WH: As part of their “In Performance at the White House” series, the President and First Lady will host a concert in the East Room honoring singer-songwriter Carole King, who will be awarded the 2013 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. The program will include performances by King, as well as Gloria Estefan, Billy Joel, Jesse McCartney, Emeli Sandé, James Taylor and Trisha Yearwood.
The entire event will be streamed live on White House Live. “Carole King: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize In Performance at the White House” will be broadcast Tuesday, May 28 at 8:00 PM ET on PBS stations nationwide…
This will be the first time the Gershwin Prize honor has been awarded to a woman…
10:0: President Obama delivers a statement on the Oklahoma tornados
Not sure if this is going ahead:
11:0: President Obama and VP Biden meet with DREAMers whose parents are in the country illegally and “who are directly affected by our broken immigration system”.
12:30: Jay Carney briefs the press
5:30: VP Biden delivers remarks at a reception hosted by the DNC in honor of Jewish American Heritage Month at the American Institute of Architects
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Best way to help tornado victims is to donate to the Red Cross at redcross.org or text REDCROSS to 90999. #okwx
White House statement: “…. Overnight, the President approved a Major Disaster Deceleration for Oklahoma, making federal funding available to support affected individuals, as well as additional federal assistance to support immediate response and recovery efforts.
“This morning the President will receive a briefing in the Oval Office on the response by Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism Lisa Monaco, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, Chief of Staff Denis McDonough, Deputy Chief of Staff Alyssa Mastromonaco and other senior members of the President’s response team. …
“At the President’s direction, FEMA Administrator Craig Fugate is traveling to Oklahoma this morning to ensure all Federal resources are supporting our state, local, and tribal partners in life saving and safety operations including search and rescue.
“FEMA has been supporting the state’s response since Sunday. At the request of the state, FEMA deployed a liaison to the state emergency operations center Sunday night.”
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Wanting to offset costs of relief to Oklahoma with budget offsets is heinous. It is literally sick.
Steve Benen: …. Ordinarily, so soon after a disaster of this magnitude, discussions about political agendas and ideologies are put on hold, which is why it came as a surprise when one of Oklahoma’s U.S. senators staked out a far-right position on federal disaster relief just five hours after the storm hit…..
I’ve seen many note overnight that Coburn is at least consistent ….. but while consistently is welcome, it doesn’t change the questions about unnecessary callousness…..
Glenn Kessler, the Washington Post’s resident Fact Denier (who so brilliantly agreed with Darrell Issa when he said an “act of terror” is not a “terrorist attack”) excelled himself today – he gave ‘Three Pinocchios’ to White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer for stating the facts: that the Benghazi emails were doctored in an attempt to smear the President.
Seriously.
So, his problem is with Pfeiffer, not with those who doctored the emails or the reporters who used them for their ‘exclusives’.
There are too many ‘highlights’ to choose from, here are two:
“….. the reporters involved have indicated they were told by their sources that these were summaries, taken from notes of e-mails that could not be kept.”
So, why did Jon Karl repeatedly imply that he had seen the original emails?
“Despite Pfeiffer’s claim of political skullduggery, we see little evidence that much was at play here besides imprecise wordsmithing or editing errors by journalists.”
Alex Sietz-Wald: This week, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough joined the chorus of those decrying the IRS for targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny in applying for nonprofit status. “You can’t allow the government to tread on political speech,” Scarborough said. “The Internal Revenue Service — the taxman — to go after their political beliefs. … I can’t imagine much worse than this,” he added.
Targeting nonprofit groups because of their political beliefs is wrong — pretty much everyone agrees on that. So today’s Scarborough must be outraged by his 2003 self, which gave this monologue on his show “Scarborough Country” on July 13, 2003:
The leader of the NAACP bashes President Bush and the Republican Party. Why is this clearly partisan group still being funded by your tax dollars? [...]
[T]he NAACP continues to get a free ride off of taxpayers because of the tax-exempt status that’s conferred to them by our federal government, now, this despite the fact the NAACP produced and ran the most vicious campaign attack ad in the history of televised presidential campaign. [...]
Rick Ungar: Over the first four years of the Obama presidency, the deficit shrunk by a total of $300 billion dollars. That is not the national debt- it is the amount of money we spend each year relative to the amount we take in. According to the latest CBO report,
“Compared to the size of the economy, the deficit in 2013 is much lower than in 2009, when Obama took office. The deficit will be 5.3 percent of gross domestic product this year, nearly half the 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009.”
The improvement in the deficit as measured against GDP is the direct result of the deficit falling to $845 billion for fiscal year 2013—a $300 billion improvement over the previous year. And the positive trend is projected to continue though the next fiscal year where the the annual budgetary deficit will fall again to $430 billion.
Five Takeaways From The CBO’s Analysis Of Obama’s Budget
Dylan Matthews: For the most part, the description of President Obama’s budget found in the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of it jibes with the description included in the initial budget release. But the CBO analysis does highlight some interesting features of the proposal. Here are a few.
1:05: Tours Ellicott Dredges (which manufactures innovative dredges and dredge equipment being sold for infrastructure projects across the country and around the world)
1:20: Delivers remarks
2:15: Visits a community center
3:0: Departs Baltimore
3:25: Arrives the White House
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Kevin Drum (Mother Jones): It’s Official: Those Bogus Email Leaks Came From Republicans
It’s not as if we didn’t know this already, but Major Garrett made it official: last week’s leaks that misquoted the Benghazi emails came directly from Republicans….
So here’s what happened. Republicans in Congress saw copies of these emails two months ago and did nothing with them. It was obvious that they showed little more than routine interagency haggling. Then someone got the bright idea of leaking two isolated tidbits and mischaracterizing them in an effort to make the State Department look bad…..
But it was typical GOP overreach. To their surprise, the White House took Republicans up on their demand to make the entire email chain public, thus making it clear to the press that they had been burned. And now reporters are letting us all know who was behind it.
Steve Benen: Whether or not an issue is a “scandal” tends to be a subjective question — one voter’s world-changing controversy may be another voter’s meaningless distraction. Indeed, the Beltway has spent a week telling the nation that the White House is engulfed in three ongoing scandals, though many of us suspect this analysis is deeply flawed.
But if we’re going to talk about real political scandals, can we at least have a conversation about Republicans lying to reporters about Benghazi?
Jeffrey Goldberg (Bloomberg): So it turns out that Susan Rice, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations and, before a group of leading Senate Republicans decided that she was evil incarnate, a top contender to replace Hillary Clinton as secretary of state, had nothing to do with formulating the White House’s response to the fatal attacks last year at the American diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Libya.
…. Republican Senators Lindsey Graham and John McCain, among others, argued for weeks that Rice was a crucial cog in a huge conspiracy to hide the facts of Benghazi from the American people….
…. I don’t expect that Graham will apologize to Rice for accusing her of engaging in an enormous conspiracy, when all she seems to have done is take the consensus of several government agencies and present it publicly. But you would hope Graham would think twice before threatening again to stop her advancement in government.
