms of the Outer Banks," said Eric Hause, partner of Panache Events, LLC, producers of the Outer Banks Wedding Salon. "Now the word is out. Couples have discovered that we have world-class wedding vendors, a variety of fabulous event venues, and a stunning natural environment that rivals any exotic wedding destination."

The number of American couples choosing a destination wedding has tripled in the last 10 years and the trend continues to grow. The thought of a wedding that combines the excitement of travel, a beautiful ocean backdrop, and an extended celebration with family and friends has great appeal.

Recent economic events have refocused couples' attention on more economical destinations rather than far flung locations such as Mexico or Hawaii. Brides are now planning destination weddings closer to home that combine a romantic setting with ease of travel and affordability.

The Outer Banks is within driving distance of half of the country's population, and travel costs are a fraction of fly-to destinations. The Outer Banks offers luxurious beachfront vacation homes and modern accommodations that are often less than those in other resort locales. The money saved allows couples to have their dream destination wedding and invite friends and families along for an extended vacation.

Couples planning an Outer Banks wedding will also find a mature local wedding industry with professional and quality vendors in every category, from cakes to coordinators to caterers.

"The caliber and professionalism of our wedding vendors offers brides the same level of luxury and sophistication that they can get at traditional wedding destinations," said Hause.

But the Outer Banks' primary appeal is its romantic seaside venues. For many brides, an ideal Outer Banks wedding means a ceremony on the beach at sunset. Outer Banks towns allow and even encourage beach weddings, while the Cape Hatteras National Seashore offers 60 miles of undeveloped barrier island shoreline as nature's backdrop.

Other popular Outer Banks event venues are just as appealing:

* The Elizabethan Gardens on Roanoke Island, a breathtaking 40-acre traditional English flower garden.
* The Whalehead Club in Corolla, a restored turn-of-the-century hunt club built by wealthy industrialists.
* The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse, the world's tallest lighthouse poised at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean.
* A myriad of palatial and modern oceanfront event homes leased by local rental companies.


To help brides planning an Outer Banks destination wedding, Panache Events, LLC, invites couples and their families to the Outer Banks Wedding Salon on November 28-30 in Kitty Hawk, NC. The area's premier wedding showcase features over 40 of the area's top notch wedding vendors and a full weekend of wedding planning events.

For more details on Outer Banks weddings, visit the Outer Banks Wedding Salon online.

From Wire Reports

WASHINGTON – With the economy in disarray and the nation's treasury draining, President-elect Barack Obama and his advisers are trying to figure out which of his expansive campaign promises to push in the opening months of his tenure and which to put on a slower track.

Obama repeated on Saturday that his first priority would be an economic recovery program to get the nation's business system back on track and people back to work. But advisers said the question was whether they could tackle health care, climate change and energy independence at once or needed to stagger these initiatives over time.

The debate between a big-bang strategy of pressing aggressively on multiple fronts versus a more pragmatic, step-by-step approach has flavored the discussion among Obama's transition advisers for months, even before his election. The tension between these strategies has been a recurring theme in the memorandums prepared for him on various issues, advisers said.

"Every president is tempted to take on too much," said one Obama adviser, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations. "On the other hand, there's the Roosevelt example and the LBJ example, which suggest an extraordinary president can do an awful lot. So that's the question: Is it too risky for the president to be ambitious?"

Much of the issue may be out of Obama's hands. The $700 billion financial bailout threatens to push the deficit into the stratosphere. "The poor man has his hands tied by the economic and financial mess we have right now," said John Tuck, a former aide to President Ronald Reagan. "I don't know what his options are. They're very, very limited."

At a news conference Friday and again in a radio address on Saturday, Obama signaled that he intends to move quickly to address the nation's financial problems, despite any obstacles. "I want to ensure that we hit the ground running on Jan. 20 because we don't have a moment to lose," he said Saturday.

The argument for an aggressive approach in the mold of Franklin D. Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson is that health care, energy and education are all part of systemic economic problems and should be addressed comprehensively. But Democrats are discussing a hybrid strategy that would push for a bold economic program and also encompass other elements of Obama's campaign platform, even if larger goals are put off.

Congressional leaders want to move swiftly in January to pass a major expansion of the Children's Health Insurance Program – a plan vetoed by President Bush – as a step toward the broader coverage Obama promised. Likewise, Democrats plan to incorporate his proposed middle-class tax cuts in the economic legislation or pass them in tandem. And Obama could increase investment in alternative energy as a down payment on a far-reaching climate plan.

"I believe it would be important to show fairly early on that change is here," said Rep. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland, a member of the House Democratic leadership. "One of the very visible ways to show that would be to pass some of the bills George Bush vetoed."

Obama has acknowledged that the economy will force him to recalibrate his program but insists that he has not backed off his commitments. "We can't afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, health care, education and tax relief for middle class families," he said Saturday.

During the campaign, Obama identified many other priorities – withdrawing from Iraq and talks with Iran, tackling immigration and the issue of detainees at Guantenamo and trade negotiations with the country's North American neighbors.

At the same time, his team is tamping down expectations of instant action by discouraging talk of a 100-day program.

Obama's transition advisers studied how Kennedy, Roosevelt, Johnson, Reagan and Bill Clinton used their first months. The lesson many drew was that even if various agencies moved forward in many directions, a new president must husband his time, energy and political capital for three dominant priorities at most. Several Obama advisers cited Reagan, who concentrated his early efforts on pushing through major tax cuts and increased military spending.

But advisers also worry that putting off sweeping initiatives makes them harder to pass later, when a president's mandate and momentum have faded. Again, they pointed to Clinton, who delayed his ultimately doomed health care plan while he passed a deficit reduction package and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

The pent-up demand from Democrats who waited out the Bush administration will be enormous. "In the next three months before they take over, the list of demands on the table is going to be staggering, absolutely staggering," said former Rep. Jim Leach of Iowa, a Republican who endorsed Obama during the campaign.

Obama recognizes that. In an interview on CNN days before the election, he explicitly ranked his priorities, starting with an economic recovery package that would include middle-class tax relief. His second priority, he said, would be energy; third, health care; fourth, tax restructuring; and fifth, education.

But then he hedged, foreseeing the unforeseen. "We don't know yet what's going to happen in January," he said. "And none of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system or the financial system."

The New York Times

WASHINGTON — For nearly two years on the campaign trail, Senator Barack Obama rarely missed a chance to take a swipe at President Bush. The name George W. Bush invariably followed the phrase “failed policies” in Mr. Obama’s speeches. “When George Bush steps down,” Mr. Obama once declared, “the world is going to breathe a sigh of relief.”

On Monday, Mr. Obama, Democrat of Illinois, may find himself conveniently forgetting those words — or at least delicately stepping around the fact that he had said them. As the president-elect, he will be welcomed at the White House as an honored guest of its current occupant, Mr. Bush, for a meeting that could be as awkward as it is historic.

In a time-honored tradition of American democracy, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, will receive a tour of their new home from Mr. Bush and the first lady, Laura Bush. Then the men will split off to begin the formal transfer of power, all the more urgent this year because of the financial crisis. Mr. Obama has said he expects a “substantive conversation between myself and the president.”

But there will also be a subtext to the session: the personal chemistry between two leaders whose worldviews are miles apart. The ritual visit is occurring uncommonly early this year, less than a week after Mr. Obama handily defeated Senator John McCain of Arizona, who was the Republican nominee and Mr. Bush’s preferred candidate. Emotions may still be raw.

“I’m not going to anticipate problems,” Mr. Obama said Friday at his first news conference as president-elect. “I’m going to go in there with a spirit of bipartisanship.”

Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have had little chance to forge the kind of personal relationship that might prompt a smooth handoff. In his book, “The Audacity of Hope,” Mr. Obama wrote less than admiringly of his first face-to-face encounter with the president, at a White House breakfast for new senators after the 2004 election, where Mr. Bush outlined his second-term agenda.

“The president’s eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty,” Mr. Obama wrote. “As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring.”

Mr. Bush, meanwhile, was privately critical of Mr. Obama during the 2008 Democratic primary race, telling friends that he thought Mr. Obama’s chief rival for the party’s nomination, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, was “more experienced and more ready to be president,” said one friend of Mr. Bush’s who had such a conversation. But Mr. Obama ran a good campaign — Mr. Bush is someone who appreciates that — and the election last week might have eased his doubts.

“President Bush is a realist,” said this friend, who spoke anonymously to disclose his private conversation with the president. “He has a way of coming to grips with things and moving on. The people have spoken.”

For Mr. Bush, the meeting has a distinct upside: the chance to take the edge off his unpopularity. Democrats are already praising him as gracious for his post-election speech in the Rose Garden, where he said it would be a “stirring sight” to see the Obama family move into the White House. The meeting on Monday will give Mr. Bush an opportunity to produce lasting images of that graciousness.

“The important thing he gets out of it,” the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin said, “is a public perception of him as somebody who is leaving in classy fashion, by opening his house and his information and his government. He wants to leave on a note that says he did everything possible to help this next president run the country.”

But such meetings can be fraught with political and personal danger. On Inauguration Day in 2001, President Bill Clinton invited Mr. Bush for coffee before the ceremony but kept his ever-punctual successor waiting for 10 minutes, recalled Mr. Bush’s first press secretary, Ari Fleischer. Even more uncomfortable was the presence of Vice President Al Gore, who lost the presidential election to Mr. Bush after a bitterly contested Florida recount.

“Clinton was his normal gregarious self, but Vice President Gore was not a happy camper,” Mr. Fleischer said. “I think it was a very sour moment for him, and you could kind of feel it in the room.”

In 1980, after President Jimmy Carter lost his re-election bid to Ronald Reagan, the two met at the White House. Mr. Carter came away feeling that Mr. Reagan had not been paying attention.

“President Carter was kind of taken aback by the meeting with Reagan,” said Jody Powell, Mr. Carter’s former press secretary. “There was a point where he sort of wandered off and asked questions that seemed to be only tangentially related to what they were talking about.”

And though the Carter White House had offered to share information about efforts to end the Iranian hostage crisis, Mr. Powell said, “My impression was that they wanted us to handle it without them being involved enough to have to take responsibility for whatever happened.”

So, too, may it be with Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama over the economy. Mr. Bush has invited world leaders to Washington on Friday and Saturday for an international conference on the economy. Mr. Obama and his team have declined to attend. Mr. Obama supports a new economic stimulus package; the Bush White House is cool to that idea.

The White House says Mr. Obama has been there seven times during Mr. Bush’s tenure, most recently in September for a much-publicized meeting on the $700 billion financial rescue package. That session blew up when House Republicans, backed by Mr. McCain, balked at the plan. Curiously enough, Mr. Obama and Mr. Bush were on the same side.

Perhaps Mr. Obama will remind Mr. Bush of that when he sees him on Monday. Or perhaps he will remind Mr. Bush of another encounter, at a White House reception in January 2005 when, according to Mr. Obama’s book, the affable president offered a dollop of hand sanitizer — “Not wanting to seem unhygienic,” Mr. Obama wrote, “I took a squirt” — and then pulled him aside for some unsolicited political advice.

“You’ve got a bright future, very bright,” Mr. Bush began, by Mr. Obama’s account. The president went on to warn the new senator that his celebrity status could hurt him: “Everybody’ll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself.”

President Bush and President-elect Barack Obama are probably hoping their meeting Monday goes better than their first get-together, which left a bad taste in the mouths of both men.

Four years ago, Obama and other newly elected members of the Senate were invited to the White House for a breakfast meeting with Bush, who pulled the young Chicagoan aside.

"Obama!" Bush exclaimed, according to Obama's account of the meeting in his second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope." "Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours -- that's one impressive lady."

The two men shook hands and then, according to Obama, Bush turned to an aide, "who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the president's hand."

Bush then offered some to Obama, who recalled: "Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt."

The president then led Obama off to one side of the room, where Bush said: "I hope you don't mind me giving you a piece of advice."

"Not at all, Mr. President," Obama told the commander-in-chief.

"You've got a bright future," Bush said presciently. "Very bright. But I've been in this town awhile and, let me tell you, it can be tough. When you get a lot of attention like you've been getting, people start gunnin' for ya. And it won't necessarily just be coming from my side, you understand. From yours, too. Everybody'll be waiting for you to slip, know what I mean? So watch yourself."

Bush then noted that he and Obama had something in common.

"We both had to debate Alan Keyes," the president said. "That guy's a piece of work, isn't he?"

Obama laughed and even "put my arm around his shoulder as we talked," he recalled, although he added the gesture "might have made many of my friends, not to mention the Secret Service agents in the room, more than a little uneasy."

Despite this display of bonhomie, Obama said the president's demeanor turned downright frightening when he laid out his agenda to the freshly minted lawmakers.

"Suddenly it felt as if somebody in a back room had flipped a switch," Obama wrote. "The president's eyes became fixed; his voice took on the agitated, rapid tone of someone neither accustomed to nor welcoming interruption; his easy affability was replaced by an almost messianic certainty. As I watched my mostly Republican Senate colleagues hang on his every word, I was reminded of the dangerous isolation that power can bring, and appreciated the Founders' wisdom in designating a system to keep power in check."

When I quoted from this passage to Bush during an Oval Office interview, the president seemed irritated to learn he had been taken to task by the senator he once counseled.

I thought I was actually showing some kindness," Bush said indignantly. "And out of that he came with this belief?"

The president added with a bit of a scowl: "He doesn't know me very well."

Bill Sammon is Washington Deputy Managing Editor for FOX News.

Gorbachev calls on Obama to carry out 'perestroika' in the U.S.

MOSCOW, November 7 (RIA Novosti) - Former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev has said that the Obama administration in the United States needs far-reaching 'perestroika' reforms to overcome the financial crisis and restore balance in the world.

The term perestroika, meaning restructuring, was used by Gorbachev in the late 1980s to describe a series of reforms that abolished state planning in the Soviet Union.

In an interview with Italy's La Stampa published on Friday, Gorbachev said President-elect Barack Obama needs to fundamentally change the misguided course followed by President George W. Bush over the past eight years.

Gorbachev said that after transforming his country in the late 1980s, he had told the Americans that it was their turn to act, but that Washington, celebrating its Cold War victory, was not interested in "a new model of a society, where politics, economics and morals went hand in hand."

He said the Republicans have failed to realize that the Soviet Union no longer exists, that Europe has changed, and that new powers like China, Brazil and Mexico have emerged as important players on the world stage.

He told the paper that the world is waiting for Obama to act, and that the White House needs to restore trust in cooperation with the United States among the Russians.

"This is a man of our times, he is capable of restarting dialogue, all the more since the circumstances will allow him to get out of a dead-end situation. Barack Obama has not had a very long career, but it is hard to find faults, and he has led an election campaign winning over the Democratic Party and Hillary Clinton herself. We can judge from this that this person is capable of engaging in dialogue and understanding current realities."

Former Russian oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky, founder of now defunct Yukos oil giant, who is in prison on fraud and tax evasion charges, also used the word perestroika in discussing the future course of the Obama administration.

In an article published in the business daily Vedomosti on Friday, Khodorkovsky said Obama's election win was not merely another change of power in a separate country, but was important for all states.

He said that, "being a liberal himself, he thinks that the world will take a left turn," and that "a global perestroika would be a logical response to the global crisis."

"The paradigm of global development is about to change. The era inaugurated by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher 30 years ago is over."

He said decisions in neoliberal economies had been made mainly by supranational institutions and transnational corporations.

Khodorkovsky predicted: "Globalization will slow to a crawl, but will not stop. The 'golden billion' of the world's richest people will have to abandon hopes of increasing their wealth, but high consumer standards which developed at the end of the 20th century will be unaffected by the change. The striving for political freedom and open competition of personalities and ideas will not disappear."

NEW YORK (AP) -- Alabama and Texas Tech and their perfect records were on top of the BCS standings Sunday. Texas, Florida and Oklahoma, all with one loss, are lurking and ready to take advantage if the front-runners fall.

Penn State's loss to Iowa on Saturday left the Crimson Tide and Red Raiders as the only unbeaten teams in the BCS conferences, making it easy to sort out the all-important first two places in the BCS standings this week.

First-place Alabama (.981 average) was No. 1 in both the Harris and USA Today coaches' polls. Second-place Texas Tech (.972) was a solid second in both polls and first in the computer rankings. The computers have Alabama No. 2.

Texas (.879) was third, followed closely by Florida (.864) and Oklahoma (.844).

Sixth-place Southern California (.789) still needs a lot of help to reach the BCS national championship game on Jan. 8 in Miami. Penn State (.683) dropped all the way from third to eighth behind unbeaten Utah (.769).

Alabama and Texas Tech are still on course to meet in the BCS national title game if they stay unbeaten, though the Crimson Tide knows now that its road will go through Atlanta.

The Tide clinched the SEC West and a spot in the league title game against Florida in the Georgia Dome on Dec. 6. The game could turn into a de-facto national semifinal, with the winner earning a spot in the championship game.

The computer rankings are helping Texas stay at the top of the one-loss pack. The Longhorns are fourth in the Harris poll, close behind Florida, and fifth in the coaches' poll, not far behind both Florida and Oklahoma, which Texas beat last month.

But the computer ratings prefer Texas and Utah over both Florida and Oklahoma.

In two weeks, Oklahoma hosts Texas Tech in the latest Big 12 game with huge national title implications.

If the Sooners win, they'll create a three-way tie for first in the Big 12 South. If the Sooners, Longhorns and Red Raiders finish deadlocked, the tiebreaker to determine who plays in the Big 12 championship game in Kansas City on Dec. 6 is best BCS average.

Utah is positioned for its second BCS bid in five seasons if it can stay unbeaten. The Utes from the Mountain West Conference need to finish in the top 12 of the BCS standings to earn an automatic bid to one of the five major bowls.

Unbeaten Boise State from the Western Athletic Conference is in ninth place and also trying to reach the BCS for the second time. The Broncos not only need to stay unbeaten, they need to pass Utah in the BCS standings to get an automatic bid.

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