Rise and Shine

Four years ago: President Obama looks out the window of Marine One as it lands at the White House, May 22, 2009 (Photo by Pete Souza)

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Today:

11:0: VP Biden Gives the Commencement Address at the United States Coast Guard Academy (audio only at WH Live)

1:0 Jay Carney’s press briefing

7:25: President Obama hosts a concert honoring Gershwin Prize winner Carole King

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NYT: The bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday has many serious hurdles ahead. It is the most serious and worthy attempt to fix immigration in a generation, but it cannot help reflecting the poisoned politics of today, with its heavy tilt toward needless border enforcement and a deficiency in equal rights.

In the most moving and wrenching moment in three weeks of committee markup, the committee’s chairman, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, sought to amend the bill to allow gay Americans to sponsor their wives and husbands for green cards. The other Democrats, including Charles Schumer of New York, implored him not to put that amendment forward, saying this measure of basic fairness would drive off Republican support and kill the entire bill. Mr. Leahy withdrew it.

With that unhappy capitulation, the bill survives, with a possible battle over same-sex marriage still to come on the Senate floor. And then the bill will need to find some path through the Republican-led House….

More here – and see ThinkProgress

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You know the economy is rockin and rollin when the press is focused on fake scandals

— John Sunununu (@JohnSunununu) May 21, 2013

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U.S. sales of existing homes climbs to three-year high | bloom.bg/10LM8Xc

— Bloomberg News (@BloombergNews) May 22, 2013

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The Dow is on track for its best May performance since 1997, up 4.55% month-to-date. (via @giovannymoreano)

— CNBC (@CNBC) May 22, 2013

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‘Tesla, labeled a “loser” by Romney, giving Obama green-energy strategy its biggest win: paying off loan 9 yrs early’ businessweek.com/news/2013-05-2…

— TheObamaDiary.com (@TheObamaDiary) May 22, 2013

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Jonathan Capehart: Here we go again. President Obama’s critics in the African American community are hammering him for doing nothing for black people …. this thinking drives me crazy because the president’s detractors fail to take a 360-degree view of what they are demanding from him and ignore what he’s actually done.

…. Coates’s criticism emanates from Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta …. Obama spoke to the black men of Morehouse not as a distant president but as a familiar peer. He used his troubled past as a real-life example of how one’s limited circumstances are neither destiny nor a hindrance to achieving the American Dream, as they define it. He urged the graduates to not make excuses, to aim high and to give back. Yet, Coates calls this “‘convenient race-talk’ from a president who ought to know better.” Obama can’t win.

… what’s missing from most African American critiques of Obama: an appreciation for Republican resistance to his agenda. To expect the president to introduce an explicit and definable “black agenda” in a Congress filled with people who believe him to be a socialist destroying the country while illegitimately occupying the Oval Office is seriously naive.

Full article here

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