Today With President Barack Obama

Thursday, May 03, 2012

Full video.

Life of Julia

Great idea from the Obama campaign.
With ads like Life of Julia and this (effective and true--not lies), Romney's going to have a tough time:

Bin Laden's Letters from Abbottabad Released

You can read them here.

Wednesday, May 02, 2012

Obama's Schedule May 3

Times are eastern.

12:30 PM
Obama and the Biden meet for lunch.

2:00 PM
Obama meets with senior advisors.

5:00 PM
Obama delivers remarks at a Cinco de Mayo Reception. Live stream.

Obama's Condolences to Netanyahu

President Obama called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel today from Air Force One to express his personal condolences on the death of his father, Benzion Netanyahu. In the call the President noted Benzion Netanyahu’s remarkable legacy of service to the Jewish people and deep friendship with the United States.

US Premature Births on Par with Somalia

But who needs healthcare? US is ranked 131 out of 184.

Shep Smith on Romney's Reaction to Newt's Quitting

The entire GOP is now armed with Etch a Sketches.

Ann Romney tweeted this photo of her BFF a while ago:

Obama Administration Takedown of Medicare Fraudsters

Getting the bad guys:

As of today, as part of a coordinated, nationwide takedown, the Medicare Fraud Strike Force – a joint initiative led by the Departments of Justice and HHS that’s comprised of federal, state, and local investigators and law enforcement officials from across the country – has charged 107 defendants in seven different cities for their alleged participation in Medicare fraud schemes involving approximately $452 million in false billings. This is the highest amount of alleged false Medicare billings involved in a single takedown in the Strike Force’s 5-year history.

The defendants charged include doctors, nurses, social workers, health-care company owners, and others – who are accused of a range of serious offenses, including health-care fraud, conspiracy to commit health-care fraud, money laundering, and violations of the anti-kickback statutes. And this takedown would not have been possible without the tireless efforts of roughly 500 agents and investigators nationwide – from the FBI and state and local officers, to the HHS Office of the Inspector General and multiple Medicare Fraud Control Units. Read the rest at DoJ

Bin Laden Raid Should Most Definitely be Politicized

Presidential campaigns are when we most discuss the most important issues; Romney shouldn’t have declared this particular one off limits. He could, instead, have responded in one of a hundred different ways—perhaps by concentrating on asking whether the war, in the past four years, has really gone the way anyone would have wanted. (Instead, as John Cassidy writes, Obama’s ad has proved to be something of a trap for Romney.)

Almost every decisive point in the ten-year story that followed the attack, after all, was highly political in character. These were precisely the issues that the founders regarded as proper subjects for argument. The list of questions that we have had to confront practically, not just abstractly, reads like a catechism of citizenship. When should we go to war? What are the limits of habeas corpus? What are our priorities—financial, moral, military—as a nation? What are the rights of citizens, and of strangers? What do Congress, the Court, and the President each get to decide? How much can we know about what they do? Is torture worth it? What are my rights? Should we sneak into South Asian countries and assassinate our enemies in the middle of the night? These are all matters for politics. And, again, in the past decade there haven’t been too many questions raised about them; there were, again, too few. And too often the critics were told to just be quiet and keep national security out of politics. Read it all at the New Yorker.

Conservative Media Message Appeals to Fear

I don't watch or read Rachel Maddow near enough because I try not to take in too much "liberal" media. But she's got to be the smartest person in news. I'm almost convinced she's beyond a liberal media slant.
Maddow talks about how the conservative media appeals to fear by telling people that they are The Way and that everyone else is out to get them. Which makes sense, because being conservative is about being fearful, so conservative media has to appeal to conservatives' desire to feel safe.

Vanity Fair's Young Obama Through Eyes of Genevieve

Update: Historian on the new Obama book.

Update: Politico, Drudge make arses of themselves.

I thought this was going to be salacious, but it's a fascinating look at a young, thinking and complex Obama through the eyes of a former girlfriend in the upcoming issue of Vanity Fair. Excerpts from Obama's letters to her:

In one letter she told Obama that she was writing a paper in her modern-poetry class at Occidental about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy:

I haven’t read “The Waste Land” for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements—Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he’s less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there’s a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism—Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it’s due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter—life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot’s irreconcilable ambivalence; don’t you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?
He was trying to find his place in the whirl of humanity, while at the same time refining the literary riffs that filled up page after page of his journals. Here’s a passage from another section of that same letter:

Moments trip gently along over here. Snow caps the bushes in unexpected ways, birds shoot and spin like balls of sound. My feet hum over the dry walks. A storm smoothes the sky, impounding the city lights, returning to us a dull yellow glow. I run every other day at the small indoor track [at Columbia] which slants slightly upward like a plate; I stretch long and slow, twist and shake, the fatigue, the inertia finding home in different parts of the body. I check the time and growl—aargh!—and tumble onto the wheel. And bodies crowd and give off heat, some people are in front and you can hear the patter or plod of the steps behind. You look down to watch your feet, neat unified steps, and you throw back your arms and run after people, and run from them and with them, and sometimes someone will shadow your pace, step for step, and you can hear the person puffing, a different puff than yours, and on a good day they’ll come up alongside and thank you for a good run, for keeping a good pace, and you nod and keep going on your way, but you’re pretty pleased, and your stride gets lighter, the slumber slipping off behind you, into the wake of the past.In one letter she told Obama that she was writing a paper in her modern-poetry class at Occidental about T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” His reply wove its way through literature, politics, and personal philosophy:

IVF

Romney: Everyone Should be a Millionaire

Romney's arrogance precedes him. There's only ever been one snob in this race and that's Romney. Not everyone wants money to be crawling out of their ears. A lot of people would just like to afford healthcare. A lot of people don't equate money with success. A lot of people don't want other people to mow their lawns. They don't want servants and they don't want to have half a dozen houses. Love the outfit. Right about the 2 minute mark, you can start snoring.

Not much an Etch A Sketch can do about this:

Tuesday, May 01, 2012

Obama's Schedule May 2

Times are eastern.

1:25 PM
Obama arrives at Joint Base Andrews.
1:40 PM
Obama arrives at the White House.
3:45 PM
Obama participates in an Ambassador Credentialing Ceremony.
4:30 PM
Obama attends a campaign event at the The W Hotel.
5:30 PM
Obama attends a campaign event at the W Hotel Obama's back from Afghanistan:

Romney and Rudy Pretend to Deliver Pizza to Firefighters

Not politicizing the anniversary of the day the 9-11 mastermind was killed, Romney and former New York 9-11 Mayor Rudy Guiliani pretend to deliver pizzas to firefighters (photos of Romney & Rudy unloading pizza in the arms of an aide). Wouldn't it have been easier to just deliver the pizzas?

The comments on NY mag's site are pretty funny: "Mitt to the firemen; ""I'm not sure about this pizza. They don't look like you made them. No, no. They came from the local Godfather's, or whatever.""

"Mitt, using his robot finger nails to cut slices, shamelessly took 25% for himself from all slices."

"Jesus, even the pizza gets to ride in the car. Poor Seamus."

Here is what Mitt Liar Face (I can do anything Obama can do) actually said about Pakistan and bin Laden when he was running for the GOP nomination the first time:

"I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours... I don't think those kinds of comments help in this effort to draw more friends to our effort," Romney told reporters on the campaign trail. Obama on Wednesday said if elected president in November 2008 he would be willing to launch military strikes against al Qaeda targets inside Pakistan with or without the approval of the Pakistani government of President Pervez Musharraf.

"If we have actionable intelligence about high-value terrorist targets and President Musharraf won't act, we will," Obama said.

Romney, the former Massachusetts governor who is one of the Republican front-runners, said U.S. troops "shouldn't be sent all over the world." He called Obama's comments "ill-timed" and "ill-considered."

"There is a war being waged by terrorists of different types and nature across the world," Romney said. "We want, as a civilized world, to participate with other nations in this civilized effort to help those nations reject the extreme with them."

Not

"No, I think I said the same thing as [Joe Biden], which was it was naive of the president to announce he would go into Pakistan," Romney said..

Romney doesn't seem to know that you can google just about anything.

As ThinkProgress points out, the U.S. wasn't certain bin Laden was in the compound. That was not a known unknown. Not only that, Joe Biden and Bob Gates, then Secretary of Defense, opposed Obama on the raid. Romney's politicizing this issue because he has no other options.