For All

OFA

Chat away 😉

Just Sayin’

I’ll be back later with a heads-up for PBO’s Tampa speech (4:15 ET), see you then 😉

catching up (again)

Paris Match

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Harold Pollack (Washington Monthly): ….. Many progressives – me, for instance – worry that OWS will promote destructive alienation from the hard and sustained work of conventional politics. If a sizeable chunk of progressive youth are passive in 2012, that is the functional equivalent of a Nader candidacy.

The best way to prevent this is to find an aspect of conventional politics that can genuinely excite and move these protesters into positive action that serves their own values and long-term goals …. Perhaps earnest substantive emails about health reform should do that – given the Affordable Care Act’s impact on millions of low-income people….

Ari Berman’s fantastic reporting describes Republican efforts across the country to establish subtle (or not-so-subtle) roadblocks to hinder voting among minorities, poor people, ex-felons, and the young … This is an obvious effort to turn the 2012 electorate into an older and whiter group that resembles the 2010 electorate rather than the 2008 electorate that brought Barack Obama to the White House.

…. Occupy Wall Street organizers: I believe you should resonate with this issue. GOP officials are trying to disenfranchise people like you: college students with university IDs not gun permits, young people and minority urban residents who don’t drive, and so on.

Full post here

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Original video here

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President Barack Obama talks with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner during a break at the G20 Summit in Cannes, France, Nov. 4. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

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The Week

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“president obama is against what just happened”

I know you’ve all discussed this already today, but some on other sites were claiming Rachel Maddow didn’t say “President Obama is against what just happened”. Well, she did:

This is seriously disappointing dishonesty from a woman as smart as Maddow. Whatever she feels about the President’s personal views on same-sex marriage, she cannot deny (but chose to ignore it last night) that he declared in February that DOMA violates the Constitution and decided that his administration would no longer defend it in the courts.

He would therefore, logically, have fully supported what happened in New York last night.

June 23, 2011 – President Obama: “I believe that gay couples deserve the same legal rights as every other couple in this country….That’s why we’re going to keep on fighting until the law no longer treats committed partners who’ve been together for decades like they’re strangers.

That’s why I have long believed that the so-called Defense of Marriage Act ought to be repealed. It was wrong. It was unfair. And since I taught constitutional law for a while, I felt like I was in a pretty good position to agree with courts that have ruled that Section 3 of DOMA violates the Constitution. And that’s why we decided, with my attorney general, that we could no longer defend the constitutionality of DOMA in the courts.”

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Truly, I never thought I’d see the day Rachel Maddow would be as dishonest as Choi & Co on this issue. Depressing.

the gop…..

Rep Steve King (R-Iowa), June 2: “Labor is a commodity, just like corn or beans or oil or gold.” (Full C-Span video here)

And lest we forget….

Thanks Michele

see? he just can’t win….

Reuters: If Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak is toppled, Israel will lose one of its very few friends in a hostile neighborhood and President Barack Obama will bear a large share of the blame, Israeli pundits said on Monday….

CNN: A top Senate Republican leader accused the Obama administration Monday of failing to promote democracy around the world …. possibly leaving Egyptian protestors wondering if the U.S. really stands with them…..

Meanwhile: The White House has confirmed that President Obama sent a message to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak telling him not to run for another term, delivered by former ambassador Frank Wisner. The answer from Mubarak was unclear, an administration official said, but Al Arabiya TV reports that Mubarak will announce in a speech shortly that he won’t run.