NewsTrust - Presidential Election 2012 - Most Recent Stories

President Obama Should Seize the High Ground

Sun, 27 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Thomas Friedman - May. 27 (Opinion) - President Obama has quite a record of accomplishment to run on for re-election if he would only run on it. During a recent discussion in Seattle with a group of educators, one of them surprised me when she pointed out that even though their state did not win President Obama’s education “Race to the Top,” that program was critical in spurring education reform in Washington State. As I listened to her analysis, the thought occurred to me: I wonder how Barack Obama would do if he ran for president as himself. ... How he would do if he ran for re-election on all the things he’s accomplished but rarely speaks about.

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The President's Last Line of Defense

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

National Journal - By Ronald Brownstein - May. 26 (News Analysis) - The new round of national and state surveys this week generally showing President Obama clinging to a tenuous advantage over Republican Mitt Romney reinforce the conclusion that socially liberal, upscale white women may stand as the president's indispensable line of defense in his struggle for reelection. Both the national ABC/Washington Post survey released earlier this week, and the NBC/Marist Polls released Thursday in the battleground states of Ohio, Virginia and Florida show Obama retaining preponderant support among minority voters who were critical to his 2008 victory. Conversely, in almost all of the surveys, Obama faces a consistent pattern of erosion from his already meager 2008 levels of support among whites without a college education.

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Bain Capital and our screwed-up culture

Sat, 26 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Fromma Harrop - May. 26 (Opinion) - The problem is not the profession. It's what one does in the course of business. But even among those intent on making it big, people with a conscience will not cross certain lines. Bain blew across them.

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CAUGHT RED HANDED

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

bbvforums.org - By Bev Harris - May. 23 (Investigative Report) - Four hundred and eighty-eight voters, every one of them in the Tennessee district of US Rep Steve Cohen (D-09), all but four lifelong Democrats, and nearly all Black, had their voting history erased by Shelby County election workers, setting them up for purge from the voter list.

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Money Unlimited

Mon, 21 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New Yorker - By Jeffrey Toobin - May. 21 (Special Report) - When Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission was first argued before the Supreme Court, on March 24, 2009, it seemed like a case of modest importance. The issue before the Justices was a narrow one. The McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law prohibi

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The Most Powerful Special Interest in Washington: The Acronym

Sun, 20 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Micah Cohen - May. 20 (Opinion) - A linguistic plague is creeping through the nation's capital - the "bacronym," where a PAC or bill name is chosen so that the initial letters of each word form a desired word.

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The Wright stuff: President Obama and the Ricketts smear

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - By Ana Marie Cox - May. 19 (Opinion) - Republicans are rightly shamed by a Super Pac ad plan to tag Obama as a black radical. The irony is his very lack of radicalism Nebraska has already supplied the right with a billionaire boogeyman: Warren Buffet, hero of the secretarial pool and worldly philanthropist. Now, the left has a Husker to hate: Joe Ricketts, the man for whom a group of Republican troublemakers dreamed up the perhaps-intentionally hilarious, to-be-sure-intentionally shocking "Plan to Defeat Barack Hussein Obama" . The document's deadpan staccato phrasing has the punctuation-agnostic urgency and livid prose of a "Mission: Impossible" assignment memo (or an Austin Powers trailer). "The Plan. An Overview," reads the titular section: "A five-minute unusually unique" – sic! – "film bringing his tutorship beneath Reverend Wright and others to the forefront of popular discourse … We start by raising an eyebrow. Teasers, hints of dark clouds to come. Buying print space, newspaper ads, kiosks at the airport, around the ...

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Is GOP trying to sabotage economy to hurt Obama?

Sat, 19 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Associated Press - By Charles Babington - May. 19 (News Analysis) - Are Republican lawmakers deliberately stalling the economic recovery to hurt President Barack Obama's re-election chances? Some top Democrats say yes, pointing to GOP stances on the debt limit and other issues that they claim are causing unnecessary economic anxiety and retarding growth.

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Mitt Romney's flip-flops

Fri, 18 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Bill Adair , Louis Jacobson - May. 18 (Fact Check) - For the 2012 presidential campaign, we're using the Flip O-Meter to assess the statements of President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney. This article includes links to the Flip-O-Meter items we've published on Romney. We'll update it as we publish more in the future.

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Mitt Romney Debt Speech Ignores Key Facts

Wed, 16 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Tom Raum - May. 16 (News Analysis) - When Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney decried the "prairie fire" of U.S. debt Tuesday, he ignored some of the sparks that set...

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JPMorgan Chase’s $2 Billion Loss

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - May. 13 (Editorial) - The lesson of JPMorgan’s stunning $2 billion trading loss is that the banks haven’t learned their lesson, and neither have the politicians. Jamie Dimon, the chief executive of JPMorgan Chase, can be clear as a bell when he denounces financial reform. But on an emergency conference call with analysts on Thursday to announce the bank’s stunning $2 billion trading loss, his message was frustratingly vague.

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Mitt Romney, the Unlikable Presidential Candidate

Sun, 13 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Daily Beast - By Michael Tomasky - May. 13 (Opinion) - It’s been a long time since the country elected a man as personally unappealing as Mitt Romney. Will Americans overlook their deeply held conviction that he’s a jerk? Very few votes are going to be cast on the basis of what Mitt Romney did or didn’t do to John Lauber in 1965. So that, per se, isn’t Romney’s problem. But this is: The story lands as another brick on pile of evidence amassing that he’s just a disagreeable human being. A few days ago I wrote about Barack Obama’s biggest problem, which is that despite all the many areas in which Americans rate him higher than Romney, the one on which they give Romney the edge happens to be pretty important: handling the economy. Now we get to Romney’s biggest problem. The likability factor. He ain’t got it. And he ain’t got much of a way to get it.

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Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Jackie Calmes, Peter Baker - May. 10 (News Report) - President Obama on Wednesday ended nearly two years of “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage by publicly endorsing it in a television interview, taking a definitive stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day.

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Obama: Gay couples should be able to marry

Thu, 10 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

ABC News - By Rick Klein - May. 10 (News Report) - President Obama today announced that he now supports same-sex marriage, reversing his longstanding opposition amid growing pressure from the Democratic base and even his own vice president.

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Hillary Clinton, barefaced and bespectacled, is a refreshing image in politics

Tue, 08 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Suzi Parker - May. 08 (Opinion) - The caption read “Hillary Au Naturale,” and the photo showed the Secretary of state without makeup except lipstick, wearing black-framed glasses.

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The PolitiFact guide to Medicare attack lines

Sun, 06 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Angie Drobnic Holan, Louis Jacobson - May. 06 (Fact Check) - Barack Obama has slashed Medicare by $500 billion. Mitt Romney and House Republicans want to end Medicare. And a new board is going to ration care so Washington can waste more money. Believe any of that? You shouldn’t. But it’s what the political ads likely will be saying between now and Election Day in November. We have some advice for voters sorting out the claims: Believe nothing you hear in a 30-second TV ad. Here are a few facts about Medicare: • It’s the government-run health insurance for Americans over age 65. • It’s a Canada-style, single-payer system. Liberals love that; conservatives don’t. • It has approximately 50 million people on its rolls. • That 50 million will grow to 80 million as baby boomers retire. Paying for that will be a challenge. Those realities about Medicare have sparked a full-fledged political brawl for 2012.

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Obama launches campaign against Romney, but his real opponent is the economy

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Dan Balz - May. 05 (Opinion) - The president took on Mitt Romney as he formally launched his reelection campaign, but the former Massachusetts governor won’t be Obama’s most stubborn rival.

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Barack Obama: use former war budget to boost US economy

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Guardian - May. 05 (News Report) - Barack Obama has declared that his goal of defeating al-Qaida is within reach and that the withdrawal of US forces from Afghanistan would free up money to help rebuild the US economy. The US president said on Saturday that it was time to focus on domestic concerns, such as helping the middle class who have been squeezed by the economic downturn. Four days after he visited Afghanistan, Obama said that money saved from ending wars should be used to reduce the country's debt and to boost healthcare, education and infrastructure. "The tide of war has turned in Afghanistan," he said in his weekly radio and internet address. "We've broken the Taliban's momentum. We've built strong Afghan security forces. We've devastated al-Qaida's leadership. And one year ago our troops launched the operation that killed Osama bin Laden.

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Student loans: Do Republicans really think program is socialist?

Sat, 05 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Christian Science Monitor - By Mark Trumbull - May. 05 (News Report) - President Obama repeated his drumbeat for student-loan relief on Friday, telling an audience of Virginia high school students that Congress must act soon to prevent a doubling of federal-loan interest rates. With the cost of subsidized Stafford loans set to double for borrowing that occurs after July 1, the issue has become a major theme for the president in the past couple of weeks. Republican lawmakers show an openness to preventing the interest rate from jumping to 6.8 percent. But they and Mr. Obama are also using the issue as an election-year opportunity to underscore their political differences.

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Mitt Romney's Dangerous Foreign Policy Team: Nostalgic for Bush, Hellbent on War with Iran

Wed, 02 May 2012 00:00:00 -0700

AlterNet - By Alex Kane - May. 02 (News Analysis) - Romney’s persistent knocks on Obama’s foreign policy make clear that, while the economy will be the number-one issue this year, foreign policy will be a close runner-up. Behind Romney’s statements on world affairs is a group of close advisers whose views harken back to the Bush administration’s belligerent neoconservative brand of US foreign policy--not the best idea, considering how discredited it has become. “The most striking aspect of Romney's approach to foreign policy is its lack of creativity -- its brazen willingness to recycle Bush-era talking points, attitudes, and of course personnel,” said Peter Certo, a researcher at Right Web, a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

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Let’s just say it: The Republicans are the problem.

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Thomas E. Mann, Norman J. Ornstein - Apr. 29 (Opinion) - Rep. Allen West, a Florida Republican, was recently captured on video asserting that there are “78 to 81” Democrats in Congress who are members of the Communist Party. Of course, it’s not unusual for some renegade lawmaker from either side of the aisle to say something outrageous. What made West’s comment — right out of the McCarthyite playbook of the 1950s — so striking was the almost complete lack of condemnation from Republican congressional leaders or other major party figures, including the remaining presidential candidates. It’s not that the GOP leadership agrees with West; it is that such extreme remarks and views are now taken for granted.

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Who to blame for the price at the pump? Tough to say

Sun, 29 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

PolitiFact - By Molly Moorhead - Apr. 29 (Fact Check) - The price of gas is determined by a litany of complex and shifting factors (Brent derivatives, anyone?), few of which you’ll hear mentioned in :30-second political ads. But politicians are interested less in cause, more in effect. The effect in this case: your anger.

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The GOP's Death Wish

Sat, 28 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

Huffington Post - By Robert Reich - Apr. 28 (Opinion) - What are the three demographic groups whose electoral impact is growing fastest? Hispanics, women, and young people. Who are Republicans pissing off the most? Latinos, women, and young people. It's almost as if the GOP can't help itself.

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Mitt plays the victim card

Sun, 22 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

The Politico - By Reid J. Epstein - Apr. 22 (News Analysis) - Meet Mitt Romney the victim. And that may be a good thing for his campaign. Following the still-rippling kerfuffle over Hilary Rosen’s comments that Ann Romney “hasn’t worked a day in her life,” Romney is portraying himself as the victim of the liberal media.

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SHELBY COUNTY PERFORMED UNAUTHORIZED ALTERATIONS IN ITS (NOW UNCERTIFIED!) VOTING SYSTEM -

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 00:00:00 -0700

bbvforums.org - By Bev Harris - Apr. 19 (Investigative Report) - They inserted a completely different program (not from Diebold at all) which alters the way the system works. Documents show that fully half of White suburbs are now processing information in a different way than the rest of the county, and that this selective and unusual processing has been taking place for at least four years. The alterations made to the system are illegal almost everywhere in the USA and automatically render their $600,000 voting system decertified, although they will claim that they don't need to use a certified system.

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