from Photographers Blog:
President Obama takes the White House to the Midwest
By Jason Reed
600 miles of ice cream stops, cornfields and cow judging contests – a glimpse inside the traveling white house circus.
The scene in Washington DC, 2011 - U.S. debt ceiling negotiations, unemployment figures that wont improve, congressional deadlock – it’s enough to make you want to get out of town. President Barack Obama did just that this week, jumping on a shiny new bus and heading out to the Midwest to spend time with pretty much anyone who wasn’t wearing a business suit.
It was surely a nice change of scenery for Obama and definitely for photographers assigned to the White House who have been fed a steady diet of presidential remarks in front of all the familiar Washington backgrounds for weeks on end. The message was however, the same. Getting the nine per cent of unemployed Americans back to work.
Perry, Bachmann shine star power at Iowa dinner
Newly-minted Republican presidential candidate Rick Perry (and his black campaign bus) rolled into Waterloo Sunday, where the Texas governor made a campaign pitch to Iowa voters.
Minnesota Congresswoman Michele Bachmann showed up at the same event. They weren’t on stage together but Perry ending up sharing the spotlight.
Perry spoke first at the Black Hawk County GOP Lincoln Day Dinner and acknowledged another Republican presidential hopeful in the room, former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum .
Fresh from her weekend victory in Iowa’s Republican straw poll in Ames, Bachmann (blue bus with white lettering and red stars) managed to fit the GOP fundraiser into her Sunday schedule but she said it had nothing to do Perry appearance in her hometown.
Bachmann told Radio Iowa the dinner was something she had always hoped to put on her schedule.
“I had a family reunion … north of Waterloo today,” she said.
He and Bachmann may be intra-party rivals, but Perry kept his focus on their mutual opponent: President Barack Obama, whose vulnerabilities include stubbornly high unemployment.
I agree with the previous poster. I’m not a fan of the tea party, but if you want to report facts instead of spin, these faux tea partiers (Bachmann, Perry, et al) have usurped Ron Paul’s message, one that he has been making for years.
Where’s the reporting on Buddy Roemer, Gary Johnson, Jon Huntsman, or any of the other candidates? When Jon Huntsman gets mentioned, it’s always in conjunction with Mitt Romney. And don’t get me started on the Sarah Palin/Michele Bachmann comparisons.
There really is a hunger out here for smart reporting. We can catch all the scoop on “Bachmann’s Birthday Blunder” on TMZ or other reality show programs/newscasts. I hold Reuters to a higher standard.
Notes from West Liberty, Iowa
(View an in-depth look at scenes from Iowa and New Hampshire in a downloadable pdf format here and a look ahead to the primaries here)
#1
West Liberty is Iowa’s first Hispanic-majority city. Fifty-two percent of the people in this town of about 3,700 are Hispanic, according to the latest U.S. Census. It’s a number that would be impressive in any state. But it’s especially noteworthy in Iowa, an overwhelmingly white corner of the America Heartland where just 5 percent of the population statewide is Hispanic.
The town, located between Davenport and Iowa City, has long had a sizable and growing Hispanic population. The reason? The major employer here is West Liberty Foods, a 260,000-square-foot food processing plant that employs about 850 workers.
The big product the plant cranks out is turkey. Each year, about 5 million live birds go in end of the West Liberty Foods plant and come out the other as about 200 million pounds of processed turkey product of one kind or another, some of it actually recognizable.
A future Yuma, Modesto, Visalia,… with so much opportunity that they have the highest unemployment rates in the country.
Washington Extra – Seven up
Ready… Set… Go… And they’re off to the races for 2012. The Republicans went north. The Democrat went south.
Seven Republicans go head-to-head in New Hampshire tonight in the first major debate in the battle for their party’s presidential nomination.
The One they hope to unseat next year, President Barack Obama, sought a head start by talking jobs (he said the word 21 times) in the battleground state of North Carolina, before attending three back-to-back Miami fundraisers in fickle Florida.
“Today, the single most serious economic problem we face is getting people back to work. We stabilized the economy. We prevented a financial meltdown. An economy that was shrinking is now growing. We’ve added more than 2 million private sector jobs over the last 15 months alone,” Obama said at Cree, Inc. in Durham, North Carolina.
That’s probably not quite how the Republicans see it. They are likely to criticize Obama’s economic performance and harp on the stubbornly high unemployment rate.
Will the Republicans who would be president propose specific ideas for turning the economy around or simply criticize the other guy?
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Then came social issues and ‘morality’…
The Tea Party’s November victories and the ensuing Republican drive for spending cuts are in large part the result of a political strategy that focuses tightly on fiscal and economic matters, while minimizing rhetoric on moral questions and social topics. But for how much longer can Republicans keep a lid on the culture war?
The 2012 presidential race, though lacking in declared GOP candidates, may be about to pry open a Pandora’s box bearing the name of social issues that have long divided Republican and independent ranks. And such an occurrence could work against the interests of fiscal conservatives, just as the GOP girds itself for a showdown with Democrats over spending cuts and the debt ceiling later this spring.
Former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, one of those Republicans who are running for president without actually running for president, tells NBC’s Today show that social conservatism is what built America and made it strong.
And if a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll shows 65 percent of GOP primary voters preferring candidates who focus more on the economy and the deficit, and less on social issues? ”I think we can walk and chew gum at the same time,” he replies.
Even the battle of the budget shows signs of becoming a Republican morality fight.
Here’s Santorum speaking to social conservatives in Iowa: “…if what we’re doing to the next generation of America, this entitlement attitude, if that is not a moral issue, I don’t know what is…”
And Newt Gingrich: “…balancing the budget is an essentially moral, not economic question…”
If you listen to Republicans, you’ll hear plenty of proud boasts about how their priorities reflect the will of the American electorate.
And if you listen to the American electorate, you’ll hear something else entirely.
Washington Extra – It’s my party
It’s Friday, when some people start thinking PARTY! Even in Washington.
The first employment report of the year, which was for December, gave the administration something to party about. The unemployment rate fell to 9.4 percent from 9.8 percent. That is the number that resonates with the public, so a four-tenths of a percentage point drop can be politically useful.
“Now, we know these numbers can bounce around from month to month. But the trend is clear,” President Barack Obama said. “We saw 12 straight months of private sector job growth. That’s the first time that’s been true since 2006.”
Gene Sperling has something to party about, he’s just got his old job back. Obama announced additions to his White House economic team and named Sperling as director of the National Economic Council (a post he held in President Bill Clinton’s administration).
We imagine the winners of the NFL playoffs that start this weekend will be dreaming of starring on big screen TVs at Super Bowl parties.
And closer to home, we’re giving Washington Extra’s FF (Founding Father), Simon Denyer, a party today to wish him all the best as he leaves for a new posting in India.
Cheers everyone.
On the 8th day before Christmas, Congress…
‘Twas eight days before Christmas and all through the Hill, lots of legislative stirring…
A nuclear arms treaty with Russia, gays in the military, avoiding a government shutdown, and even loosening immigration law. All these weighty issues are enough to make any politician on Capitol Hill reach for something easier to decide. So, it’s official. Mark Twain is one of America’s most famous literary icons.
It says so in House Resolution 1733. Congress, with its hands full trying to jam a year’s worth of legislative activity through the days before Christmas, managed to squeeze out the Twain bill giving the writer of “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” recognition on the 175th anniversary of his birth and the 100th anniversary of his death.
Thomas Edison may not be so lucky. Republican Congresswoman Marsha Blackburn tells FOX Business Network: “I can tell you that on January 5th as we are sworn in, a bill is going to be put in the hopper … that will push to repeal the light bulb.”
(We will resist the temptation for the obvious “how many lawmakers does it take to screw in a light bulb?”)
Meanwhile, soon-to-be Speaker John Boehner was on a bit of a tear…
He said he would quickly be turning to “killing the job-killing health care law,” not to mention ending “the job-killing spending binge.” And he wants to axe the “job-killing policies that are denying economic growth and opportunity.”
Two questions on a comparative economy. (1.) Once Canada runs out of natural resources to sell will it’s the GST and PST be enough to support their health care, welfare, education and pension systems on the tax revenues from foreign made goods or would the US be like South Korea waiting for the 80% of Canadians to rush over the Niagara river under the Free Trade Act. (2.) Can the US economy grow through the importation of foreign building supplies, illegal construction workers and the tax revenues on foreign goods or are the Wal-marts and mega malls to big to fail?
Is deficit debate a new political dawn?
Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles think it may be a new day in American politics, one where politicans who hike taxes and alter Social Security stay in office.
Simpson, a former Republican senator, tells MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” that he sees evidence of change whenever he strolls through an airport: “I can tell you, we used to get lots of signals. I get more thumbs up now than other digits.”
The pair, co-chairs of President Barack Obama’s National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform, have proposed cutting the U.S. budget deficit by reducing defense spending, eliminating tax breaks, hiking the gasoline tax and altering Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.
Those kinds of measures have been a presciption for political suicide up to now, although the recommendations call for lower tax rates overall.
But with voters agonizing over joblessness, the deficit and growing economic powers like China, Simpson and Bowles believe the public wants to hear straight talk about the country’s problems and the steps needed to set things straight.
“Congress people used to believe if they came up here they’d get punished for making tough decisions. I think it’s just the opposite today,” Bowles says. “They will be severely penalized if they take a walk and don’t make these tough decisions and don’t get real.”
Simpson warns specifically against a current argument that says you can eliminate the deficit by banning earmarks, attacking waste, fraud and abuse, and scaling back foreign assistance.
Seriously folks – comedian testifies before U.S. Congress
It was all quite funny, but the subject is very serious especially in a sluggish U.S. economy with an unemployment rate stuck at 9.6 percent.
The House Judiciary Committee held a hearing Friday on whether illegal migrant workers take jobs away from Americans. Comedy Central’s Stephen Colbert testified in character as a conservative talk show host.
He was there at the invitation of Representative Zoe Lofgren and his testimony was based on the one day he spent for his show “The Colbert Report” laboring in the fields along with migrant farm workers.
“I reject this idea that farm work is among the semi-mythical jobs that Americans won’t do,” Colbert said.
“I’ll admit, I started my workday with preconceived notions of migrant labor. But after working with these men and women, picking beans, packing corn for hours on end, side by side, in the unforgiving sun, I have to say, and I do mean this sincerely, please don’t make me do this again,” he testified.
“It is really, really hard.”
Colbert said his experience shows why so few Americans are clamoring to do the job.
Colbert shoots from the hips and manages to hit you right between the eyeballs. There is always the element of truth to get your juices flowing. Love him … and congress could use a good jab in the funny bone, at least to get them to listen, talk, agree, discuss, THINK…
In other words, the United States legislative assemblage could use a good mockery!
The first commenter here has decided that Fox News didn’t think it was very respectful. Perhaps he should read how the Republicans are delaying and making a mockery daily of the system?
from Reuters Investigates:
In case you missed them
Just because it was summer, doesn't mean we weren't busy here at Reuters. Here are a few of our recent special reports that you might have missed.
Tracking Iran's nuclear money trail to Turkey. U.N. correspondent Lou Charbonneau -- who used to cover the IAEA for Reuters -- followed the money to Turkey where an Iranian bank under U.S. and EU sanctions is operating freely. Nice to see the New York Times follow up on this today, and the Washington Post also quizzed Turkey's president about it.
Blue-collar, unemployed and seeing red -- Chicago correspondent James Kelleher went on the road for this story about the long-term unemployed and what that means for Obama and the Democrats at November's midterm elections.
Even though he's been forced to move back in with his parents and has virtually no income, Stevenson opposes Obama's proposal to let some tax cuts for the wealthy, dating back to George W. Bush's presidency, expire at year's end in order to raise revenue and reduce the deficit.
"How is more people, keeping more of the money they earn, bad for the economy?" he said. "The answer is -- it's not."
Thanks for your comment Yevgen but White House photographer Jason Reed is the author of the piece.