12:05: President Obama delivers remarks at a campaign event at Sloan’s Lake Park, Denver
1:35: Departs Denver
2:15: Vice President Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at the Mid-America Center in Council Bluffs, IA
3:35: President Obama arrives in Madison, Wis.
4:40: Delivers remarks at a campaign event at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
6:05: Departs Madison
8:05: Arrives at the White House
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NYT: Mitt Romney repeatedly questioned President Obama’s honesty at Wednesday night’s debate …. but he made a number of misleading statements himself on the size of the federal deficits, taxes, Medicare and health care……
Doubling the Deficit: Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama had doubled the deficit. That is not true….
Green Energy: Mr. Romney said that half the companies backed by the president’s green energy stimulus program have gone out of business. That is a gross overstatement. Of nearly three dozen recipients of loans under the Department of Energy’s loan guarantee program, only three are currently in bankruptcy…..
The $716 Billion Cut From Medicare: Mr. Obama first brought up Mr. Romney’s frequent criticism that the president cut $716 billion from Medicare, by saying the cost savings were from reduced payments to insurance companies and other health care providers. But Mr. Romney repeated the claim, suggesting that the $716 billion in Medicare reductions would indeed come from current beneficiaries.
While fact-checkers have repeatedly debunked this claim, it remains a standard attack line for Mr. Romney…..
LA Times: Mitt Romney repeated a number of erroneous claims during Wednesday’s debate about President Obama’s healthcare law, including that it relies on a board that will decide “what kind of treatment” patients can get.
This is a myth advanced repeatedly by critics of the Affordable Care Act and debunked consistently by independent fact-checkers.
…. The panel of independent experts is empowered to suggest cuts to how much the federal government pays healthcare providers … but is explicitly prohibited from cutting benefits for people on Medicare.
CNN: A new survey indicates President Barack Obama moved up four points following the Democratic National Convention last week, and now has a six point advantage over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney.
According to a CNN/ORC International Poll released Monday, 52% of likely voters nationwide back the president, compared to 46% for Romney. Just before the convention in Charlotte, North Carolina, Obama was tied with Romney 48%-48%.
President Obama last week promised a boom in manufacturing and 1 million new jobs if he is reelected.
But is the boom for real? For high-paying, skilled manufacturing jobs, it just might be.
The number of job openings for skilled factory workers has increased 38% since 2005, according to numbers from the Conference Board that measure labor demand across industries.
More strikingly, the sharpest increase in postings for skilled workers – 152% – has occurred in the last three or so years.
Steve Benen: “Obamacare” is working: “The share of young adults without health insurance fell by one-sixth in 2011 from the previous year, the largest annual decline for any age group since the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention began collecting the data in 1997.” (See NYT)
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WSJ: The Planned Parenthood Action Fund is making one of the largest ad buys in its history, buying $3.2 million TV time in the battleground states of Virginia and Ohio, saying Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is bad for women’s health.
Tuesday: To mark the 11th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, the President, the First Lady and White House staff will gather on the South Lawn of the White House Tuesday morning to observe a moment of silence. Later that morning, they will travel to the Pentagon Memorial. In the afternoon, the President will travel to Walter Reed National Military Medical Center and visit with wounded warriors who are being treated at the hospital and their families
Wednesday: The President will travel to Las Vegas and Denver for campaign events. He will remain overnight in Denver
Thursday: The President will travel to Arvada, Colorado. He will return to the White House in the evening
Friday: The President and First Lady will welcome the 2012 U.S. Olympic and Paralympic teams to the White House
Msg from The Obama Diary: Genuine bloggers who create their own posts are welcome to use anything from TOD – rebloggers, who only copy others in an attempt to up their traffic, are not. Like the reblogger who treats women like this – explicit – while copying TOD posts on women’s rights. He belongs in the GOP.
Msg from The Obama Diary: Genuine bloggers who create their own posts, are welcome to use anything they ever see at TOD – rebloggers, who just copy others’ posts in an attempt to up their traffic, are not. Especially rebloggers who talk to women like this – explicit – while copying TOD posts on women’s rights. Thanks.
Greg Sargent: As you’ve surely heard by now, two GOP convention attendees were ejected from the festivities last night after throwing nuts at a black CNN camera-woman. The words “this is how we feed animals” were uttered.
…. CNN put out its own terse statement last night confirming the bare minimum about the affair ….. the question is whether CNN, which presumably knows all the details about the incident, will treat this as a news story, and report in full detail what happened.
…. It’s a tough spot for the network, but CNN is a news organization. It’s not in the business of withholding information about newsworthy events. Given the seemingly deplorable nature of this event, and given that it took place on the scene of the biggest story in politics right now, you’d think CNN will eventually err on the side of informing people, rather than the opposite.
Andrew Sullivan: Why CNN Sucks – Because it has a huge story on its hands – an insight into ugly racism among the GOP base….
…. If I were the camerawoman involved, this would not be enough. CNN has now run a small story on the incident but doesn’t seem to be pushing it. Why? Because this awful notion of balance – which requires journalists to be lobotomized when assessing reality – is “on-brand”. Oy.
Steve Benen: The general trend on initial unemployment claims over the last few months has been largely encouraging, despite occasional setbacks, and most analysts expected this morning’s report to show a modest uptick in filings.
The good news is, that didn’t happen. In fact, initial jobless claims reached a four-year low last week, and the new totals were unchanged this week.
Greg Sargent: At yesterday’s debate, Mitt Romney and the other candidates went all in on birth control – sorry, “religious liberty” – in blasting President Obama over the contraception controversy…. But some new polling out this morning from Quinnipiac illustrates the risk Republicans are taking with this latest reprise of the culture wars:
President Obama recently announced an adjustment to the administration’s health-care rule regarding religiously affiliated employers providing birth control coverage to female employees. Women will still be guaranteed coverage for birth control without any out-of-pocket cost, but will have to seek the coverage directly from their insurance companies if their employers object to birth control on religious grounds. Do you approve or disapprove of President Obama’s decision?
Steve Benen: …… Romney added that Obama is “requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.”
It is, in fact, literally “unbelievable,” since that’s not at all what the administration is doing.
It was painful enough to have so much of the debate focus on opposition to birth control, but Romney’s dishonesty managed to make a mind-numbing discussion even worse.
Ronald Brownstein (National Journal): ….. Some of Romney’s answers could come back to haunt him, not in the primary but in a general election, if he gets that far.
At a time when some Republicans are already concerned that he has narrowed his potential support among Latinos with an unflinching embrace of conservative positions on immigration (like “self-deportation”), Romney doubled down by insisting that on “day one” as president he would drop the federal legal challenge to Arizona’s tough state statute against illegal immigration.
And on the same day that an NBC/Marist poll already showed Romney trailing President Obama by 18 percentage points in Michigan, a state Republicans once hoped to contest this fall, Romney likewise doubled down on his criticism of the auto rescue engineered by Bush and Obama – and sprinkled in some especially sharp rhetoric against the United Auto Workers union for good measure.
E.J. Dionne: They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist….
Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.
Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies … And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.
….. As for Obama as a socialist, ponder two numbers: 13,005, which the Dow Jones average hit this week, up from a low point of 6,547 in March 2009. Some socialist.
We are blessed with the freedom to say whatever we want about our president. But those who cast Obama as something other than one of us don’t understand him and don’t understand what it means to be American.
Secretary of Defense Leo Panetta, First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden at an event to announce a new report outlining opportunities and best practices for states to better support military spouses serving in professions with state licensure requirements at the Pentagon in Washington
Nate Silver: The last time I considered Barack Obama’s re-election chances in this magazine, in mid-November, things were looking pretty bleak for the president. The statistical model I used measured three key factors — a president’s approval rating, economic growth and the ideological orientation of his opponent — and taken together, they showed that Obama had become a slight underdog to win re-election.
Three months later, his position is much stronger……
PPP: Michigan is looking more and more like it won’t be in the swing state column this fall. PPP’s newest poll there finds Barack Obama leading the entire Republican field by double digits.
The biggest surprise in the numbers might be how badly Obama is beating Mitt Romney- he leads him by 16 points at 54-38. That’s a major departure from PPP’s previous 3 Michigan President polls, which found Obama ahead by only 4-7 points. Romney’s seen a major decline in his personal favorability in the state over the last 6 months from 39/43 to now 29/58. His numbers have dropped across the board but the most striking shift is with independents. He’s gone from a +14 spread with them at 48/34 to a -20 one at 32/52.
USA Today: President Obama has outraised the top Republican presidential fundraiser in two-thirds of the country, including battleground states such as Pennsylvania and North Carolina considered crucial to his re-election prospects, a USA TODAY analysis shows.
In 19 states, Obama collected more than his four major GOP rivals combined… Obama also has a fundraising edge over Romney in all but two of a dozen swing states – Florida and Michigan, where Romney was born and his father served as governor in the 1960s.
Thursday: PBO will attend campaign events in Corona del Mar, California before traveling to San Francisco, California to attend campaign events. He will spend the night in San Francisco.
Friday: PBO will travel to the Seattle where he will continue to discuss his blueprint for an economy built to last. He will also attend campaign events in the Seattle area before returning to Washington, D.C. later in the evening.
BMG: The next big prize in the GOP primaries is Michigan, one of Mitt Romney’s five home states. He’s released an ad showing him driving around in a fancy Chrysler while he talks about how much he loves Michigan, and all…..
And here’s the problem: that Chrysler that he’s driving is a 300 model, and the 300 is made in Canada…..
President Barack Obama talks on the phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, Feb. 13, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Tuesday: PBO and the Vice President will meet with Vice President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China at the White House.
Wednesday: PBO will travel to Master Lock in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to continue to discuss his blueprint for an economy built to last based on American manufacturing and the importance of companies insourcing and investing in America. He will then travel to Los Angeles, California where he will attend campaign events. He will spend the night in Los Angeles.
Thursday: PBO will attend campaign events in Corona del Mar, California before traveling to San Francisco, California to attend campaign events. He will spend the night in San Francisco.
Friday: PBO will travel to the Seattle where he will continue to discuss his blueprint for an economy built to last. He will also attend campaign events in the Seattle area before returning to Washington, D.C. later in the evening.
PoliticalWire: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina rallied local volunteers in Arizona over the weekend by assuring them that Obama intends to compete in Arizona, according to the Arizona Republic.
Said Messina: “People said last time, ‘Oh, you can’t win Virginia,’ until we did. ‘You can’t win Florida,’ until we did. ‘You can never win North Carolina,’ until we did. And so a whole bunch of people are saying, ‘Can he win Arizona? Can he not win Arizona?’ The fact is you all are the secret weapon we have.”
The campaign will soon have four offices in the state.
Pew Research: Barack Obama now holds an eight-point lead over Mitt Romney in a general election matchup, and he has gained significant ground among independent voters. A month ago, 40% of independents said they would back Obama over Romney – today 51% say they would, while the number expressing support for Romney has slipped from 50% to 42%.
Paul Krugman: Mitt Romney has a gift for words – self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”
As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
evening all
Tags: adele, arizona, Barack, budget, cnn, comment, contraception, contraceptives, cpac, do, dog, exports, facts, Gingrich, gop, how, i, interview, jim, krugman, let's, light, lighting, messina, Michelle, mitt, Newt, Obama, office, oval, Paul, payroll, phone, photo, poll, President, robert, romney, schedule, shrum, stay, tax, together, toon, tweet, Twitter, up, video
President Barack Obama talks on the phone with British Prime Minister David Cameron in the Oval Office, Feb. 13, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
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ThinkProgress
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The week ahead:
Tuesday: PBO and the Vice President will meet with Vice President Xi Jinping of the People’s Republic of China at the White House.
Wednesday: PBO will travel to Master Lock in Milwaukee, Wisconsin to continue to discuss his blueprint for an economy built to last based on American manufacturing and the importance of companies insourcing and investing in America. He will then travel to Los Angeles, California where he will attend campaign events. He will spend the night in Los Angeles.
Thursday: PBO will attend campaign events in Corona del Mar, California before traveling to San Francisco, California to attend campaign events. He will spend the night in San Francisco.
Friday: PBO will travel to the Seattle where he will continue to discuss his blueprint for an economy built to last. He will also attend campaign events in the Seattle area before returning to Washington, D.C. later in the evening.
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Business Insider
Thanks Loriah
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TPM
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PoliticalWire: Obama campaign manager Jim Messina rallied local volunteers in Arizona over the weekend by assuring them that Obama intends to compete in Arizona, according to the Arizona Republic.
Said Messina: “People said last time, ‘Oh, you can’t win Virginia,’ until we did. ‘You can’t win Florida,’ until we did. ‘You can never win North Carolina,’ until we did. And so a whole bunch of people are saying, ‘Can he win Arizona? Can he not win Arizona?’ The fact is you all are the secret weapon we have.”
The campaign will soon have four offices in the state.
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The Week
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ThinkProgress
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Thanks Jeremy!
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Pew Research: Barack Obama now holds an eight-point lead over Mitt Romney in a general election matchup, and he has gained significant ground among independent voters. A month ago, 40% of independents said they would back Obama over Romney – today 51% say they would, while the number expressing support for Romney has slipped from 50% to 42%.
More here
Thanks Loriah
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Paul Krugman: Mitt Romney has a gift for words – self-destructive words. On Friday he did it again, telling the Conservative Political Action Conference that he was a “severely conservative governor.”
As Molly Ball of The Atlantic pointed out, Mr. Romney “described conservatism as if it were a disease.” Indeed. Mark Liberman, a linguistics professor at the University of Pennsylvania, provided a list of words that most commonly follow the adverb “severely”; the top five, in frequency of use, are disabled, depressed, ill, limited and injured.
That’s clearly not what Mr. Romney meant to convey. Yet if you look at the race for the G.O.P. presidential nomination, you have to wonder whether it was a Freudian slip. For something has clearly gone very wrong with modern American conservatism.
Full post here
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DCCC
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Thanks What is Working
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The Week
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For newcomers here – welcome! – I’ve added a new section explaining how to comment on the blog. Check the sidebar on the right. Thank you.
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CNN iReport sits down with first lady Michelle Obama to discuss the second anniversary of her Let’s Move initiative.
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Oh go on, one more time……