NYT: Obama Says Income Gap Is Fraying U.S. Social Fabric
In a week when he tried to focus attention on the struggles of the middle class, President Obama said in an interview that he was worried that years of widening income inequality and the lingering effects of the financial crisis had frayed the country’s social fabric and undermined Americans’ belief in opportunity.
“If the economy is growing, everybody feels invested,” President Obama said in an interview last week in Galesburg, Ill. “Everybody feels as if we’re rolling in the same direction.”
Upward mobility, Mr. Obama said in a 40-minute interview with The New York Times, “was part and parcel of who we were as Americans.”
“And that’s what’s been eroding over the last 20, 30 years, well before the financial crisis,” he added.
“If we don’t do anything, then growth will be slower than it should be. Unemployment will not go down as fast as it should. Income inequality will continue to rise,” he said. “That’s not a future that we should accept.”….
10:20 AM: President Obama delivers remarks marking the 60th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice
6:30 PM: VP Biden and Dr Jill Biden visit with U.S. service members, military families, and Defense Department employees at an event at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii
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The Week Ahead:
Monday: The President will welcome the San Francisco Giants to the White House to honor the team and their 2012 World Series Championship
Tuesday: The President will travel to the Amazon fulfillment center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, to give the first in a series of policy speeches on his better bargain for the middle class. The speech is scheduled to begin at 1:30 p.m. ET.
Wednesday: The President will welcome NCAA Champion UConn Huskies to honor the team and their 2013 NCAA Women’s Basketball Championship. Also on Wednesday, he will travel to Capitol Hill for a meeting with Democrats in both chambers
Thursday: The President will host Yemeni President Abdo Rabbu Mansour Hadi at the White House
Friday: The President will attend meetings at the White House
The latest state to publish insurance rates under Obamacare is Maryland. The results seem consistent with the pattern we’ve seen so far. When state officials want the law to work, it works pretty well. And Maryland officials want the law to work.
The governor is a prominent Democrat and among Obamacare’s most vocal boosters. The state political establishment supports him. The officials in agencies working on Obamacare — the state Department of Health, the Insurance Administration, and the newly created Health Benefits Exchange — feel the same way. None of this is surprising: Maryland is a strongly blue state. Obama is popular there and, one imagines, so is his health plan.
ABC: How White Are the Reporters Covering Obama? Very, Stats Show
The face of the nation is changing fast, but the White House press corps remains the same.
A new report in The Washington Post details how the news media, and especially the White House press, is disproportionately whiter and less diverse than the country as a whole.
“When the first black president of the United States walked into the White House press room to talk about Trayvon Martin and the complexities of race in America last Friday, the people poised to convey his remarks to the world were overwhelmingly of one race — white….
At a time when one of the most contentious subjects in Washington is immigration reform — an issue of great import to many Hispanics — the people questioning the president on a regular basis are unlikely to be Hispanic themselves,” the Post’s Paul Fahri writes…..
12.4 percent: The proportion of U.S. newspaper journalists who are racial minorities…..
37 percent: The U.S.’s minority population
7: Number of full-time White House correspondents who are African-American or Asian-American, out of 53. That’s 13.2 percent. Figures for other groups weren’t available.
3: Number of African-Americans who have served on the White House Correspondents Association board in its 99-year history.
David Firestone (NYT): North Carolina: First in Voter Suppression
Gov. Pat McCrory of North Carolina didn’t like our recent editorial that criticized the state for abandoning its traditions of racial equality, strong public schools, and economic fairness. He wrote a letter to the editor saying he was leading the state to a “powerful comeback.”
That’s demonstrably untrue when it comes to the economy and the schools. But as yesterday’s events in the state capital showed, one thing is making a comeback: an old habit of suppressing the votes of minorities, young people and the poor, all in the hopes of preserving Republican power.
Freed of federal election supervision by the Supreme Court, the North Carolina legislature passed a bill that combines every idea for suppressing voter turnout that Republicans have advanced in other states. Rick Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California, Irvine, called it “the most sweeping anti-voter law in at least decades.”
…. None of this has anything to do with fraud. Out of 7 million ballots cast in the state in 2012, there were 121 allegations of voter fraud, a rate of .00174 percent….
NBC News: The United States intends to transfer two additional detainees from Guantanamo Bay to Algeria as part of its effort to close the military prison in Cuba, the White House said Friday in a statement.
“We are taking this step in consultation with the Congress, and in a responsible manner that protects our national security,” the statement from White House spokesman Jay Carney read. “We continue to call on Congress to join us in supporting these efforts by lifting the current restrictions that significantly limit our ability to transfer detainees out of Guantanamo, even those who have been approved for transfer.”
Sy Mukherjee: Starting next Thursday, Wisconsin’s Green Bay region will no longer have an abortion provider. That’s because Ob/Gyn Associates, the sole abortion clinic in the area, was recently sold to a health system which announced on Friday that it will stop offering abortion services on August 1st. And their decision, combined with an anti-abortion bill quietly signed into law by Gov. Scott Walker (R) earlier in July, will force Green Bay women who want or need an abortion to travel over 250 miles round trip to find the closest facility.
Practically speaking, the law would force two of the state’s five clinics — a private clinic in Milwaukee and a Planned Parenthood facility in Appleton — to close down entirely.
Josh Israel: Since Attorney General Eric Holder’s announcementThursday that the Department of Justice would “ask a federal court in Texas to subject the State of Texas to a preclearance regime similar to the one required by Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act,” the reaction from Texas Republicans has been furious. But Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner (R-WI), who sponsored the 2006 Voting Rights Act re-authorization, backed the move as legally proper.
But Sensenbrenner told The Hill on Thursday that these critics were misrepresenting the facts. “The [Justice] department’s actions are consistent with the Voting Rights Act,” he said, noting that Voting Rights Act still allows challenges to changes that would suppress minority voters.
VP Biden, his wife Jill Biden, their daughter Ashley and son-in-law Dr Howard Krein, walk through the Singapore Botanic Gardens, July 26
VP Biden shakes hands with a diner during an impromptu visit to Adam Road Hawker Food Centre in Singapore, July 26
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On this day:
July 27, 2012: President Barack Obama hugs a member of the American Legion Boys Nation in the East Wing during their tour of the White House (Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
July 27, 2012: U.S. Olympic wrestler Elena Pirozhkova picks up the First Lady during a greet with Team USA Olympic athletes competing in the 2012 Summer Olympic Games in London (Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)
July 27, 2012: First Lady Michelle Obama greets former Olympic swimmer Summer Sanders, right, and her children, Skye and Spider, following a “Let’s Move! London” event at Winfield House in London, England (Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)
July 27, 2012: First Lady Michelle Obama talks with Joshua Wilkins-Waldron during a “Let’s Move! London” event at Winfield House in London (Photo by Sonya N. Hebert)
The Obama Diary 
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