On This Day: President Obama hugs first lady Michelle Obama after speaking at a memorial service at McKale Center on the University of Arizona campus, Jan. 12, 2011, in Tucson, Ariz
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The Week Ahead:
Monday: The President will welcome the President of Spain, Mariano Rajoy Brey, to the White House
Tuesday: The President will hold a Cabinet meeting, and in the afternoon he will welcome the 2013 NBA Champion Miami Heat to the White House to honor the team on winning their second straight championship title
Wednesday: The President will travel to Raleigh, North Carolina, for an event on the economy
Thursday: The President and First Lady will host an event at the White House on expanding college opportunity
Friday: The President will make remarks about the outcome of the review that he has led on the issue of signal intelligence
If I didn’t have access to health care I couldn’t imagine what my life would be like. The health care technology we have today is a blessing. The idea that we’re not sharing that with as many people as possible is crazy to me.
How did it feel to learn about the new health care options available to you?
It made me feel relieved and a little bit more in control.
Getting covered means: a piece of mind to keep living my life.
@nycjim: What Chris Christie woke up to this morning.
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Media Matters: How The Media Marketed Chris Christie’s Straight Shooter Charade
He’s been relentlessly and adoringly depicted as some sort of Straight Shooter. He’s an authentic and bipartisan Every Man, a master communicator, and that rare politician who cuts through the stagecraft and delivers hard truths. Christie’s coverage has been a long-running, and rather extreme, case of personality trumping substance. The truth is Christie was never the Straight Shooter that political reporters and pundits made him out to be. Not even close, as I’ll detail below. Instead, the Straight Shooter story represented appealing fiction for the press. They tagged him as “authentic” and loved it when he got into yelling matches with voters.
In August of 2010, the state was shocked to discover it had narrowly missed out on $400 million worth of desperately needed education aid from the federal government because New Jersey’s application for the grant was flawed. Christie initially tried to blame the Obama administration but that claim was shown to be false. Christie’s own Education Commissioner then publicly blamed Christie for the failure to land the money. He insisted the governor, who famously feuds with the state’s teacher unions, had placed that political battle and his right-wing credentials ahead of securing the federal funds and that Christie had told him the “money was not worth it” to the state if it meant he had to cooperate with teachers. In November 2010, the U.S. Department of Justice inspector general found that while serving as U.S. attorney, Christie routinely billed taxpayers for luxury hotels on trips and failed to follow federal travel regulations.
Martin Longman: Christie Showed His Stripes As U.S. Attorney
The dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy of 2007 has been largely forgotten, but it was a very big deal at the time. It resulted in the resignations of the Attorney General, the Deputy Attorney General, the Acting Associate Attorney General, the chief of staff for the Attorney General, the chief of staff for the Deputy Attorney General, the Director of the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys, the former acting Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division, and the Department of Justice’s White House Liaison. It was a total disaster for the Bush administration that was the natural result of a conspiracy to deliberately politicize the Justice Department. The U.S. Attorneys who were fired were fired for insufficient partisan zeal. In some cases, they refused to open meritless voter fraud cases. In other cases, they wouldn’t open meritless investigations on Democratic politicians. In still other cases, they were actually investigating lawbreaking by Republicans.
So, one of the takeaways from the scandal was that the U.S. Attorneys who weren’tdismissed were incredibly suspect. The attorneys who were found acceptable to the Bush administration were the ones who would launch phony investigations against innocent people and who would cover up criminal activity if is was carried out by Bush’s allies. Chris Christie was a U.S. Attorney who passed that test. He was considered sufficiently corrupt (or corruptible) to remain a U.S. Attorney in Alberto Gonzales’s (and Karl Rove’s) Justice Department.
Adario Strange: 5 Hospitalized After West Virginia Water Contamination Crisis
Five people have been hospitalized following a major water-contamination crisis in West Virginia, according to local news reports. Although the exact reasons for the hospitalizations have yet to be confirmed, local reports suggest that the patients’ symptoms could have been caused by chemical contamination of the water supply. Government officials in West Virginia declared a state of emergency on Thursday in nine counties due to water contamination that has impacted over 300,000 local residents. Due to the contaminated supply, residents in the affected areas have been unable to drink tap water or use it to bathe, cook or even wash clothes for several days.
The situation reached a critical point Thursday when residents of Kanawha County reported smelling a licorice smell in the air, which was traced back to a 35,000-gallon chemical storage tank based near the Elk River. Operated by Freedom Industries, the storage tank reportedly overflowed and eventually contaminated the water supply maintained by the West Virginia American Water Co. plant, according to CNN. Freedom Industries president Gary Southern held a televised press conference Friday during which he answered questions about the accident, while sipping a bottle of Aquafina water. “At this point, Freedom Industries is still working to determine the amount of 4-methylcyclohexanemethanol, or Crude MCHM, a chemical used in processing coal, that has been released, as the first priority was safety, containment and cleanup.”
BP has lost an appeal to cancel the terms of its multi-billion-dollar settlement with businesses over the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill disaster. A US federal appeals court on Saturday upheld the terms of the original 2012 settlement. The UK oil giant has supported compensation for businesses harmed by the disaster.
But it argued that the terms of the existing deal meant that some huge sums were being paid for false claims. In 2012, BP agreed to make payments to those who suffered economic losses as a result of the disaster aboard the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, which triggered the worst offshore oil spill in US history. The blast killed 11 workers and released an estimated four million barrels of oil into the gulf.
FEW believed that John Kerry, the American secretary of state, would manage to haul the Israelis and Palestinians back into the negotiating room, let alone get them to discuss anything of substance. Yet six months since talks began, he may be able to present, within weeks, a “framework agreement”, after which final details must be hammered out. Diplomats who had mocked his dogged prophetic conviction now sound shocked by his progress. Rejectionists on both sides who quietly presumed that the process would collapse under its own weight now express alarm. Consternation and confusion are visible on the faces of some ministers in Binyamin Netanyahu’s Israeli government.
Mr Kerry’s methodical midwifery may be paying off. His team of 120, including four generals, has almost as great a command of detail as do the Israelis and Palestinians. He hugs the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, a former firebrand who vilified Palestinians and was cordially detested by them in return, whereas his predecessor, Hillary Clinton, used to shun him. Mr Lieberman nowadays praises Mr Kerry for bringing peace closer than ever, and has turned the ten naysayers in his party’s parliamentary bloc into yes men. Yair Lapid, the finance minister, has come out strongly in favour, bringing onside his 19 parliamentarians, the second-biggest party in the 120-strong Knesset. Mr Kerry’s people have also courted the black-hatted Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox. All told, he has overseen a remarkable turnaround. After the election at the beginning of last year, a narrow majority in the Knesset would have shied from a negotiated two-state solution. Now, according to insiders, its members stand 85-35 or so in its favour.
Jonathan Chait: That Awkward Moment When Republicans Have To Hurt The Poor Before They Can Love Them
“Poverty,” reports the New York Times, “is suddenly the subject of bipartisan embrace.” Before poor people get too excited about this new development, some clarification may be in order. The parties are not embracing a shared program to alleviate poverty, nor even the goal of doing something at all about poverty anytime soon. There is merely shared agreement to discuss poverty as a subject. What hasn’t changed is the general shape of the Republican economic agenda in either the long run or the short run. Republicans agree that government takes too much from the rich and gives too much to the non-rich, and its domestic agenda is constructed largely as a corrective to what Republicans see as excessive redistribution.
Republicans also believe that nothing about the immediate labor market requires any changes to their general economic policies. (That is, they don’t believe high unemployment justifies temporarily relaxing their opposition to deficit spending or to worry less about coddling the unemployed.) The near-term agenda remains completely unaltered. Republicans remain unified in their desire to cut food stamps and end emergency unemployment benefits unless offset by other cuts to domestic spending. Nearly all support ongoing state-based campaigns to deny Medicaid coverage to uninsured people too poor to qualify for tax credits to buy private insurance.
Chris Geidner: Obama Administration To Recognize Utah Same-Sex Couples’ Marriages
The federal government will recognize the marriages of same-sex couples who married in Utah in recent weeks, the Justice Department announced Friday. Approximately 1,360 same-sex couples married between Dec. 20, 2013 — when U.S. District Court Judge Robert J. Shelby found the state’s ban on same-sex couples’ marriages to be unconstitutional — and this Monday, when the Supreme Court put new marriages of same-sex couples on hold pending the state’s appeal of Shelby’s ruling.
In a video released by the Justice Department on Friday, Attorney General Eric Holder announced, “I am confirming today that, for purposes of federal law, these marriages will be recognized as lawful and considered eligible for all relevant federal benefits on the same terms as other same-sex marriages.” Specifically, he noted, “In the days ahead, we will continue to coordinate across the federal government to ensure the timely provision of every federal benefit to which Utah couples and couples throughout the country are entitled — regardless of whether they are in same-sex or opposite-sex marriages.”
AP: Former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords returned to the scene of the horrific shooting that wounded her and killed six people two years ago, urging senators Wednesday to pass background checks for gun purchases in her first public event at the site since the rampage.
Giffords, who is still recovering from her injuries, spoke fewer than 20 words in the parking lot of the Safeway grocery store in her hometown of Tucson in a brief but emotional call for stricter gun control measures.
“Be bold. Be courageous,” Giffords said. “Please support background checks.”
Gabrielle Giffords listens to a speaker Wednesday as an emotional husband Mark Kelly hugs her during a return to the site of a shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that left her critically wounded
Charles Pierce: Is anyone taking seriously the complaints now coming about how the president’s re-election campaign is using the decision to kill Osama bin Laden to its own advantage? I think the killing of the author of the 9/11 atrocities, and a considerable international murderer even beyond that particular crime, is something that a president who wants to be president again is within his rights to use…..
…. it’s no more or less “fair” on the merits than is Romney’s constant refrain that the president “doesn’t understand how the economy works” because he’s never been a vulture capitalist.
….. demonstrating the pure class and raw political courage that has marked his entire political career by throwing a cheap shot at someone who wasn’t in the room, Romney said that, “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.” This from a man whose toughest decision in his life has been which house to sleep in.
…. every time he talks about foreign policy, Romney is a blindfolded man in a yard full of rakes. He wrote a Washington Post op-ed about arms control that proved Romney didn’t know enough about the subject to feed to his fish. He flirted with advocating a trade war with China, and he and his advisors occasionally slip and call Russia “the Soviet Union.” Of course, he did make the bobsleds run on time, so there’s that.
Washington Post (Chris Cillizza and Rachel Weiner): The one-year anniversary of the killing of Osama bin Laden has occasioned a fierce political debate about the appropriateness of President Obama’s reelection campaign touting the death for their partisan benefit.
It shouldn’t. Here’s why …. simply because the death of bin Laden bolsters Obama’s case for reelection doesn’t mean that it is out of bounds. What’s good for the political goose is good for the political gander.
In case you need a little more convincing, remember that President George W. Bush stoked considerable controversy when just one day after formally announcing for reelection, he launched TV ads that prominently featured imagery from Sept. 11, 2001. “Sept. 11 changed the equation in our public policy,” White House spokesman Scott McClellan said at the time, defending the ads. “The president’s steady leadership is vital to how we wage war on terrorism.”
That’s, in essence, the same argument that Obama and his team are making about the use of bin-Laden in two web videos released by the campaign over the last 96 hours. If the American public needs to make a judgment on Obama’s first term decision-making, then it doesn’t make sense to ignore one of the major moments of those four years….
Charles Pierce: Good on the Obama people for taking on the current national campaign of voter-suppression at the local level. Back in Mississippi during the Freedom Summer, volunteers were deeply schooled in the various regulations and tactics used to deprive African Americans of their right to vote ….
The new Florida rules … were the centerpiece of a training effort over the weekend by the Obama for America staff in the state. All volunteers and staff members in Florida are required to attend a mandatory session on the new laws … Those who go through the training must pass a quiz administered by the campaign before they can attempt to register voters on the president’s behalf.
This is absolutely the same thing that those people did in Mississippi 50 years ago, and it’s become necessary to do it again because the same foul impulses that brought us literacy tests and the poll tax is bringing us these latest attempts to make difficult what should be the easiest right for us to exercise. And, not for nothing, but Greg Palast brings our attention back to 2000 again, and the effect that what looks today like a rudimentary exercise in voter-suppression had on our history.
The Fact Checker (Washington Post): Two well-funded Republican groups began running hard-hitting ads against President Obama last week, aiming to spend an estimated $8 million in key battleground states. The spots hit similar themes, attacking Obama on green-energy investments, and even cite similar sources.
Watching these ads is a depressing duty for The Fact Checker, because many of their claims – regarding “billions” of stimulus dollars going overseas – had been debunked two years ago by our colleagues at PolitiFact and Factcheck.org. Yet here the erroneous assertions emerge yet again, without any shame, labeled as “the truth” or “fact.”
….. One can certainly raise questions about how stimulus funding was used and whether it was effective. But there is no excuse for these kinds of ads, which take facts out of context or simply invent them. These groups should be especially ashamed, given that these claims have been previously debunked, or, in the case of the erroneous ABC report, withdrawn.
Annika Shepp basks in the arms of First Lady Michelle Obama at Tucson International Airport on April 30. Shepp was one of nearly twenty youth volunteers to greet the First Lady as she arrived to speak at a campaign event downtown
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President Obama has no public events listed on his schedule. First lady Michelle Obama will attend campaign events in Las Vegas, Nev., and Albuquerque, N.M.
Rep. Gabrielle Giffords talked with President Barack Obama on Sunday, the one-year anniversary of a southern Arizona shooting rampage that left her and 12 others wounded and six people dead.
The congresswoman will be among those marking the somber occasion by attending a vigil Sunday night on University of Arizona’s campus, one of several such memorial events in recent days.
…. Obama called Giffords on Sunday “to offer his support” and say that she, other shooting victims and the Tucson community are “in their daily thoughts and prayers,” the White House said in a statement.
“The president expressed amazement at the courage and determination Rep. Giffords has shown along her incredible road to recovery, calling her an inspiration to his family and Americans across the country,” the statement added.
President Barack Obama makes a statement to members of the press in the Roosevelt Room of the White House, Nov. 28, 2011. The President, along with European Council President Herman Van Rompuy, obscured, and President of the European Commission José Manuel Barroso, right, delivered remarks following a summit with leaders of the European Union to discuss issues of mutual concern. (Official White House Photo by Lawrence Jackson)
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Coming up:
Tuesday: The President will host Prime Minister Mark Rutte of the Netherlands for a meeting in the Oval Office.
Wednesday: The President will travel to Scranton, Pennsylvania where he will deliver remarks urging Congress to act to extend and expand the payroll tax cut that has given tax breaks to millions of families across the country this year. In the evening, the President will travel to New York City where he will attend campaign events.
Thursday: The First Family will attend the National Christmas Tree Lighting on the Ellipse.
Friday: The President will host the White House Tribal Nations Conference at the Department of the Interior and deliver remarks.
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Three RNPS images of the year, 2011:
Children from public schools in the town of Chatfield, Minnesota, help President Obama get up after he posed with them for a picture, during his bus trip to the Midwest, August 15
Better version:
First lady Michelle Obama holds the hand NASA shuttle commander Mark Kelly, the husband of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, as they listen to President Barack Obama speak at the “Together We Thrive: Tucson and America” event, January 12
President Obama plays table tennis against students with British Prime Minister David Cameron, London, May 24
Tomorrow, the President and First Lady will sit with Gabrielle Giffords as they watch the launch of Endeavour with her husband Mark Kelly on board. There is always hope.
Night everyone, see you tomorrow
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Friday:
8:30 AM The first family departs the White House
10:50 AM Arrives in Alabama
11:10 AM President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama view the damage in Alabama, as well as meeting with Governor Bentley, state and local officials and families affected by the storms
12:45 PM The first family departs Alabama
2:10 PM: Arrives in Cape Canaveral, Florida
2:45 PM The first family tours the orbiter processing facility
3:30 PM: …views the launch of the space shuttle Endeavour
5:40 PM President Obama arrives in Miami, Florida
6:55 PM: ….delivers the Miami Dade College commencement address
President Barack Obama signs the John M. Roll United States Courthouse Bill in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington on February 17. The bill will name a new federal courthouse in Yuma, Arizona, after slain federal Judge John M. Roll who died in last month’s shooting in Tucson. The President was joined by members of Roll’s family, members of the Arizona Congressional delegation, and members of his cabinet.
The Guardian: Less than three months ago, Barack Obama was being declared a political corpse as his opponents seized control of the lower house of Congress and suggested that he would be president in name only.
But buttressed by a rapid turnaround in the polls, Obama will use his annual state of the union address tomorrow to position himself as the voice of the centre, appealing for his political opponents to find common ground in the face of the Republicans’ declared policy of obstructionism.
The president’s approval rating has risen back to about 50%, a much quicker rebound than either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan managed following midterm defeats in Congressional elections – and both went on to win re-election comfortably.
The polls show that the president scored points, particularly among independent voters, for compromising with the outgoing Congress on extending tax cuts for the wealthy and showing he could deliver results with a burst of legislation that lifted the bar on gay people in the military and won approval of a nuclear missile treaty with Russia.
Obama’s inspiring speech in the wake of the Tucson shootings also stood in stark contrast to Sarah Palin’s self-serving attempt to justify the often violent political rhetoric on the right….
The Obama Diary 
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