Obama campaign launches voter drive around gay marriage
President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, looking to tap support for the president’s embrace of same-sex marriage, launched a voter drive in key electoral states on Wednesday, saying a Mitt Romney presidency would be the “ultimate deal breaker” for proponents of “marriage equality.”
The campaign’s effort to mobilize lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, and transgender voters and those who back their rights to wed is called “Obama Pride: LGBT Americans For Obama” and will combine on-the-ground operations in Pennsylvania, Colorado, Nevada, and Florida with an enhanced digital footprint.
“The President fights for our equality because he believes we are equal. Mitt Romney would fight against our equality because he believes we do not deserve it,” said Joe Solmonese, an Obama campaign co-chair and president of the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group. “We can not afford to go back.”
The campaign is highlighting Romney’s opposition to same-sex-marriage and his support of a federal amendment to the constitution that would define marriage as between one man and one woman. It’ll make its push during parades, phone banks, house parties, and other get-out-the-vote maneuvers.
Romney “has pledged to write discrimination into the Constitution of the United States,” Solmonese said, calling a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman the “ultimate deal breaker” for the LGBT community.
The campaign juxtaposed Romney’s public statements with the president’s legislative record, which includes ending the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy that prevented gays from serving openly in the military and signing into law the Hate Crimes Prevention Act, making it a federal hate crime to assault people based on sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity.
The Democratic incumbent in early May became the first sitting president to embrace same-sex marriage, which analysts say is particularly important to voters under age 35, a voting bloc that helped lead Obama to the White House in 2008. The campaign immediately rallied around the shift, which sparked passionate debates and a money rush on both sides.
The tunnel to political prominence
A new report on the controversy that helped launch New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie to national prominence – and make him a vice-presidential contender – has reignited debate over one of the country’s most popular and polarizing Republicans.
A General Accounting Office report on Tuesday examined the impact of Christie’s decision in October 2010 to cancel a multibillion-dollar rail tunnel linking commuters in his state of New Jersey to midtown Manhattan.
Though the report didn’t reveal any secrets, it gave Christie’s supporters and opponents a new opportunity to define him: as either a maverick fiscal conservative fighting wasteful government, or as a political opportunist willing to trample working people for his political ends.
Christie backs Republican presidential frontrunner Mitt Romney and is frequently mentioned as a possible vice-presidential candidate who could possibly move a Democratic-leaning state into the Republican column in November.
The $8.7 billion Hudson River tunnel project, also known as ARC, would have dug a new rail tunnel under the Hudson river, creating tens of thousands of jobs and meet growing demand for mass transit in the nation’s largest metropolitan area. New York, New Jersey and the U.S. government would have shared the costs.
But the potential for billions of dollars in cost overruns hung over the massive project, and New Jersey taxpayers would have been responsible for most of them.
Estimates varied for much the tunnel would ultimately cost. Christie assumed the most costly estimate in the report to justify its cancellation – and rounded up from $13.7 billion to $14 billion. In short, after the report, the facts remained the same, as did the political spin.
Barbour says Clinton’s 1996 strategy might help Obama
Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour on Friday offered some advice to the man that he may seek to unseat in next year’s election, President Barack Obama.
The potential 2012 Republican presidential candidate said he doesn’t expect Obama to follow the lead of a Democratic predecessor and declare, “the era of big government is over.”
But Barbour said if Obama did deliver such a message, as President Bill Clinton did in 1996, “I think his job approval would go up.”
Barbour said it would be “good for the country” and the president if he moved to the political center — just as Clinton did after Republicans won control of Congress in 1994.
“This (past) election was undoubtedly a repudiation of the Obama policy,” Barbour said of the November congressional contests that saw Republicans win the House of Representatives from Obama’s Democrats and increase their clout in the Senate.
“The American people saw all this spending, they saw the gigantic deficits, they saw the debt being run up, they saw the damage it did to the economy, they saw the creation of a government-run health-care system — and they voted against it, and they voted against it in droves,” Barbour said.
Barbour made the comments to reporters after privately addressing the second day of a three-day retreat in Baltimore by House Republicans.
Barbour’s “helpful” suggestions would carry more weight if the President’s approval ratings weren’t up nearly ten points since the elections. If the country is so down on Obama, why is it that more and more Americans think he’s doing a good job? The independents are leaning more and more toward the President———and they aren’t impressed with the Republicans in congress (or the Dems) at all, at all.
Edwards: the good, the bad and the diapers
If anyone wanted whiplash today, they should have watched the John Edwards story.
First thing in the morning Edwards issued a statement confirming what had previously been gossiped but not proven: he was in fact the father of Rielle Hunter’s 2-year-old daughter.
(No need to count backwards, she was an Edwards campaign videographer during his bid for the Democratic nomination for the White House).
After dropping that bombshell (so that everyone could now nod their heads and turn to each other and say “I knew it all along”), where would you have expected Edwards to turn up next?
He landed in Haiti as the Humanitarian Edwards.
One of our reporters in Haiti (Adam Entous) ran into Edwards at the Port-au-Prince airport. The freshly confessed former senator arrived on a chartered flight with a group of volunteer doctors and actor Sean Penn.
But he had nothing more to say about the affair.
Cheating on your wife is a deal breaker for Republican voters–but only if you are a Democrat. John Ensign, David Vitter, Newt Gingrich, John McCain, and Rudy Giuliani are all still quite popular among conservatives.
How you like me now?!
Remember during the presidential campaign, when Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton was asked about her “likability” compared to that of rival Barack Obama?
The inference was that people didn’t like her as much as they liked him, even after he told her during a presidential debate: “You’re likable enough.”
That was then.
This is now.
Secretary of State Clinton is more popular (or can we just say likable) than President Obama, according to a Gallup poll released on Thursday.
Clinton is viewed favorably by 62 percent of Americans, just three points below her rating in January. Obama’s favorable rating has fallen 22 points from 78 percent in January to land at 56 percent.
Here’s a look back at that moment in New Hampshire in 2008, when Clinton’s likability was in question.
the americans (specilly this woman) are the top terrorist in the world. really is true
Obama says Bush “a good guy”
PHILADELPHIA – Barack Obama, who pilloried his soon-to-be predecessor’s policies during two years on the campaign trail, said Friday that George W. Bush is a good guy.
“If you look at my statements throughout the campaign, I always thought he was a good guy,” the Democratic president-elect said on CNN about the Republican president whom he replaces Tuesday.
“I mean, I think personally he is a good man who loves his family and loves his country. And I think he made the best decisions that he could at times under some very difficult circumstances.”
Best decisions he could? Obama lambasted Bush on the campaign trail for his decisions on a wide range of issues, including the Iraq war, financial regulation, climate change and the treatment of prisoners.
Obama made reference to those, too.
“Over the last several years, we have made a series of bad choices and we are now going to be inheriting the consequences of a lot of those bad choices,” the president-elect said.
“That does not mean that I think he’s not a good person. And his White House staff has done an extraordinary job in working with us for a smooth transition.”
We went from one administration to another, and we are seeing two totally different ideologies.
We see how President Bush protected us from terrorists-
and now we see how the new administration would rather we refrain from usage of the word terrorists.
We will see how we will be protected in the future.
As someone who was directly affected by 9/11- I SAY THANKS TO PRESIDENT AND MRS BUSH. YOU TOOK ALOT OF FLACK FROM A MEAN MEDIA.
THANK YOU.
Clinton says unlikely to mount another White House bid
WASHINGTON – Democrat Hillary Clinton lost a tough battle for her party’s presidential nomination this year and says she is unlikely to make another run for it.
In an interview with Fox News aired on Tuesday, she was first asked to rate on a scale of one to 10 whether she would become the next majority leader in the Senate, which she put at the bottom of the scale.
“Oh, probably zero,” she said. “I’m not seeking any other position than to be the best senator from New York that I can be.”
She also said she had no interest in serving on the Supreme Court, another idea that has floated among political pundits when they talk about Clinton’s future.
According to Fox News, Clinton then proceeded cast doubt that she would mount another presidential bid, saying the chances were “probably close to zero.”
“There’s an old saying: Bloom where you’re planted,” she said.
Media-battered Clinton calls for greater scrutiny
SIOUX FALLS, S.D. – As a Democratic presidential candidate, New York senator and former first lady, Hillary Clinton has had her share of media scrutiny. Still, she says the news media should become a more aggressive public watchdog.
“I really do. I really do,” Clinton told reporters when asked if she sincerely favors greater press scrutiny.
“On the right things. On things that are important to the future of our country. On things that actually matter. I would love that,” said Clinton, long hounded by the press as one of the nation’s most popular yet polarizing figures.
Clinton made the remarks to reporters on her campaign plane on Wednesday night in wake of the new book by former White House spokesman Scott McClellan, who says the Bush administration manipulated information to lead the U.S. into the Iraq war.
“What I hope is that the press and the public and the political class will be much more vigorous and skeptical than everybody was,” Clinton said.
“Everyone, you know, in his or her own way, basically let the administration get away with it. And they got away with it. They got re-elected and here we are,” she said.
Referring to McClellan’s book as well as ones by other former administration officials, Clinton said, “Unfortunately, there were a lot of people in a position to know much more than most of us who went along.
This is in response to Maile. I am a white, working class woman and I DO NOT THINK that Clinton represents me. I think she represents her power-hungry, murky, selfish motives.
Between Republicans and Democrats, it’s always the choice of the lesser of two evils.
Republicans are completely greedy, selfish, self-absorbed, money hungry party who would sell their own mother while Democrats are so fixated on “rights and freedoms” with no boundaries they are just completely immoral who would sleep with their own mother.