rise and shine

White House: On Monday, January 30, the President will join a special Google+ Hangout from the West Wing. He’ll be answering several of the most popular questions that have been submitted through YouTube, and some of the people who submitted questions will even be invited to join the President in the Hangout and take part in the live conversation.

Do you have a question for President Obama? Here’s how you can participate:

Starting today through January 28th, you can visit the White House YouTube channel to submit your questions and vote on your favorites.

Tomorrow, watch the State of the Union live at 9:00 p.m. EST on YouTube.com/whitehouse or on WhiteHouse.gov/sotu

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Paul Krugman: How goes the state of the union? Well, the state of the economy remains terrible. Three years after President Obama’s inauguration and two and a half years since the official end of the recession, unemployment remains painfully high.

But there are reasons to think that we’re finally on the (slow) road to better times. And we wouldn’t be on that road if Mr. Obama had given in to Republican demands that he slash spending, or the Federal Reserve had given in to Republican demands that it tighten money.

Why am I letting a bit of optimism break through the clouds? Recent economic data have been a bit better, but we’ve already had several false dawns on that front. More important, there’s evidence that the two great problems at the root of our slump — the housing bust and excessive private debt — are finally easing.

….if this year’s election brings the wrong ideology to power, America’s nascent recovery might well be snuffed out.

More here

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From Steve Benen:

INGRAHAM: You’ve also noted that there are signs of improvement on the horizon in the economy. How do you answer the president’s argument that the economy is getting better in a general election campaign if you yourself are saying it’s getting better?

ROMNEY: Well, of course it’s getting better. The economy always gets better after a recession, there is always a recovery. […]

INGRAHAM: Isn’t it a hard argument to make if you’re saying, like, OK, he inherited this recession, he took a bunch of steps to try to turn the economy around, and now, we’re seeing more jobs, but vote against him anyway? Isn’t that a hard argument to make? Is that a stark enough contrast?

ROMNEY: Have you got a better one, Laura? It just happens to be the truth.

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John Heilemann (NY Mag): ….. If Gingrich wins Florida, the Republican Establishment is going to have a meltdown that makes Three Mile Island look like a marshmallow roast. Why? Because the Establishment will be staring down the barrel of two utterly unpalatable choices. On the one hand, Gingrich’s national favorable-unfavorable ratings of 26.5 and 58.6 percent, respectively make him not just unelectable against Obama but also mean that he would likely be a ten-ton millstone around the necks of down-ballot Republican candidates across the country. And on the other, Romney will have shown in two successive contests—one in a bellwether Republican state, the other in a key swing state—an inability to beat his deeply unpopular rival. If this scenario unfolds, the sound of GOP grandees whispering calls for a white knight, be it Indiana governor Mitch Daniels (who, conveniently, is delivering the Republican response to Obama’s State of the Union address on Tuesday night) or Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan or even Jeb Bush, will be deafening.

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Nick Anderson

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Fareed Zakaria (CNN): …. President Obama entered the Oval Office with the United States deeply unpopular around the world, with vast commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, with difficult relations with many countries and a large part of the world feeling that it had been ignored by an America obsessed by the “War on Terror.”

Obama was determined to pare down America’s commitments and its military footprint and to regain goodwill and trust abroad. For the most part, he has done so….

If the war against al Qaeda is the most visible and dramatic success story, the most significant long-term success might be in Asia, where Obama has pivoted …. He did so carefully and skillfully so that Asia countries saw it as a response to their requests rather than an unilateral assertion of American power….

All in all, it’s a pretty strong record. Which is why you actually don’t hear Republicans talking much about foreign policy on the campaign trail.

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Greg Sargent: Romney to bombard Gingrich with scorched earth attacks: The big news this morning is that the Romney campaign — stung by Newt Gingrich’s big South Carolina win — is prepared to unleash a white-hot series of assaults on the (again) surging challenger. One of these, apparently, will be a continued demand that Gingrich release the ethics probe that got him bounced from Congress — even though the probe has already been released.

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TPM

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McClatchy

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Morning everyone 😉

good afternoon

Air Force One heads down a snowy runway for takeoff at Buckley Air Force Base in Aurora, Colo. as President Barack Obama headed back to Washington

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Washington Post: Obama moves to ease student loan burdens

President Obama on Wednesday announced a plan to allow college graduates to cap federal student loan repayments at 10 percent of discretionary income starting in January, two years before the cap was due to take effect under federal law.

The accelerated “pay as you earn” program, which Obama will authorize through executive order, could benefit up to 1.6 million borrowers and reduce their payments by as much as a couple hundred dollars a month, administration officials said. All remaining debt on the federal loans would be forgiven after 20 years – five years earlier than under current law.

Read full article here

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😯

Thanks Esmerelda

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Reuters: …. President Obama’s appearance on “The Tonight Show With Jay Leno” lifted the show to its highest Tuesday-night ratings since March 2, 2010, the night after Leno returned to the show.

Tuesday’s episode received a 4.1/11 metered-market household rating, a 52 percent leap over his Tuesday-night average so far this season. With Obama’s appearance,” The Tonight Show” handily surpassed “Late Show with David Letterman,” which posted a 2.7/7 household rating, “Nightline,” which drew a 3.6/9, and “Jimmy Kimmel Live,” which received a 1.8./6.

Thanks Proud

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Ruth Marcus (Washington Post): In an interview with Parade magazine, the Texas governor declared Obama’s place of birth a “distractive” issue even as he happily latched on to the opportunity to distract ….. It was classic Perry, combining logical incoherence and a smarmy cheap shot.

…. Is this a presidential campaign or a middle-school playground? I’ll show you mine if you show me yours? By the way, if I had Perry’s grades, I wouldn’t be mentioning them. Certainly not if I were running against a former president of the Harvard Law Review.

…. You might think this was the candidate cannily trying to have it both ways: a nod to the birther crazies with a simultaneous wink at those who know this is a ridiculous distraction. Except that Perry managed to step on his real message of the day: his unaffordable and unfair proposal to “simplify” the tax code – by grafting a flat-tax alternative onto the existing system.

…. The matter of Obama’s birth certificate should be a closed case. It is astonishing that a sitting governor, no less a serious candidate for president, would stoop to playing this game.

… The country is facing serious problems. This will be a fateful election. Voters deserve better than scare tactics and drivel.

Full article here

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President Obama returns a salute as he steps off Marine One helicopter on the South Lawn of the White House as he returned from a three day trip to Nevada, California and Colorado.

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Thanks Marlz

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downgraded

Paul Krugman: OK, so Standard and Poors has gone ahead with the threatened downgrade. It’s a strange situation.

On one hand, there is a case to be made that the madness of the right has made America a fundamentally unsound nation. And yes, it is the madness of the right: if not for the extremism of anti-tax Republicans, we would have no trouble reaching an agreement that would ensure long-run solvency.

On the other hand, it’s hard to think of anyone less qualified to pass judgment on America than the rating agencies. The people who rated subprime-backed securities are now declaring that they are the judges of fiscal policy? Really?

Just to make it perfect, it turns out that S&P got the math wrong by $2 trillion, and after much discussion conceded the point – then went ahead with the downgrade.

More than that, everything I’ve heard about S&P’s demands suggests that it’s talking nonsense about the US fiscal situation. The agency has suggested that the downgrade depended on the size of agreed deficit reduction over the next decade, with $4 trillion apparently the magic number. Yet US solvency depends hardly at all on what happens in the near or even medium term: an extra trillion in debt adds only a fraction of a percent of GDP to future interest costs, so a couple of trillion more or less barely signifies in the long term. What matters is the longer-term prospect, which in turn mainly depends on health care costs.

So what was S&P even talking about? Presumably they had some theory that restraint now is an indicator of the future – but there’s no good reason to believe that theory, and for sure S&P has no authority to make that kind of vague political judgment.

In short, S&P is just making stuff up – and after the mortgage debacle, they really don’t have that right.

So this is an outrage – not because America is A-OK, but because these people are in no position to pass judgment.

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I ignore Krugman’s political views, he’s fast becoming the left’s Bachmann (clueless and marginally bonkers), but when he concentrates on an area he actually knows something about (economics) he can, occasionally, be interesting. I’ve read him before going on about Standard and Poors so I reckoned he wouldn’t be impressed with the downgrade news. He’s, eh, not!

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UPI: …. another government official said the White House had told S&P the company’s thinking was “based on flawed math and assumptions.” And S&P acknowledged “its numbers are wrong.”

An administration official told NBC News after the credit rating was lowered, “It’s amateur hour at S&P.”

The official said the administration showed S&P where its computation errors occurred.

Rep. Barney Frank, the ranking member on the House Financial Services Committee, said on MSNBC the decision was “just a political judgment by a group of incompetents.”

“This is the rating agency that took money from people who were selling junk bonds and told other people to buy it,” Frank said, accusing S&P of overvaluing private debt while consistently undervaluing public debt. They are as responsible for the financial crisis as anybody else. There is zero chance of (the United States) defaulting,” Frank said.

oh dear ….

TPM

Thank you Loriah

ryan 2012!

Bloomberg: Representative Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman who has become a star in the Republican Party with his plan to overhaul Medicare, is emerging as a polarizing figure among Americans. Twenty-six percent of people view the Wisconsin lawmaker unfavorably while 23 percent see him favorably, according to a Bloomberg National Poll conducted June 17-20.

The only public figures in the survey with higher net unfavorable ratings than Ryan were Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin.

….By a margin of 57 percent to 34 percent, poll respondents say they would be worse off if Ryan’s plan to convert Medicare to a system of subsidized private health coverage were adopted. Fifty-eight percent of independents, a critical voting bloc in recent elections, say they would be worse off.

That’s likely to encourage Democrats to bank their success in next year’s presidential and congressional races on tying Republicans to the Medicare plan, which was passed by the Republican-controlled House on April 15.

….President Obama’s new health-care law gets a more favorable reaction. The poll of 1,000 adults found that 51 percent of all Americans say that while the law may need modification, it shouldn’t be repealed, and another 11 percent say it should be left alone. That compares with 35 percent who want the new law overturned.

…Respondents say they trust Obama’s party, the Democrats, more than Republicans to do a better job of dealing with Medicare, by 43 percent to 34 percent, with 23 percent not sure. Independents give Democrats a 14-percentage-point advantage over Republicans when it comes to handling Medicare.

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gop to the half-termer: ‘it’s over’

John Dickerson (Slate): The (Half-Termer) says George Washington is her favorite founder because he was reluctant to serve but answered the call of duty. She likes to think of herself this way, answering the needs of a clamoring electorate. That is part of the cinematic beauty of her bus tour: The crowds that greet her can represent that call to take up their standard and head into presidential battle on their behalf.

There’s only one problem: The call isn’t coming. That’s the clear message in a new CBS News poll of the Republican field. Taken after the (Half-Termer) bus tour started rolling, it asked Republicans whether she should run. By a 20-point margin (54 percent to 34 percent), Republicans said she should not run. Among Tea Party supporters, where she has her strongest following, she is also waved off against a run. Half say she should not run; 38 percent say she should….

…. Some 36 percent of Republican voters have an unfavorable view of her, compared with the 37 percent that have a favorable view. Her favorability rating has declined since April.

…Perhaps the grim developments in the face of her latest public bus tour may only spur her interest in running to prove that she can not only show the pundits she’s right but that she can defy political gravity. Still, if Paul Revere were involved in politics today, he might be ringing those warning bells.

More here

Thank you Loriah

still on track….

Robert Shrum: Forget the noisy declarations about lousy economic news sinking Obama’s re-election. The president is still on track for a second term.

….what will endure after this remarkable week is the emergence of a consensus that Barack Obama could lose next year… First, the unemployment numbers … Second, The Times headlined an analysis, widely repeated, that no incumbent president since FDR has won a second term when unemployment was above 7.2 percent … Third, in the latest Washington Post/ABC poll … nearly 60 percent of people offer a negative verdict on Obama’s stewardship of the economy. Then the clincher: While he defeats most Republicans by a margin of 10 to 17 points, the president is now tied with Mitt Romney….

…..much of the new mood is too instant, too superficial, and too casually ahistorical… …As The Times’ Nate Silver wrote in gently questioning his own paper’s deterministic metric, there is a “maddeningly inexact relationship between unemployment and re-election.”

….the relevant signs suggest that Barack Obama is in a more advantageous position than Ronald Reagan was. In Gallup’s June 1983 numbers, Reagan’s approval was 43 percent; in late May and early June, Obama was five to eight points higher. And of the two presidents in the last four decades who had the highest approval ratings this far out from the election, the first Bush was trounced and the second Bush barely squeaked by. The presidents with middling ratings – Nixon, Reagan, and Clinton – ultimately triumphed; Dole was ahead of Clinton in June of 1995.

…flat earth economics won’t hold with the public if Republicans hold to their present resolve and convert the attractive abstraction of spending cuts into the grim reality of shredding Medicare. There’s the leverage for the president if the GOP refuses to compromise on a reasonable basis – which is probably a remote possibility at best.

…In the week Weiner was roasted, the conventional wisdom included that the 2012 election is not yet baked. But I suspect that by then the economy will finally be seen as moving in the right direction – or that sooner than that, Republican efforts to trash the recovery and repeal the New Deal will become all too transparent and repellant. Either outcome leads to Obama’s second term.

Full article here

Thank you Ladyhawke

‘republicans continue to be their own worst enemy’

Harold Meyerson (Washington Post): If you think it is Rep. Paul Ryan’s gutting of Medicare that is pulling the Republicans down, you need to think bigger … his proposal to convert Medicare into a private insurance-voucher plan is indeed a political calamity for the GOP, as the results of last week’s congressional special election in Upstate New York showed. But it’s far from the only disaster that the party has visited upon itself.

For even as Republicans have imperiled themselves on the national level, they also seem to be committing political hara-kiri in one statehouse after the next. Republican governors who took office this year or last – the ones as determined as Ryan to do a wholesale rewrite of America’s social contract – have approval ratings that we normally associate with strains of bacteria. What’s more, they’re tanking in many of the swing states that will be key in next year’s presidential election.

In Florida, only 29 percent of voters approve of Gov. Rick Scott’s five-month tenure in office …  In Wisconsin, Scott Walker would now lose in a recall election to either of two Democrats: former senator Russ Feingold and former Milwaukee mayor Tom Barrett….Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s approval rating is a bargain-basement 33 percent, while his disapproval rating had risen to 56 percent….And so it goes in state after state. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder had a 33 percent approval rating, against a 60 percent disapproval rating … Gov. Chris Christie’s favorables had slumped to 40 percent, while his unfavorables had risen to 60 percent.

….the Democratic governors of the nation’s two biggest blue states – California’s Jerry Brown and New York’s Andrew Cuomo – both have approval ratings higher than their disapprovals….

But the Republican governors – like Ryan and his fellow Republicans in Congress – have pursued a more radical course that sharply disadvantages most Americans. Even worse, they have sought to enact their agendas without warning their constituents. Republicans did not run last year on a platform of ending collective bargaining, slashing school budgets and gutting Medicare – in essence, favoring society’s most powerful at the expense of everyone else – yet that’s precisely what they’ve done since gaining power. That’s not merely bad policy; it’s bad faith – and bad news for Republicans’ electoral prospects.

Full article here

sweet!

Gallup

*** The last time the President’s disapproval rating was as low as 39% with Gallup was …..  November 15, 2009 ***

Even GOP Rasmussen have the President at 49 😉

Meanwhile, here’s the latest from Pew:

 

Also from the Pew poll – “Independents’ assessments of Obama’s performance spiked from 42% to 52% approval on news of Osama’s death, and remain at 49% in the current survey. The current survey also finds that just 37% of independents disapprove of Obama’s job performance, the lowest since the fall of 2009.”

“29 per cent!”

Politico: Six months ago, in the wake of the wipe-out midterm elections, moderate Florida Sen. Bill Nelson privately vented that President Barack Obama, weighed down by his health reform effort and muddled messaging, was “toxic” for Democrats back home.

Yet Obama’s approval rating has surged from 42 percent to 51 percent in the last month, and Nelson is now openly embracing the president, pronouncing himself dutifully “fired up” at an Obama-hosted Miami fundraiser this spring.

What’s changed? …Obama’s biggest asset in a critical swing state he won by a mere 2.8-percentage-point margin in 2008 might be Rick Scott, the wildly unpopular Republican governor Democrats are casting as Lex Luthor to Obama’s Clark Kent.

…A Quinnipiac University poll last week showed Scott’s approval rating at 29 percent and his disapproval rating at 57 percent – by far the lowest approval rating of any governor in the country.

“The double whammy for any Republican running in Florida is Rick Scott and Medicare,” said Debbie Wasserman…“Rick Scott is at 29 percent – 29 percent!” she added.

Broward County political blogger Brandon Thorp summed it up this way: “If presidential and gubernatorial elections were held in Florida today, no declared Republican presidential candidate could unseat Obama, while Rick Scott would have a hard time beating Raul Castro.”

Full article here

Thank you Jovie