tuesday

very, very, very smart people

President Barack Obama congratulates Google Science Fair winners, from left, Naomi Shah, Shree Bose, and Lauren Hodge in the Oval Office, Oct. 3. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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June 2011:

thank you, espn

ESPN

Thank ESPN on Twitter – Monday Night Football’s PR guy here

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USA Today: ESPN has dropped Hank Williams Jr. from opening Monday Night Football tonight after Williams controversial comments today about President Obama.

….. Williams, perhaps best known for his “are you ready for some football?” lead-in to ESPN’s Monday Night Football, Monday compared this summer’s so-called golf summit between Obama and House Speaker John Boehner as “one of the biggest political mistakes ever.”

As Williams put it on Fox News’ Fox & Friends: “It would be like Hitler playing golf with Benjamin Netanyahu.”

When asked on Fox to explain his analogy, Williams said Obama and Vice-President Biden are “the enemy.”

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It still isn’t clear if ESPN have just dropped the creep from tonight’s show – or completely. Keep tweeting, let them know what you think 😉

catching up

President Barack Obama makes a statement at the start of a Cabinet Meeting in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, Monday, Oct. 3, 2011. From left are, Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, Obama, Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, US Trade Representative Ron Kirk, and UN Ambassador Susan Rice.

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Michael Tomasky: So the Rick Perry hunting ground story has been absorbed …. the way things seem to be shaking out, the big loser from the revelation that the property bore the name “Ni**erhead” is … not Rick Perry. It’s the black guy.

…. Herman Cain was the first – and as of Sunday night the only – Perry opponent to pounce on The Washington Post’s revelations published Sunday morning …. it is instructive, is it not, that no other candidate jumped on this revelation?

… This charge may make some conservatives feel that Perry is a tad embarrassing. But how many will it personally offend? Let’s face it, based on the evidence of the last debate, the GOP base thinks Perry isn’t racially insensitive enough, giving $100,000 college-education discounts to all those illegal brown children.

…. If the story is true in its worst light, it maybe doesn’t make him a racist. It does make him a person who doesn’t care what people who aren’t just like him think — and who doesn’t even bother to be friends with anyone who cares. I have a word for that: Texashead. But it’s OK. That used to be a kind of railroad spike.

Full article here

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Steve Benen: The RNC was delighted today to trumpet a quote from House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi about the Obama White House. “‘I think you need to talk about how poorly they do on message,” she was quoted as saying about the president and his team. “They can’t see around corners; they anticipate nothing.”

I was curious about the context, so I went to the Newsweek/Daily Beast article that featured the quote. It wasn’t there. As it turns out, there’s a good reason for that:

Just one problem: She never said it, according to both her office and sources at Newsweek …. Newsweek has retracted the quote, and put an editor’s note on the piece: “Editor’s Note; An earlier version of this story included a comment erroneously attributed to House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, criticizing the White House’s efforts at political messaging. Newsweek and The Daily Beast regret the error.”

More here

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Bloomberg: In May 2008, a unit of Koch Industries Inc., one of the world’s largest privately held companies, sent Ludmila Egorova-Farines, its newly hired compliance officer and ethics manager, to investigate the management of a subsidiary in Arles in southern France. In less than a week, she discovered that the company had paid bribes to win contracts.

“I uncovered the practices within a few days,” Egorova- Farines says. “They were not hidden at all.”

…. Egorova-Farines wasn’t rewarded for bringing the illicit payments to the company’s attention. Her superiors removed her from the inquiry in August 2008 and fired her in June 2009, calling her incompetent, even after Koch’s investigators substantiated her findings. She sued Koch-Glitsch in France for wrongful termination.

…. A Bloomberg Markets investigation has (also) found that Koch Industries – in addition to being involved in improper payments to win business in Africa, India and the Middle Easre – has sold millions of dollars of petrochemical equipment to Iran, a country the U.S. identifies as a sponsor of global terrorism.

Full article here

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Worth seeing again (and again and again and again….):

ThinkProgress

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President Obama: “I don’t think the American people would dispute that at every step of the way, I have done everything I can to try to get the Republican Party to work with me to try to deal with what is the biggest crisis of our lifetime, and each time all we’ve gotten from them is, ‘no’.”

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(a very, very early) heads up

George Stephanopoulos will interview President Obama at 2:35 p.m. ET.

The interview will be on both Yahoo! News and ABCNews.com

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Have to go out for a few hours, but will catch up later 😉

(sticky – new posts below) coming up

ABC

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Tomorrow: The President will be at Eastfield College in Mesquite, Texas, to deliver remarks urging Congress to pass the American Jobs Act. He will also travel to St. Louis, Mo., for campaign events before returning to DC.

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 Happy 19th Wedding Anniversary 😉

email, call, tweet….

From Linda at What is Working:

Since it is President Obama and First Lady Michelle’s anniversary I thought it would be good for them and for us to make our first action of the week be:

Contact the Whitehouse, show your support for the AJA, thank them for all they have done, and let them know what our friends and neighbors have been saying. So often our CALLS TO ACTION focus on complaints, I think it is good for our souls to also make time to offer appreciation and support.

President Obama on Twitter and Facebook

White House website contact

Phone: 202-456-1111

taxing issues

ThinkProgress

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Michael Scherer (Time): When Barack Obama talks about taxes these days, he likes to talk about Omaha billionaire Warren Buffett’s secretary …. but if Mitt Romney is able to clinch the Republican nomination for President next spring, Obama will have a better example to talk about.

That’s because Romney, a wealthy man whose income mostly comes from long-term investments, is exactly the sort of “millionaire and billionaire” that Obama likes to hold up for scrutiny, since the source of Romney’s income allows him to pay a lower percentage of his money to the federal government each year than many middle-class wage earners.

…. People who earn as much money as Romney typically make most of it in capital gains and often deduct more than they earn in royalties, salary and interest. In other words, they never pay the 35% rate that their income would be subject to if they just got a paycheck like most Americans.

…. Should Romney win the Republican nomination, he will face substantial pressure to release his own tax returns. Usually such disclosures are little more than formality, but in Romney’s case, it would land him in the middle of one of the biggest policy debates of this election season.

…. any tax reform plan put forward by Obama would likely have a significant impact on Romney’s returns. And perhaps more importantly, if Romney wins the nomination, Obama will have a great line to use in debates and on the stump. He wouldn’t just be running against Romney, he’d be running against the large tax advantage that a millionaire investor’s income provides.

Full article here

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Greg Sargent (Wasington Post): Fact check of the day: CNN takes apart the ubiquitous GOP claim that tax hikes on the rich would be damaging to small businesses and the nation’s “job creators”:

In sharp contrast to the rhetoric, current data suggests small businesses don’t create an outsized number of jobs, very few small business owners fall into the top two tax brackets, and tax cuts for small businesses are ineffective stimulus measures.

    Relatively few small businesses would be affected: Extending the tax cuts for top earners for another decade would come at a significant cost – nearly $1 trillion in added debt over a decade. But small businesses wouldn’t see much of that cash. Only 2.5% to 3.5% of small businesses would be affected by an increase in those two rates.

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politics & pizza? indistinguishable.

‘perry shifts from one crisis to another’

Mediaite

Steve Benen has more here – original Washington Post article here