Night Owls: Welcome To N.E.R.D.

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This is your introduction to the fantastic, AMAZING, freaking ridiculous N.E.R.D. aka ‘Nobody Ever Really Dies.’ Why are they amazing? Because they range from rock, to hip hop, to funk, to alternative.

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Rise and Shine

Cagle

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10:50: President Obama departs the White House en route Fairfax, Va.

11:45: Delivers remarks at George Mason University in Fairfax, Va. (C-Span)

11:45: VP Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at the Sun City Community Center (C-Span)

2:0: Michelle Obama speaks to grassroots supporters at a campaign event in Racine, Wisconsin (listed by CNN)

3:30: VP Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at Lincoln Park High School

4:45: President Obama departs the White House en route Camp David

5:15: Michelle Obama speaks to supporters at a campaign event at the University of Wisconsin-Wausau (listed by CNN)

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Cagle

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Thank you Pamela!

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OFA

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BuzzFeed: Kennedy Attacked Romney For Lack Of Women At Bain In 1994 Ad: “Exclusively White And Male”

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Manchester, New Hampshire, Oct 18 (Darren McCollester/Getty)

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The Alfred E Smith Dinner, Oct 18 (Mario Tama/Getty)

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Chron: A defaced painting of President Barack Obama, across the street from The Breakfast Klub restaurant in midtown, will be redone with a new design, said the original artist, Reginald C. Adams.

…. The original mural, done during the presidential election campaign in 2008, was damaged sometime early Monday by vandals who threw red paint on the larger-than-life image across the street from the popular restaurant at Travis and Alabama.

…. Marcus Davis, the restaurant owner, said he discovered the damage when he got to work about 7 a.m. Monday.

“When this happened it was a sad occasion, and yet there was some excitement there in terms of the opportunity it presents,” Davis said. “Just as President Obama has not given up and has turned a negative into a positive, that’s the example I will follow.”

More here

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Cagle

Cagle

Cagle

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Cagle

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Morning everyone 😉

President Obama at the Alfred E Smith Dinner

Heads Up: President Obama at the Alfred E Smith Dinner

9:0 ET (approx): The Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner

President Obama and …. if you have a weak stomach press mute …. Willard delivers remarks

C-Span * CBS 1 * CBS 2 * CNN

This, That…. and a possibly way too early Heads Up

Manchester, New Hampshire, October 18 (Reuters/Jason Reed)

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Coming Up:

President Obama delivers remarks at the 67th Annual Alfred. E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner

C-Span * CBS 1 * CBS 2 * CNN

Streaming has started (7:40 ET) – warning: Willard will appear too …. wait, they’re having their dinner first, then we’ll get the speeches.

2008:

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(Jason Reed/Reuters)

Manchester, New Hampshire (Mark Bolton/Union Leader)

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JFK, Oct 18 (Reuters/Jason Reed)

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Live with Michael and Kelly (FBD)

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The Daily Show, October 18 (MSNBC)

This, That and the Other

A baby is held up by supporters as President Obama addresses a crowd of thousands at the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument in Keene, California, October 8 (UPI/Phil McCarten)

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A girl wearing a “Big Bird” sweater waves at President Obama (Reuters/Larry Downing) 🙂

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Text of the President’s remarks here

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(Reuters/Larry Downing)

….. with Cesar Chavez’ widow Helen F. Chavez, left, and Dolores Huerta, Co-Founder of the United Farm Workers, as they tour the Cesar E. Chavez National Monument Memorial Garden (AP/Carolyn Kaster)

rise and shine (and heads up)

White House live

CNN live streaming

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James Fallows (The Atlantic): … but then he gets a chance to sing at the White House tonight, doing Sweet Home Chicago with Mick Jagger and also B.B. King?? Jeesh, talk about being the most powerful man in the world.

…. The guy does have a charm that is hard to imagine the Santorums or Romneys ever matching ….  for extra enjoyment check out the shots of White House chief of staff Jacob Lew bopping in the background. A real hep cat, for sure!

More here

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AP: A surging Rick Santorum is running even with Mitt Romney atop the Republican presidential field, but neither candidate is faring well against President Barack Obama eight months before Americans vote, a new survey shows.

Obama tops 50 percent support when matched against each of the four GOP candidates and holds a significant lead over each of them, according to the Associated Press-GfK poll….

….. Obama holds an 8-point lead over Romney, 9 points over Santorum and 10 points over Gingrich or Paul…. Notably, the survey showed the president dominating among independents, a group central to Obama’s 2008 victory, whose support for him had faltered in recent months. According to the poll, 6 in 10 independents would choose Obama over any of the Republicans.

More here

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MSNBC

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Marquette: President Barack Obama leads each of his Republican rivals in Wisconsin, according to the new Marquette Law School Poll. Obama leads former Senator Rick Santorum 51 percent to 40 percent and leads former governor Mitt Romney by 53 percent to 38 percent. In January, Obama’s lead over Romney was 48 percent to 40 percent. The president holds a 52 percent to 36 percent lead over Rep. Ron Paul and a 56 percent to 33 percent margin over former Speaker Newt Gingrich.

More here

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Esquire

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Charles Pierce: It should be A Very Special Episode, this Wednesday night’s season finale of the 1,329,465,771.5 Republican debates. They should invite the whole cast back, all the people who left the show for their own spinoffs, the way they brought Rhoda and Phyllis back when Mary Richards got fired at WJM. Look, here’s Herman Cain, and there’s Michele Bachmann, and there’s Rick Perry, stumbling and falling into the potato salad. And there’s the formerly invisible Jon Huntsman. Who knew he was so tall?

More here

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The Week

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Chris Matthews video here, Ed Schultz here

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TPM

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Steve Benen: Last week, the House Oversight Committee, led by Chairman Darrell Issa, held a one-sided hearing on contraception access, featuring an opening panel of five conservative men – and no one else. Democrats on the committee had invited a witness, Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke, but Issa refused to allow her to participate.

House Dems aren’t taking “no” for an answer …. Nancy Pelosi announced Tuesday that a Democratic panel will meet this week to hear testimony from just one witness: Sandra Fluke….

…. There was, however, an unexpected twist yesterday afternoon … the Republican-controlled Committee on House Administration has refused to allow the hearing to be televised ….. what is it, exactly, about Fluke’s perspective that has Republicans so concerned? The law student wants to share the story of a classmate who lost an ovary due to an ailment that could have been treated with birth control.

Full post here

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Morning everyone 😉

‘obama’s prudent policy on afghanistan’

E.J. Dionne: …. Prudence went on vacation during the administration of the second President Bush, but it’s back as the hallmark of President Obama’s approach to foreign policy. And it was the underlying theme of Obama’s speech on Afghanistan last week.

You would think this would be popular. But it turns out that Obama finds himself almost alone in his effort to define a broad new middle ground in international affairs. It’s not that the center isn’t holding. It’s that most politicians don’t seem to want to go near it.

….Obama is trying to get out of Afghanistan, carefully. He’s trying to put “a difficult decade” of war behind us. If he is reelected, he would chart a new course freed from the two enormous military engagements that George W. Bush undertook.

…His withdrawal schedule from Afghanistan is too slow for the doves, too quick for the hawks. In the case of Libya, he’s too aggressive for those weary of American military intervention and not bold enough for those who think the United States has a moral obligation to bring down the Gaddafi dictatorship. The fact that almost all our troops will be out of Iraq by the end of the year goes unheralded.

…Obama is not being excessively prudent to worry that a quicker withdrawal could disrupt our alliances, undo our achievements on the ground and weaken our efforts to leave a relatively stable situation behind when we do get out…….his effort to find a more stable middle ground in foreign policy deserves more support than it’s getting.

Full article here

morning!

Random old photo to make you smile! President Barack Obama stands by a cut-out picture of First Lady Michelle Obama during a visit to Miami Central High School in Miami, Fla., March 4, 2011. (Pete Souza)

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Morning everyone – I’m late getting started today, still catching up with the news. Will post more and will reply to your emails and comments asap!

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BWD has a brilliant post on the reaction to last night’s 60 Minutes interview – don’t miss it, see here

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Huge apologies to any one who tried to donate to Obama/Biden 2012 on The Obama Diary page of the OFA site – some of you had problems with the link (here) so I’m going to try to get that sorted out now. Also, I can’t find ‘The Obama Diary’ when I search the site, so I need to find out why. If anyone has any ideas about what the problem is, please let me know!

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President Obama drives a new Chevy Volt during his tour of the General Motors Auto Plant in Hamtramck, Mich., July 30, 2010. (Pete Souza)

This is a great read from EJ Dionne about how the success of the bailout of the car industry has been almost completely ignored by the media, and how its critics (“Socialism!”) have not been called to account:

E.J. Dionne: Rescuing Detroit: No news about government’s good news … Don’t expect to see a lot of newspapers and Web sites with this headline: “Big Government Bailout Worked.” But it would be entirely accurate.

The actual headlines make the point. “Demand for fuel-efficient cars helps GM to $3.2 billion profit,” declared The Post. “GM Reports Earnings Tripled in First Quarter, as Revenue Jumped 15%,” reported the New York Times.

Far too little attention has been paid to the success of the government’s rescue of the Detroit-based auto companies, and almost no attention has been paid to how completely and utterly wrong bailout opponents were when they insisted it was doomed to failure … you won’t see a news conference where the bailout’s foes candidly acknowledge how mistaken they were.

The lack of accountability is stunning but not surprising. It reflects a deep bias in the way our political debate is carried out. The unexamined assumption of so much political reporting is that attacks on government’s capacity to do anything right make intuitive sense because “everybody knows” that government is basically inefficient and incompetent, especially when compared with the private sector.

Government failure gets a lot of coverage. That’s useful because government should be held accountable for its mistakes. What’s not okay is that we hear very little when government acts competently and even creatively….

Full article here

Steve Benen has posted about this too – see here

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MSNBC: The latest NBC News poll finds that nearly two-thirds of Americans back President Obama’s decision not to release the photos taken after Osama bin Laden’s death. Fifty-two percent said they strongly believe the Obama administration should not release the photos, and an additional 12 percent agreed, although not as strongly…..

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Okay, this has nothing to do with President Obama, but I just wanted to share my pain: I spend my life trying to convince cat-lovers that dogs are waaaaaaay more intelligent … and then along comes a video like this. Yes, this dog is trying to get a statue to play fetch with him. I can only assume he’s a Republican?

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morning

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NYT: President Obama travels to ground zero in Lower Manhattan Thursday afternoon … he plans to lay a wreath at a memorial to the nearly 3,000 victims of the 9/11 attacks. He will also meet privately with family members of the victims, firefighters and other rescue workers who died in the September 2001 attacks.

…On Friday, the president will go on the road again to Fort Campbell in Kentucky for a less somber occasion: to pay tribute to those who flew the Navy Seal team to Bin Laden’s compound deep inside Pakistan. The Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, which provided air transportation for the Navy assault team, is based at Fort Campbell.

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E.J. Dionne (Washington Post): Barack Obama is not the man many Americans thought he was. This sudden realization has transformed American politics … The sheer audacity of the successful operation against Osama bin Laden has forced Obama’s friends and foes alike to reassess what they make of a chief executive who defies easy categorization and reveals less about himself than politicians are typically drawn to do.

Obama is hard to understand because he is many things and not just one thing. He has now proved that he can be bold at an operational level, even as he remains cautious at a philosophical level. His proclivity to gather facts and weigh alternatives does not lead automatically, in the venerable phrase, to the paralysis of analysis. It can also end in daring action tempered by prudence – for example, making sure that additional helicopters were available to our Navy SEALs.

… one of his close aides told me long ago, there is inside a very cool, tough, even hard man. Obama is not reluctant to use American military power …. because he ordered this attack, and because it was successful, no one will ever view Barack Obama in quite the same way again.

Full article here

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(Thanks Lee)

Jo-Ann Armao: Right call on bin Laden photos …. I have to confess to breathing a sigh of relief on hearing the White House’s decision not to release photos of Osama bin Laden’s bloodied corpse. Just as I found the dance-on-his-grave celebrations that followed Sunday’s announcement of his death a tad unseemly, the idea of America proudly displaying its kill was unsettling.

….what purpose would be served by releasing these photos, said to be profoundly gruesome? Those who say it would eliminate questions about whether bin Laden actually died are kidding themselves that the bin Laden doubters would accept photos released by the U.S. government as real proof.

….the only purpose served by the photos’ release would have been to satisfy the morbid curiosity of a public that’s become accustomed to blood and violence as entertainment. The cost could well have been inflaming public opinion in places where American troops are serving and that’s simply – as the administration wisely determined – too high a price to pay.

Full article here

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Eugene Robinson: Why I would’ve released the bin Laden photos … I understand why President Obama decided otherwise, and of course I respect that decision. But I think showing the world evidence – however gruesome – of the terrorist butcher’s death would have been the better call.

Why? Because while gory photographs would have inflamed some jihadists and wannabes, I believe they would have disillusioned and deflated others. A heroic myth of invulnerability had been built around bin Laden….Showing him in death would definitively refute any notion that bin Laden enjoyed some kind of divine protection. The myth would die with the man.

It’s also true that photographic evidence would silence most, but not all, of the conspiracy theorists … but this is just a secondary consideration, because the wing nuts won’t get any traction. I doubt that even Donald Trump is going to endorse a theory that requires calling Navy SEALs a bunch of bald-faced liars – not to mention the entire military and intelligence chains of command.

The reason to display the photos is to show bin Laden for what he really was: not a holy warrior, not a holy anything, but a deluded mass murderer who met the end he so richly deserved.

Full article here

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The Fix (Washington Post): In the days since the killing of Osama bin Laden, President Obama has adopted a simple strategy: be big.

Big as in magnanimous. Big as in bipartisan (or, better yet, nonpartisan). Big as in inclusive.

…Let’s first revisit some of the decisions Obama has made in recent days.

* Obama’s speech announcing the death of bin Laden was somber and short – devoid of triumphalism or credit-taking.

* In making the decision not to release a photo of the deceased bin Laden … Obama made an appeal to a shared American value system. “That’s not who we are. We don’t trot out this stuff as trophies. We don’t need to spike the football.”

* Obama invited former President George W. Bush to attend a wreath-laying ceremony at Ground Zero tomorrow (Bush declined) and took a pass on making remarks at the event…

Full article here