May 19, 2012
Associated Press: "Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama's re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth."
Regardless of whether the suspicions are right, "there's evidence
that unceasing partisan gridlock and the prospect of big tax increases
and spending cuts in January are causing some companies to postpone
expansions."
USA Today interviews Secretary of State Hillary Clinton:
Q. "But how do you find the energy to travel 750,000 miles?"
A. "777 -- but who's counting?"
Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) was "forced to sell his dream home" in Utah with "his mortgage bank taking a significant loss -- up to $400,000 -- in a 'short sale' as the housing bust in his neighborhood drained his house's value," the
Salt Lake Tribune reports.
"Lee purchased the home for around $1.1 million in January 2008, at the height of the housing boom and when he was working as a private practice lawyer. But as home prices dipped and he was elected to the Senate, Lee found himself underwater in the home and without the means to pay off the difference."
Lee's wife and three children are now living in a rental home.
An amendment that would legalize the use of propaganda on American audiences is being inserted into the latest defense authorization bill,
BuzzFeed reports.
The amendment to the defense authorization bill would "strike the current ban on domestic dissemination" of propaganda material produced by the State Department and the Pentagon."
"The tweak to the bill would essentially neutralize two previous acts -- the Smith-Mundt Act of 1948 and Foreign Relations Authorization Act in 1987 -- that had been passed to protect U.S. audiences from our own government's misinformation campaigns."
Coming this fall:
Government Bullies: Americans Arrested, Abused, and Terrorized by Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY).
BuzzFeed notes that coming out with a book is "an act that's de facto required of ambitious politicians priming themselves for the national stage."
Many
expect Paul to launch a White House bid in 2016.
"Unless you run a financial institution whose business model is built on cheating consumers, or making risky bets that could damage the whole economy, you have nothing to fear from Wall Street reform."
-- President Obama, in his
weekly address, calling for stricter reform after J.P. Morgan's multi-billion dollar loss.
See more...
Linda McMahon (R) won the Republican endorsement for U.S. Senate in Connecticut for the second time in two years, the
Hartford Courant reports, but she'll face former Rep. Chris Shays (R) in an August primary.
"McMahon said she learned much from her 2010 run, her first bid for elective office. Her 2010 campaign was notable for its lack of support from women voters. Although she would have been the state's first female U.S. senator, polls repeatedly showed her lagging behind Blumenthal among women, who seemed particularly turned off by her ties to the professional wrestling industry and its reputation for violence and sexually exploitative images of women."
May 18, 2012
Greg Sargent: "If Mitt Romney is to win the presidency, he'll likely have to clear a high historical hurdle: Getting elected while losing both his state of residence (Massachusetts) and his native state (Michigan)... The last person to get elected president while losing his home state and his state of birth was James Polk, in 1844."
The White House confirmed that George W. Bush and his wife, Laura, will return to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue later this month to be honored by President Obama with the unveiling of their official portraits, the
Dallas Morning News reports.
It's a "rare joint appearance between the current and past presidents... It could also provide an interesting interaction between Bush and Obama, whose re-election campaign continues to remind voters of the economic troubles the Democrat inherited when he took over from Bush."
Mitt Romney
mentioned that he's currently reading
The Escape Artists: How Obama's Team Fumbled the Recovery by Noam Scheiber.
Vice President Joe Biden told
WTOV-TV that he doesn't "blame people" for voting against President Obama in West Virginia's Democratic primary when an imprisoned felon
won 41% of the vote.
Said Biden: "Look, I come from a household where whenever there's a recession, somebody around my grandpop or my dad's table lost their job -- a brother, a sister, a friend, a neighbor. When you're outta work, man, it's a depression. And a lot of people are still hurt because of this God-awful recession we inherited that cost 8.4 million jobs before we could really get going. And so I don't blame people. They're frustrated. They're angry."
See more...
Walter Shapiro says the "modern history of what happens to losing vice presidential nominees is enough to make any politician recoil in horror."
"Since 1972, there are eight people in this camp. (There have been ten elections, but two of the losing running mates -- Walter Mondale and Dan Quayle -- were sitting vice presidents who were voted out of office.) Exactly one of them, Lloyd Bentsen, who ran with Michael Dukakis in 1988, had his reputation burnished by the experience. Nearly all the others would have been much better off had they turned down the invitation."
Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett (R) told
KFYI he's not entirely convinced President Obama was really born in the United States and suggested he could be knocked off the state's presidential ballot.
Said Bennett: "I'm not a birther. I believe the president was born in Hawaii -- or at least I hope he was. But my responsibility as secretary of state is to make sure the ballots in Arizona are correct and that those people whose names are on the ballot have met the qualifications for the office they are seeking."
Bennett said he has been trying to get officials in Hawaii to verify the president's birth certificate for the last eight weeks.
Update: Bennett sends a statement: "First, I have been on the record since 2009 that I believe the President was born in Hawaii. I am not a birther. At the request of a constituent, I asked the state of Hawaii for a Verification in lieu of certified copy. We're merely asking them to officially confirm they have the President's birth certificate in their possession and are awaiting their response."
See more...
Bill Clinton will not back longtime ally Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY) in his re-election bid, the
New York Post reports.
"Clinton strongly backed Rangel's re-election in 2010 when the incumbent was under fire for House ethics-rules violations that later led to a congressional censure... Rangel, in turn, vehemently defended Clinton during the ex-president's impeachment proceedings, and led the charge to launch Hillary Rodham Clinton's political career, helping her get elected to the US Senate from New York."
However, a Clinton source said the former president "has a personal conflict this time around. One of Rangel's rivals, Clyde Williams, was a top aide at the Clinton Foundation and worked in the Clinton administration."
"Sodomy is not a civil right. It's not the same as the civil rights movement."
-- Virginia U.S. Senate candidate Robert Marshall (R), quoted by the
Richmond Times-Dispatch, on opposing an openly gay judicial candidate.
Karl Rove's American Crossroads group
has fun with the fact that President Obama's staff altered biographies of previous presidents on the White House website.
See more...
Politico notes it took just 30 minutes for conservatives "to jump all over Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and his leadership team after the GOP's game plan for dealing with President Barack Obama's health care law leaked to the media."
"Their gripe? Republicans would try to replicate popular parts of Obama's health care law if the Supreme Court overturns the law this summer... The behind-the-scenes fight among Republicans richly illustrates why House GOP leadership is so cautious, sensitive and calculating when it comes to dealing with the conservative right."
"I love policy, I don't really love politics. One can do a lot with policy not in Washington."
-- Former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice, quoted by
NBC Chicago, on why she doesn't want to be Mitt Romney's running mate.
First Read: "What we learned last week and this week is how hard it is for both Obama and Romney to stay on their own messages. Both had their best-laid plans for the week stepped on in various ways. Last week, gay marriage did that to Obama. This week, the debt ceiling and then Ricketts did that for Romney. It's just never easy to stay on message (and it's hardest part of a presidential campaign). The good ones figure out what to ignore and what to jump on."
"Donors from big banks are betting on Mitt Romney to defeat President Obama and repeal new restraints on risky, large-scale investments," the
Boston Globe reports.
"The top five donor groups in Romney's campaign are individuals and political action committees associated with large financial institutions... By contrast, Obama's top five contributor groups include individuals and PACs affiliated with high technology giants Google Inc. and Microsoft Corp., and the global law firms DLA Piper and Sidley Austin, and do not include those associated with banks. In 2008, financial institutions backed him generously."
Mitt Romney is up with his first
advertisement since becoming the almost-certain Republican nominee, a positive spot featuring the Keystone XL pipeline, health care and taxes.
See more...
Newt Gingrich "did not exactly recant" to the
Atlanta Journal Constitution "but did acknowledge the ineffectiveness of one attack he used on Romney -- the private equity firm Bain Capital. When Gingrich accused Romney and Bain of taking over companies and downsizing them at the expense of workers, he was widely condemned by fellow Republicans and eventually backed off."
"This week the Obama campaign released an ad along those same lines. Gingrich said his experience should be a lesson to Obama: 'that dog won't hunt.'"
Gingrich explained: "You want me to be mad because in one company somewhere Romney may have in fact been involved in someone losing their job while you as president have been involved in millions of people losing their jobs?"
Paul Krugman: "Suddenly, it has become easy to see how the euro -- that grand, flawed experiment in monetary union without political union -- could come apart at the seams. We're not talking about a distant prospect, either. Things could fall apart with stunning speed, in a matter of months, not years. And the costs -- both economic and, arguably even more important, political -- could be huge."
A new
Mason-Dixon poll shows Mitt Romney (R) leading President Obama by three points in the presidential race nationally, 47% to 44%.
Meanwhile, a new
Investors Business Daily/TIPP poll shows Obama ahead by three points, 43% to 40%.
The results are within each survey's margin of error.
It's been nearly two years since Al Gore shocked the public with the announcement he had separated from his wife Tipper after 40 years of marriage and now the
Washington Post reports he has a girl friend.
"Her name is Elizabeth Keadle -- better known as Liz -- a well-heeled Democratic donor from Southern California in her 50s with a background in science and a devotion to environmental causes."
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