Politicususa: … On October 7th, 1998, Matthew Shepard accepted a ride from Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson … they drove Matthew into the country, tied him to a fence post and beat him severely … they attacked Matthew because he was gay. They left him there in the cold dark, bleeding and unconscious until a cyclist found him, almost 18 hours later. Matthew died from his injuries on October 12th, 1998…
Eleven years after Matthew’s death, President Barack Obama signed into law The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Act … this bill makes it a federal crime to assault people based on their gender, sexual orientation and gender identity … Judy Shepard had visited President Obama in the Oval Office and he had made her a promise that this day would come. By signing The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Act into law, President Obama kept his promise to Matthew’s family.
…. I asked many people to share their memories of Matthew Shepard with me, including Captain Stephen Snyder-Hill … the Army officer who was booed at the Republican debate…
Joshua Snyder-Hill: … A year later I was taken to DC for my first equality event. I was still not out to my family or friends. The one thing I remember most were the people picketing the concert hall cheering Matthew’s death and celebrating it as a victory. I remember all my fear of coming out melted away. I had spent three days in DC seeing nothing but hope and activism until that moment; it was then and there I decided, I had to be part of the fight for equality. Matthew’s death and the energy behind it, made me want to be proud of who I was and show love conquered hate.
Full article here
The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act, 2009:
MSNBC: ….. Herman Cain now leads the race for the Republican presidential nomination, according to the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll.
…. the onetime frontrunner, Rick Perry, has plummeted to third place, dropping more than 20 percentage points since late August:
Cain 27, Romney 23, Perry 16, Paul 11, Gingrich 8, Bachmann 5, Huntsman 3, Santorum 1
In the previous survey, conducted in late August, Perry led the field at 38%, Romney stood at 23%, while Cain was at only 5%.
President Obama 46 v Romney 44 - President Obama 49 v Cain 38 - President Obama 51 v Perry 39
….. 78% of Democratic primary voters say they want their party to nominate Obama again as its 2012 presidential candidate. By comparison, in April 1995, 67% of Democrats said the same of Bill Clinton….
The presidential motorcade is parked as President Obama and South Korean President Lee Myung-bak have dinner at Woo Lae Oak, a Korean restaurant, in Vienna, Va.
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President Obama issued a statement Wednesday saluting the passage, by both the House and Senate, of trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama, as well as a measure designed to help American workers who subsequently lose their jobs:
“The landmark trade agreements and assistance for American workers that passed tonight are a major win for American workers and businesses. I’ve fought to make sure that these trade agreements with South Korea, Colombia and Panama deliver the best possible deal for our country, and I’ve insisted that we do more to help American workers who have been affected by global competition. Tonight’s vote, with bipartisan support, will significantly boost exports that bear the proud label “Made in America,” support tens of thousands of good-paying American jobs and protect labor rights, the environment and intellectual property. American automakers, farmers, ranchers and manufacturers, including many small businesses, will be able to compete and win in new markets. I look forward to signing these agreements, which will help achieve my goal of doubling American exports and keeping America competitive in the 21st century.”
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2009: The President displays his skills in the Korean martial art of taekwondo at the presidential office in Seoul. South Korean President Lee Myung-bak gave him a taekwondo uniform and black belt as a gift during his visit to the office for summit talks.
Charles P. Pierce: …. The only unemployment problem that concerns congressional Republicans at the moment is the problem that Barack Obama is not yet unemployed … Not a single Republican senator voted for this thing….
All of these guys represent states with severe unemployment problems. All of these guys represent states with rotting sewer systems, unstable bridges, and crumbling schools …. Hey, Pat Toomey, congratulations for saving 35,000 Pennsylvania schools from the horrors of modernization. And Marco Rubio acted boldly to rescue Florida from $1.6 billion in highway repairs.
The Republicans, en masse, have decided that, in the interest of doing away with a Democratic president, they will decline even to discuss the most fundamental responsibility of government: keeping the damn country from falling apart. It was an altogether remarkable moment. The president should have known from the second his hand came off the Bible that the other party had no goal except making sure that he failed….
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Mediaite
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Steve Benen: With Senate Democrats preparing to push individual votes on the component parts of the American Jobs Act, they do so knowing that the public is on their side.
….. In fact (in the latest NBC News poll), with 63% of Americans supporting the president’s jobs ideas, it appears that the only thing that’s more popular are tax increases on the rich - the NBC/WSJ found 64% believe it’s a “good idea” to ask the wealthy and corporations to pay more …. With poll numbers like these, is it any wonder Democrats intend to keep pushing forward on this?
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James Bouie (The Nation): ….In the parallel world where political actors are held responsible for their actions, headlines would announce that Republicans - acting on mindless hostility to President Obama - kept more than $400 billion in needed stimulus (including $175 billion in tax cuts) from reaching the economy, leaving millions without assistance and pushing the country closer to a second recession.
As it stands, newspaper writers are content to leave Republicans off the hook for their relentless obstructionism. To wit, here’s the New York Times with a description of last night’s action in the Senate:
In a major setback for President Obama, the Senate on Tuesday blocked consideration of his $447 billion jobs bill …. The legislation, announced with fanfare by the president at a joint session of Congress last month, fell short of the 60 needed to overcome procedural hurdles in the Senate.
This use of the passive voice might make sense if legislating were a game of Calvinball, and the AJA was blocked by a sudden and arbitrary new rule. But of course, that’s not what happened. The American Jobs Act failed because Senate Republicans chose to invoke the filibuster and raise the threshold for passage to sixty votes….
Since Obama entered office, media outlets - and newspapers especially - have obscured the locus of Congressional obstruction. The filibuster has become a routine part of Washington, and few people bother to note the extent to which its current use is ahistorical and unprecedented. This refusal to blame Republicans for their actions didn’t make sense to me then, and it doesn’t make sense to me now.
I believed in him, and he let me down: 40
He’s doing great: 1
I never believed in him: 27
He’s doing the best he can: 22
Did you vote in the 2010 midterm elections?
Yes: 39 No: 55
No, but only because I wasn’t 18: 5
Rank yourself on the following Scale of Liberalism:
Not liberal at all: 6
Liberal but fairly mainstream (i.e., Barack Obama): 3
Strongly liberal (i.e., Paul Krugman): 12
Fed up with Democrats, believe country needs overhaul (i.e., Ralph Nader): 41
Convinced the U.S. government is no better than, say, Al Qaeda (i.e., Noam Chomsky): 34
TPM: And so it begins. On a press call Wednesday, David Axelrod took direct aim at Mitt Romney, signalling that Obama’s campaign is ready to engage with the man most see as the likely Republican nominee…
To take on Romney, Axelrod used an old saw: The man is a flip-flopper, he told reporters. …. “I know Gov. Perry has made some halting efforts to do that in debates, but he hasn’t exactly gotten the gun out of the holster,” Axelrod said. “So I wouldn’t exactly say that Gov. Romney has been scrutinized to the degree that he will or he should.”
…. Axelrod said that Romney’s been pretty good so far at shifting with the political winds. “I will give him this: he is as vehement and as strong in his convictions when he takes one position as he is when he takes the diametrically opposite position. And that is something that in the short-term you can get rewarded for.”
But in the long run, Romney’s past will come back to haunt him. “George Burns once said, ‘all you need to succeed in show business is sincerity and if you can fake that you’ve got it made.’ And there’s something to that in politics as well,” Axelrod said. “But I don’t think you can do that in a presidential campaign. Ultimately people want to know who you are, what you believe and what you’re willing to stand for.”
ABC: If his campaign for a second term is like a basketball game, President Obama says it’s nearing halftime, he’s down on the scoreboard, and facing a full court press.
Obama told a crowd of campaign donors, including a mix of past and present NBA stars, in Florida tonight that “this is like the second quarter, maybe the third. And we’ve still got a lot of work to do.”
“But I want everyone to know I’m a fourth-quarter player,” he said. “I don’t miss my shots in the fourth quarter.”
Obama spoke at the glitzy Lake Mary, Fla., home of attorney John Morgan, one of his top volunteer fundraisers, or bundlers, where around 100 guests paid at least $1,500 to see the president speak. Proceeds flowed to the Obama Victory Fund, a joint account between the Obama Campaign and the Democratic National Committee.
NBA all-star Grant Hill, Boston Celtics coach Doc Rivers, Orlando Magic center Dwight Howard and Phoenix Suns guard Vince Carter were among the pro basketball players in attendance, according to press pool reports. The official invitation for the event also listed ex-NBA great Patrick Ewing as a co-host.
“So as long as we’ve got a strong team and everybody’s engaged and involved, we’re not just going to win this election,” Obama said. “We are going to win this election and then we are going to make sure that we rebuild this country.”
President Obama shakes hands with U.S. Army Sgt. First Class Leroy Arthur Petry of Santa Fe, N.M., after being introduced by Petry, who received the Medal of Honor, before speaking at the White House Forum on American Latino Heritage
Greg Sargent: …. Yesterday in the Senate, Republicans - joined by two Dems - unanimously blocked passage of Obama’s jobs bill, even though a majority of the Senate wanted to act. While this was a defeat for Obama, it also gave the White House the positioning it wants for the next phase of this fight, in which Obama will now pressure Congress to take a stand on individual pieces of his plan. Which is to say, Obama will pressure Congress to reveal whether it’s willing to take any action at all at a time of nine percent unemployment and mass economic suffering and anxiety.
Meanwhile, the Republican candidates met for a debate last night, and they uniformly agreed on one thing: Government is the problem, and must be rolled back on multiple fronts if we are to have any hope of a recovery.
And so, the White House, facing certain defeat on the jobs bill, at least established a baseline for the 2012 fight, which will be all about a simple question: Can and should our public officials act to bring relief to the American people at a time of national crisis? Or should government simply move out of the way and let the private sector right itself of its own accord?
…. The media play the White House wanted: The AP headline tells the story just as the White House hoped: “Senate Republicans vote to kill Obama’s jobs bill.”
This is the positioning the White House was going for: Republicans blocked the will of the majority by killing Obama’s effort at action on unemployment, and now Obama will continue the campaign by demanding they take a stand on the bill’s individual provisions, which poll very well.
Joan Ruaiz (Guest blogger at Extreme Liberal): … Simply put, the Occupy Wall Street Movement is Americans’ individual calls of shame on corporate greed, but done collectively. It represents the frustrations of millions of Americans who did everything right, but have been forced to realize that their hard work no longer brings with it the promised spoils of the American Dream….
Interestingly, there are various diverging interest groups who seek to mold this burgeoning movement into their own image.
There are the Ron Paul supporters who mistakenly believe that they share a common link with the OWS, simply because it is a movement that isn’t positive towards the accepted status quo. They ignore that many in the movement are demanding more financial regulations, not less, that the unemployed within the movement want stronger social programs to assist those hit hardest, not weaker ones…
…. the Tea Party supporters selfishly want to believe that this OWS movement is against the government, when it really isn’t. OWS protestors actually are demanding more governmental intervention in reigning in corporate greed, not a system of laissez-faire “free” markets where only the strong survive….
… the folks of no party, always dissatisfied with everything, going way back, don’t see that many of the protestors are seeking workable solutions that can be implemented effectively and immediately. They are already tired to death of waiting.
11:35 President Obama delivers remarks at the White House Forum on American Latino Heritage
2:40 The President meets with the National Association of Evangelicals Executive Committee
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Steve Benen: There were no doubts about the eventual outcome of the Senate fight over the American Jobs Act. Democrats would have needed at least seven Republicans who were willing to let members vote on the legislation, and the actual number was zero…..
…. Yesterday, there were reports that several members of the Senate Democratic caucus - Ben Nelson, Joe Manchin, Joe Lieberman, Jim Webb, Jeanne Shaheen, and Jon Tester - who would either vote with Republicans or fail to vote at all. The result would have been a political loss as well as a legislative one - Republicans would have been able to argue, accurately, that a majority of the Senate rejected the president’s jobs bill.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid deserves a lot of credit for making sure that didn’t happen. In the end, the American Jobs Act got 51 votes, and only two Dems - Nebraska’s Ben Nelson and Montana’s Jon Tester - sided with Republicans. (The official final tally was 50 to 49, but that’s only because Reid had to switch his vote for procedural reasons.)
…. What matters most is that Senate Republicans, in the midst of a jobs crisis and intense public demand for congressional action, killed a credible jobs bill for no apparent reason…..literally every Republican in the Senate - including the alleged “moderates” - not only rejected the popular jobs bill, they refused to even let the chamber vote on it at all. That should be the front-page story nationwide this morning.
Full post here
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Robert Shrum: …. on the one hand, Romney charges Obama with slashing defense spending, when it has increased every year during this administration. On the other hand, he insists that he favored health-care reform only at the state level, when it’s indisputable that he offered Massachusetts as a national model both in 2008 and in the first edition of his book. It was titled No Apologies, but he’s been apologizing on health care ever since. And he never misses an opportunity for opportunism: An advocate of privatizing Social Security, he’s now attacking Perry by posing as the program’s defender.
Romney is a poser but he’s the only viable nominee the party now has …. but he will be hobbled by his own record as a take-over artist who dismembered companies and destroyed jobs - and by the positions he’s taken against tax fairness and in favor of unfettered speculation.
…. It’s clear that the president won’t let 2012 be cast as a referendum; he’s now setting out the basic choice: Who’s on your side? Romney will call this class warfare, but people are coming to understand that we’ve already had a decade of class warfare - against the middle-class….
Mitt Romney will be ill-prepared for this contest. He will enter the general election burdened by the craziness to which he’s had to kowtow. The primaries are also stripping away the strands of his already threadbare character. And they’re leaving him on the wrong side of the great dividing line of 2012 - for the privileged, not ordinary people.
Full article here
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Michael Tomasky: This was supposed to be the first debate that (finally!) had real drama … Well, they were all pretty terrible. But, it must be said, by degree. Romney was unbad enough to stay ahead … He wasn’t good, but he wasn’t bad enough to lose ground.
Cain has become a better debater. He has mastered that first-level trick of sounding like he knows what he’s talking about. He hasn’t mastered the second-level art of actually knowing what he’s talking about, but, then, few of them do…
Perry? He choked badly on an early big moment when Charlie Rose asked him what his plan was. He stumbled his way into some boilerplate about energy, but he spoke unconfidently and was looking at Charlie as a child looks at his teacher while trying to remember that middle string of the alphabet….
Michele Bachmann is gone, poor gal … Ron Paul wastes everyone’s time, starting with his….
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