President Barack Obama listens during a tour of the National Hurricane Center in Miami, to draw attention to preparedness in advance of the annual storm season that formally begins June 1. With President Obama are National Hurricane Center Director Rick Knabb, left, and Hugh D. Cobb III, center, Chief, Tropical Analysis & Forecast Branch
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It’s wonderful to have a president take time out of his busy day to answer questions honestly and not dismissively. Thanks, President Barack Obama!
Just got a hurricane preparedness briefing in Miami. Acting on climate change is critical. Got climate Qs? I'll answer at 1pm ET. #AskPOTUS
President Barack Obama passes an image of a hurricane during a tour of the National Hurricane Center
President Barack Obama speaks after receiving a briefing at the National Hurricane Center in Miami. From left are, NOAA Administrator Kathy Sullivan; Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker and Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Administrator Craig Fugate
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Obama visiting Shrine of Our Lady of Charity in Miami to pay respects to the Cuban-American diaspora. pic.twitter.com/lhJ11t3jzU
President Barack Obama speaks at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., about the fight against Ebola. The president is highlighting advances in research for an Ebola vaccine and pushing Congress to approve his request for $6.2 billion to confront the disease abroad and to secure against its spread in the United States
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President Barack Obama tours the Vaccine Research Center with Dr. Nancy Sullivan, U.S. Secretary of HHS Sylvia Burwell, and Dr. Anthony Fauci to talk about Ebola, during a visit to the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland
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"I’m calling on Congress to approve our emergency funding request to fight this disease." —President Obama #Ebolapic.twitter.com/waIFFNyACz
Four years ago: President Obama looks out the window of Marine One as it lands at the White House, May 22, 2009 (Photo by Pete Souza)
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Today:
11:0: VP Biden Gives the Commencement Address at the United States Coast Guard Academy (audio only at WH Live)
1:0 Jay Carney’s press briefing
7:25: President Obama hosts a concert honoring Gershwin Prize winner Carole King
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NYT: The bipartisan immigration bill that passed the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday has many serious hurdles ahead. It is the most serious and worthy attempt to fix immigration in a generation, but it cannot help reflecting the poisoned politics of today, with its heavy tilt toward needless border enforcement and a deficiency in equal rights.
In the most moving and wrenching moment in three weeks of committee markup, the committee’s chairman, Patrick Leahy of Vermont, sought to amend the bill to allow gay Americans to sponsor their wives and husbands for green cards. The other Democrats, including Charles Schumer of New York, implored him not to put that amendment forward, saying this measure of basic fairness would drive off Republican support and kill the entire bill. Mr. Leahy withdrew it.
With that unhappy capitulation, the bill survives, with a possible battle over same-sex marriage still to come on the Senate floor. And then the bill will need to find some path through the Republican-led House….
Jonathan Capehart: Here we go again. President Obama’s critics in the African American community are hammering him for doing nothing for black people …. this thinking drives me crazy because the president’s detractors fail to take a 360-degree view of what they are demanding from him and ignore what he’s actually done.
…. Coates’s criticism emanates from Obama’s commencement address at Morehouse College in Atlanta …. Obama spoke to the black men of Morehouse not as a distant president but as a familiar peer. He used his troubled past as a real-life example of how one’s limited circumstances are neither destiny nor a hindrance to achieving the American Dream, as they define it. He urged the graduates to not make excuses, to aim high and to give back. Yet, Coates calls this “‘convenient race-talk’ from a president who ought to know better.” Obama can’t win.
… what’s missing from most African American critiques of Obama: an appreciation for Republican resistance to his agenda. To expect the president to introduce an explicit and definable “black agenda” in a Congress filled with people who believe him to be a socialist destroying the country while illegitimately occupying the Oval Office is seriously naive.
President Obama and Attorney General Holder attend the 32nd annual National Peace Officers’ Memorial Service at the West Front Lawn at the U.S. Capitol, May 15
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Two Bush-appointees, the IRS commissioner and deputy commissioner, are gone. Next, Lois Lerner, the Bush-appt’d head of 501c4 division.
Steve Benen: USA Today had an item today on the IRS controversy, which seemed to reinforce much of what we already know: conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status faced unfair and unreasonable scrutiny. But deep in the article, in the 18th paragraph, USA Today added seven unexpected words: “Some liberal groups did get additional scrutiny.”
NPR: The Justice Department’s subpoena of Associated Press phone records as part of an investigation into what Attorney General Eric Holder has called “a very grave leak” to the news agency has set off a political firestorm on Capitol Hill, but there’s a lot to the AP story published a year ago that started it all.
….. as NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston reports, there’s much more to the story:
“As we understood it then and still understand it, that suicide bomber that AP refers to in its story was actually a double agent working with western intelligence agencies,” Dina says.
Although the double-agent did hand the new underwear bomb technology to U.S. officials, “they had hoped the agent could do more [and] … one consequence of the story is that this agent’s identity was blown,” she says.
I reckon Andrew Sullivan is about as consistent as Willard Romney when it comes to his political views, so I’m never too bothered by what he has to say, one way or another.
Still, I appreciated what he had to say here (from CrooksAndLiars).
Thanks DesertFlower
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Read SmartyPants on Sullivan’s Newsweek article here
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Back later, I need to take a few more dozen pills to ease the pain of Manchester City winning the title. 😥
Andrew Sullivan: I can see no problem with the ad run by Obama on his extraordinarily ballsy decision to choose the riskiest path to get bin Laden and all the intelligence his compound contained ….. If Bush had done it, he would have jumped out of a helicopter in a jump-suit with fireworks. And it is simply true that both George W. Bush and Mitt Romney downplayed the importance of finding and bringing Osama bin Laden to justice….
….. And this was a key issue in the 2008 election …. this was a hugely successful policy opposed by McCain, opposed by Bush and opposed by Romney. No wonder they’re so upset at reality. It’s the same reaction they have when it becomes clear that Osama bin Laden was captured and killed by a president smart enough not to deploy torture, years after a bunch of thugs took over US intelligence on the orders of the panicked incompetent, Dick Cheney.
And one thing about John McCain. He actually said: “And, you know the thing about heroes, they don’t brag.” For his entire political career, McCain has done nothing but brag about his own military service, milking every last, disgusting drop for his own interests, making it the center-piece of his campaign. And he didn’t kill anyone – just crashed his plane…..
Jon Meacham: Republicans are – forgive the cliché – shocked, shocked to discover that a presidential contender is “politicizing” an important national event. In this sense, “politicizing” might be best translated as “beating us up and we don’t have anything much to say to stop it.” The ad itself raises intriguing, substantive, legitimate questions – and the ferocious, sputtering Republican reaction is proof positive that they know it, or at least suspect it.
Michael Tomasky: It couldn’t be more hilarious, watching these Republicans rend their garments over the Obama administration’s bin Laden video. Imaging the paroxysms we’d have been forced to endure if George W. Bush had iced the dreaded one is all we need to do to understand how hypocritical it all is. But what obviously gets under Republicans’ skin is not the fact of this video’s existence, but the fact that Barack Obama got him and they didn’t, which destroys their assumption of the past decade that they are “the 9/11 party.” And more than that – and this is the real story here – it’s the fact that the Democrats don’t appear to be afraid of the Republicans anymore. That, to Republicans, is what’s truly unacceptable.
In the morning, the President will meet with the Council on Jobs and Competitiveness at the White House.
In the afternoon, the President will host King Abdullah II of Jordan.
Later, the President will welcome the World Series Champion St. Louis Cardinals to the White House to honor the team and their 2011 World Series victory.
SmartyPants spotted a brilliant comment under Andrew Sullivan’s post the other day, ‘Why Obama still matters’. It was written by “a black attorney in his 20’s” and, as she said, “he knocked it out of the park”:
…not to be too racial about this, but myself and a lot of my minority friends sense that white liberals’ disappointment from Obama comes from a sense of entitlement.
Unlike affluent white liberals, minorities in this country seem to have a better grasp of a key truth in life: you don’t always get everything you want. We know, if not firsthand then from the stories of our parents, that America isn’t always a nice place, and all you can hope for is incremental change. Unlike a lot of our affluent white liberal friends, we are used to not getting it all and have learned to live with it….
Washington Post: President Barack Obama is bringing his family to Towson University, just north of Baltimore, to watch Towson play Oregon State on Saturday afternoon. The first lady’s brother, Craig Robinson, is Oregon State’s head coach.
A year ago:
President Obama gets a hug from his youngest daughter Sasha during an NCAA basketball game between Oregon State and Howard University
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Steve Benen: It’s hard to overstate how much success the United States has had over the last few years against al Qaeda. The terrorist network … has been all but crushed. Remember a few years ago, before the 2008 elections, when Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) proclaimed on Fox News that al Qaeda members would be “dancing in the streets” if Barack Obama were elected president? Well, that turned out to be backwards.
…. in the wake of Osama bin Laden’s demise, the fact remains that al Qaeda, whatever its intentions for the future, has been reduced to a largely defeated force.
President Obama leaves the athletic facility at Fort McNair in Washington after playing basketball … the President signaled his approval of a deal ending the 149-day lockout between professional basketball players and owners. “Good deal,” he said, giving the thumbs up, when asked about the agreement that ended the NBA strike
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….. visiting Kramerbooks in Washington, Nov. 26
The presidential purchases at the bookstore, according to the White House, included:
The Invention of Hugo Cabret – by Brian Selnick
Diary of a Whimpy Kid Cabin Fever – by Jeff Kinney
Tails – by Matthew Van Fleet
Descent into Chaos – by Ahmed Rashid
The Tiger’s Wife – by Tea Obreht
The Phantom Tollbooth – by Norton Juster
The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao – by Junot Diaz
Deaniac (The People’s View): … I have always known that Glenn Greenwald is a opportunistic, dishonest, fact-ignorning blowhard. But today we get to add ironic to that … Greenwald wrote a column accusing the SEIU, a union that has endorsed President Obama for re-election, of attempting to “co-opt” the Occupy Wall Street movement. Why? Well because apparently …. they have trademarked and copyrighted the phrase “99 percent.”
…. The very same Glenn Greenwald who is accusing the SEIU of trying to use OWS’ language (heaven forbid!) for their own purposes …. (is) trying to sell (and promote) winter gear for the OWS protesters being disbursed by the notorious Firedoglake. But of course, Greenwald fails to mention that he stands to financially gain from donations to FDL, as the treasurer of FDL’s PAC, Accountability Now, and his company, DMDM Enterprises, is used to taking money for “administrative expenses” from Accountability Now.
An examination of FEC reports shows that Greenwald’s DMDM Enterprises received more than $40,000 from FDL’s Accountability Now from 2008-2010, and of course, we have no idea how much more he has received as salary as Treasurer…..
The Obama Diary 
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