President Obama interacts with children while flanked by First Lady Michelle Obama and Standing Rock Sioux Tribe Chairman David Archambault II during the Cannon Ball Flag Day celebration at the Cannon Ball Powwow Grounds on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota
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Man in the crowd: “We love Michelle too!” Pres. Obama smiles: “Of course you love Michelle. Who doesn’t love Michelle?” #PrezRezVisit
A gazillion thanks to those of you who provide links to posts on other blogs, really appreciate it, it makes it so easy for all of us to keep up with what’s worth reading.
Just a very, very polite request: please only include a few short extracts from the posts and then provide the link to the full piece. eg If it’s, say, a piece by Steve Benen that runs to about 10 paragraphs, just include about 2 or 3 paragraphs, or parts of 3 or 4, and then the link.
If we post most or all of the piece here then there’ll be no need for us to visit the blog itself, which isn’t fair on the author of the post in question. Thanks everyone.
Jon Hopwood (Yahoo): …. Barack Obama visited New Hampshire two days after Mitt Romney …. the events illustrated a substantial difference in style between two politicians….
… Obama’s appearance, in which the President displayed a fire-in-the-belly that was perfect for prime time and showed him in full campaign mode, was in sharp contrast to the more subdued political pitch made by Romney in Nashua. While Obama is cool, he can turn up the heat. The laid-back Romney, in contrast, comes across as cold….
Obama roused an enthusiastic crowd with his rhetoric. He was back at being the master of the campaign trail. Romney, in contrast, was rather flat …. Romney’s appearance brought to mind Clint Eastwood’s recent remarks about him: That if a movie-maker was looking for an actor to play the President, central casting would send over Mitt. Just what he stood for, Clint said, is anybody’s guess.
…. Romney was paired with the tall and also good-looking Kelly Ayotte. But there was something uncanny about the pair, something not quite human. Rather than fashion models, they struck me as two mannequins that had miraculously come to life and had escaped from Macy’s. There was a plastic quality about both, and for a candidate for President of the United States going up against one of the great campaigners of modern times, Barack Obama, this could prove fatal.
9:35 AM The President departs the White House en route to Joint Base Andrews
9:50 Departs Joint Base Andrews en route to Manchester, N.H.
11:0 Arrives in Manchester, N.H.
12:15 Delivers remarks on the American Jobs Act
1:20 Departs Manchester, N.H.
2:55 Arrives at the White House
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President Barack Obama looks at a photograph of Kate Puzey as he greets her brother, David Puzey, and other guests in the Oval Office, Nov. 21. The President signed the Kate Puzey Peace Corps Volunteer Protection Act of 2011, which improves the preventative measures and the response of the Peace Corps in cases of crime and sexual assault of Peace Corps volunteers.
Andrew Sullivan: The one thing I noticed in my continental run-around this past week is just how mad liberals are at Obama. I remain as baffled by this anger as I am by Republican contempt for the guy. New York magazine has two superb essays that sum up my own feelings on both sides pretty perfectly – by Jon Chait and David Frum. Chait notes how systemic and eternal liberal disenchantment is, and how congenitally useless Democrats are in rallying round a leader, even one who has achieved so much in such a short time.
Many Dems even now think Clinton was more successful in fighting the GOP in his first term than Obama has been. (Memo to the left: universal healthcare was achieved under Obama). But much of this is the usual Democratic limpness and whininess. If George Bush had taken out Osama bin Laden, wiped out al Qaeda’s leadership and gathered a treasure trove of real intelligence by a daring raid, he’d be on Mount Rushmore by now. If he’d done the equivalent on the right of universal healthcare, he’d be the second coming of Reagan. But Obama and liberals? If I hear one more gripe about single payer from someone in their fifties with a ponytail, I’ll scream.
… I remain unrepentant in my support for this president, a man who has accomplished more in the face of a more hostile environment in his first three years than any president since Johnson. I wish more reasonable Dems and a few moderate Republicans will soon have the courage to say so.
Robert Shrum: …. In a New York Times blog post titled “Decision 2013,” Emory University psychology professor Drew Westen offers strong opinions about the shortcomings of a president “tied up in knots of indecision” ….
…. It is a scathing indictment from someone who plainly feels his counsel and wisdom have been scorned. It is also a stunning repudiation of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s insistence that people are entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.
…. Westen launches an overall indictment of the president’s character – Obama is a president frozen in the ice of his own intellect, too logical, too rational, too disconnected from emotions …. the portrayal here of Obama is far removed from reality.
Ask Osama bin Laden if the president is indecisive. As for delay, health care reform was delayed for a century – and Obama passed it. The economy continues to be troubled, but Obama saved it from disaster … Financial reform, student loan reform, credit card reform, the greatest infrastructure investment in a generation – the list goes on. These are not the markers of indecision and delay. Nor is something else progressive critics thought Obama could never achieve. It was Bill Clinton, who famously felt our pain, who inflicted plenty of it by signing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into law. It was Obama who repealed it with a masterful sense of timing and a cool and rational approach to the Pentagon.
That is a hallmark of his presidency. An effective president can’t be just a partisan, appealing solely to the base. But Obama has delivered more progressive change than anyone at anytime since the 1960s. He hasn’t, as Westen writes, “just run out the clock.” He’s moved history ahead….
Residents of Atkinson line up on Illinois Route 6 to show support for President Obama
President Obama jumps onto the stage prior to speaking at a town hall meeting, Aug. 17, at Wyffels Hybrids Inc., in Atkinson, Ill
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Alpha
President Obama arrives to speak at a town hall style meeting at Country Corner Farm Market on August 17, in Alpha, Illinois
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President Obama huddles with the Galesburg High School football team in Galesburg, Ill.
A girl on the Galesburg High School volleyball team reacts as she gets to meet President Barack Obama
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President Obama waves as he boards Air Force One at the Air National Guard Base in Peoria, Ill., en route to Washington after his three-day economic bus tour
Adam Serwer (Washington Post): This Wednesday morning become one of the most surreal and ridiculous moments in the history of American politics when the White House decided to release copies of President Barack Obama’s “long form birth certificate,” in an attempt to quiet conspiracy theorists who believe the president was born elsewhere…
….According to Media Matters, Fox News has spent over two hours promoting false claims about Obama’s birthplace across 54 segments, and only in ten did Fox News hosts challenge those claims. This isn’t just about Trump. All he did was encourage the communications wing of the conservative movement to go into overdrive in an attempt to make birtherism mainstream.
Aside from being one of the most idiotic moments in American political history, this marks a level of personal humiliation no previous president has ever been asked to endure. Other presidents have been the target of crazy conspiracy theories, sure, but few have been as self-evidently absurd as birtherism. None has been so clearly rooted in anxieties about the president’s racial identity, because no previous American president has been black.
This whole situation is an embarrassment to the country. Yesterday Jesse Jackson described birtherism as racial “code,” but there’s nothing “coded” about it. It’s just racism….
And birtherism is only one of a number of racially charged conspiracy theories that have bubbled out of the right-wing swamp and have been allowed to fester by conservative elites. Those who have spent the last two years clinging to the notion that the president wasn’t born in the United States, who have alleged that the president wasn’t intelligent enough to write his own autobiography or somehow coasted to magna cum laude at Harvard law, are carrying on new varieties of an old, dying tradition of American racism. Similar accusations dogged early black writers like Frederick Douglass and Phyllis Wheatley, whose brilliance provoked an existential crisis among people incapable of abandoning myths of black intellectual inferiority.
….Sadly, those who fostered doubts about the president’s citizenship are unlikely to relent in the face of factual proof, because birtherism was never about the facts. For its most ardent proponents, it was and is about their inability to accept the legitimacy of a black man in the White House. Nothing about the decision to release the president’s birth certificate can change that.
President Barack Obama talks with Garth Brooks, who was presented with the “Grammy on the Hill Award” for his leadership in advancing the rights of music makers, in the Oval Office, April 14, 2010. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
The Obama Diary 
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