Hispanic activists protest Romney on Dream Act ahead of debate
Campaigning in Iowa late last year, Mitt Romney said he would veto a proposal granting U.S. citizenship to undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children.
While turning his back on the so-called Dream Act won him support from grassroots conservatives in the Midwest, it brought out Hispanic activists in protest against him ahead of the debate on Wednesday.
“I just want a president who is going to be good for my community, for people who have a dream and want an education,” said Carla Uiquidi, one of a dozen or so protesters in the street opposite the Mesa Arts Center toting placards that read “Veto Romney Not the Dream Act.”
Under the Dream Act, which was brought up in the Senate in May, young undocumented immigrants who have lived most of their lives in the United States and graduate from U.S. high schools would be eligible for a conditional six-year “path to citizenship” if they earn a college degree or serve two years in the military.
Romney told caucus voters in Lemars, Iowa, in late December that he would secure the U.S.-Mexico border with a fence and enough Border Patrol agents to guard it.
His remarks there drew vigorous applause there and at a later appearance in Sioux City. Romney said he would eliminate the “magnet” that draws illegal immigrants by cracking down on employers who hire them. They didn’t impress Uiquidi on Wednesday.
Washington Extra – Tax time
If President Obama did indeed schedule the release of his corporate tax revamp Wednesday to steal the spotlight from Mitt Romney’s tax plan rollout – as some critics charge – it just might have worked. The Obama plan was the top story of the day.
But perhaps more importantly, Obama neutralized corporate taxes as an election year issue by aligning himself with Republican positions.
Sure, there may be differences in the tax rates each candidate backs – Obama at 28 percent, Romney 25 percent, Santorum 17.5 percent and Gingrich 12.5 percent.
But the message is the same: cut taxes on our corporations and especially domestic manufacturers to make the United States more competitive. That’s all voters are likely to hear.
The president also showed Corporate America – not his biggest fan – that he’s willing to talk with them, at least on the tax issue. Cutting the corporate tax rate has been a top goal of big businesses for many years.
Not that it will add up to much more than political messaging, at least this year, with elections coming in November. The odds of meaningful tax legislation in 2012 are slim to none.
But come 2013, tax reform could be the big show and Obama’s plan puts him at center stage.
Obama sings again, this time blues with B.B. King, Mick Jagger
President Barack Obama gave what appeared to be an impromptu performance of “Sweet Home Chicago” during a blues concert Tuesday night at the White House in celebration of Black History Month.
At the end of an evening of performances from the likes of B.B. King, Mick Jagger, Jeff Beck, Derek Trucks, Shemekia Copeland and others, Obama grabbed a mic from the stage and crooned, “Come on, baby don’t you wanna go,” part of the popular blues standard.
A month ago, Obama sang a little Al Green — a moment captured on video and viewed thousands of times over. It was seen as having added cool points to the president. Afterwards First Lady Michelle said Obama sings to her all the time.
Whether Tuesday’s performance was really impromptu, or staged as another way to help the president’s image during an election year, we may never know. One thing we do know is that Republican candidates like Mitt Romney have not had the same success in musical performance.
Obama called the blues “music with humble beginnings,” with roots in slavery and segregation in the United States.
Obama said, “Because their music teaches us that when we find ourselves at a crossroads, we don’t shy away from our problems. We own them. We face up to them. We deal with them. We sing about them. We turn them into art.”
See the video here from PBS. Obama sings at about 47 seconds.
Gingrich offers “dream team” to supporters
For a $100 donation, this free poster of Newt Gingrich and his conservative “Dream Team” can be yours.
The poster — featuring the Republican presidential candidate flanked by endorsers of his White House bid — was offered to supporters Tuesday in a new fundraising appeal.
The Dream Team photo was unveiled at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Washington last week. The Gingrich campaign said it was hit, and now conservatives across the country are clamoring for a copy of their own.
We wondered whether the Gingrich folks were inspired by the reported success of rival Rick Santorum’s sweater vest campaign. But there was no immediate response to an email inquiry about the initial poster offering.
By its own account, the Santorum campaign’s “thank you” gift to small donors — supporters without SuperPAC money — has been a hit too.
The Santorum camp has “extended by popular demand” — for a limited time — its offer of the official Rick Santorum For President sweater vest, which can be had for a minimum contribution of $100. “It’s a great way to show your support for Rick,” the campaign says, describing the vest as 100 percent cotton, made in the USA, and grey (shouldn’t that be g-r-a-y?).
And that’s not even the biggest acknowledgement being offered to people willing to make small contributions to their favorite candidate.
oh man, part of that $100 goes to the guy that photoshopped 20 lbs of bacon fat off Newt’s neck. That’s great. It looks like some kind of poster for CSI: Ignorantville.
Tending to China-US relations
Valentine’s Day is as good a day as any for China and the United States to work on the kinks in their relationship.
Chinese Vice President Xi Jinping signaled beforehand that tending to the state of the “dynamic and promising” U.S.-China connection would be the at the heart of his White House visit on Tuesday.
The economic and trade relationship between the two countries is far too important to be frayed by “frictions and differences,” Xi wrote in a Q&A submitted to the Washington Post and published on the eve of his White House meeting with President Barack Obama.
“What is important is that we properly handle these differences through coordination based on equality, mutual benefit, mutual understanding and mutual accommodation. We must not allow frictions and differences to undermine the larger interests of our business cooperation,” Xi wrote.
The man many see as China’s leader-in-waiting promised to do better and called on the United States to make an effort too — but he might not be feeling any love from the Republicans seeking to upset Obama in the Nov. 6 election.
Tough talk on China has been a recurring theme on the campaign trail — especially for former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. He calls China a cheater and says, if elected, he’d work to get Bejing labeled a currency manipulator, something the U.S. Treasury has so far refrained from doing.
In a speech last week, the Republican lumped China with Russia and jihadism. (It didn’t have the same ring of George W. Bush’s axis of evil, but the point was made.) Romney, a leading candidate now tied in recent polls, said that trio threatened to compete with the United States and the West for world leadership.
Washington Extra – A Deng Xiaoping Moment?
Maybe it’s the careful, consensus-oriented system that produces them, but China’s leaders in recent years have not exactly exuded personality. President Hu Jintao is famous for his stiff manner and scripted speaking style. Jiang Zemin was slightly more relaxed, and enjoyed showing off his English language skills and knowledge of U.S. history.
Washington on Tuesday will get its first close look at China’s next president, current Vice President Xi Jinping, who has a reputation for being more open and refreshingly direct than some of his predecessors. It may be too much to hope for a “Deng Xiaoping moment,” a 1979 turning point in Sino-American cultural relations when the diminutive Deng, China’s great modernizer, attended a rodeo in Simonton, Texas, donned a giant cowboy hat and wowed the crowd. Deng was then China’s vice premier.
Xi has conflicting needs on this visit. He wants to show peers and the public back home that he can handle the American account, China’s most important relationship. He visited Iowa in 1985 and, by all accounts, the experience affected him. He also wants to strike a good working relationship with the White House and Capitol Hill, which could help both sides handle a daunting array of disagreements: human rights, the South China Sea, China’s currency, and Obama’s more aggressive posture in Asia, to name a few.
But Xi also won’t want to make any waves that could complicate his ascendance to the top of China’s pyramid, still 13 months away. So a jaunty tractor ride when he returns to Iowa later this week may not be in the cards.
Here are our top stories from Washington…
Obama election-year budget aims to spur hiring President Barack Obama called for new spending to boost growth and higher taxes on the rich, laying out an election-year vision for America in a budget that drew heavy fire from Republicans for failing to curb huge deficits. Obama’s 2013 spending proposal is expected to go nowhere in a divided Congress and is widely seen as more of a campaign document that frames his economic pitch to voters and seeks to shift the focus from deficits to economic growth. For more of this story by Alister Bull and Laura MacInnis, read here. For a story on the Arab Spring and the budget by Susan Cornwell, read here. For a story on proposed dividend tax hike by Kim Dixon and Patrick Temple-West, read here.
“Dogs Against Romney” keeps barking on Seamus
It’s an anti-Romney movement five years in the making, and now it’s a large and growing “Super Pack” that even plans to crash the legendary Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show this week.
Dogs Against Romney is an ad-hoc group that likes dogs (and even, when pressed, some cats) but does not like Mitt Romney. It was brought together by the now well-known story of how Romney, the Republican presidential candidate, once drove from Boston to Canada with his dog in a carrier strapped to the roof of the speeding family car.
For those unfamiliar, the story –- unearthed by the Boston Globe in 2007 — goes something like this: In 1983 Romney, then a rising star in the private equity world, loaded up the family station wagon with sons and luggage for a long trek from Boston to Ontario, Canada. Seamus, the family’s Irish Setter, was put in his dog crate and strapped to the top of the car. Poor Seamus, whether terrified or over-excited or just not given a chance for a potty break, at some point soiled himself, as the Romney boys discovered when they saw brown liquid running down the window. Romney, the turnaround and efficiency specialist, quickly pulled into a nearby gas station to hose down the car, and the dog, and get back on the road.
Not long after the Seamus story became public, dog lover Scott Crider started the dogsagainstromney.com website and blog, in time for the former Massachusetts governor’s first, unsuccessful White House run. With Romney now arguably the Republican front-runner for 2012, the website and the movement have returned with fresh vigor.
Crider, 47, is a digital creative director and social media strategist based in Gulf Shores, Alabama, who works on the website in his spare time. He calls it “a work of satire with a serious message, and totally grass-roots.” The generic brown dog — nicknamed Rusty –- in the current stars-and-stripes emblazoned “In Dog We Trust/Dogs Against Romney” poster is “a composite of all the dogs I’ve owned in my life,” said Crider.
Dogs Against Romney has some simple principles: primarily among them, that dogs aren’t luggage. The website runs regular photos of member-dogs in cars, along with the slogan, “I ride inside.”
if Rompney gets to the WH, there will be doggy-doo all over the steps.
Not all smooth sailing for Romney in Maine
Republican Mitt Romney found it was not all smooth sailing in Maine on Friday night when he was heckled repeatedly at a town hall meeting in Portland at a marine storage and repair facility.
Romney jetted in from Washington to fire up his base a day before the Maine Republican Party announces the results of a week-long caucusing process. But the well-attended meeting wasn’t without some unexpected drama that showed the candidate’s testy side.
The event’s second question centered on “stashing your money away in Cayman Islands,” based on investment strategies revealed when Romney recently released his 2010 tax returns. “ First of all, first of all, I’ll have to take a look at what the trustee says,” Romney said, adding that his fortune — estimated to be as high as $250 million — has been managed in a blind trust for ten years.
When Romney later talked about the importance of increasing domestic oil production, an audience member yelled, “NO FRACKING, NO FRACKING,” referring to the technique for extracting oil and natural gas from deep underground by the injection of a highly pressurized fluid. Fracking has been linked to a number of unintended consequences, from water contamination to earthquakes. A brief, heated exchange followed, before Romney finally shot back, “don’t get so upset about it, madam. It’s not worth getting upset about.”
On the Keystone Pipeline itself, Romney said, “If you don’t want oil from Canada, vote for Barack Obama.”
Romney also endured heckling on his proposal to immediately overturn President Barack Obama’s healthcare reforms if elected president. “OBAMACARE IS ROMNEYCARE,” shouted a man with a ponytail. And when Romney used one of his standard stump lines –- that U.S. household incomes have fallen under Obama’s watch, the same man yelled, “THERE’S A RECESSION GOING ON, MISTER ROMNEY!”
Ron Paul takes commanding early lead in Maine Caucus http://www.examiner.com/libertarian-in-d enver/ron-paul-takes-commanding-early-le ad-maine-caucus
Watch live: Mitt Romney speaks at CPAC
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks at CPAC at 12:55pm ET.
Watch live:
go “Romney” because now your turn and definitely “YES YOU CAN” but not Barack Obama !
Maybe it’s better not to get that big endorsement
One staple of the U.S. political scene is the quest for endorsements, and Republican front-runner Mitt Romney seems to be leading in the race for support from the GOP establishment.
He picked up the support of Arizona Senator John McCain, who was the 2008 Republican presidential nominee, New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley and Tim Pawlenty, the former governor of Minnesota, who also was a member of the U.S. presidential field until August.
He may not be part of the party “establishment,” but Romney even got the backing of a high-profile party figure — albeit one who declared himself an independent in December — reality television star and real estate mogul Donald Trump, who called the former Massachusetts governor “tough, sharp and smart.”
But does such support really help?
“At best, so far that’s gotten him mixed results,” Republican strategist Keith Appell said, when asked about Romney’s support by party leaders. “Nikki Haley didn’t help in South Carolina. Tim Pawlenty did not help him in Minnesota.”
Prominent supporters can act as useful surrogates. Backers might pay to attend a fundraiser headlined by a well-known supporter, and voters might turn out to hear one speak.
How could a smart guy like Mitt Romney think that the endorsement of a scam artist like Trump could bolster his credibility with anybody. Romney’s ONLY asset is his business acumen, touching Trump is a “tar-baby: that tarnishes that asset.
PS. If phrase “tar-baby” could not conceivably be considered racist, when applied to anyone as “White” as Trump, pc has truly gone too far.
