rise and shine

USA Today: President Obama’s re-election team is seeking help from Internet and on-the-ground backers to spread the word about Obama’s record in office, and to bash his Republican critics.

The purpose of the “Truth Team” is to “promote the President’s achievements, respond to attacks on his record and hold the eventual Republican nominee accountable,” said the announcement from the Obama re-election team.

The overall website – BarackObama.com/TruthTeam – includes three specialty websites: KeepingHisWord.com (devoted to Obama’s record), KeepingGOPHonest.com (attacking Republicans), and AttackWatch.com (responding to critical GOP ads).

“The sites also contain tools for sharing materials via Facebook, Twitter and email, and empowers supporters to take further action by volunteering, writing letters to the editor, sending postcards to undecided voters with information about the President’s record, and more,” said the Obama announcement.

More here

The three sites: KeepingHisWord – AttackWatch – KeepingGOPHonest

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More ‘Keeping his Word’ videos here

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AP: President Barack Obama wants community colleges and businesses to work together to train 2 million workers in high-growth industries, and on Monday will request $8 billion to create a fund to encourage the effort.

Obama’s plan, to be spelled out at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale, Va., is called the “Community College to Career Fund,” the White House said. It would seek to train workers within areas such as health care, transportation and advanced manufacturing, and would be administered by the Education and Labor departments.

The proposed fund is part of a new budget Obama is sending to Congress. It aims to achieve $4 trillion in deficit reduction over the next decade by restraining government spending and raising taxes on the wealthy. In an election year with a gridlocked Congress, nearly every aspect of the budget will face tough scrutiny.

More here

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Today:

11:00: PBO delivers remarks on his FY 2013 Budget to students at Northern Virginia Community College in Annandale

1:45: PBO awards the 2011 National Medal of Arts and National Humanities Medal. Michelle Obama also attends.

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TPM: It was a long road back, but President Obama is now back in positive territory in our TPM Poll Average.

The shift comes on the heels of a completed Iraq withdrawal, a legislative win on the payroll tax cut before Christmas, and perhaps most importantly, good economic numbers in January and early February. The President’s numbers have jumped in the last few days in both Gallup and Rasmussen tracking polls as well as individual national polls.

More here

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The Week

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BroadwayCarl: Many on the left have set their hair on fire over President Obama’s solution to the conflict between religious institutions, primarily the Catholic church, providing health care coverage which includes birth control to women and the teachings of the church. One would have to be in the wildest parts of Siberia to have missed this controversy, so I will not recount the drama that has unfolded.

However, once again the ubiquitous word “cave” has appeared in association with this decision. There was a time when this would infuriate me, but now I laugh at the predictability of the critical left.

Full post here

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White House

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ThinkProgress

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More ‘Keeping his Word’ videos here

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Washington Post

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TPM

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Morning everyone 😉

fighting back

Mediaite: This week the Obama campaign launched a new front in the heightened information wars that come with presidential campaigns, with a starkly designed and somewhat controversial new website called Attack Watch. The site enables user-generated submissions of what Obama supporters deem to be unfair or untruthful media attacks on President Obama, his political campaign and his administration’s policy….

…. the site has so far been a big hit. A source within the Obama campaign has told Mediaite, that in just the first day, the user-generated research tool has been nothing short of an enormous success. “In less than 24 hours we’ve had over 100,000 people sign up at the website, which indicates significant interest from supporters.”….

….. the very least this digital effort did its job bit perhaps instilling a little fear in the GOP campaign efforts. It’s not difficult to imagine social media staffers at the RNC scratching their heads and saying “why didn’t we think of that?”

The essence of AttackWatch is the Obama campaign outsourcing of opposition media research to its army of loyal supporters …. In the brave new world that is political smear campaigns, leveraging the passion of one’s political base is not something that we should fear, but rather a smart and savvy political move.

Thank you Loriah

Sign up here

Follow @attackwatch on Twitter

‘get the facts, fight the smears’

Link – this is a seriously excellent site, part of OFA. I’ve added it to the blogroll here if you ever need the link.

Sign up here

Follow @attackwatch on Twitter

Thanks Jovie and Tien Le