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10:30AM: President Obama receives the Presidential Daily Briefing
11:45AM: President Obama delivers remarks at the 2015 National Medal of Arts and the National Humanities Medal ceremony
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12:30PM: Press Secretary Josh Earnest holds the White House Briefing
3PM: President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama are interviewed by Robin Roberts for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
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First Lady Michelle Obama and President Barack Obama hugging Kitty Casey
President Barack Obama delivers remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. The National Prayer Breakfast is in it’s 63rd year
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President Barack Obama strikes the Heisman pose with Heisman Trophy winner Derrick Henry
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President Barack Obama meets with Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos in the Oval Office. President Obama and President Santos are expected to make a bid for increased aid for Colombia and talk about “Plan Colombia,” a U.S. aid initiative started in 2000 to help combat Colombian drug cartels
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President Barack Obama holds a Golden State Warriors basketball jersey presented to him during an event with the 2015 NBA Champion Golden State Warriors
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President Barack Obama jokes while demonstrating “clowning” when talking about Stephen Curry
The Handshake
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President Barack Obama shakes hands with Cuba’s President Raul Castro
President Castro blocks out reporters’ questions
President Obama holds a news conference at the conclusion of the Summit of the Americas in Panama City
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President Obama meets with Brazilian President, Dilma Rousseff
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Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda Gaston Browne (front L), Argentina’s President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (front R), U.S President Barack Obama (back L), Grenada’s Prime Minister Keith Mitchell (second row R) and Uruguay’s President Tabare Vazquez (top R) wave during the family photo of the VII Summit of the Americas in Panama City
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Ecuador’s President Rafael Correa smiles as he listens to remarks by President Barack Obama during the first plenary session of the Summit of the Americas in Panama City, Panama
President Obama, flanked by National Security Advisor Susan Rice, gives remarks at the first plenary session of the Summit of the Americas
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With Secretary John Kerry
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Homeward bound
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Puerto Rico’s Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi and Sen. Carmelo Rios unveil a bronze statue of President Barack Obama, along the “Avenue of Heroes” outside the Capitol building, in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Feb. 20. Puerto Rican officials unveiled statues of Obama and former President Lyndon B. Johnson. Every sitting U.S. president who has ever visited Puerto Rico is honored with a statue, dating back to Theodore Roosevelt. Obama became the eighth when he visited in June.
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Steve Benen’s growing list of achievements by PBO’s administration on gay rights:
* announced it will not defend the constitutionality of statutes blocking same-sex military spouses from receiving marriage benefits
* successfully repealed the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” law
* expanded federal benefits for the same-sex partners of executive-branch employees
* signed the Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law
* cleared the way for hospital-visitation rights for same-sex couples
* lifted the travel/immigration ban on those with HIV/AIDS
* ordered the Federal Housing Authority to no longer consider the sexual orientation of applicants on loans
* expanded the Census to include the number of people who report being in a same-sex relationship
* directed U.S. agencies abroad to ensure our humanitarian and diplomatic efforts “promote and protect” the rights of gays and lesbians
* endorsed repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act
* stopped trying to defend DOMA against federal court challenges
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O……kay:
A carnival float depicts US President Barack Obama as Captain America during the traditional parade in Cologne, Germany, Feb. 20
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Charles P. Pierce (Esquire): ….. Having aligned itself in the mid-1960’s with the angry remnants of American apartheid, the Republican party – and the conservative “movement” which is its only real energy – is now scrambling, one state at a time, to undo the achievements of the Civil Rights Movement on the wrong side of which it decided to place itself for political advantage…..
….. The shift is driven by the fact that people do not want black people, or poor people, or Democrats in general, to vote. This was obvious from the voter cadging in Florida in 2000, and in the mischief with the voting machine placements in Ohio in 2004. It was energized recently by the fact that black people and poor people helped elect a black person president, and a substantial portion of the Republican party and its conservative base found that to be an illegitimate outcome and has worked ever since his inauguration to delegitimize him on the grounds that he is a black man who was elected and is, therefore, not really president.
Full post here
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SmartyPants: One of the things that concerns me as we watch the Republicans revert to their old culture wars against women, people of color, gays & lesbians, poor people, unions, etc. is that we will all divide again into our camps to defend our root causes and forget the bigger picture that binds us. Other than fear, the right’s most effective weapon against us is division.
What will keep us united is to always remember the big picture of what’s happening. As I’ve been saying, keeping an eye on the forest means recognizing that the old white male heterosexual patriarchy is dying and the Republican Party is in chaos. What we can expect is that the old beast is going to strike out at anything it perceives as a threat and therefore the cause of its demise.
Full post here
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Carter Eskew (Washington Post): I was thinking of taking today off, but Rick Santorum wouldn’t let me.
Rick Santorum went and said another stupid thing. “The Earth is not the objective,” he told “Face The Nation.” “Man is the objective. And, I think a lot of radical environmentalists have it upside down.”
I think he says these things not because he is, in fact, stupid, but because he is angry, and anger fuels his supporters.
More here
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Go to OFA for the interactive graphic
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Ed Kilgore: A good deal of the excitement over the recent contraception coverage mandate has resulted from the hopes of Republicans, and the fears of some Catholic liberals, that the controversy could prove to be a “wedge issue” that would drive significant numbers of Catholic voters into the GOP column in November.
The assumption behind such scenarios, of course, is that there is a self-conscious “Catholic vote” that operates independently of the rest of the electorate, and that can be moved by the pronouncements of Catholic religious leaders.
My latest column for The New Republic examines this assumption, and finds it uncompelling in several respects: Catholic voters are remarkably similar to all voters in their partisan inclinations; they do not have any overall inclination to follow the Church hierarchy on hot-button cultural issues; and in fact, they are not responding differently from other Americans to the contraception coverage mandate controversy. “The Catholic Vote” looks just like America.
More here
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Tuesday: 11:35 AM – PBO hosts a payroll tax cut event, VP Biden also attends.
The President and First Lady will invite music legends and contemporary major artists to the White House for a celebration of Blues music and in recognition of Black History Month as part of their “In Performance at the White House” series.
Wednesday: The President will deliver remarks at the construction site of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.
Thursday: The President will travel to the University of Miami to continue to discuss his blueprint for an economy built to last.
Friday: The President will host Prime Minister Thorning-Schmidt of Denmark for a meeting in the Oval Office.
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Reverend Keith A. Gordon: Blues fans, circle Monday, February 27th, 2012 on your calendars, ’cause we’re going to paint the White House blue! The Emmy Award-winning PBS series In Performance At The White House is going to document a historic celebration of the blues with a taping of a February 21st concert to be held in the East Room of the White House, the event hosted by President and Mrs. Obama in recognition of Black History Month.
In Performance At The White House program host Taraji P. Henson will oversee the concert, which will feature performances by Troy “Trombone Shorty” Andrews, B.B. King, Jeff Beck, Buddy Guy, Gary Clark, Jr., Keb’ Mo’, Susan Tedeschi and Derek Trucks, Shemekia Copeland, Warren Haynes, and Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger. Stax Records legend Booker T. Jones will serve as the concert’s music director and bandleader.
….. The concert will be streamed live (from 7:20) on the White House, Public Broadcasting, and Black Public Media websites….
E.J. Dionne: “The tide of war is receding,” President Obama said today. He’s right to withdraw our troops from Iraq by the end of the year.
I am sure some longtime supporters of the war will criticize him for pulling out too quickly. But as Obama pointed out, we have been at war in Iraq for nine years. The situation there will never present a perfect time for withdrawal…
… It was appropriate that Obama made this announcement immediately in the wake of Moammar Gaddafi’s death. It’s worth noting that our intervention in Libya, which did not place U.S. forces on the ground, was not only successful but also left the United States far more popular among the Libyan people. Gaddafi would not have fallen without outside intervention, but he was ultimately brought down by the Libyans themselves. Is this not a far better model for democratization?
…. “The United States is moving forward from a position of strength,” Obama said today. The truth is we will be stronger for ending an intervention in Iraq that has cost us so much in lives, injuries and money. On this matter, at least, we really have “turned the page” that Obama spoke about so often in his campaign.
Full article here
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People with weak stomachs, don’t click the next two videos, they both feature Piers Morgan.
So, Morgan, talking about Cain’s 999 plan, tells Juan Williams that “I read a Wall St Journal Op-ed piece yesterday, very praiseworthy, by a big financial expert”.
Williams kindly points out the piece was written by the Reagan administration guy Arthur Laffer, one of the architects of, yes, the ….. 999 plan 🙄
So, “big financial expert” Laffer was praising his own plan in the “very praiseworthy” Wall St Journal Op-ed piece that so impressed Morgan.
How much is CNN paying this guy?
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Be warned, it’s Bill Maher being, well, Bill Maher:
Mediaite (Thanks Loriah)
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Andrew Sullivan: ….. if you’d told me in January 2009 that the banks would pay us back the entire bailout and then some, that the auto companies would actually turn around with government help and be a major engine of recovery, that there would be continuous job growth since 2009, however insufficient, after the worst demand collapse since the 1930s, that bin Laden would be dead, Egypt transitioning to democracy, al Qaeda all but decimated as a global threat, and civil rights for gays expanding more rapidly than at any time in history … well I would be expecting a triumphant re-election campaign.
But we are where we are – and the economic pain is real and the president must take his lumps. The good news for those of us who still back Obama and hope for his re-election is that even with all this positive record essentially dismissed and little of it capitalized on politically, Obama is still neck and neck with any likely opponent. And he is his own best messager.
At some point, he needs to shuck off the restraint, and tell the actual story of the last three years – against the fantastic and self-serving lies and delusions we keep hearing in Republican debates and Beltway chatter. If he does it with panache, he won’t need a jumpsuit onto an aircraft carrier. And many of his missions may even be accomplished.
Full post here
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See you tomorrow 😉
President Obama and Puerto Rico’s Congressional Representative Pedro Pierluisi arrive at Muniz Air National Guard Base
NYT: ….By the time Air Force One landed just before noon in the first “official” visit of a sitting American president since John F. Kennedy, the crowd gathered in a hot hangar at Luis Munoz Marin International Airport had swelled to more than 1,000.
…The president’s schedule included the speech at the airport hangar, a visit to La Fortaleza, the longest-serving governor’s mansion in the Western Hemisphere (the White House says), a tour of the Kennedy Suite, where President Kennedy stayed in 1961, and a concert by a youth orchestra.
Perhaps more important on Mr. Obama’s itinerary, though, was the interviews he scheduled with El Nuevo Dia and Univision of Puerto Rico, and a fund-raising event Tuesday afternoon meant to plump Democratic National Committee coffers.
…About half of Puerto Ricans here now advocate statehood. The other half, more or less, prefer that the island remain a commonwealth because they are concerned about keeping its cultural identity intact. A few would like independence.
Puerto Ricans hold American citizenship and can be drafted, but the territory has no voting representative in Congress. And while Puerto Ricans in Puerto Rico can vote in a presidential primary, they cannot vote in general presidential elections. Only Puerto Ricans in the United States can.
….About that first official visit business: Other sitting American presidents have certainly been to Puerto Rico. President Gerald R. Ford came in 1976, but it was for a Group of Seven economic summit, so that apparently doesn’t count as official, since it wasn’t for official Puerto Rico business. Ditto for President Lyndon B. Johnson – he came in 1968, but it was just to visit a military base on the island, so that’s not being considered official either….
President Obama greets singer Marc Anthony at Luis Munoz Marin International Airport
From left, Musician Marc Antony, Puerto Rico Mayor Jorge Santini Padilla, President Obama, Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno, Rep. Pedor Pierluisi, D-Puerto Rico, and Adjutant General of the Puerto Rico National Guard Antonio J. Vicens
…arriving to speak to a crowd at an airport hanger at Muniz Air National Guard Base
President Obama, Gov. Luis Fortuno and Rep. Pedor Pierluisi, D-Puerto Rico, tour La Fortaleza
….with Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno
….with Puerto Rico Gov. Luis Fortuno, his wife Luce Vela and Resident Commissioner Pedro Pierluisi
…. with Sen. Alejandro Garcia Padilla at Kasalta bakery
A woman holds an image of President Obama, dressed as Superman, as she waits for the presidential motorcade in San Juan
President Obama waves from Air Force One prior to departing Luis Munoz Marin International Airport
President Barack Obama boards Air Force One at Miami International Airport en route to Puerto Rico
Hopefully it will be on CNN
Telemundopr.com have live coverage of the visit here – I think WapaTV does too
Women holding US flags dance as they wait for the arrival of President Barack Obama in San Juan, Puerto Rico
President Obama and President Juan Manuel Santos speak to the press after meeting in the Oval Office. April 7
Do you think his mind might have been elsewhere?!
Juan Cole: As I expected, now that Qaddafi’s advantage in armor and heavy weapons is being neutralized by the UN allies’ air campaign, the liberation movement is regaining lost territory….
I am unabashedly cheering the liberation movement on, and glad that the UNSC-authorized intervention has saved them from being crushed …
…On the surface, the situation in Libya a week and a half ago posed a contradiction between two key principles of Left politics: supporting the ordinary people and opposing foreign domination of them. Libya’s workers and townspeople had risen up to overthrow the dictator in city after city … even in the capital of Tripoli, working-class neighborhoods such as Suq al-Jumah and Tajoura had chased out the secret police….
…The United Nations Security Council authorization for UN member states to intervene to forestall this massacre thus pitched the question. If the Left opposed intervention, it de facto acquiesced in Qaddafi’s destruction of a movement embodying the aspirations of most of Libya’s workers and poor, along with large numbers of white collar middle class people. Qaddafi would have reestablished himself, with the liberation movement squashed like a bug and the country put back under secret police rule…
The arguments against international intervention are not trivial, but they all did have the implication that it was all right with the world community if Qaddafi deployed tanks against innocent civilian crowds just exercising their right to peaceful assembly and to petition their government…
Some have charged that the Libya action has a Neoconservative political odor. But the Neoconservatives hate the United Nations and wanted to destroy it. They went to war on Iraq despite the lack of UNSC authorization, in a way that clearly contravened the UN Charter…. …The Libya action, in contrast, observes all the norms of international law and multilateral consultation that the Neoconservatives despise.
The intervention in Libya was done in a legal way. It was provoked by a vote of the Arab League, including the newly liberated Egyptian and Tunisian governments. It was urged by a United Nations Security Council resolution, the gold standard for military intervention.
….To make ‘anti-imperialism’ trump all other values in a mindless way leads to frankly absurd positions…. ..in Libya intervention was demanded by the people being massacred as well as by the regional powers, was authorized by the UNSC, and could practically attain its humanitarian aim of forestalling a massacre through aerial bombardment of murderous armored brigades.
…I would like to urge the Left to learn to chew gum and walk at the same time. It is possible to reason our way through, on a case-by-case basis, to an ethical progressive position that supports the ordinary folk in their travails in places like Libya. If we just don’t care if the people of Benghazi are subjected to murder and repression on a vast scale, we aren’t people of the Left. We should avoid making ‘foreign intervention’ an absolute taboo the way the Right makes abortion an absolute taboo if doing so makes us heartless….
Read the full letter here
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Thank you so much for the link Suzanne, this is just brilliant …. although I suspect it will make Juan Cole an even bigger hate figure for the Professional Left than he already is. Their rage at the international community (especially President Obama, of course) for stepping in to stop the slaughter of the innocent is a sight to behold.
Professor Juan Cole: Here are the differences between George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the current United Nations action in Libya:
1. The action in Libya was authorized by the United Nations Security Council. That in Iraq was not. By the UN Charter, military action after 1945 should either come as self-defense or with UNSC authorization. Most countries in the world are signatories to the charter and bound by its provisions.
2. The Libyan people had risen up and thrown off the Qaddafi regime, with some 80-90 percent of the country having gone out of his hands before he started having tank commanders fire shells into peaceful crowds. It was this vast majority of the Libyan people that demanded the UN no-fly zone. In 2002-3 there was no similar popular movement against Saddam Hussein.
3. There was an ongoing massacre of civilians, and the threat of more such massacres in Benghazi, by the Qaddafi regime, which precipitated the UNSC resolution. Although the Saddam Hussein regime had massacred people in the 1980s and early 1990s, nothing was going on in 2002-2003 that would have required international intervention.
Read the full article here
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