And thanks, too, for all the brilliant links and news in the comments today – crikey, you people are severely fired up đ
****
If you have any spare time at all, please consider volunteering for Obama/Biden 2012 – lots of people here have done so already, despite doubting their ability to contribute …. and they’ve loved every single minute of it. No regrets in November, hey? Sign up here
****
I’m only about a week behind on emails, so I’m very proud of myself đ Will catch up soon … ish.
****
President Barack Obama and Vice President Joe Biden meet with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and National Security Advisor Tom Donilon in the Oval Office, Aug. 16, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
A 3,000-pound granite marker sits at the corner of Dorchester and 53rd Streets where President Barack Obama first kissed first lady Michele Obama, Aug. 16, in Chicago
The President first kissed his now-wife outside a Chicago ice cream shop – and there’s a plaque to prove it.
The owners of a Hyde Park shopping center installed the 3,000-pound granite marker this week with a plaque reading “On this site President Barack Obama first kissed Michelle Obama.” There’s a picture of the first couple and a quote from the president describing their first date.
The sweet smooch happened in 1989 when the president treated the first lady to ice cream at a Baskin-Robbins, which is now a Subway restaurant. The boulder sits in a flower bed next to the shopping center.
The Obamas will celebrate their 20th wedding anniversary this October. They have a home in Chicago’s Kenwood neighborhood, not far from the shopping center.
Boston.com: In 2009, as Rep. Paul D. Ryan was railing against President Obamaâs $787 billion stimulus package as a âwasteful spending spree,â he wrote at least four letters to Obamaâs secretary of energy asking that millions of dollars from the program be granted to a pair of Wisconsin conservation groups, according to documents obtained by the Globe.
The advocacy appeared to pay off; both groups were awarded the economic recovery funds — one receiving a $20 million grant to help thousands of local businesses and homes improve their energy efficiency, agency documents show.
Ryanâs letters to the energy secretary praising the energy initiatives as he sought a portion of the funding are in sharp contrast to the House Budget Committee chairmanâs image as a Tea Party favorite adamantly opposed to federal spending on such programs.
Boston.com: After seeking millions of dollars from a federal stimulus program he opposed on grounds it would not help the economy, Republican vice presidential candidate Rep. Paul Ryan then appeared on a Boston talk radio program and denied he lobbied the Obama administration for the home state aid.
On October 28, 2010, after the Wisconsin Republican penned at least five letters to two federal departments seeking grants under the Obama administrationâs economic recovery package, Ryan responded to a caller on WBZâs Nightside with Dan Rea who asked if he sought any of the money. Ryan said that he would not vote against something âthen write to the government to ask them to send us money.â
âI did not request any stimulus money,â he continued.
In response to a request from the Boston Globe, the CBS affiliate replayed the audio for a reporter on Thursday.
Ryanâs campaign spokesman, Brendan Buck, did not immediately respond to a request for comment….
Michael Tomasky: Well, leave it to Mitt Romney of all people to put Paul Ryan on his ticket and then move immediately thereafter to distance himself from the Ryan budget. It’s so typical of everything we’ve seen of this semi-vertebrate. Try to bathe in Ryan’s refracted glory to right wingers while trying to tell seniors hey, psst, this is not really my thing, get it? Unbelievable.
It’s important to keep track of the Medicare lies, as they’re bound to pile up. The basic deal is that the Romney-Ryan line about Obama cutting $716 billion while they’ll “strengthen” the program is, shockingly I know, a lie. Ryan’s Medicare program cuts the same $716 billion! And then it cuts even more. And then, Romney’s proposal, insofar as it can be divined because as usual the details are scant, would likely cut even more than that.
âŚ. I trust you saw the USA Today/Gallup poll yesterday showing that Ryan is the second least-approved of vice-presidential choice in the last quarter century âŚ. “If the Democrats handle this right” is always a big if, but if they do, this ticket has the makings of a disaster.
Jonathan Cohn (TNR): Have you seen Mitt Romneyâs new ad on Medicare? âŚ. Itâs not very subtle. And itâs not very true.
By now, you should know all about the hypocrisy of Romney attacking Obama for cutting Medicare. Paul Ryan put the same cuts in his budget plan. And while Romney has insisted heâd restore them, his budget doesn’t have room for that. If heâs serious about his overall spending plan, then heâd surely have to cut Medicare by as much as Obama did. In fact, heâd probably have to cut it by even more. And that’s just in the first ten years.
Still, the power of this ad is the appeal to senior citizens: Obama is taking your money and giving it somebody else. Thatâs why Romney and his allies keep saying that Obama âraidedâ Medicare. But, under the Affordable Care Act, a chunk of the money that comes out of Medicare goes right back into it. It helps seniors pay for prescription drugs, filling in the donut hole from Medicare Part D. It also allows seniors to get preventative care without co-pays, which means they can get an annual wellness visit, cancer screenings, and the like with no out-of-pocket costs. In the first half of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than a million seniors have saved an average of $629 on their drug bills because of this assistance.
âŚthis business about “raiding” Medicare? It’s a naked appeal to selfishness and brazen misrepresentation of reality.
Michael Cohen (NY Daily News): âŚ. if you really want to talk about who is playing the race card this year, itâs worth briefly revisiting the latest attack ad from the Romney campaign on welfareâŚ.
It might seem odd to the untrained observer that welfare is even being prominently featured in this campaign. Itâs hardly an issue of pressing concern among voters. But of course, welfare never is and never has been just about policy; itâs really about politics and in particular, racial politics.
Romney accuses Obama of gutting welfare reform by granting waivers to state governments in how they choose to implement the law. Itâs a charge that is completely without merit; spun from whole cloth; an invented attack line. But again, lying on the campaign trail about President Obamaâs record is the rule, not the exception, for Mitt Romney.
⌠Whatâs most striking about the ad are the visuals â workers wiping their brow; working class Americans toiling away at manufacturing jobs. And coincidentally all the people in the ad … are white. This might not mean much, except for the fact that, as anyone who has followed American politics for the past 45 years knows, criticisms of the welfare system from the campaign trail have habitually always been used as racial code in attacks on Democrats for coddling blacks. It is the symbol of wasteful government spending, rewarding poor Americans for not working and creating a culture of dependency.
âŚ. Indeed, this ad and in fact this whole line of attack is one of the most blatant uses of racial coding in a presidential campaign since the Willie Horton ad of 1988….
The Obama Diary 
You must be logged in to post a comment.