On This Day: First Lady Michelle Obama greets guests during a Mother’s Day Tea in the State Dining Room of the White House, May 7, 2010 (Photo by Samantha Appleton)
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Today (All Times Eastern)
11:05 ET: President Obama departs the White House
1:35 ET: Arrives Arkansas
3:50 ET: Travels to central Arkansas to view the devastation from the recent tornadoes and severe storms and meet with the families affected by this disaster, as well as first responders and recovery workers. The President will deliver remarks.
4:35 ET: Departs Arkansas
8:0 ET: Arrives Los Angeles
9:55 ET: Delivers remarks and answers questions at a joint fundraiser for House and Senate Democrats, private residency, Los Angeles
11:10 ET: Attends USC Shoah Foundation dinner, Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, Los Angeles
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The Week Ahead
Thursday: Participates in a DNC roundtable in Los Angeles before traveling to San Diego to participate in a DCCC event. The President will then travel to San Jose where he will participate in two DNC events and remain overnight.
Friday: Participates in an event on energy in the San Jose area. Following the event the President will return to Washington, DC.
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USC: USC Shoah Foundation To Host President Obama As Featured Speaker At 20th Anniversary Gala
On May 7, 2014, USC Shoah Foundation – The Institute for Visual History and Education will gather in Los Angeles for its 20th Anniversary Ambassadors for Humanity Gala. To help mark this occasion, the Institute will have the great privilege of welcoming President Barack Obama, who will speak to common values and shared responsibilities in building a brighter future.
Institute founder and USC trustee Steven Spielberg will recognize President Obama with the Institute’s highest honor, the Ambassador for Humanity Award for his global efforts to protect human rights, his commitment to education and expanding educational technology, and his work advancing opportunities for all people.
“President Obama’s commitment to democracy and human rights has long been felt,” Spielberg said. “As a constitutional scholar and as president, his interest in expanding justice and opportunity for all is remarkably evident. The president’s recent appointment of the first special envoy for Holocaust Survivor Services in United States history demonstrates his staunch commitment to honoring the past while building a better future. I am extremely grateful to have President Obama join us on this significant milestone of the USC Shoah Foundation.”
More here
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Bloomberg: Insurers Say Most Obamacare Customers Paid First Premiums
Three large health insurers including WellPoint Inc. (WLP) and Aetna Inc. (AET) say that a high percentage of their new Obamacare customers are paying their first premiums, undermining a Republican criticism of enrollment in the program.
As many as 90 percent of WellPoint customers have paid their first premium by its due date, according to testimony the company prepared for a congressional hearing today. For Aetna, the payment is in the “low to mid-80 percent range,” the company said in its own testimony. Health Care Service Corp., which operates Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in five states including Texas, said that number is at least 83 percent.
Making the first monthly payment is the last step to confirm enrollment in plans sold under the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and Republicans have made the question of how many paid a line of attack on the law.
More here
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Lucy McCalmont: Obama: Nigeria Kidnappings ‘Awful’
President Barack Obama called the kidnapping of nearly 300 girls in Nigeria “awful,” and added that the U.S. will “do everything we can” to help Nigeria. “Obviously, what’s happening is awful and, as a father of two girls, I can’t imagine what the parents are going through,” Obama said in an interview with CBS, one of a collection of interviews the president gave to local and national TV outlets on Tuesday afternoon. Coverage of the incident has grown since the kidnappings occurred three weeks ago, thanks in part to the social media hashtag #BringBackOurGirls, which has been trending worldwide, and has been tweeted more than a million times, according to BBC News.
Obama said in his interview with CBS that the White House is “sending in a team made up of our military, and law enforcement and other experts and we’re very glad that Nigeria’s accepted the help.” Obama called Boko Haram, the group that has claimed to have taken the girls as “one of the worst, regional or local terrorist organizations in the world.” Boko Haram, whose name roughly translates in English to “Western education is sinful,” is an Islamic terrorist group based in the Northeast region of Nigeria. ”We’ve long sought to work with Nigeria on dealing with them and we’re going to do everything we can to assist them in recovering these young women,” Obama said, adding that more work is needed in targeting the group. “More broadly though, we’re going to have to really tackle a pernicious problem inside that country — an organization that has carried out ruthless attacks and killed thousands of people over the last several years,” Obama said.
More here
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Jonathan Cohn: See How Right-Wing Media “Covered” Obamacare’s Big News Day
Monday was a pretty big news day for Obamacare. But you wouldn’t know it by reading conservative media.
In the morning, Gallup reported that the percentage of adults without health insurance had dropped to 13.4 percent, at least according to its surveys. That’s the lowest rate the organization has recorded since it began asking the question in early 2008. Then, in the afternoon, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a major study, based on data from Massachusetts, suggesting that giving people health insurance makes people healthier—and that, by extension, the Affordable Care Act could end up saving more than 10,000 lives a year.
The news got lots of attention from the mainstream media and from health-care policy analysts. But on the right? Crickets.
More here
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Brian Beutler: Democrats Should Absolutely Boycott the GOP’s Phony Benghazi Committee
Events are still unfolding, but everything that’s happened so far today points to the likelihood that House Democrats will protest the Select Committee on Benghazi, leaving Republicans to re-re-re-re-re-re-investigate the 2012 attacks, and their aftermath, in partisan fashion.
When initially contemplated, the idea was met with swift derision by some members of the commentariat. Ron Fournier, a tribune for bipartisan comity, thinks a boycott would be an error.
And the broader vibe is that a boycott wouldn’t be a sporting move. But that argument is incorrect. A boycott would be excellent politics, and Democrats have none other than Mitch McConnell to thank for the insight.
More here
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AP: US To Let Some High-Skilled Immigrant Spouses Work
The Obama administration wants to allow some spouses of high-skilled immigrants to work in the United States, the departments of Homeland Security and Commerce announced Tuesday. The rule change, which is set to be published in the Federal Register later this week, would affect spouses of as many as 100,000 holders of H-1B high-skilled visas. “The proposals announced today will encourage highly skilled, specially trained individuals to remain in the United States and continue to support U.S. businesses and the growth of the U.S. economy,” said Homeland Security Deputy Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker said the rule change would help the U.S. attract and keep “world-class talent” working in the United States. The new rule is the latest in a series of administrative actions President Barack Obama has announced as efforts to win broad immigration reform in Congress have failed. The H-1B visas for high-skilled workers are among the most sought-after by high-tech firms. Earlier this year the 85,000 H-1B visas available for 2015 were gobbled up in just a week. The same thing happened last year.
More here
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If you compare the costs of the Reagan Administration’s serial security lapses in Beirut to the costs of Benghazi, it’s clear what has really deteriorated in the intervening three decades. It’s not the security of American government personnel working abroad. It’s the behavior of American congressmen at home.
The story in Beirut wasn’t over. In September of 1984, for the third time in eighteen months, jihadists bombed a U.S. government outpost in Beirut yet again. President Reagan acknowledged that the new security precautions that had been advocated by Congress hadn’t yet been implemented at the U.S. embassy annex that had been hit.
The problem, the President admitted, was that the repairs hadn’t quite been completed on time. As he put it, “Anyone who’s ever had their kitchen done over knows that it never gets done as soon as you wish it would.” Imagine how Congressman Issa and Fox News would react to a similar explanation from President Obama today.
Full post here
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ThinkProgress: Here’s Why Nigeria Hasn’t Yet Found Its 300 Missing Girls
The world isn’t just aware of the plight of three hundred girls kidnapped from their boarding school in Nigeria now. It has become, finally, invested. Globally, people are demanding that the Nigerian government do more to find the 276 girls still missing, while a hashtag, #BringBackOurGirls, unites the web behind their cause.
The world is eager to see the girls, stolen away in the night three weeks ago, returned. But part of the reason why the girls remain abducted lies in just how the government has waged its war against the terrorists who carried out the kidnapping over the last half a decade. And the terrorists who hold them captive remain an unpredictable factor, leaving even experts unsure just how to bring about their freedom from the men determined to prevent them from gaining an education.
More here
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BBC: Ukraine Crisis: Pro-Russian Troops Seize Back Mariupol City Hall
Pro-Russian separatists have seized back the city hall in the southern Ukrainian port of Mariupol, hours after being ousted by security forces. Government forces first raised the Ukraine flag on the building but later left – allowing the rebels who captured it last week to be back in control. Rebels have occupied official buildings in dozens of towns in eastern Ukraine in recent weeks. The Kiev government has sent troops to restore its authority. Shortly after the Russian and “Donetsk Peoples’ Republic” flags were hoisted over Mariupol’s city hall, the scene of tensions moved to the police station where 16 arrested pro-Russian activists were being held.
Heavily-armed police fired warning shots into the air as an angry crowd of friends and relatives gathered at the police gates concerned that the detainees would be moved to another province, the BBC’s Sarah Rainsford reports from the scene. Earlier on Wednesday, Ukrainian Interior Minister Arsen Avakov said government troops had taken over Mariupol’s city hall following a joint operation by ministry troops and the army. Russian President Vladimir Putin, meeting the chair of the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Moscow, said he was ready to “seek ways out of this crisis”.
More here
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President Obama returns to the Oval Office after giving interviews in the Rose Garden of the White House, May 6, 2014 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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TPM: Charlie Crist Says He Became A Democrat Because Of GOP Racism
Charlie Crist said once again Tuesday that racism motivates many of President Obama’s most hostile GOP adversaries.
It was partly for that reason that Crist, the former Republican governor of Florida who’s now trying to reclaim his old job as a Democrat, broke with his former party.
“I couldn’t be consistent with myself and my core beliefs, and stay with a party that was so unfriendly toward the African-American president, I’ll just go there,” Crist told Fusion’s Jorge Ramos. “I was a Republican and I saw the activists and what they were doing, it was intolerable to me.”
More here
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Sam Baker: Another Obamacare Attack Goes Bust
Health insurance companies say the number of people who paid their Obamacare premiums will be higher than House Republicans implied. The House Energy and Commerce Committee said last week that, based on information it received from insurers, only 67 percent of people who signed up for private coverage through Obamacare’s exchanges had gone on to pay their first month’s premium. Conservatives have fixated on the number of unpaid premiums, arguing that the White House’s statistics—8 million people have selected a plan—are meaningless. Consumers aren’t truly enrolled until they pay their first premium, so the number of paid enrollments is indeed a more accurate picture of how many people the law’s exchanges are covering.
But this week, in written testimony to the same committee, insurers say the 67 percent figure was premature—and that they warned the committee not to draw sweeping conclusions from the information it requested. Energy and Commerce’s figure included people who signed up for coverage but whose first premium hadn’t come due at the time of the committee’s inquiry. And that’s a lot of people. Wellpoint, the largest insurer in the Obamacare exchanges, said the payment rate is closer to 90 percent among people who reached their first payment deadline. The company has given investors the same estimate. Health Care Service Corp., which administers Blue Cross Blue Shield plans in several states, told the committee the same thing: Of plans that have reached their payment deadlines, about 80 percent to 90 percent are paid enrollments.
More here
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Michael Dunn: Nutter Raises Minimum Wage For Most City Contract Workers
Mayor Michael Nutter has decided to raise the minimum wage that companies doing business with the city must pay to their workers. And he extended that requirement to subcontractors as well. “This is something that’s been on my mind for a long, long time,” he said today. “I finally came to the conclusion that the unemployment rate is coming down, more and more people seem to be working, the city is doing a little better.
And I came to the conclusion that we cannot leave folks behind — that if people are doing better in this city, that we need to make sure that some of that benefit is being spread to those who need it the most.” And, with that, Nutter signed an executive order that does two things: it extends the living wage requirement to subcontractors, and secondly, effective next January, it raises the wage rate from $10.88 an hour to $12 an hour. The mayor said he was convinced to do this both by urgings to all mayors by President Obama, and by the local work of city councilman-at-large Wilson Goode Jr.
More here
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Steve Benen: Following GOP Misstep, Senate Slowly Fills The Federal Bench
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) no doubt understands that his party’s majority status is in jeopardy and his eight-year run heading the chamber may be wrapping up at the end of this Congress. The question is what he intends to do with the next several months. Part of the focus will be on what Senate Democrats call their “Fair Shot” agenda. Republicans have already killed proposals on pay equity and the minimum wage, but Dems still have other policy measures in mind – including an upcoming fight on college affordability – that the party hopes will leave them better positioned for the midterm elections. But Reid is also thinking ahead when it comes to confirmation votes.
Yesterday, for example, the Senate confirmed Kansas Supreme Court Justice Nancy Moritz to fill a vacancy on the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. There’s been a lot of these kinds of votes lately. On Thursday the Senate confirmed two district-court judges. The day before, six other district-court judges were confirmed, which followed an appeals-court confirmation the day before that. In late March, shortly before the Senate broke for its Spring recess, the chamber confirmed another appeals-court nominee and four other district-court nominees. All told, we haven’t seen a flurry of jurists fill vacancies on the federal bench like this in quite a long while. Had it not been for the so-called “nuclear option,” we almost certainly would not see all of this progress.
More here
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Eugene Robinson: Time For Some Happy Talk From Democrats
Democrats, if you want to win in the fall, take some advice from Pharrell Williams: “Clap along if you feel like happiness is the truth.” The Mountie-hat-wearing pop singer’s infectious “Happy” should be the Democratic Party’s theme song for the midterm election. Despite Republican claims to the contrary, things are definitely looking up. Democrats ought to be clicking their heels and spreading the good news. Friday’s announcement that unemployment fell to 6.3 percent was huge. The fact that the economy added 288,000 jobs in April — despite continued bad weather early in the month in parts of the country — suggests that the recovery has greater momentum than pessimists had feared. Economists were expecting decent numbers. These are great. The stock market, meanwhile, is flirting with an all-time high. The Dow has risen about 10 percent over the past year; the S&P 500, more than 16 percent; the Nasdaq, about 22 percent . During President Obama’s term in office, the Dow has more than doubled. If he were a socialist, as his harshest critics claim, he’d be a truly lousy one.
The numbers prove that Obama is, in fact, a skillful capitalist who guided the economy out of its worst slump since the Great Depression. He accomplished this feat despite being saddled with a Republican opposition in Congress that reflexively opposes his every initiative — even those based on policies the GOP supported in the past. Speaking of which, the Affordable Care Act — which is based, you’ll recall, on a framework developed in Republican think tanks — is clearly a success and may soon be seen as a triumph. More than 8 million people have signed up for insurance through the federal and state exchanges; Obama’s benchmark had been 7 million. Enough of these enrollees are young and healthy to ensure the program’s continued viability. Democrats now have a positive story they can tell in their campaign ads and speeches: “We promised you that these were the right policies to get the economy on track and reform health care. We said it would take time to see results and asked for patience. You gave us your trust, and now we’re seeing the benefits. This is just the beginning. Give us a mandate to keep moving forward on an agenda that is working.” Listen up, Democrats. You fixed the economy. You expanded access to health care. Oh, and you ended two wars. Show a little happiness. It’s contagious.
More here
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On This Day
Sen. Obama on board his campaign plane at Midway Airport en-route to Washington DC, May 7, 2008 in Chicago
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First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden wait for the start of the Women’s Leadership Forum Issues Conference at the Washington Hilton in Washington, D.C., May 7, 2010 (Photo by Samantha Appleton)
First Lady Michelle Obama chats with a member of her mentoring program, as her mother Marian Robinson looks on at the State Dining Room of the White House May 7, 2010
President Obama arrives to discuss the April jobs numbers outside the Oval Office, May 7, 2010. With him are Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner, Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, Budget Director Peter R. Orszag, Secretary of Commerce Gary F. Locke and Chief of the National Economic Council Larry Summers
President Obama and First Lady Michelle leave Komi restaurant in the Dupont Circle neighborhood May 7, 2010 in Washington, DC
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First Lady Michelle Obama receives applause following her commencement address to the 2011 graduating class at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls, Iowa, May 7, 2011 (Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama leave Tosca Restaurant in Washington, DC on May 7, 2011
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President Obama greets 2010 Fermi Award recipients Dr. Burton Richter, right, and his wife Laurose, and Dr. Mildred S. Dresselhaus, third from right, and her husband Gene, in the Oval Office, May 7, 2012 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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President Barack Obama and President Park Geun-hye of the Republic of Korea walk on the Colonnade of the White House before a working lunch in the Cabinet Room, May 7, 2013. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
First Lady Michelle Obama participates in a book signing, May 7, 2013, at the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC.
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