Democrats Targeting GOP
EPA Official Resigns
Over ‘Crucify’ Comment
Obama Needles Romney
On Past Bin Laden Quotes
Walker Raises Big Money To Fight Wis. Recall
TPM Editors’ Blog Opinions, Context & Ideas from TPM Editors
The British Are Coming
For the last twenty years or so, Republican presidential campaigns have used the British tabloid press to pitch their hit pieces that couldn’t get placed in the more professional US press. (Yes, it’s a pretty sad commentary on journalism in the UK but that’s where foreign intelligence services usually plant or pay in their disinformation campaigns too.) You can see here the first efforts of the folks around the Romney campaign to push what amounts to a ‘Navy Seals for Truth’ pitch to defend the former Massachusetts Governor. (The piece is being pushed on Drudge, which has worked closely with the Romney camp all through the primaries.
Read More →Life Of Biden
Some great pics of Joe Biden in the age of mile-wide lapels and double-knit polyester.
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Rinse And Repeat
Senate Democrats zero in on Republicans’ vulnerability among women voters by pushing Paycheck Fairness Act.
Spoiler Alert
When I think of nanotube applications, things like space elevators come to mind. But MIT has come up with a much more mundane albeit practical use for nanotubes.
Phoenix Rising
One World Trade Center today became the tallest building in New York. Take a look.
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Feckless?
The Romney campaign is calling President Obama ”feckless” on the bin Laden raid. As TPM Reader TC just put it, maybe ‘reckless’, maybe ‘obvious’. But pretty hard to see how he can qualify as ‘feckless’ on this count.
Right Back at It
At a press availability with a foreign head of government no less, President Obama just pressed reporters to look back at Mitt Romney’s earlier statements about not prioritizing hunting down Osama bin Laden and not invading Pakistani sovereign territory to do it.
On what this back and forth is all about, see this post from earlier this morning.
Also note Obama’s actual words – “I assume that people meant what they said when they said it” – another smack at Romney’s vulnerability as a perceived flip-flopper or political weathervane, and I suspect how the Chicago team plans to box Romney in.
Memory Lane
Have we seen this before? I mentioned earlier that Obama’s bin Laden hit on Romney is as much a dominance move as something about actual policy. We saw something very similar back in 2004. Here’s what I wrote about it back then. Curious to hear your thoughts.
Crucified
Did the Obama administration just roll over for the Jim Inhofe / Fox News rage machine? Kind of feels that way.
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Down And Out
The forgotten front in the war on voting: the disenfranchisement of some 5.3 million felons.
Watergate Revisited
Are parts of the enduring narrative of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate investigation not true?
Inside the Mitt Laden Smackdown
As you know, on the eve of the anniversary of the targeted killing of arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden, the Obama reelection campaign launched a frontal attack on Mitt Romney. They not only celebrated Obama’s decision but freely suggested that Romney wouldn’t have had the focus or the guts to make the call.
As it happens, of course, Romney has provided plenty of evidence to back up this attack. In line with the late Bush administration policy and messaging on OBL, Romney repeatedly said that the US shouldn’t focus on hunting him down. The point wasn’t that OBL was off the hook but that we shouldn’t be focusing on this one guy. Romney followed by attacking Obama in 2008 for suggesting that he would unilaterally send American troops into Pakistan to kill bin Laden. In both cases, Romney was doing little more than repeating the strategic or political orthodoxy of the GOP leader of the moment, in the first case George W. Bush in 2007 and then John McCain in 2008.
Read More →One Year Later
The five stages of GOP reaction to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
Barking Up The Wrong Tree
White House dismisses Sen. Marco Rubio’s claims that it is actively working to torpedo his version of the DREAM Act: “If this proposal fails, the reason will be the Republicans,” a White House official tells TPM.
All Aboard!
Virginia is pushing ahead with passenger rail expansion in the state despite the uncertainty of federal funding, Carl Franzen reports.
See And Be Seen
Photos from this weekend’s White House Correspondents’ Association annual dinner.
Tommy Flanagan Watch
Romney top advisor Eric Fehrnstrom says that not only did Mitt Romney not oppose auto bailout but that President Obama actually got the idea from Mitt.
Friday News Dump
Mexico sends ”diplomatic note of protest” to U.S. government over its decision announced late Friday not to prosecute a Border Patrol agent for the 2010 shooting death of a Mexican teenager.
Contrast Alert
A mashup of the two speeches that Obama and Romney gave this week to college campus audiences. Watch.
Livin’ La Vida Loca
Return with us now to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when Ally McBeal was hot, Ozzy had a TV show, and Arianna Huffington was undergoing her political metamorphosis.
Secret Watergate Source Revealed As Grand Juror
The secret source in the Washington Post's Watergate reporting turns out to have been a grand juror.
CEO-In-Chief? Testing Mitt’s Main Argument
Conservatives say Romney may only need to make one argument: he has the business bona fides to turn the economy around.
Most Recent Latest news stories from TPM reporters
The Day In 100 Seconds: MSNBC Monday
After a fair and balanced look at Fox News, comes 100 seconds of MSNBC Monday, including pressing coverage of Saturday’s “Nerd Prom” (aka, the White House Correspondents Dinner), the Brew Factor and the White House Soup of the Day. More substantially, the network was all over Republicans’ outrage that the Obama campaign would dare mention the successful raid to kill Osama bin Laden.
To top it all off, MSNBC’s hosts analyzed the Obama campaign’s new slogan, one that felt oddly familiar to them.
MIT Builds Carbon Nanotube Sensor To Detect Rotten Fruit
Thinking with their heads and their stomachs, MIT scientists have been hard at work developing a means to cut down on rotten produce. They have developed a cheap electronic sensor built out of carbon nanotubes that can detect in real-time the ripeness of fruits and vegetables. The tiny sensor was constructed using tens of thousands of nanotubes, sheets of carbon atoms rolled into cylinders, with added copper atoms, for a cost of about 25 cents, MIT News reported on Monday. With an…
Tennessee Passes Bill To Tamp Down ‘Gateway Sexual Activity’
You’ve heard of gateway drugs – smoking marijuana supposedly leads to harder, more addictive substances. But what about “gateway sexual activity”: the hand-holding, lip-locking and light-grazes that can lead to … other things? The Tennessee Legislature on Friday sent a bill to Gov. Bill Haslam’s desk that, according to the Tennessean, would require sex-ed classes to “exclusively and emphatically” promote abstinence and ban teachers and outside groups from promoting “gateway sexual, …
Obama Needles Romney On Old Bin Laden Quotes
President Obama is doubling down on his campaign’s effort to sow doubts about whether Mitt Romney would have made the call to take out Osama bin Laden, indicating Monday that Romney’s own quotes on the issue from the previous election make it fair game. “I just recommend that everybody take a look at people’s previous statements in terms of what they thought was appropriate to go into Pakistan and take out bin Laden,” Obama said at a press conference in the White House. “I assume…
EPA Official Resigns Over 2010 ‘Crucify’ Comment
Al Armendariz, a mid-level official at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) since 2009, resigned this week after conservatives expressed outrage at a metaphor he invoked at a town hall meeting nearly two years ago.
Armendariz, who took leave from Southern Methodist University to join the administration, commented at a meeting back in 2010 that the EPA’s enforcement policy was to find “people who are not compliant with the law, and you hit them as hard as you can and you make examples out of them.”
Kickstarter Celebrates 3 Years As Top Projects Shift Toward Tech Products
NEW YORK – The New York-based crowdfunding website Kickstarter on Monday celebrated its third birthday with a look back at old website design prototypes and a feature story in the New York Times detailing how it has become yet another portal for startup companies to raise money. An official blog post by Kickstarter co-founder Yancey Strickler noted that so far, the website – which allows anyone with an idea for a creative project to solicit donations from the public over the Web. …
Dems Plot To Corner GOP With New Equal Pay Bill
Next up in the Democrats’ effort to put Republicans on the wrong side of women’s issues: A new bill to combat gender-based pay disparities. With the general election in full swing, Republicans are working overtime to repair their image with female voters. But Democrats aren’t about to let that happen. Now that the Violence Against Women Act is poised to be re-authorized in some form, Dems are planning a push to enhance protections for women who sue for pay discrimination, the kind of …
While Apple Fights E-Book Lawsuit, Microsoft Partners With Barnes & Noble
Looks like Microsoft and Barnes & Noble have been doing some reading of ancient proverbs, perhaps specifically: “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.” That neatly explains a new deal reached by the two companies to collaborate on a new e-book company, which will be a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble’s successful Nook business. Announced Monday, the new partnership is called “Newco,” for the time being (Barnes & Noble says they haven’t settled on the name). It sees Microsoft investing…
It Turns Out Woodward And Bernstein’s ‘Mystic’ Was A Watergate Grand Juror
The secret source that legendary journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein referred to as a “mystic” in their investigation that brought down President Nixon turns out to have been a grand juror who spoke to them in a likely violation of the law.
The revelation came out on Sunday when one of Woodward’s former research assistants published an article for New York Magazine, poking holes in a tale that seemed to have been a cemented part of journalistic lore.
Today On The Trail: April 30, 2012
Here are 10 things you need to know today. Clinton calls Romney Bush “on steriods”: At a fundraiser Sunday evening, Bill Clinton appeared with President Obama and made the case that, without mentioning him by name, Mitt Romney is pushing George W. Bush’s agenda, only worse. Romney “basically wants to do what they did before, on steroids,” Clinton said, “which will get you the same consequences you got before, on steroids.” Obama echoed a line Robert Gibbs spoke earlier Sunday when he…
CEO-In-Chief? Testing Mitt Romney’s Main Argument
Republicans and pundits say Mitt Romney may only need to make one argument this cycle – that’s he is the most competent candidate for president to shepherd the nation’s economy. The crux of the former Massachusetts governor’s campaign is that he can do for government what he did in business: Run it. He’s fond of saying on the trail that he’s a “conservative businessman” who’s made millions turning around firms and starting new ones, and his administration could leverage business…
The Forgotten Front In The War On Voting
State restrictions on early voting, voter ID laws and regulations on voter registration groups have been getting a lot of attention this year because of the impact they could have on the 2012 election. But there’s at least one voting issue that advocates say deserves more focus: the disenfranchisement of former felons. Nationwide, the approximately 5.3 million Americans with felonies (and, in several states, those with misdemeanor convictions) are kept away from the polls, according…
Dems Squeeze GOP Over Taxing Wealthy To Pay For Affordable Student Loans
Now that the GOP has dropped its politically untenable objection to extending low-interest student loans, the legislative battle has entered a familiar realm, just weeks ahead of a scheduled rate hike: How should Congress pay for keeping the loans cheap? It’s familiar terrain for observers of the payroll tax fight, which ended with both parties simply agreeing not to pay for the holiday at all. But before they reached that point, the parties bickered over various financing schemes…
White House To Rubio: Don’t Blame Obama If Your DREAM Act Fails
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) is angling to blame President Obama for the looming failure of his watered-down DREAM Act, and the White House is strongly objecting to that implication, insisting that Rubio’s problem is with his own party, not the president. “The notion that somehow the president or Democrats would be the roadblock to any progress on immigration is ridiculous,” a White House official told TPM. “If this proposal fails, the reason will be the Republicans.” The official…
The Five Stages Of GOP Reaction To Osama Bin Laden’s Death – And What’s Next
As America nears the one-year anniversary of the operation that killed Osama bin Laden, Democrats are running on the tagline, “bin Laden is dead, General Motors is alive,” as Vice President Joe Biden put it this week. Republicans are not happy with the development. After the Obama campaign put out a video suggesting Mitt Romney might not have made the same decision to send Navy SEALs into Pakistan, the RNC went ballistic, dispatching an irate John McCain to condemn their efforts to …
Virginia Forges Ahead On State Rail Projects, Sans Federal Support
As politicians in California debate the merits of going forward with the state’s $68 billion high speed rail project given the uncertainty of receiving federal matching funds, across the country, another state has essentially decided to go it alone. The Virginia Department of Rail and Public Transportation is forging ahead on several state rail improvement and expansion projects using mostly state funding, concerned that even promised federal funds won’t materialize in time. “We’re …
Top GOP Strategist Denies Pay Disparity For Women
During a contentious debate about women voters on Sunday roundtable, top Republican strategist Alex Castellanos downplayed the existence of a gender-based pay gap, a view which liberal MSNBC host Rachel Maddow described as “a serious difference in factual understanding of the world.” A new study released in April by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that women earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by men. It’s one of several studies showing women are paid less than men…
Romney Campaign Takes Credit For Auto Bailout Success
Vice President Joe Biden reiterated the President’s bottom-line election-year pitch on Thursday: “Osama bin Laden is dead and General Motors is alive.” The opposite might be true, Biden said, if Mitt Romney had been president. But top Romney adviser Eric Fehrnstrom is also giving credit to his candidate for the auto industry’s success. At a Saturday forum hosted by the Washington Post, Fehrnstrom said that Obama’s auto industry rescue was successful because it was exactly what Romney …
Decoding The Spin From Dems, GOP In Student Loan Battle
A battle over how to avert a student loan interest rate hike is breeding political opportunism on both sides of the divide. Republicans are trying to use to occasion to slice off a piece of “Obamacare,” and Democrats are turning it into another debate about women’s health. Leaders of both parties want to freeze existing rates on federally-subsidized student loans. House Republicans voted Friday to do so by repealing the health care reform law’s currently $10 billion prevention and…
Obama & Jimmy Kimmel Perform At White House Correspondents Dinner (VIDEOS)
At the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, D.C. Saturday, President Obama delivered a stand-up comedy routine before comedian Jimmy Kimmel took the mic and entertained the crowd of reporters, lawmakers and celebrities
Watch Obama’s speech:
Watch Kimmel’s speech:
Videos courtesy of CBS News. …