morning ;-)

The Obama campaign announced in an email this morning that the president’s reelection effort and the Democratic National Committee raised a combined $70 million in the third quarter of the year:

— In the third fundraising quarter of this year, 606,027 people donated to this campaign — even more than gave in the record-breaking previous quarter.

— Those people gave more than 766,000 total donations – 98 percent of them $250 or less, at an average amount of $56. That’s more than twice as many donations than we had at this point in the historic 2008 campaign.

— We are focused on building infrastructure that will help us win in 2012. And each quarter we set a combined goal for the campaign and our allies at the Democratic National Committee. We far exceeded our goal of $55 million this quarter between the two organizations. Great work.

— Together, Obama for America and the DNC raised more than $70 million. And it all happened during a summer when the President was focused on doing the job he was elected to do — a summer when we had to cancel a series of fundraising events and ask everyone to dig a little deeper.

The Obama campaign raised $42.8 million on its own and the DNC took in $27.3 million, an Obama campaign official said.

The announcement follows an $86 million second quarter for Obama and the DNC, and sets up the president to outraise by far the whole GOP field, combined, in back to back fundraising periods.

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(Video takes 10 seconds to start! Thanks Tally)

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Today:

9:0 President Obama, Vice President Biden and First Lady Michelle Obama welcome South Korean President Lee and First Lady Kim to the White House

11:0 The First Lady invites the Republic of Korea’s First Lady Kim Yoon-ok to Annandale High School in Virginia

11:05 The President holds a bilateral meeting with President Lee and official U.S. and South Korean delegations

12:20 The President holds a joint press conference with President Lee

7:0 The President and First Lady welcome South Korean President Lee and First Lady Kim to the White House for a state dinner

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‘70% of tea partiers don’t want to cut medicare either’

😕

Yahoo: The Tea Party movement is supposed to be the engine driving Republicans’ push for sharp cuts to spending and reform entitlements. Representative Paul Ryan’s 2012 budget, which passed the House last week, phases out Medicare for people under 55 and turns Medicaid into block grants. But it turns out that Tea Partiers, like most Americans, strongly oppose cutting Medicare and Medicaid. A new McClatchy-Marist poll shows 70 percent of “Tea Party supporters” oppose cutting those programs – and 80 percent of registered voters agree.

So though The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait has argued that “the Ryan budget represents the victory of the Tea Party mentality over mainstream conservatism within the Republican Party,” it looks like Ryan’s plan doesn’t represent the activists, either.

Slate’s Dave Weigel calls the Marist poll a “nice present” for Democrats, and “pretty ugly numbers” for Republicans. He adds: “If Democrats can keep portraying the cuts as worse than they are–this was done successfully in the 2005 Social Security fight–there’s a win here.”

For another articulation of this view, recall that even when House Republicans passed Ryan’s budget Friday, NBC News’ Mark Murray marveled at their political gambit: “Either the normal rules of American politics have changed, or Republicans have walked into an electoral buzz saw–on a Medicare plan that won’t pass the 112th Congress and that many of them didn’t campaign on in 2010.”

Thank you LOL 😉