This and That

President Barack Obama meets with members of his national security team to discuss the situation in Egypt, in the Situation Room of the White House, July 3 (Photo by Pete Souza)

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Statement by President Barack Obama on Egypt:

As I have said since the Egyptian Revolution, the United States supports a set of core principles, including opposition to violence, protection of universal human rights, and reform that meets the legitimate aspirations of the people.  The United States does not support particular individuals or political parties, but we are committed to the democratic process and respect for the rule of law.  Since the current unrest in Egypt began, we have called on all parties to work together to address the legitimate grievances of the Egyptian people, in accordance with the democratic process, and without recourse to violence or the use of force.

The United States is monitoring the very fluid situation in Egypt, and we believe that ultimately the future of Egypt can only be determined by the Egyptian people. Nevertheless, we are deeply concerned by the decision of the Egyptian Armed Forces to remove President Morsy and suspend the Egyptian constitution. I now call on the Egyptian military to move quickly and responsibly to return full authority back to a democratically elected civilian government as soon as possible through an inclusive and transparent process, and to avoid any arbitrary arrests of President Morsy and his supporters. Given today’s developments, I have also directed the relevant departments and agencies to review the implications under U.S. law for our assistance to the Government of Egypt.

The United States continues to believe firmly that the best foundation for lasting stability in Egypt is a democratic political order with participation from all sides and all political parties —secular and religious, civilian and military. During this uncertain period, we expect the military to ensure that the rights of all Egyptian men and women are protected, including the right to peaceful assembly, due process, and free and fair trials in civilian courts.  Moreover, the goal of any political process should be a government that respects the rights of all people, majority and minority; that institutionalizes the checks and balances upon which democracy depends; and that places the interests of the people above party or faction. The voices of all those who have protested peacefully must be heard – including those who welcomed today’s developments, and those who have supported President Morsy. In the interim, I urge all sides to avoid violence and come together to ensure the lasting restoration of Egypt’s democracy.

No transition to democracy comes without difficulty, but in the end it must stay true to the will of the people. An honest, capable and representative government is what ordinary Egyptians seek and what they deserve. The longstanding partnership between the United States and Egypt is based on shared interests and values, and we will continue to work with the Egyptian people to ensure that Egypt’s transition to democracy succeeds.

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Obama administration was too cozy to Morsi. Obama admin didn’t do enough for Morsi. #TVcoverageOfEgypt #obamasfault #nomatterwhat

— Steve Weinstein (@steveweinstein) July 3, 2013

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Conservatives think the employer mandate delay is going to hurt Obamacare. They are wrong. http://t.co/kilNwwGEh7 via @jonathanchait

— The Lovely Plains (@DaRiverZkind) July 3, 2013

Everyone mad about the delay in #HCR employer mandate: read why it’s good policy and great progressive politics http://t.co/Z8Ef3sBPMC

— The People’s View (@thepeoplesview) July 3, 2013

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NYT: Congressional Budget Analysts Release Positive Economic Assessment of Immigration Overhaul

Congressional budget analysts on Wednesday released a positive economic assessment of the broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws that passed the Senate last week, saying that the new legislation would cut more than $800 billion from the federal deficit over the next two decades and lead to 9.6 million new legal residents in the country.

Though the Congressional Budget Office had offered in June a similar estimate of the immigration bill that was then being debated in the Senate — in a report that found the benefits of an increase in legal residents from the immigration overhaul would outweigh the costs — the new report provides an analysis of the actual bill recently passed by the Senate.

More here

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This is freaking genius from @RobDelaney. A woman’s reproductive decisions should be controlled by her. http://t.co/p7MEfYZDvV

— Nerdy Wonka (@NerdyWonka) July 3, 2013

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Proposal: actual journalists would be investigating the obvious connections behind the TX/OH/NC/KS abortion bills and not Shiny Ball Crap.

— Zandar (@ZandarVTS) July 3, 2013

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The HUGE consequence of the Texas abortion legislation that you won’t hear about from the mainstream media —> http://t.co/7CuZ6V3eOa

— ThinkProgress (@thinkprogress) July 3, 2013

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Steve Benen: Koch brothers push GOP officials to sign anti-climate pledge

The Republican Party is certainly fond of its pledges. Grover Norquist, of course, has his infamous anti-tax pledge that has interfered with federal policymaking in recent decades, and in 2011, GOP presidential candidates were pushed to endorse an anti-gay pledge from the National Organization for Marriage.

But as it turns out, there’s another pledge that’s taken root in Republican politics that’s received far less attention. The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer reports this week on the “No Climate Tax Pledge” pushed by Charles and David Koch….

More here

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Too funny….

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Atlantic Wire: The Tale of the Re-Routed Bolivian President’s Plane Is Falling Apart

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‘Put the white back in the White House’

A supporter of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan waits for a campaign event to begin on October 12 in Lancaster, Ohio (Getty)

I posted this earlier in the comments of the previous thread, but I think it really needs to be highlighted.

Was this man even challenged at the campaign event today, by other Romney/Ryan supporters or staff?

Did anyone ask him to leave?

Will Romney/Ryan disassociate themselves from this guy?

Or are they good with this hate?

“It’s about time we got a First Lady who looks like a First Lady…”

NPR

VP Biden: “This is not your father’s Republican party. This is a different brand.”

Lawrence Jackson

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Fight the hate – donate:

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

Charlottesville …. and more

Msg from The Obama Diary: Genuine bloggers who create their own posts are welcome to use anything from TOD – rebloggers, who only copy others in an attempt to up their traffic, are not. Like the reblogger who treats women like this – explicit – while copying TOD posts on women’s rights. He belongs in the GOP.

@NoShock

See the speech at C-Span

CNN’s silence

Msg from The Obama Diary: Genuine bloggers who create their own posts, are welcome to use anything they ever see at TOD – rebloggers, who just copy others’ posts in an attempt to up their traffic, are not. Especially rebloggers who talk to women like this – explicit – while copying TOD posts on women’s rights. Thanks.

Greg Sargent: As you’ve surely heard by now, two GOP convention attendees were ejected from the festivities last night after throwing nuts at a black CNN camera-woman. The words “this is how we feed animals” were uttered.

…. CNN put out its own terse statement last night confirming the bare minimum about the affair ….. the question is whether CNN, which presumably knows all the details about the incident, will treat this as a news story, and report in full detail what happened.

…. It’s a tough spot for the network, but CNN is a news organization. It’s not in the business of withholding information about newsworthy events. Given the seemingly deplorable nature of this event, and given that it took place on the scene of the biggest story in politics right now, you’d think CNN will eventually err on the side of informing people, rather than the opposite.

Full post here

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Andrew Sullivan: Why CNN Sucks – Because it has a huge story on its hands – an insight into ugly racism among the GOP base….

…. If I were the camerawoman involved, this would not be enough. CNN has now run a small story on the incident but doesn’t seem to be pushing it. Why? Because this awful notion of balance – which requires journalists to be lobotomized when assessing reality – is “on-brand”. Oy.

Full post here

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Read more at TPM

“Understand Your Power: Don’t Give It Away”

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Thursday:

3:30 ET: President Obama delivers remarks at a campaign event in Charlottesville, Virgina

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I watched some of the GOP convention today …. mainly with the sound switched off. Seriously. I have zero interest in hearing what those execrable race-baiting bigots have to say.

But what struck me – and it’s hardly a surprise – was the sea of mean, hate-filled faces, the ugliest sample of humanity I’ve had the misfortune to witness in a very long time.

They’re not even there to support Romney, they’re just there to oppose the black guy, and are emboldened in Tampa to spew their bile because they’re surrounded by their fellow bigots. A communal spirit.

We joke sometimes about the GOP’s lack of diversity, but today’s scene really was something else, if the aliens landed and assumed this audience was representative of America in 2012, they’d have assumed the country was populated by nothing but angry, bitter whites. And I’m white, so I know an angry, bitter one when I see one.

And they might have wondered about the crusty old guys yee-hawing in delight at declarations that a woman should have absolutely no rights over her own body, even when she’s raped or the victim of incest.

It was stunning.

As Greg Sargent said today, Romney will, most probably, get a boost in the polls from this obnoxious charade …. but then there’ll be the Democratic convention. And, soon enough, there’ll be the debates.

That’s why we should grit our teeth and let this week go, painful as it is to see these pitiful excuses for human beings dominate the news cycle and the MSM giving them a pass each and every time they spit their hate.

Our time will come.

Stay strong.

Register. Volunteer. Donate. Vote.

PS I just watched Ann Romney. I’m going to be polite, for once, even if I now feel physically ill. But I give you this:

I rest my case.

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‘Racial air-raid sirens’

Charles Pierce: …. Chris Matthews got all up in the slick, smug little grill of obvious anagram Reince Priebus this morning on Morning Joe’s Playhouse over the obvious racial air-raid sirens that have echoed through Republican politics only since about half-past 1964, and which have grown especially loud these past few weeks as Willard Romney made his little fun-fun about birth certificates last week, and his campaign released an ad falsely accusing the president of “gutting welfare reform” …

If you can tear yourself away from the attempts of the hosts to tut-tut-my-good-man the whole thing to death – and poor Tom Brokaw, who freaking covered the civil-rights movement and knows good and well which party latched on to the wrong side of those events and rode them to glory, looks as though he might have a stroke – listen carefully to what Matthews says. He links the birther joke to the welfare commercials, which any thinking analyst would do, since they came hard, one upon the other….

…. What we have in this campaign is a joining of old Republican money with the modern American financial universe, and its power applied to advance ideas straight out of the swamps of the Wallace campaign 50 years ago. It is an unholy mess, and it is precisely the unholy mess over which Reince Priebus wants to preside, and if Mika wants the tone to change, maybe she should start there.

I predict Matthews will be disciplined. I, for one, am willing to go his bail on this one.

Full post here

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Michael Tomasky: …. Tom Edsall said it without quite saying it this morning in the Times (link), that this Romney-Ryan campaign is becoming among the most racist we’ve ever seen. The two key lies so far are totally about race – that Obama is soft on welfare recipients, and that he’s “robbing” $716 billion from Medicare (77 percent of recipients are white) to “pay for Obamacare” (that is, to extend health care to black and brown people who don’t deserve it, haven’t earned it, etc.).

… We’re going to be hearing a lot of those lies this week, and a lot of quasi-racist dog-whistling about how Obama doesn’t feel the same way about America as “we” do. So no – still not sure what I should find non-loathsome about that.

Full post here

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Read Thomas Edsall’s ‘Making the Election About Race’ piece here

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Ed Kilgore: … It’s clear by now that the Romney campaign is going to shrug off the almost universal denunciation of his welfare ads (and to only a lesser extent, his Medicare ads that show a white senior frowning as the narrator says ObamaCare is “not for you”) as a pack of despicable, race-baiting lies ….

… If nothing else, his wizards probably figured out some time ago that the “welfare” crap offered a rare opportunity to hit notes equally effective with “the base” and the non-college educated white voters who make up a high percentage of this election’s “swing”. Add in the thick armor conservatives have built for themselves against any accusations of racism — now, almost by definition, they believe only liberals are racists, and only white people are targets of racism – and it was probably an easy call for Team Mitt, particularly since truthfulness is not a factor at all.

…. Romney’s not going to be shamed out of his unsavory tactics. But on the other hand, if his gambit fails, not only will his presidential ambitions perish once and for all, but just maybe the kind of politics he has come to exemplify – rich people encouraging the middle class to “kick down” at “those people” – will take a hit as well.

Full post here

Chris Matthews v Reince Priebus

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

Time: The number of people seeking unemployment aid fell to nearly a four-year low last week, an encouraging sign of continued improvement in the job market.

The Labor Department says weekly applications for unemployment benefits fell 15,000 to a seasonally adjusted 358,000. That’s the second-lowest level since April 2008.

The four-week average, a less volatile measure, fell to 366,250, the lowest since late April 2008.

The figures come a week after the government reported that employers added 243,000 net jobs last month. That pushed the unemployment rate down to 8.3 percent, the lowest in nearly three years.

When applications fall consistently below 375,000, it usually signals that hiring is strong enough to lower the unemployment rate.

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Steve Benen: The general trend on initial unemployment claims over the last few months has been largely encouraging, though there have been setbacks, and most analysts expected this morning’s report to show an uptick in filings.

The good news is, that didn’t happen. The better news is, initial jobless claims have reached one of the lowest levels we’ve seen in four years.

….. here’s the chart, showing weekly, initial unemployment claims going back to the beginning of 2007 (see above)

More here

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Ezra Klein

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Nick Baumann (Mother Jones): President Barack Obama’s decision to require most employers to cover birth control and insurers to offer it at no cost has created a firestorm of controversy. But the central mandate — that most employers have to cover preventative care for women — has been law for over a decade. This point has been completely lost in the current controversy, as Republican presidential candidates and social conservatives claim that Obama has launched a war on religious liberty and the Catholic Church.

Despite the longstanding precedent, “no one screamed” until now, said Sara Rosenbaum, a health law expert at George Washington University.

More here

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Link – thanks rikyrah

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Gail Collins (NYT): ….. This new rule on contraceptive coverage is part of the health care reform law …. The churches themselves don’t have to provide contraceptive coverage. Neither do organizations that are closely tied to a religion’s doctrinal mission. We are talking about places like hospitals and universities that rely heavily on government money and hire people from outside the faith.

We are arguing about whether women who do not agree with the church position, or who are often not even Catholic, should be denied health care coverage that everyone else gets because their employer has a religious objection to it. If so, what happens if an employer belongs to a religion that forbids certain types of blood transfusions? Or disapproves of any medical intervention to interfere with the working of God on the human body?

Organized religion thrives in this country, so the system we’ve worked out seems to be serving it pretty well. Religions don’t get to force their particular dogma on the larger public. The government, in return, protects the right of every religion to make its case heard.

More here

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Romney’s network of influence could make a real difference in the policies that matter to all of us. Get the word out, and share this infographic with everyone you know – click here

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Steve Benen: …. the Conservative Political Action Conference will get underway in Washington today, and will feature a cavalcade of Republican leaders and prominent far-right voices…. ….. every member of the Republican congressional leadership and each of the leading GOP presidential candidates  will be on hand to shamelessly pander to the right-wing audience.

But they’re not the only ones who’ll be part of CPAC 2012: ….. CPAC is hosting the panel “The Failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening the American Identity” with Peter Brimelow, the founder and head of VDARE.com. VDARE is a White Nationalist website, run by Brimelow, which frequently publishes the works of anti-Semitic and racist writers….

When BuzzFeed’s Rosie Gray asked CPAC organizers if they would renounce Brimelow’s participation at the conference, they chose not to.

More here

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Rasmussen?!?!?! 😯

Rasmussen: Voter confidence in President Obama’s handling of the economy is at its highest level in a year’s time. That’s in line with the recent upticks in overall economic confidence and in Obama’s job approval ratings as measured by the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll.

Forty percent (40%) of Likely U.S. Voters now rate the president’s performance in the economic area as good or excellent – That’s up from 36% a week ago and is the highest positive finding since the first week in February 2011.

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Nick Anderson

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Morning everyone 😉