evening all

KVUE (Austin, Texas)

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President Barack Obama talks with the 2011-2012 White House Fellows in the Oval Office, March 12, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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On Tuesday and Wednesday, the President and First Lady look forward to welcoming Prime Minister Cameron and his wife, Samantha Cameron, to Washington for an Official Visit and State Dinner.

On Tuesday, the President and Prime Minister Cameron will travel together to Dayton, Ohio to watch an NCAA Tournament basketball game. Also on Tuesday, the First Lady and Samantha Cameron will be participating in an Olympics-themed event with DC-area school children.

On Wednesday, there will be a formal arrival ceremony and State Dinner. The two leaders will also have the opportunity to consult on a wide range of serious issues where we are working together, including: Afghanistan, where our troops are serving shoulder-to-shoulder; Iran; Syria; and global economic and trade issues. They will also discuss the upcoming G-8 and NATO Summits.

On Thursday, the President will attend meetings at the White House.

On Friday, the President will attend campaign events in Chicago, Illinois, and Atlanta, Georgia.

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Cagle

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It’s funny, the media usually loves quoting Gallup polls ….. hmm, not so much today:

President Barack Obama’s job approval rating rose to 49% in the three-day period from Friday through Sunday …. the highest measured since early February, and before that the highest since June 2011.

….Obama’s job approval rating was at 43% as last week began. His rating improved to 48% by mid-week before rising to 49% over the weekend, suggesting that he was on the upswing even before Friday’s jobs report.

…. Obama’s 45% approval rating among men last week is up from 41% the previous week and is the highest recorded since July of last year. Obama’s job rating among women last week was 51%, up two percentage points from the week of Feb. 27 through March 4.

President Obama appears to have benefited from Americans’ significantly improved view of the national economy, including the positive jobs report released on Friday….

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The Week

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Nick Anderson

Greg Sargent: Think Progress gets its hands on an internal memo from Premiere Radio Networks that lists nearly 100 national companies that have asked that their advertisements not be played on the Rush Limbaugh show – companies that have not been publicly named until now. Think Progress claims that brings the total of sponsors who have pulled out in the wake of the “slut” controversy to 141 – far more than previously thought.

…. indeed the memo does say this of those advertisers: “They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public.”

More here

Cagle

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McClatchy

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The host with the most – Bo hangs out with the KVUE crew from Austin, Texas, March 12:

camera hog

Univision reporter Adriana Arevalo, March 12

one voice

by hgerhard

Good morning TOD family ….. I want to comment on the now familiar subject of the best way to help the President win re-election.

I believe that those who say that we must stay on top of all the developments and not bury our heads in the sand are perfectly right. However, I know from personal experience how much I get energized by a clear positive statement from a someone I don’t know and I meet by chance.

Just a few days ago I had the opportunity to attend an event with the First Lady. I arrived at the place well ahead of the opening and went to a nearby restaurant to kill some time. Since I didn’t want to order food, I sat at the bar and ordered a fruit juice.

There was a lively conversation taking place, obviously related to the visit of Michelle Obama. Some of it was toxic and I experienced the familiar dread of having to listen to the lies and distortions about the President and his administration.

But then the woman next to me spoke up and told the rest of the crowd that she disagreed and supported the President. What happened then really amazed me: several of the people who had sat and listened silently joined in and brought up their own issues in support of the President – everything from health care to Wall Street reform, from the rescue of the auto industry to bringing the troops home from Iraq. A quick count of the people talking made it clear that the pro Obama voices were in the majority.

And yet, I am convinced that I would have left that place with a dark cloud around me, if it had not been for that one woman making a simple statement.

It reminded me of the 2008 campaign and how one voice can change everything.

So, yes, I will continue to inform myself about all the issues that come up, I will continue to read and tweet Attack Watch and all the positive news I find. But the real lesson is to speak up whenever I hear people talk about the President and the issues at hand. We all must be that one voice that enlightens and encourages others.

That’s how we win.

‘tough decisions’

rise and shine

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President Obama sits for interviews today with stations from Los Angeles, Denver, Austin, Des Moines, Orlando, Cincinnati, Las Vegas and Pittsburgh.

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LA Times: Mary Brown, whose case against the 2010 healthcare reform law is pending before the Supreme Court, argues that the government shouldn’t be able to force her to carry health insurance. Joined by three other individuals and a small-business trade association, she’s asking the justices to rule that the law’s insurance mandate is unconstitutional and that the rest of the act should be thrown out with it. But new revelations about her own situation make the case for the other side.

….. Brown and her husband have fallen on hard times since filing the lawsuit, largely because their auto repair business in Florida failed. The couple have filed for bankruptcy protection, asking a federal court to wipe out close to $60,000 in consumer debts. Significantly, their unpaid bills include $2,750 owed to a local hospital and physicians group and $1,735 to out-of-state medical specialists.

The disclosures are political gold for the Obama administration, transforming Brown from a champion of individual liberty into an exemplar of a problem the new law was designed to address.

More here

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TPM: What if “Obamacare” not only helped save Medicare from fiscal doom, but also quashed the GOP’s longstanding goal of privatizing the program? It’s too early to know what will ultimately happen, but new evidence suggests that nightmare scenario for conservatives is within the realm of possibility.

In a development with potentially profound implications – both for Medicare itself and for the broader ideological fight between the two parties over the role of government – researchers writing in the New England Journal of Medicine believe that the growth in per patient Medicare costs has slowed, contra earlier projections that spending would soar at an unsustainable rate. More importantly, the researchers believe this trend will hold over time, thanks largely to the Affordable Care Act’s sweeping cost-control policies.

More here

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OFA

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Charles Pierce: ….. We can help by pointing out relentlessly the one thing that every one of the graphs, and every one of the monthly jobs reports, have had in common: namely, that the president was handed a multimegaton dungbomb of an economy when he took over.

No, nobody’s happy with 8-percent unemployment as the new normal … Still, every month, there’s another one of these (graphs), and the one abiding characteristic they all have is that they show vividly that the recession was a helluva lot deeper than anyone thought, or that anyone was led to believe. I’m not entirely sure that “He Helped Stave Off A Great Depression” isn’t a bad plank to run on.

More here

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Maddow Blog: An estimated 65,000 people gathered at the Wisconsin state capitol yesterday to mark the one-year anniversary of Governor Scott Walker’s bill stripping union rights from public employees.

More here

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Cagle

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Morning everyone 😉