Rise and Shine

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Today:

11:35 ET: Vice President Joe Biden speaks at a campaign event in Fort Myers, Florida (live on C-Span)

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NYT Editorial: The Economy and the Blame …. The problem with Mr. Romney’s “blame Obama” mantra is that Mr. Obama is not responsible for the deep and protracted recession that predated his administration and is at the root of the persistently high unemployment. Job creation under Mr. Obama’s term far outpaced the job growth following the first recession of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001. New evidence released this week showed recent employment has been stronger than previously tallied.

…. The challenge is to foster the recovery and then put the budget on a sustainable path. Meeting the first challenge requires a belief that government has a stimulative role to play at times of economic weakness and a willingness to play it, which only Mr. Obama has demonstrated. Meeting the budget challenge requires raising taxes, which Mr. Obama is prepared to do but Mr. Romney is not.

He has assumed voters will reject Mr. Obama because of the weak economy. They may well re-elect him because the economy needs more help.

Full editorial here

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Cagle

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Dana Milbank: Meet Willard Mitt Romney, champion of the common man ….. When it comes to speaking up for the downtrodden, Romney isn’t just another man of the people. He is the Rolls-Royce of populists.

With evidence building that his prospects have been hurt by his dismissal of nearly half the country as moochers, Romney has been making it his job to worry about the 47 percent of Americans he famously said it wasn’t his job to worry about.

But when such an appeal is attempted by a man who has painstakingly crafted for himself a public image combining Scrooge McDuck and Thurston Howell III, there is bound to be a certain amount of awkwardness and inconsistency…..

…. Why the Baron of Bain would be making a late appeal to the downtrodden is obvious. The latest Washington Post-ABC News poll finds that Americans regard Romney’s “47 percent” remarks negatively, 54 percent to 32 percent. Respondents who self-describe as independent, the all-important demographic, regarded the comments even more negatively.

More here

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Virginia Beach (OFA)

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Charles Blow: Mitt Romney is losing badly. And he has only himself to blame. Not only is he trailing President Obama in almost every national poll, he’s trailing in almost every poll of swing states.

What is the Republican response? That there must be some magical, maniacal skew in the numbers, and the skew must be a conscious effort by a scheming, elite media to dampen Republican enthusiasm.

…. This is just an extension of the Republican war on facts. If you find a truth disagreeable, simply deny it. Call it corrupt. Suggest that it is little more than one side of a story — an opinionated, biased one — and insist that there is another explanation. The base will buy it.

Let’s just call this Operation Ostrich…..

Full article here

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OFA

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Videos of the week?

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OFA

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Genius!

Daily Beast: Barack Obama’s Campaign Scoring Points With Video Gamers

You’ve sunk my battleship! That popular phrase ran endlessly in long-ago TV commercials promoting the board-game version of naval warfare. Now, that battleground has morphed into a digital shootout that could tip the balance of the presidential campaign.

The Obama team has targeted Battleship and 17 other online games—including Scrabble, Tetris, and Madden NFL 13—in highly contested swing states to woo legions of early voters.

By placing ads alongside these popular titles by Electronic Arts, the president’s campaign hopes to replicate the past success of this strategy. In 2008, surveys found that gamers who saw political ads were 120 percent more likely to have a positive reaction to the candidate, and 50 percent more likely to consider casting a vote for him.

Those who click are transported to GottaVote.com or GottaRegister.com, which are Obama/Biden sites…..

More here

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Lawrence University, Wisconsin, Sept 28

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OFA

TOD fundraisers:

a4alice * Alycee * BWD * CollegeKay * Cookemom * DonnaDem4Obama

Hgerhard * HZ * Judith Fardig * Mae Who Love Our CIC

Marlz * Meta * Pamela *prettyfoot58 * proudmemberofglobalzero * Rita * Theo67 * The Obama Diary

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Moooooooooooooorning everyone 😉

Rise and Shine

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Michael Tomasky: Mitt Tells Voters in Video to Drop Dead …. Sure it was a dumb move for Romney to denounce half of America. But he was just channeling today’s GOP.

…. Can he really believe this? It’s incomprehensible. And yet it’s not. This is the story conservatives have been telling themselves over and over in the Tea Party age … An inevitable consequence, I suppose, of campaigning among these people for all these years. You marinate a cherry in cheap whiskey long enough, the stink attaches.

…. It’s hard to judge the impact of this comment just yet ….. I would expect we’ll see “Obama voter — and I’m not a victim” and “I pay a higher tax rate than you, Governor!” signs at rallies by tomorrow. Indeed, the average person pays more in mere payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare (15.3 percent) than Romney paid in total taxes for the year he released his returns (13.9 percent).

I suspect an impact that’s fairly big. People on the right will blame the media. But the real culprit is the words themselves. They slander millions of hard-working Americans ….. When Romney is licking his wounds on Nov. 7, that party and movement will fire all its arrows at him. He’ll deserve a lot of them. But they will have buried him with the ignorance and rage they demanded he adopt. His chief crime will have been his weakness in failing to confront them.

More here

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@BarackObama

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Paul Krugman: The Real Romney

Oh, my. Mother Jones has what it says is a video of Mitt Romney talking to donors; it sure looks and sounds real. And it reveals a candidate who despises half the country….

….. Actually, if you look at the facts, you learn that the great bulk of those who pay no income tax pay other taxes; also, many of the people in the no-income-tax category are (a) elderly (b) students or (c) having a bad year, having lost a job — that is, they’re people who have paid income taxes in the past and/or will pay income taxes in the future. The idea that half of Americans are just grifters is grotesque.

If this is real, it’s very, very ugly.

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NY Mag

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Jonathan Capehart: Back in February, Mitt Romney stuck his ample silver foot in his mouth when he told CNN’s Soledad O’Brien, “I’m not concerned about the very poor.” He went on to say, “We have a safety net there. If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. I’m not concerned about the very rich, they’re doing just fine. I’m concerned about the very heart of the America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling, and I’ll continue to take that message across the nation.”

….. That one-minute-seven-second clip lays waste to Romney’s concern “about the very heart of America, the 90, 95 percent of Americans who right now are struggling.” Worse, it reveals it to be a lie. He couldn’t care less about them, it seems. That condescending clip shows a contempt for half the country that demands an explanation from Romney.

More here

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NYT: …. Mr. Romney is absolutely correct that about half of American households do not pay federal income tax. (He is also tapping into a now long-running vein of conservative anger at those households.) But he is missing some crucial context on why they do not pay federal income tax.

The nonpartisan and highly respected Tax Policy Center derived the 47 percent number and published an excellent analysis of it last summer.

It found that about half of the households that do not pay federal income tax do not pay it because they are simply too poor…. The other half consists of households taking advantage of tax credits and other provisions, mostly support for senior citizens and low-income working families.

Put bluntly, these are not households shirking their tax liabilities. The pool consists mostly of the poor, of relatively low-income working families and of old people.

More here

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Mediaite: Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney held a surprise late-night press availability to address the maelstrom surrounding hidden camera video that surfaced …

Romney offered no apology, other than to concede that his point was “not elegantly stated,” and drew a distinction between a “political process” and what he says in front of people he knows can hear him.

Nothing Romney said at the ultra-brief presser was nearly as newsworthy as the very fact that he held it, a sign of the seismic panic this clip has caused. The campaign was already reeling from a Politico story about campaign disarray that had already dominated much of today’s news cycle. The hidden camera video, taken at a May 17 fundraiser at the home of hedge fund manager Marc Leder, is only the tip  of the iceberg. Mother Jones’ David Corn has over an hour of footage from the event, which he says he will begin rolling out “soon.”

….. The decision to hold a surprise press conference at 10 pm eastern time (Romney was speaking from California) underscores the type of damage the Romney campaign fears from this tape, but it would have helped if Romney had said something that… helped….

More here

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Cagle

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Today: The President will welcome WNBA Champion Minnesota Lynx to the White House to honor the team and their 2011 WNBA Finals victory. In the afternoon, the President will travel to New York City for campaign events. While in New York City, the President will tape an appearance on the Late Show with David Letterman. The President will return to the White House in the evening:

11:15: Jay Carney briefs reporters at the White House.

11:30: VP Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at the Bridge View Center in Ottumwa, IA.

1:10: President welcomes the WNBA Champion Minnesota Lynx to the White House.

3:00: VP Biden delivers remarks at a campaign event at Grinnell College in Grinnell, IA.

4:40: President Obama tapes an interview for the “Late Show with David Letterman” at the Ed Sullivan Theater in New York, NY.

7:40: President Obama delivers remarks at a campaign event at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York, NY.

9:45: President Obama delivers remarks at a campaign event at the 40/40 Club in New York, NY.

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Morning everyone 😉

Rise and Shine – and Heads Up!

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Heads up!

10:55 ET (estimated time): President Obama delivers remarks at St. Petersburg College-Seminole Campus

C-Span * CNN * CBS 1 * CBS 2

Later:

4:30 ET: Delivers remarks at Kissimmee Civic Center

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SeaCoastOnline: Folks were as optimistic as the sunny day as they left Strawbery Banke Museum after President Barack Obama’s remarks to a crowd of an estimated 6,000 people.

“You really got the feeling that this was about you,” said Jude Flynn of Kittery, Maine. …. “He needs to finish the job he began on turning around the economy,” he said. “I also agree on his principles of allowing people to make choices on marriage and other things. I feel safe with him. The other side is scary to me.”

“We definitely need to go forward with the president’s plans,” said Pat Dunnell of Manchester, who was accompanied by her husband, Bud. “I don’t want Medicare vouchers,” she said.

….. “I’m also for women’s choice,” Corinne Baker of Hampton said. “If you’re a woman, you have to vote for him.”

Lilly Ramos-Spooner of Manchester was with two friends and her 9-year-old granddaughter, Sophia Victoria Spooner. “I am so motivated right now,” she said. “There were a lot of young people surrounding us and they all said they were signing up to vote after today.”

More here

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Strawbery Banke Museum in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Sept 7

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Rise and Shine

Newseum

Liberation: American Dream …. American Horror

Vive la France!

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Thank you for the caption Japa

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Retweet

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NYT: Mitt Romney appears to trim his social convictions to the party’s prevailing winds. There is no doubt, however, about where the party’s vice-presidential candidate stands. A long history of social extremism makes Paul Ryan an emblem of the Republican tack to the far right.

Mr. Romney’s choice of Mr. Ryan carried some risks, considering Mr. Ryan’s advocacy of overhauling Medicare, but it has sent the strongest signal of solidarity to those who have made the party unrecognizable to moderates. Strident conservatives had been uneasy with Mr. Romney, but it is the rest of the country that should be nervous about conservatives’ now-enthusiastic acceptance of the Republican ticket.

….. for years, he has been a reliable vote against workplace equity for women, opposing the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act …. he has co-sponsored more than three dozen anti-abortion bills…. his budget would end all government financing for Planned Parenthood while slashing spending on prenatal care and infant nutrition….

Mr. Ryan’s record on gay rights is no less egregious. He supports a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage, and voted against the repeal of the military’s discriminatory don’t-ask, don’t-tell policy. In 2009, a decade after Matthew Shepard was murdered for being gay, Mr. Ryan voted against a bill named after Mr. Shepard that expands the federal hate crimes act to include brutality based on sexual orientation.

…. Mr. Ryan is one of the most anti-gun-control candidates on a presidential ticket in many years, holding a grade of “A” from the National Rifle Association and opposing a background check requirement for purchases at gun shows.

Full editorial here

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Rise and Shine

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Michael Tomasky: Well, leave it to Mitt Romney of all people to put Paul Ryan on his ticket and then move immediately thereafter to distance himself from the Ryan budget. It’s so typical of everything we’ve seen of this semi-vertebrate. Try to bathe in Ryan’s refracted glory to right wingers while trying to tell seniors hey, psst, this is not really my thing, get it? Unbelievable.

It’s important to keep track of the Medicare lies, as they’re bound to pile up. The basic deal is that the Romney-Ryan line about Obama cutting $716 billion while they’ll “strengthen” the program is, shockingly I know, a lie. Ryan’s Medicare program cuts the same $716 billion! And then it cuts even more. And then, Romney’s proposal, insofar as it can be divined because as usual the details are scant, would likely cut even more than that.

…. I trust you saw the USA Today/Gallup poll yesterday showing that Ryan is the second least-approved of vice-presidential choice in the last quarter century …. “If the Democrats handle this right” is always a big if, but if they do, this ticket has the makings of a disaster.

Full post here

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Jonathan Cohn (TNR): Have you seen Mitt Romney’s new ad on Medicare? …. It’s not very subtle. And it’s not very true.

By now, you should know all about the hypocrisy of Romney attacking Obama for cutting Medicare. Paul Ryan put the same cuts in his budget plan. And while Romney has insisted he’d restore them, his budget doesn’t have room for that. If he’s serious about his overall spending plan, then he’d surely have to cut Medicare by as much as Obama did. In fact, he’d probably have to cut it by even more. And that’s just in the first ten years.

Still, the power of this ad is the appeal to senior citizens: Obama is taking your money and giving it somebody else. That’s why Romney and his allies keep saying that Obama “raided” Medicare. But, under the Affordable Care Act, a chunk of the money that comes out of Medicare goes right back into it. It helps seniors pay for prescription drugs, filling in the donut hole from Medicare Part D. It also allows seniors to get preventative care without co-pays, which means they can get an annual wellness visit, cancer screenings, and the like with no out-of-pocket costs. In the first half of this year, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than a million seniors have saved an average of $629 on their drug bills because of this assistance.

…this business about “raiding” Medicare? It’s a naked appeal to selfishness and brazen misrepresentation of reality.

Full post here

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Cagle

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Michael Cohen (NY Daily News): …. if you really want to talk about who is playing the race card this year, it’s worth briefly revisiting the latest attack ad from the Romney campaign on welfare….

It might seem odd to the untrained observer that welfare is even being prominently featured in this campaign. It’s hardly an issue of pressing concern among voters. But of course, welfare never is and never has been just about policy; it’s really about politics and in particular, racial politics.

Romney accuses Obama of gutting welfare reform by granting waivers to state governments in how they choose to implement the law. It’s a charge that is completely without merit; spun from whole cloth; an invented attack line. But again, lying on the campaign trail about President Obama’s record is the rule, not the exception, for Mitt Romney.

… What’s most striking about the ad are the visuals – workers wiping their brow; working class Americans toiling away at manufacturing jobs. And coincidentally all the people in the ad … are white. This might not mean much, except for the fact that, as anyone who has followed American politics for the past 45 years knows, criticisms of the welfare system from the campaign trail have habitually always been used as racial code in attacks on Democrats for coddling blacks. It is the symbol of wasteful government spending, rewarding poor Americans for not working and creating a culture of dependency.

…. Indeed, this ad and in fact this whole line of attack is one of the most blatant uses of racial coding in a presidential campaign since the Willie Horton ad of 1988….

Full article here

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Iowa, August 15

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Cagle

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President Obama and first lady Michelle Obama return to the White House from Iowa, August 15

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Morning everyone 😉

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PS

Rise and Shine

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Thank you Hopefruit

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11.0: Vice President Biden addresses the National Association of Police Organizations’ annual convention in Manalapan, Florida

2:25: President Obama departs San Francisco en route Reno, Nevada

3:10: Arrives in Reno

3:35: Delivers remarks at the 113th National Convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars (Live coverage)

5:00: Departs Reno en route Oakland, California

5:50: Arrives in Oakland

6:20: Attends a campaign event at the Scottish Rite Center, Oakland (Closed press)

8:35: Delivers remarks at a campaign event (Private residence, closed press)

10:55: Delivers remarks at a campaign event (Live coverage)

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Cagle

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Cagle

The Fact Checker (Washington Post): …. There are few original ideas in politics, just old arguments. We were reminded of this as we considered the ruckus over comments by President Obama that his GOP rival, former governor Mitt Romney, criticized as an attack on free enterprise. Romney immediately began jabbing Obama on the campaign trail and the Romney campaign rushed out an attack ad focused on Obama’s words – though, as we shall see, it sliced and diced the president’s quote to make it seem much worse.

…. The biggest problem with Romney’s ad is that it leaves out just enough chunks of Obama’s words – such as a reference to “roads and bridges”- so that it sounds like Obama is attacking individual initiative. The ad deceivingly cuts away from Obama speaking in order to make it sees as if the sentences follow one another, when in fact eight sentences are snipped away.

Suddenly, the word “that” appears as if it is referring to a business, rather than (apparently) to roads and bridges.

…. by focusing on one ill-phrased sentence, Romney and his campaign have decided to pretend that Obama is talking about something different – and then further extrapolated it so that it becomes ridiculous.

Full article here

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Morning everyone

Rise and Shine

This video is dedicated to Alex Okrent, the staffer in President Obama’s campaign office who died yesterday. May he rest in peace

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You can see President Obama’s speeches in Virginia yesterday on C-Span

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Bloomberg: President Barack Obama has gained an advantage over Republican Mitt Romney in a Pew Research Center Poll showing public confidence in either one’s handling of the economy shifting toward the president in the past month.

Obama leads Romney by 50 percent to 43 percent among registered voters surveyed, Pew reports, with the Republican Party’s presumed presidential nominee losing 3 percentage points of support since its previous poll in early June.

Public opinion on which candidate would do a better job of improving economic conditions has shifted from an advantage for Romney in Pew’s June survey to support for Obama in the latest survey of 2,373 registered voters conducted June 28-July 9.

More here

Thanks amk

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Charles Blow: Mitt Romney’s stories just don’t jibe.

First, there is the issue of when he left Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he founded.

….Second is the issue of Romney’s tax returns.

…The narrative is starting to take hold that he is dishonest, devious and irreconcilably different. These are simple, deadly character flaws in a candidate because they’re antithetical to the American ideal of the presidency.

… My mother used to say: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.” The simple truth makes sense, stands on its own and can be proved. Nine times out of 10, things that require constant clarification and endless appending aren’t the simple truth.

That’s mother’s wit, and everyone has a mother.

Full article here

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Charles Pierce: As entertaining as all the When-Did-Willard-Leave-Bain-And-How-Thoroughly-Did-He-Leave-It? whoop-de-doo is, doesn’t fighting over the subject imply that you’re accepting the notion that Bain only went all predatory and pirate-ish as a result of Thoroughly Moral Mitt’s departure? And isn’t that really the wrong question to be asking, and doesn’t that really make you sort of a sap? Discuss.

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Cagle

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Today:

The President will hold campaign rallies in Glen Allen (Richmond) and Centreville (Northern VA.).

The rally at Centreville High School starts at 4 p.m. ET – not sure yet about the Glen Allen speech.

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Morning everyone 😉

Unfortunate front page of the day

Rise and Shine

President Obama boards Air Force One at Des Moines International Airport en route to Washington DC, May 24

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Morning everyone, back in a while 😉

Rise and Shine

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Newseum

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Today:

11:15 AM: President Obama and VP Biden honor the 2012 National Association of Police Organizations TOP COPS award winners

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Michelle Obama will deliver the commencement address for North Carolina A&T University’s graduation ceremony – not sure what time this is on. There’ll be live streaming here.

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Two supporters from Montana show their Obama 2012 pride at a base camp on Mt. Everest.

Flickr

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Robert Shrum: Obama’s gay-marriage endorsement is a moral and political win – Pundits are eager to pontificate on how supporting same-sex marriage will cost Obama in November. They couldn’t be more wrong

Forty-nine years ago this spring, as he proposed the landmark civil rights reforms of the 1960s, John F. Kennedy became the first president to declare that ending racial discrimination was a moral issue …. Now Barack Obama has taken the next step in the unfinished journey toward that ideal: He cut through a cacophony of political advice, the calculus of pre-election caution, to become the first president to endorse marriage equality – and thus to affirm that gay rights are fundamental human rights.

It was fitting that this historic moment came, as JFK’s did, from a president who himself had to overcome generations of prejudice to be in the White House in the first place.

…..this president, who has repealed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, pushed through a hate crimes law, and refused to defend the shameful Defense of Marriage Act has now sealed his legacy as the champion of a 21st century birth of freedom in America.

That should be rewarded, not punished, in November – and I think it will be. Americans are a decent people; sometimes it just takes time.

Full post here

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Cagle

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Morning everyone