rise and shine

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

The good news is, that didn’t happen. In fact, initial jobless claims reached a four-year low last week, and the new totals were unchanged this week.

More here

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Greg Sargent: At yesterday’s debate, Mitt Romney and the other candidates went all in on birth control – sorry, “religious liberty” – in blasting President Obama over the contraception controversy…. But some new polling out this morning from Quinnipiac illustrates the risk Republicans are taking with this latest reprise of the culture wars:

President Obama recently announced an adjustment to the administration’s health-care rule regarding religiously affiliated employers providing birth control coverage to female employees. Women will still be guaranteed coverage for birth control without any out-of-pocket cost, but will have to seek the coverage directly from their insurance companies if their employers object to birth control on religious grounds. Do you approve or disapprove of President Obama’s decision?

Approve: 54

Disapprove: 38

Independents approve 56-36; women 56-34.

More here

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Steve Benen: …… Romney added that Obama is “requiring the Catholic Church to provide for its employees and its various enterprises health care insurance that would include birth control, sterilization and the morning-after pill. Unbelievable.”

It is, in fact, literally “unbelievable,” since that’s not at all what the administration is doing.

It was painful enough to have so much of the debate focus on opposition to birth control, but Romney’s dishonesty managed to make a mind-numbing discussion even worse.

Full post here

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TPM (Thanks Desertflower)

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Washington Post

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Ronald Brownstein (National Journal): ….. Some of Romney’s answers could come back to haunt him, not in the primary but in a general election, if he gets that far.

At a time when some Republicans are already concerned that he has narrowed his potential support among Latinos with an unflinching embrace of conservative positions on immigration (like “self-deportation”), Romney doubled down by insisting that on “day one” as president he would drop the federal legal challenge to Arizona’s tough state statute against illegal immigration.

And on the same day that an NBC/Marist poll already showed Romney trailing President Obama by 18 percentage points in Michigan, a state Republicans once hoped to contest this fall, Romney likewise doubled down on his criticism of the auto rescue engineered by Bush and Obama – and sprinkled in some especially sharp rhetoric against the United Auto Workers union for good measure.

More here

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TPM

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ThinkProgress (Thanks Ladyhawke)

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E.J. Dionne: They say that President Obama is a Muslim, but if he isn’t, he’s a secularist who is waging war on religion. On some days he’s a Nazi, but on most others he’s merely a socialist….

Whatever our president is, he is never allowed to be a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.

Please forgive this outburst. It’s simply astonishing that a man in his fourth year as our president continues to be the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies … And now that the economy is improving, short-circuiting easy criticisms, Obama’s adversaries are reheating all the old tropes and cliches and slanders.

….. As for Obama as a socialist, ponder two numbers: 13,005, which the Dow Jones average hit this week, up from a low point of 6,547 in March 2009. Some socialist.

We are blessed with the freedom to say whatever we want about our president. But those who cast Obama as something other than one of us don’t understand him and don’t understand what it means to be American.

Full article here

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The Week

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Nick Anderson

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10:45: PBO departs the White House

1:25 Arrives in Miami, Florida.

1:45: Tours the Industrial Assessment Center at the University of Miami.

2:25: Delivers remarks to University of Miami students and faculty members.

4:20: Delivers remarks at a campaign event at the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, Florida.

5:55: Delivers remarks at a campaign event.

7:00L Departs Miami, Florida en route Orlando, Florida.

8:15: Arrives in Orlando, Florida.

8:55: Delivers remarks at a campaign event.

10:30: Departs Orlando, Florida en route Joint Base Andrews.

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Morning everyone 😉

demagoguery?

LA Times: A testy White House meeting between President Obama and House Republican leaders Wednesday failed to lower the partisan pitch in the capital, much less make progress toward a deal on the federal debt ceiling.

Instead, the two sides traded complaints, accusing each other of partisanship and posturing. Republicans demanded that the administration produce a budget-cutting plan, which the White House said it had already done.

Rep. Paul D. Ryan, architect of a Medicare overhaul aimed at slashing the cost of the popular entitlement program by reducing the government’s open-ended commitment to seniors, accused Obama of “mis-describing” his plan and implored the president to ease up on the “demagoguery”.

In reply, Obama said he was no stranger to cartoonish depictions, reeling off a list of conservatives’ favorite attack points: “I’m the death-panel-supporting, socialist, may-not-have-been-born-here president,” Obama said, according to people familiar with his remarks.

More here

Thank you LOL

Jeez, I love this man!

morning comrades!

😆

“….the basic right to form free trade unions & to strike”?! communist!

sign of the times

😆

‘if this is socialism, call me comrade’

Ritholtz.com: No politics or partisanship here, “just the facts ma’am”.  The stock market, as measured by the S&P500 (a capitalization-weighted index, published since 1957, of the prices of 500 large common stocks actively traded in the United States) is up just about 50 percent since President Obama’s inauguration …. only Eisenhower comes close, but not even in the same zip code. A 50 percent stock move does a lot “spreading the wealth around” and Joe the Plumber’s pension is in much better shape today than it was in November 2008.

Washington Monthly: For about the first two months after President Obama was inaugurated …. Wall Street indexes were dropping sharply … conservatives said the declines were evidence that the White House’s economic policies were a mess, if not an outright failure, and that the president didn’t know what he was doing.

…..The drop in the Dow, the Wall Street Journal insisted, was a direct result of investors evaluating “Mr Obama’s agenda and his approach to governance”. Karl Rove and Lou Dobbs made the same case. So did Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, John Boehner, Mitt Romney…..

That was nearly two years ago, and wouldn’t you know it, they’re not saying that anymore.

….a chart like this one (see above) comes with all kinds of caveats … the value of a stock market index is hardly the best metric for measuring the strength of the economy …. and it’s easier to generate major gains like these when one starts from a very low point – and after eight years of disastrous Republican policies, Bush bequeathed an economy in shambles.

That said, there are some relevant angles to results like these, too. For example, it’s hard not to notice that the right seems awfully selective about when Wall Street indexes count – when the markets are down, Obama deserves the blame; when the markets are up; Obama doesn’t deserve the credit. It’s funny how that works. It’s also tough for unhinged conservatives to continue to insist that the White House is comprised of radical socialists, intent on destroying private enterprise, when major indexes have soared under Obama’s watch.

Full article here

indoctrination!

by Creators Syndicate

so teabaggers, which is it?

Get the t-shirt here