Skeet-Shooter-in-Chief

President Barack Obama shoots clay targets on the range at Camp David, Md., Saturday, Aug. 4, 2012. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)

@davidplouffe

night everyone

President Obama hosts military fathers and children for a screening of Cars 2 in advance of Father’s Day in the South Court Auditorium June 15. The event is part of the President’s Fatherhood and Mentoring Initiative.

More here

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Never forget:

“Hate is too great a burden to bear. It injures the hater more than it injures the hated.” (Coretta Scott King)

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I completely failed in my promise to reply to emails and check out all the comments today, or to try again to find out why lots of you are having trouble with the new WordPress comment box. Another promise: I’ll try to get it done tomorrow 😕

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First Lady Michelle Obama and a young volunteer mix cement as they help build a playground during the KaBOOM! and Congressional Family Service Project at Imagine Southeast Public Charter School in Washington, D.C., June 15, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Chuck Kennedy)

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From the comments I got a chance to read today, I saw that a lot of you were down about the renewed attacks on the President from the professional left.

Just a couple of things:

The vast majority of the professional left didn’t campaign or vote for Barack Obama in 2008 – this is the simple truth, as any of you who visited the better known liberal (ha!) sites would have seen in 2007/08. These people’s hatred for BHO was a sight to behold – even before he took office. I witnessed it myself time and time again – that’s why I started this blog, to get away from these ****ed up hate-mongers.

But he got elected without them, and he will get elected without them again in 2012.

Check all the recent polls – his support from genuine progressives usually tops 80 per cent. The professional left are in a tiny minority, they just make a lot of noise. They are irrelevant, just a bunch of self-promoting, bitter keyboard warriors with seriously troubled agendas.

Always remember, so many of the professional left divas – like Arianna Huffington and Cenk Uygur – were hardcore right-wingers until not too long ago. Miraculous conversions that had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that they found it easier to forge media careers as ‘progressives’. And then there’s the PL’s beloved Glenn Greenwald, his hatred of the President leaving the chap foaming at the mouth as he pounds his keyboard and spews his daily bile. This, incidentally, the guy who’s still pushing the candidacy of Republican/Libertarian Gary Johnson – the racist scumbag who wants to end child labor laws. How progressive of you, Glenn 🙄

These people aren’t progressives, they’re attention-seeking opportunists who haven’t a genuine liberal bone in their bodies. Uygur, the self-appointed voice of the Professional Left, and self-confessed Ronald Reagan devotee, is the guy who sneered at the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, describing equal pay for women as a “minor” achievement by the President (see here).

See?

These people are just not worth your energy or worry – they are nothing, they represent no one but themselves, a tiny hate-filled clique whose biggest fear is progress. **** them, preserve your energy and passion for getting President Obama re-elected 😉

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2008 ….. “Them”

Do you think she voted for President Obama in 2008? Me neither. And she probably won’t vote for him either in 2012.

Net loss? Zero.

😉

hello tea party people

Thanks so much Tea Partiers for trying to comment here and defend Sarah Palin with your delightful Tea Party language – but sorry, we like to keep this place a Tea Party-free zone (you have plenty of other places to play).

But to the two guys who insisted – as Palin’s spokeswoman did – that they were “surveyor’s symbols” on that map targeting Gabrielle Giffords and 19 other Democrats….. a story they only came up with after the shootings …. well, someone disagreed with you as far back as November:

Mind you, she didn’t even get that right: they weren’t bulleyes, they were, quite obviously, crosshairs …. no mention of “surveyor’s symbols” though. And remember the accompanying Tweet from Palin – “don’t retreat, RELOAD”? Since when do you reload surveyor’s symbols?

So, even if it could be proved that they were “surveyor’s symbols”, Palin thought they were targets.

You must try harder covering up for your Queen.

‘gabrielle giffords is the victim of a debased political culture’

Jonathan Raban (UK Independent): One could be shocked, but hardly surprised, by the news on Saturday … it was an event that seemed to grow out of America’s present disturbed and angry climate, like a killer-tornado or hurricane: awful, yes, but part of the weather, and, in some sense, only to be expected.

….an ad published last March by Sarah Palin’s political action committee … showed a map of the United States, dotted with 20 vulnerable Democratic seats in Congress, each identified by cross-hairs in a gunsight. Giffords’ seat was one of these. The legend above the map read: “We’ve diagnosed the problem… Help us prescribe the solution.”

….it would be absurd now to claim that the proposed “solution” was death by assassination … but Gabrielle Giffords made great sense when, in March 2010, she discussed the Palin map with a TV interviewer, saying: “Sarah Palin has the cross-hairs of a gunsight over our district – and when people do that, they’ve got to realise there are consequences to that action.”

In the martial atmosphere of an election year (and in a country where four sitting presidents have been assassinated, and many more have survived serious attempts on their lives), extravagant figures of speech can all too easily become literal, and rhetorical guns turn into real ones.

In November last year, Giffords was narrowly re-elected against a Tea Party Republican named Jesse Kelly who… conducted his political campaign in the language of warfare. …. “Get on Target for Victory in November Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office Shoot a fully automated M-16 with Jesse Kelly.”

Kelly’s campaign website closed down some time after noon on Saturday, and was replaced with a message of sympathy for Gabrielle Giffords … before the site closed, I caught his November thanks to the “thousands of warriors who fought with me in this campaign”.

….voters became “warriors” … but the word also exactly reflects the Tea Party mindset: this is war. Or, as Sarah Palin put it in a Tweet last year: “Commonsense Conservatives & lovers of America: ‘Don’t retreat – instead RELOAD!’…..

….The Tucson shootings can’t be blamed on Palin, Kelly, or the Tea Party: all three are more or less typical inhabitants of the debased, exaggerated and vitriolic language that now dominates American public discourse. Keith Olbermann, on the liberal left, speaks it as fluently as do Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck on the right….

….There is a chance, if rather a slim one, that the Tucson massacre will make both politicians and commentators draw back and reconsider their terms. Politics is not warfare. The Democratic party is not a colonialist tyranny. Obama is not George III. To live in a slew of overheated metaphors, in language vastly disproportionate to the occasion, is to invite and license the kind of atrocity that happened the day before yesterday.

Read the full article here

(Is it fair for the writer to lump Olbermann in with Limbaugh and Beck? Yes, he is of course hugely partisan, but does he use hate speech??)

‘surveyor’s symbols’

The Atlantic: Sarah Palin new media aide Rebecca Mansour sought to deflect attention from an electoral map Palin posted on her Facebook page last March in an appearance on Tammy Bruce’s radio show Saturday. The images long described as crosshairs or rifle sights were actually just surveyor’s symbols, Mansour said.

MANSOUR: I just want to clarify again, and maybe it wasn’t done on the record enough by us when this came out, the graphic, is just, it’s basically – we never, ever, ever intended it to be gunsights. It was simply crosshairs like you see on maps.

BRUCE: Well, it’s a surveyor’s symbol. It’s a surveyor’s symbol.

MANSOUR: It’s a surveyor’s symbol. I just want to say this, Tammy, if I can. This graphic was done, not even done in house – we had a political graphics professional who did this for us.

While there is no evidence the alleged Tuscon shooter ever saw the electoral target list – let alone took it to heart as an instruction – what is clear is that Palin’s history with weaponized rhetoric and imagery will be – and already has been – cast in a new light by the shooting in Arizona….

….the same day Palin posted the image with the scopes over congressional districts on her Facebook page, she tweeted, “Don’t retreat, Instead – RELOAD” and asked her followers to check out her Facebook page for details.

As well, there has been no national political figure in American life more eager to correct media misconceptions in real time that Palin, raising questions about why she did not object in the spring of 2010 when controversy erupted over her imagery, which even Giffords described on national television as representing gun “crosshairs.”

Thank you Ladyhawke for this link:

Washington Monthly: A ‘SURVEYOR’S SYMBOL’? …. the two did not discuss the fact that the image was immediately followed by Palin urging like-minded folks to “reload.” Of course, everyone knows surveyors’ equipment needs to be reloaded, too, right? Oh wait….

It’s worth emphasizing that the website for Palin’s political action committee was scrubbed yesterday, and offending materials related to Giffords and crosshairs were removed.

So, I have three related questions. The first is, if Palin’s materials were entirely defensible, why scrub the website? Isn’t this an implicit acknowledgement of an offense?

The second is, if the crosshairs were unrelated to guns – “Surveyor’s symbols”? Seriously? – why did Palin’s team wait to come up with this alternative interpretation until yesterday?

And the third question is, I wonder just how difficult it would be for Palin to simply acknowledge, “In retrospect, those crosshairs were inappropriate. I regret it.”

Read the full post here