President Barack Obama talks on the phone with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, in the Oval Office, Sept. 28, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Charles Pierce: …..the footage offers an extraordinary look at what the candidate is like when he’s around people he perceives to be worthy of what he believes is the truth….
To this moment, I guarantee you, Romney is probably astonished at what all the fuss is about. This is simply the way the world is …. He is what his golden life has made him to be….
…. We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he’s a fake, which means he’s not a very good one. There’s really only one campaign left to him now.
Unfortunately for American politics, that means only one thing. It’s going to get extraordinarily dirty extraordinarily fast. There is going to be pale birtherism and barely covert racism ….. There is going to be poor-baiting, and gay-baiting, and ladyparts-baiting, and probably baiting of things I haven’t thought of yet……
Yet another TOD post that has been reblogged by Jueseppi B, despite requests that he make his own effort to support PBO rather than copying others simply to drive up his reblog’s traffic. He doesn’t take kindly to being challenged, as another woman found out: explicit. Genuine bloggers are welcome to use anything they ever see at TOD. Thanks
Steve Benen: …. I watch a whole lot of Obama’s speeches, and I’d say he seemed a little more fired up than usual. (Pay particular attention to his tone of voice in the last 90 seconds.)
Las Vegas, August 22
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Politico: President Obama said he’s beating Mitt Romney “by a few points” and said time is running out in the 2012 presidential election.
“I can’t resist a basketball analogy,” he told donors at a Lincoln Center fundraiser that featured NBA commissioner David Stern and current and former basketball stars including Michael Jordan. “We are in the fourth quarter. We’re up by a few points but the other side is coming strong and they, they, they play a little dirty. We’ve got a few folks on our team in foul trouble. We’ve got a couple of injuries and I believe that they’ve got one last run in them.”
“I’d say there’s about seven minutes to go in the game. And Michael’s competitiveness is legendary and nobody knows better than Michael that if you’ve got a little bit of a lead and there’s about seven minutes ago, that’s when you put them away.”
Politico: President Obama mocked Missouri Rep. Todd Akin here, telling a fundraising crowd packed with pro basketball stars that the embattled Senate candidate “somehow missed science class.”
“Recently some of you have been paying attention to the commentary about the senator from Missouri, Mr. Akin,” Obama said. “The interesting thing here is that this, this is an individual who sits on the House Committee on Science and Technology but somehow missed science class. And it’s representative of the desire to go backwards instead of forwards and fight fights that we thought were settled 20 or 30 years ago.”