Tornado Alley (PROG)

[F6]

On Obama's 'Disappointing' DNC Speech

By James Fallows
Sep 8 2012, 12:40 AM ET

I said last night [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/three-quick-points-on-obamas-speech/262088/ ] that Barack Obama's acceptance speech [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2012/09/07/remarks-president-democratic-national-convention ], while not as flashy as some others in his past and several others at the convention, "did the job" he needed it to do. It was solid, serious, and under- rather than over-emotional -- traits shared by his strikingly low-key inaugural address -- and in that sense was a better bet for the president than going all-out to repeat his "Yes we can!" performance of four years ago.

- If he had been much more flowery, at a time of discouraging economic realities, he would be teed up for criticisms that "he's out of touch," or "he's all talk," or "great at speeches, bad at results." Those would have been at least as burdensome as the "too downbeat" criticism he is getting instead.

- Instead he was sober, meat-and-potatoes, going into as much detail as a convention speech (vs. a State of the Union) allows. Anyone complaining that there was "not enough substance" in his talk needs to go look at some past nominees' convention speeches. It is possible to go too light on the details, as Mitt Romney must now regret doing in his failure to talk about Afghanistan. But Obama served up about as much policy as normal convention speeches will bear.

- It's important to stress that it doesn't matter if Obama "fell short" of the emotional level of his wife's speech, or the crowd-command of Bill Clinton's. The rank-the-speakers derby had an entirely different edge for the Democrats than for the Republicans. Bill Clinton is no doubt savoring every story saying that his speech was the highlight of the convention. But for Obama, all that matters is that Clinton is now doing his best to pull the nominee across the line. (Think how history would be different if Al Gore had asked Clinton to do this 12 years ago.) At the RNC, by contrast, Chris Christie and Marco Rubio were "helping" Romney -- sort of. To spell it out: they're better off if he loses this year.

- In retrospect, the most dramatic tonal moment of the speech may have been this brief passage near the end. Obama was indirectly addressing the difference between the Hope-and-Change aura of 2008, and the Doing-Our-Best-and-Hoping-for-Better realities now. But with the final three words, he made several points at once:

I recognize that times have changed since I first spoke to this convention. The times have changed, and so have I. I'm no longer just a candidate. I'm the President.

To me, that final sentence came across not as boasting or preening. Instead it had a startling spare, understated drama. Obama used it as the transition to a line about the burden of wartime leadership. ("That means I know what it means to send young Americans into battle, for I have held in my arms the mothers and fathers of those who didn't return.") But I heard it as also conveying, Let's get serious here. I'm the President, so I know how hard these trade-offs are. I'm the President, so there are some things I won't joke about. But also: for all of you who think I'm a Muslim, an alien, a socialist, a fraud, here's a reminder. I'm the President.

- Also in retrospect, the most important "content" part of Bill Clinton's speech may have been his argument that things were about to get better, economically. In case you've forgotten:

[Obama] has laid the foundation for a new, modern, successful economy of shared prosperity. And if you will renew the president's contract, you will feel it. You will feel it.

(Cheers, applause.)

Folks, whether the American people believe what I just said or not may be the whole election. I just want you to know that I believe it. With all my heart, I believe it.

(Cheers, applause.)

Now, why do I believe it?

I'm fixing to tell you why...

Now, two messages from readers who object to the media's pooh-poohing of Obama's speech. First, from a male reader in the South:

I liked the speech. I especially liked its personal humility and the references to "citizenship." Don't know if he used the word "honor," but it's a similar kind of word. It's the kind of word your fantasy of a 50s dad would use. He fit himself right into the role of a more professorial version of Biden's dad. "I'm going away for a while, Joey, there's jobs there. But, remember things will be all right." It was the optimism of sacrifice. In our mythology, a dad conveys that, even though mother more often live it today.

He was playing Bambi's dad. Tom Hanks.

The entire convention was about asserting the "traditional values" of an untraditional American political coalition of tribes that has not before wielded real power. Nothing is more symbolically key to those traditional values than a wise, disciplined father.

For as long as I've been following politics, dems/liberals/etc. have been -- pardon the crudity -- the pussies. The people asking the power to be nice to them and complaining when it's not. Or maybe the kids. The powerful, world-weary father is the ultimate antidote to both of those perceptions. Dems have been fond of referring to themselves as the adults for a long-time. I think they're finally really projecting it.

I think that's what Obama was after. Obviously, we'll see if it works.

And, from a female reader in California:

First, the speech reminded us he is the adult in the room. The MSNBC moderators wondered why people cheered when he said "I am the President." It resonated deeply to my husband and me. He is the MAN. And we were touched when he asked for our vote. You can't close the sale unless you ask for the money.

It was a measured speech, spoken with gravity and humility, with the strength to tell the hard truths about the Republican nominees (the foreign policy takedowns in particular). The new theme of citizenship was invigorating. It's not just that it echoed the false notes of Citizens United, but it UNITED people around a concept that again was neither red state nor blue state, to paraphrase his 2008 speech and swept up in its embrace the DREAMERS.

I marveled at the craftsmanship in which he emphasized again and again, without shouting it out, I am an American, I love America, I am a man of faith (it took Rev. Al and Melissa Harris-Perry to enlighten me on the biblical quotes and themes...but I was raised Buddhist). The way he re-framed the Hope and Change argument, reminding us that the path is long but it leads to a better place, my gosh, that made everyone want to dust off their Hope posters (take that Paul Ryan) or tack up a new one.

I think he also did a very good job reminding us that progress and change are personal. Our family is personally better off than Election Day 2008. Our 25 year old son got to join my husband's health plan. Same son got a good paying job this summer with the company of his dreams. My husband's company (Japanese auto) has been able to hand out pay raises and bonuses for the first time in years. I can get a wellness check for free. The value of our 401Ks, which had been decimated by 30%+ in 2008, have rebounded and grown, the value of our home is again rising. My daughter (a college junior) will someday benefit from the Lily Ledbetter Act and no co-pays for contraceptives. The war is over in Iraq and I can't remember the last time a friend in the Reserve has been called up. Gay friends can marry...

Pundits tend to be obsessed with the aggregate numbers of unemployment and rising gas prices. But they forget that the gut-wrenching fear of losing everything and the feeling of powerlessness in the face of rising prices (not just gas but CPI in general) are gone. We remember when prices were high under George Bush, but now there are more hybrid cars available, as well as improved public transit and bike paths and new towns that can be walked not driven. There is a growing internet economy that helps many with cheaper prices and opportunities to earn money outside the old-line corporate/small business/farm model. Have you been to a swap meet lately? Positive change has happened these past 4 years and it can't be denied...

Taken as a whole, the DNC speakers walked all of us up to President Obama's speech. The passion, fire, focus, MATH (as Jon Stewart marveled), were brought forth by the First Lady, Pres. Clinton (listen!) and Vice President Biden. My Facebook friends said they saw the speech and donated. I will too. That speech got me fired up and ready to go.

Update: See The Atlantic's Garance Franke-Ruta to similar effect just after the speech [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/behind-the-enthusiasm-gap-a-war-weary-obama/262085/ ].

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/on-obamas-disappointing-dnc-speech/262130/ [DNC speeches at (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79356770 and preceding (and any future following)]


===


Obama’s Way


BEST FOOT FORWARD Michael Lewis and President Barack Obama in the Colonnade of the White House, heading toward the Oval Office.
Official White House Photograph by Pete Souza.


President Barack Obama and Michael Lewis during a basketball game.
By Pete Souza/Official White House Photograph.
[ http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/09/barack-obama-michael-lewis#slide=1 ]


Obama and Lewis on Air Force One.
By Pete Souza/Official White House Photograph.
[ http://www.vanityfair.com/online/daily/2012/09/barack-obama-michael-lewis#slide=2 ]


To understand how air-force navigator Tyler Stark ended up in a thornbush in the Libyan desert in March 2011, one must understand what it’s like to be president of the United States—and this president in particular. Hanging around Barack Obama for six months, in the White House, aboard Air Force One, and on the basketball court, Michael Lewis learns the reality of the Nobel Peace Prize winner who sent Stark into combat.

By Michael Lewis
Vanity Fair
October 2012 [issue of]

Even af­ter his parachute opened, Tyler Stark sensed he was coming down too fast. The last thing he’d heard was the pilot saying, “Bailout! Bailout! Bail—” Before the third call was finished, there’d come the violent kick in the rear from the ejector seat, then a rush of cool air. They called it “opening shock” for a reason. He was disoriented. A minute earlier, when the plane had started to spin—it felt like a car hitting a patch of ice—his first thought had been that everything was going to be fine: My first mission, I had my first close call. He’d since changed his mind. He could see the red light of his jet’s rocket fading away and also, falling more slowly, the pilot’s parachute. He went immediately to his checklist: he untangled himself from his life raft, then checked the canopy of his chute and saw the gash. That’s why he was coming down too fast. How fast he couldn’t say, but he told himself he’d have to execute a perfect landing. It was the middle of the night. The sky was black. Below his feet he could see a few lights and houses, but mainly it was just desert.

When he was two years old, Tyler Stark had told his parents he wanted to fly, like his grandfather who had been shot down by the Germans over Austria. His parents didn’t take him too seriously until he went to college, at Colorado State University, when on the first day of school he had enrolled in the air-force R.O.T.C. program. A misdiagnosis about his eyesight killed his dreams of being a pilot and forced him into the backseat, as a navigator. At first he was crushed by the news, but then he realized that, while an air-force pilot might be assigned to fly cargo planes or even drones, the only planes with navigators in them were fighter jets. So the mix-up about his eyesight had been a blessing in disguise. The first years of his air-force career he’d spent on bases in Florida and North Carolina. In 2009 they’d shipped him to England, and to a position where he might see action. And on the night of March 21, 2011, Captain Tyler Stark took off in an F-15 from a base in Italy, with a pilot he’d only just met, on his first combat mission. He now had reasons to think it might also be his last.

Even so, as he floated down, he felt almost calm. The night air was cool, and there was no sound, only awesome silence. He didn’t really know why he’d been sent here, to Libya, in the first place. He knew his assignment, his specific mission. But he didn’t know the reason for it. He’d never met a Libyan. Drifting high over the desert he had no sense that he was at once an expression of an idea framed late one night in the White House by the president himself, writing with a No. 2 pencil, and also, suddenly, a threat to that idea. He didn’t sense these invisible threads in his existence, only the visible ones yoking him to his torn parachute. His thoughts were only of survival. He realized, If I can see my plane exploding, and my chute in the air, so can the enemy. He’d just turned 27—one of only three facts about himself, along with his name and rank, that he was now prepared to divulge if captured.

He scanned the earth beneath his dangling feet. He was going to hit hard, and there was nothing he could do about it.

*

At nine o’clock one Saturday morning I made my way to the Diplomatic Reception Room, on the ground floor of the White House. I’d asked to play in the president’s regular basketball game, in part because I wondered how and why a 50-year-old still played a game designed for a 25-year-old body, in part because a good way to get to know someone is to do something with him. I hadn’t the slightest idea what kind of a game it was. The first hint came when a valet passed through bearing, as if they were sacred objects, a pair of slick red-white-and-blue Under Armour high-tops with the president’s number (44) on the side. Then came the president, looking like a boxer before a fight, in sweats and slightly incongruous black rubber shower shoes. As he climbed into the back of a black S.U.V., a worried expression crossed his face. “I forgot my mouth guard,” he said. Your mouth guard? I think. Why would you need a mouth guard?

“Hey, Doc,” he shouted to the van holding the medical staff that travels with him wherever he goes. “You got my mouth guard?” The doc had his mouth guard. Obama relaxed back in his seat and said casually that he didn’t want to get his teeth knocked out this time, “since we’re only 100 days away.” From the election, he meant, then he smiled and showed me which teeth, in some previous basketball game, had been knocked out. “Exactly what kind of game is this?” I asked, and he laughed and told me not to worry. He doesn’t. “What happens is, as I get older, the chances I’m going to play well go down. When I was 30 there was, like, a one-in-two chance. By the time I was 40 it was more like one in three or one in four.” He used to focus on personal achievement, but as he can no longer achieve so much personally, he’s switched to trying to figure out how to make his team win. In his decline he’s maintaining his relevance and sense of purpose.

Basketball hadn’t appeared on the president’s official schedule, and so we traveled the streets of Washington unofficially, almost normally. A single police car rode in front of us, but there were no motorcycles or sirens or whirring lights: we even stopped at red lights. It still took only five minutes to get to the court inside the F.B.I. The president’s game rotates around several federal courts, but he prefers the F.B.I.’s because it is a bit smaller than a regulation court, which reduces also the advantages of youth. A dozen players were warming up. I recognized Arne Duncan, the former captain of the Harvard basketball team and current secretary of education. Apart from him and a couple of disturbingly large and athletic guys in their 40s, everyone appeared to be roughly 28 years old, roughly six and a half feet tall, and the possessor of a 30-inch vertical leap. It was not a normal pickup basketball game; it was a group of serious basketball players who come together three or four times each week. Obama joins when he can. “How many of you played in college?” I asked the only player even close to my height. “All of us,” he replied cheerfully and said he’d played point guard at Florida State. “Most everyone played pro too—except for the president.” Not in the N.B.A., he added, but in Europe and Asia.

Overhearing the conversation, another player tossed me a jersey and said, “That’s my dad on your shirt. He’s the head coach at Miami.” Having highly developed fight-or-flight instincts, I realized in only about 4 seconds that I was in an uncomfortable situation, and it took only another 10 to figure out just how deeply I did not belong. Oh well, I thought, at least I can guard the president. Obama played in high school, on a team that won the Hawaii state championship. But he hadn’t played in college, and even in high school he hadn’t started. Plus, he hadn’t played in several months, and he was days away from his 51st birthday: how good could he be?

*

The president ran a couple of laps around the gym, then shouted, “Let’s go!” He himself divvied up the teams so each one had roughly the same number of giants and the same number of old people. Having put me on his team, he turned to me and said, “We’ll sit you first, until we get a little bit of a lead.” I thought he was joking, but actually he wasn’t; he was as serious as a heart attack. I was benched. I took my place in the wooden stands, along with a few of the other players, and the White House photographer, the medical team, the Secret Service, and the guy with the buzz cut who carried the nuclear football, to watch the president play.

Obama was 20 or more years older than most of them, and probably not as physically gifted, though it was hard to say because of the age differences. No one held back, no one deferred. Guys on his team dribbled past him and ignored the fact he was wide open. When he drives through the streets, crowds part, but when he drives to the basket large, hostile men slide over to cut him off. It’s revealing that he would seek out a game like this but even more that others would give it to him: no one watching would have been able to guess which guy was president. As a player on the other team, who must have outweighed Obama by a hundred pounds, backed the president of the United States down and knocked the crap out of him, all for the sake of a single layup, I leaned over to the former Florida State point guard.

“No one seems to be taking it easy on him,” I said.

“If you take it easy on him, you’re not invited back,” he explained.

I thought to myself, It must be hard not to take it easy on the president.

The point guard laughed, turned to another guy on the bench, and said, “Remember Rey?”

“Who’s Rey?” I asked.

“Rey pump-faked, turned, and just connected with the president right in the mouth,” the other guy said. “Gave him 16 stitches.”

“Where’s Rey?” I asked.

“Rey hasn’t been back.”

Obama could find a perfectly respectable game with his equals in which he could shoot and score and star, but this is the game he wants to play. It’s ridiculously challenging, and he has very little space to maneuver, but he appears happy. He’s actually just good enough to be useful to his team, as it turns out. Not flashy, but he slides in to take charges, passes well, and does a lot of little things well. The only risk he takes is his shot, but he shoots so seldom, and so carefully, that it actually isn’t much of a risk at all. (He smiles when he misses; when he makes one, he looks even more serious.) “Spacing is big. He knows where to go,” said one of the other players as we watched. “And unlike a lot of lefties, he can go to his right.”

And he chattered constantly. “You can’t leave him open like that!” … “Money!” … “Take that shot!” His team jumped ahead, mainly because it took fewer stupid shots. When I threw one up I discovered the reason for this. When you are on the president’s basketball team and you take a stupid shot, the president of the United States screams at you. “Don’t be looking to the sidelines all sheepish,” he hollered at me. “You got to get back and play D!”

*

At some point I discreetly moved up to where I belonged, into the stands beside the guy who was operating the clock. His name was Martin Nesbitt. When I had pointed him out to Obama and asked who he was, Obama, sounding like he was about 12 years old, said, “Marty—well, Marty’s my best friend.”

Nesbitt does an extremely good impression of a man who could just barely give a shit that his best friend is the president of the United States. After the fifth game, with the president’s team up 3–2, guys started drifting toward their gym bags in the way they do when everyone thinks it’s over.

“I could go one more,” said Obama.

Nesbitt hooted. “He’s actually going to take the risk of letting this thing get tied up? That’s out of character.”

“He’s that competitive?” I asked.

“Even games we never play. Shuffleboard. I don’t know how to play shuffleboard. He doesn’t know how to play shuffleboard. But if we play, it’s like ‘I can beat you.’”

Martin Nesbitt, C.E.O. of an airport-parking company, met Obama before Obama ever ran for public office, playing pickup basketball with him in Chicago. Well into their friendship he knew next to nothing of Obama’s achievements. Obama had neglected to inform him that he had gone to Harvard Law School, for example, or been editor of its Law Review, or really anything that would convey his status off the basketball court. “At some point after we’d known each other a long time, he gives me this book he’s written,” said Nesbitt. “I, you know, just put it up on the shelf. I thought it was like a self-published thing. I still didn’t know anything about him. I didn’t care.” One day Marty and his wife were cleaning house, and he found the book on the shelf. Dreams from My Father, it was called. “The thing just fell off. So I opened it and started reading. And I was like, ‘Holy shit, this guy can write.’ I tell my wife. She says, ‘Marty, Barack is going to be president one day.’”

*

From the time his wife goes to bed, around 10 at night, until he finally retires, at 1, Barack Obama enjoys the closest thing he experiences to privacy: no one but him really knows exactly where he is or what he’s up to. He can’t leave his house, of course, but he can watch ESPN, surf his iPad, read books, dial up foreign leaders in different time zones, and any number of other activities that feel almost normal. He can also wrestle his mind back into the state it would need to be if, say, he wanted to write.

And so, in a funny way, the president’s day actually starts the night before. When he awakens at seven, he already has a jump on things. He arrives at the gym on the third floor of the residence, above his bedroom, at 7:30. He works out until 8:30 (cardio one day, weights the next), then showers and dresses in either a blue or gray suit. “My wife makes fun of how routinized I’ve become,” he says. He’d moved a long way in this direction before he became president, but the office has moved him even further. “It’s not my natural state,” he says. “Naturally, I’m just a kid from Hawaii. But at some point in my life I overcompensated.” After a quick breakfast and a glance at the newspapers—most of which he’s already read on his iPad—he reviews his daily security briefing. When he first became president he often was surprised by the secret news; now he seldom is. “Maybe once a month.”

One summer morning I met him outside the private elevator that brings him down from the residence. His morning commute, of roughly 70 yards, started in the ground-floor center hall, and continued past a pair of oil paintings, of Rosalynn Carter and Betty Ford, and through two sets of double doors, guarded by a Secret Service officer. After a short walk along a back porch, guarded by several other men in black, he passed through a set of French doors into the reception area outside the Oval Office. His secretary, Anita, was already at her desk. Anita, he explained, has been with him since he campaigned for the Senate, back in 2004. As political attachments go, eight years isn’t a long time; in his case, it counts as forever. Eight years ago he could have taken a group tour of the White House and no one would have recognized him.

Passing Anita, the president walked into the Oval Office. “When I’m in Washington I spend half my time in this place,” he said. “It’s surprisingly comfortable.” During the week he is never alone in the office, but on weekends he can come down and have the place to himself. The first time Obama set foot in this room was right after he’d been elected, to pay a call on George Bush. The second time was the first day he arrived for work—and the first thing he did was call in several junior people who had been with him since long before anyone cared who he was so they might see how it felt to sit in the Oval Office. “Let’s just stay normal,” he said to them.

*

When a new president is elected, the White House curatorial staff removes everything from the office the departing president put in it, unless they worry it will cause a political stir—in which case they ask the new president. Right after the last election they removed a few oil paintings of Texas. It took Obama longer than usual to make changes to the office because, as he put it, “we came in when the economy was tanking and our first priority wasn’t redecorating.” Eighteen months into the office he reupholstered the two chairs in his sitting area. (“The chairs were kind of greasy. I was starting to think, Folks are going to start talking about us.”) Then he swapped out the antique coffee table for a contemporary one, and the bust of Winston Churchill lent to Bush by Tony Blair for one of Martin Luther King Jr. And he took one look at the bookshelves, filled with china, and thought, This won’t do. “They had a bunch of plates in there,” he says, a little incredulously. “I’m not a dish guy.” The dishes he replaced with the original applications for several famous patents and patent models—Samuel Morse’s 1849 model for the first telegraph, for instance, which he pointed to and said, “This is the start of the Internet right here.” Finally, he ordered a new oval rug inscribed with his favorite brief quotations from people he admires. “I had a bunch of quotes that didn’t fit [on the rug],” he admitted. One quote that did fit, I saw, was a favorite of Martin Luther King Jr.’s: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

*

And that’s it—the sum total of the Obamas’ additions and subtractions to his workspace. “I tend to be a spare guy anyway,” he said. But the changes still generated controversy, especially the removal of the Churchill bust, which created so much stupid noise that Mitt Romney on the stump is now pledging that he will return it to the Oval Office.

He’s kept the desk used by Bush—the one with the secret panel made famous by John-John Kennedy. It had been brought in by Jimmy Car­ter to replace the one with the secret taping system in it, used by Johnson and Nixon. “Is there a taping system in here?” I asked, gazing up at the crown molding.

“No,” he said, then added, “It’d be fun to have a taping system. It’d be wonderful to have a verbatim rec­ord of history.” Obama doesn’t come across as political or calculating, but every now and then it seems to occur to him how something would sound, if repeated out of context and then handed as a weapon to people who wish him ill. “Actually,” he said, “I’ve got to be careful here [about what I say].”

“When people come here, are they nervous?” I asked him, to change the subject. Even in the White House lobby you can tell who works here and who doesn’t by the sound of their conversation and their body language. The people who don’t work here have the checked-my-actual-personality-at-the-door look of people on TV for the first time in their lives. In the presence of the president himself even celebrities are so distracted that they cease to notice all else. He’d make an excellent accomplice to a pickpocket.

“Yes,” he said. “And what’s true is that it is true of just about everyone who comes here. I think that the space affects them. But when you work here you forget about it.”

He pulled me down a short hallway toward his private office, the place he goes when he wants his staff to leave him be.

Along the way we passed a few other things he had installed—and that he must know his successor is going to have a hell of a time removing: a copy of the Emancipation Proclamation; an odd, stark snapshot of an old, fat Teddy Roosevelt dragging his horse up a hill (“Even the horse looks tired”); the announcement of the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. We entered his private study, its desk piled high with novels—on top is Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending. He pointed to the patio outside his window. It was built by Reagan, he says, on a lovely quiet spot in the shade of a giant magnolia.

A century ago presidents, when they took office, would auction the contents of the place on the White House lawn. Sixty-five years ago Harry Truman could rip apart the south side of the White House and build himself a new balcony. Thirty years ago Ronald Reagan could create a discreet seating area hidden from public view. Today there is no way any president could build anything that would enhance the White House without being accused of violating some sacred site, or turning the place into a country club, or wasting taxpayer money, or, worst of all, being oblivious to appearances. To the way it will seem. Obama looked at the Reagan patio and laughed at the audacity of building it.

Crossing the White House lawn on the way out that morning I passed a giant crater, surrounded by heavy machinery. For the better part of a year hordes of workmen have been digging and building something deep below the White House—though what it is no one who knows will really say. “Infrastructure” is the answer you get when you ask. But no one really does ask, much less insist on the public’s right to know. The president of the United States can’t move a bust in the Oval Office without facing a firestorm of disapproval. But he can dig a hole deep in his front yard and build an underground labyrinth and no one even asks what he’s up to.

*

Bruce and Dorene Stark, parents of Tyler, live in the Denver suburb of Littleton, which is actually bigger than you might think. In mid-March of last year, when they heard from their son out of the blue, they’d been planning a trip to England to visit him. “We get this odd e-mail from him,” says Bruce. “It doesn’t even say, ‘Hi, Mom and Dad.’ It says, ‘I’m no longer in the U.K., and I don’t know when I’ll be back.’” They didn’t know what it meant, but, as Dorene Stark puts it, “you get this creepy feeling.” A week later, on a Monday night, the phone rang. “I’m watching some TV show,” recalls Bruce. “I pick up the phone and it says, ‘Out of the area,’ or something like that.” He answered anyway. “It’s Tyler. He doesn’t say hi or anything. He just says, ‘Dad.’ And I say, ‘Hey, what’s up?’ He says, ‘I just need you to do me a favor: I’m going to give you a number, and I want you to call it.’ I say, ‘Hold on. I don’t have anything to write with.’”

Bruce Stark found pen and paper, then picked up the phone again. Tyler then gave his father the phone number of his air-force base in England. “And then,” remembers Bruce, “he says, ‘I just need you to tell them I’m alive and I’m O.K.’

“‘What do you mean you’re alive and you’re O.K.?’” asked Bruce, understandably.

But Tyler was already gone. Bruce Stark hung up, called his wife, and told her he’d just had the strangest phone call from Tyler. “I said to Bruce, ‘Something has happened,’” says Dorene. “As a mother you just get this sixth sense. But Bruce says, ‘Oh no, he sounded fine!’” They still had no idea where in the world their son might be. They searched the news for some hint but found nothing, except a lot of coverage of the Fukushima tsunami and growing nuclear disaster. “I have a pretty good relationship with God,” says Dorene. She decided to pray about it. She drove to her church, but it was locked; she pounded on the door, but no one answered. Seeing how late it was in England, Bruce simply sent his son’s base an e-mail relaying Tyler’s strange message.

At 4:30 the next morning they received a phone call from their son’s commanding officer. The polite lieutenant colonel apologized for waking them but wanted to let them know before they heard it elsewhere that the plane they were now showing on CNN was indeed Tyler’s. “He says they have determined that Tyler is on the ground somewhere and O.K.,” says Dorene. “And I thought, Your definition of O.K. and mine are clearly going to be different. They send people home without limbs.”

The Starks turned on their television and found CNN, where, sure enough, they were airing footage of a completely destroyed airplane, somewhere in the desert of Libya. Until that moment they didn’t know that the United States might have invaded Libya. They did not care for Barack Obama and would never vote for him, but they didn’t question whatever the president had just done, and they didn’t pay much attention to the various criticisms of this new war being made by various TV commentators.

But the sight of their son’s plane’s smoldering wreckage was deeply disturbing. “That was just a sick feeling at that point,” recalls Bruce. Dorene found it strangely familiar. She turned to her husband and asked, “Doesn’t this remind you of Columbine?” Tyler had been a freshman at Columbine High the year of the shootings. That afternoon, before anyone knew anything, his parents had watched the news and seen that some of the kids who happened to be in the school library at the time had been killed. The shooting had happened during study hall, exactly when Tyler was meant to be in the library. Now as she watched the CNN report of her son’s plane crash she realized she was in the same state of mind she had been in when she’d been watching news reports of the Columbine massacre. “Your body is almost numb,” she says. “Just to protect you from whatever news might happen.”

*

We were on Air Force One, somewhere between North America and South America, when a hand shook my shoulder, and I gazed up to find Obama staring down at me. I’d been seated in the cabin in the middle of the plane—the place where the seats and tables can be easily removed so that if the president’s body needs to be transported after his death there’s a place to put his coffin. Apparently, I’d fallen asleep. The president’s lips were pursed, impatiently.

“What?” I said, stupidly.

“Come on, let’s go,” he said, and gave me one more shake.

There are no wide-open spaces in presidential life, only nooks and crannies, and the front of Air Force One is one of them. When he’s on his plane, small gaps of time sometimes open in his schedule, and there are fewer people around to leap in and consume them. In this case, Obama had just found himself with 30 free minutes.

“What you got for me?” he asked and plopped down in the chair beside his desk. His desk is designed to tilt down when the plane is on the ground so that it might be perfectly flat when the plane is nose up, in flight. It was now perfectly flat.

“I want to play that game again,” I said. “Assume that in 30 minutes you will stop being president. I will take your place. Prepare me. Teach me how to be president.”

This was the third time I’d put the question to him, in one form or another. The first time, a month earlier in this same cabin, he’d had a lot of trouble getting his mind around the idea that I, not he, was president. He’d started by saying something he knew to be dull and expected but that—he insisted—was nevertheless perfectly true. “Here is what I would tell you,” he’d said. “I would say that your first and principal task is to think about the hopes and dreams the American people invested in you. Everything you are doing has to be viewed through this prism. And I tell you what every president … I actually think every president understands this responsibility. I don’t know George Bush well. I know Bill Clinton better. But I think they both approached the job in that spirit.” Then he added that the world thinks he spends a lot more time worrying about political angles than he actually does.

This time he covered a lot more ground and was willing to talk about the mundane details of presidential existence. “You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

*

There are several aspects of his job that seem obvious to him but strike me as so deeply weird that I can’t help but bring them up. For example, he has the oddest relationship to the news of any human being on the planet. Wherever it starts out, it quickly finds him and forces him to make some decision about it: whether to respond to it, and shape it, or to leave it be. As the news speeds up, so must our president’s response to it, and then, on top of it all, the news to which he must respond is often about him.

On the leather sofa beside me were the five newspapers that are laid out for him every time he travels. “In every one of those someone is saying something nasty about you,” I said to him. “You turn on the television and you could find people being even nastier. If I’m president, I’m thinking, I’ll just walk around pissed off all the time, looking for someone to punch.”

He shook his head. He doesn’t watch cable news, which he thinks is genuinely toxic. One of his aides told me that once, thinking the president otherwise occupied, he’d made the mistake of switching the Air Force One television from ESPN, which Obama prefers, to a cable news show. The president walked into the room and watched a talking head explain knowingly to his audience why he, Obama, had taken some action. “Oh, so that’s why I did it,” said Obama, and walked out. Now he said, “One of the things you realize fairly quickly in this job is that there is a character people see out there called Barack Obama. That’s not you. Whether it is good or bad, it is not you. I learned that on the campaign.” Then he added, “You have to filter stuff, but you can’t filter it so much you live in this fantasyland.”

The other aspect of his job I have trouble getting comfortable with is its bizarre emotional demands. In the span of a few hours, a president will go from celebrating the Super Bowl champions to running meetings on how to fix the financial system, to watching people on TV make up stuff about him, to listening to members of Congress explain why they can’t support a reasonable idea simply because he, the president, is for it, to sitting down with the parents of a young soldier recently killed in action. He spends his day leaping over ravines between vastly different feelings. How does anyone become used to this?

As I was still a little groggy and put my question poorly, he answered a question it hadn’t occurred to me to ask: Why doesn’t he show more emotion? He does this on occasion, even when I’ve put the question clearly—see in what I’ve asked some implicit criticism, usually one he’s heard many times before. As he’s not naturally defensive, it’s pretty clearly an acquired trait. “There are some things about being president that I still have difficulty doing,” he said. “For example, faking emotion. Because I feel it is an insult to the people I’m dealing with. For me to feign outrage, for example, feels to me like I’m not taking the American people seriously. I’m absolutely positive that I’m serving the American people better if I’m maintaining my authenticity. And that’s an overused word. And these days people practice being authentic. But I’m at my best when I believe what I am saying.”

That was not what I had been after. What I had wanted to know was: Where do you put what you actually feel, when there is no place in your job to feel it? When you are president you are not allowed to go numb to protect yourself from whatever news might happen. But it was too late; my time was up; I returned to my seat in the cabin.

*

When they give you the tour of Air Force One they show you the extra-large doors in the middle of the plane, to accommodate a president’s coffin—as they did Reagan’s. They tell you about the boxes of M&M candies embossed with the presidential seal, the medical room prepared for every emergency (there’s even a bag that says, “Cyanide Antidote Kit”), and the conference room refitted with fancy video equipment since 9/11 so that the president doesn’t need to land to address the nation. What they don’t tell you—though everyone who rides on it nods when you point it out—is how little sense it gives you of your relationship to the ground. There are no announcements from the pilot and no seat-belt signs; people are up and walking around during takeoff and landing. But that’s not all. The president’s plane simply does not give you, the moment before you land, the same feeling of an impending collision that you get in other airplanes. One moment you are up in the air. The next— bam!

*

Tyler Stark hit the desert floor in what he believed was a perfect position. “I thought I did a pretty good job, but halfway through I hear this ‘pop’ and I fall on my butt.” He’d torn tendons in both his left knee and his left ankle. He looked around for shelter. There was nothing but a few chest-high thornbushes and some small rocks. He was in the middle of a desert; there was no place to hide. I need to get away from this area, he thought. He collected the gear he wanted, stuffed the rest in a thornbush, and began to move. “The moment of serenity had gone away,” he recalled. It was his first combat mission, but he’d felt the way he now felt once before: during Columbine. He’d been shot at once in the cafeteria by one of the killers, and then many times by the other one as he had raced down the hall. He’d heard the bullets zipping past his head and exploding into the metal lockers. “It’s the feeling not real­ly of terror,” he said, “but of not knowing what is going on. You just go with your gut decision to get to safety.” The difference between this and that was that he’d trained for this. “For Columbine I didn’t have any training, so I was just going.”

He wandered the desert until he realized there was no place to go. In the end he found a thornbush a little bigger than the others and got himself inside it as best he could. There he called nato command, to let them know where he was. He established contact, but it wasn’t easy—in part because of the dog. What appeared to be a border collie had found him, and every time he moved to pick up his communications gear the dog moved in on him and started barking. He reached for and armed his 9-mm. pistol, but then thought, What am I going to do? Shoot a dog? He liked dogs.

He’d been on the loose for two hours when he heard voices. “They were coming from the direction where the parachute was. I didn’t speak Arabic, so I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but to me it kind of sounded like ‘Hey, we found a parachute.’” Out of nowhere a spotlight appeared, on top of some sort of vehicle. The light passed right over the thornbush. Tyler was now flat on the ground. “I’m trying to think as thin as possible,” he said. But he could see that the light had stopped moving back and forth and had settled on him. “I initially wouldn’t acknowledge or accept it,” he said. Then someone screamed, “American, come out!” “And I think, Nope. Not quite that easy.” Another shout: “American, come out!” At length, Tyler rose and started walking toward the light.

*

The gist of Obama’s advice to any would-be president is something like this: You may think that the presidency is essentially a public-relations job. Relations with the public are indeed important, maybe now more than ever, as public opinion is the only tool he has for pressuring an intractable opposition to agree on anything. He admits that he has been guilty, at times, of misreading the public. He badly underestimated, for instance, how little it would cost Republicans politically to oppose ideas they had once advocated, merely because Obama supported them. He thought the other side would pay a bigger price for inflicting damage on the country for the sake of defeating a president. But the idea that he might somehow frighten Congress into doing what he wanted was, to him, clearly absurd. “All of these forces have created an environment in which the incentives for politicians to cooperate don’t function the way they used to,” he said. “L.B.J. operated in an environment in which if he got a couple of committee chairmen to agree he had a deal. Those chairmen didn’t have to worry about a Tea Party challenge. About cable news. That model has progressively shifted for each president. It’s not a fear-versus-a-nice-guy approach that is the choice. The question is: How do you shape public opinion and frame an issue so that it’s hard for the opposition to say no. And these days you don’t do that by saying, ‘I’m going to withhold an earmark,’ or ‘I’m not going to appoint your brother-in-law to the federal bench.’”

But if you happen to be president just now, what you are faced with, mainly, is not a public-relations problem but an endless string of decisions. Putting it the way George W. Bush did sounded silly but he was right: the president is a decider. Many if not most of his decisions are thrust upon the president, out of the blue, by events beyond his control: oil spills, financial panics, pandemics, earthquakes, fires, coups, invasions, underwear bombers, movie-theater shooters, and on and on and on. They don’t order themselves neatly for his consideration but come in waves, jumbled on top of each other. “Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable,” Obama said at one point. “Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you’ll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn’t going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can’t be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.” On top of all of this, after you have made your decision, you need to feign total certainty about it. People being led do not want to think probabilistically.

*

The second week in March of last year offered a nice illustration of a president’s curious predicament. On March 11 a tsunami rolled over the Japanese village of Fukushima, triggering the meltdown of reactors inside a nuclear power plant in the town—and raising the alarming possibility that a cloud of radiation would waft over the United States. If you happened to be president of the United States, you were woken up and given the news. (In fact, the president seldom is awakened with news of some crisis, but his aides routinely are, to determine if the president’s sleep needs to be disrupted for whatever has just happened. As one nighttime crisis vetter put it, “They’ll say, ‘This just happened in Afghanistan,’ and I’m like, ‘O.K., and what am I supposed to do about it?’”) In the case of Fukushima, if you were able to go back to sleep you did so knowing that radiation clouds were not your most difficult problem. Not even close. At that very moment, you were deciding on whether to approve a ridiculously audacious plan to assassinate Osama bin Laden in his house in Pakistan. You were arguing, as ever, with Republican leaders in Congress about the budget. And you were receiving daily briefings on various revolutions in various Arab countries. In early February, following the lead of the Egyptians and the Tunisians, the Libyan people had revolted against their dictator, who was now bent on crushing them. Muammar Qaddafi and his army of 27,000 men were marching across the Libyan desert toward a city called Ben­gha­zi and were promising to exterminate some large number of the 1.2 million people inside.

If you were president just then and you turned your television to some cable news channel you would have seen many Republican senators screaming at you to invade Libya and many Democratic congressmen hollering at you that you had no business putting American lives at risk in Libya. If you flipped over to the networks on March 7 you might have caught ABC White House correspondent Jake Tapper saying to your press secretary, Jay Carney, “More than a thousand people have died, according to the United Nations. How many more people have to die before the United States decides, O.K., we’re going to take this one step of a no-fly zone?”

By March 13, Qaddafi appeared to be roughly two weeks from getting to Ben­gha­zi. On that day the French announced they were planning to introduce a resolution in the United Nations to use U.N. forces to secure the skies over Libya in order to prevent Libyan planes from flying. A “no-fly zone” this was called, and it forced Obama’s hand. The president had to decide whether to support the no-fly-zone resolution or not. At 4:10 p.m. on March 15 the White House held a meeting to discuss the issue. “Here is what we knew,” recalls Obama, by which he means here is what I knew. “We knew that Qaddafi was moving on Benghazi, and that his history was such that he could carry out a threat to kill tens of thousands of people. We knew we didn’t have a lot of time—somewhere between two days and two weeks. We knew they were moving faster than we originally anticipated. We knew that Europe was proposing a no-fly zone.”

That much had been in the news. One crucial piece of information had not. “We knew that a no-fly zone would not save the people of Ben­gha­zi,” says Obama. “The no-fly zone was an expression of concern that didn’t real­ly do anything.” European leaders wanted to create a no-fly zone to stop Qaddafi, but Qaddafi wasn’t flying. His army was racing across the North African desert in jeeps and tanks. Obama had to have wondered just how aware of this were these foreign leaders supposedly interested in the fate of these Libyan civilians. He didn’t know if they knew that a no-fly zone was pointless, but if they’d talked to any military leader for five minutes they would have. And that was not all. “The last thing we knew,” he adds, “is that if you announced a no-fly zone and if it appeared feckless, there would be additional pressure for us to go further. As enthusiastic as France and Britain were about the no-fly zone, there was a danger that if we participated the U.S. would own the operation. Because we had the capacity.”

*

On March 15 the president had a typically full schedule. Already he’d met with his national-security advisers, given a series of TV interviews on the No Child Left Behind law, lunched with his vice president, celebrated the winners of an Intel high-school science competition, and spent a good chunk of time alone in the Oval Office with a child suffering from an incurable disease, whose final wish had been to meet the president. His last event, before convening a meeting with 18 advisers (which his official schedule listed simply as “The President and the Vice-President Meet With Secretary of Defense Gates”), was to sit down with ESPN. Twenty-five minutes after he’d given the world his March Madness tournament picks Obama walked down to the Situation Room. He’d been there just the day before, to hold his first meeting to discuss how to kill Osama bin Laden.

In White House jargon this was a meeting of “the principals,” which is to say the big shots. In addition to Biden and Gates, it included Secretary of State Hil­lary Clinton (on the phone from Cairo), chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Admiral Mike Mullen, White House chief of staff William Daley, head of the National Security Council Tom Doni­lon (who had organized the meeting), and U.N. ambassador Susan Rice (on a video screen from New York). The senior people, at least those in the Situation Room, sat around the table. Their subordinates sat around the perimeter of the room. “Obama structures meetings so that they’re not debates,” says one participant. “They’re mini-speeches. He likes to make decisions by having his mind occupying the various positions. He likes to imagine holding the view.” Says another person at the meeting, “He seems very much to want to hear from people. Even when he’s made up his mind he wants to cherry-pick the best arguments to justify what he wants to do.”

Before big meetings the president is given a kind of road map, a list of who will be at the meeting and what they might be called on to contribute. The point of this particular meeting was for the people who knew something about Libya to describe what they thought Qad­da­fi might do, and then for the Pentagon to give the president his military options. “The intelligence was very abstract,” says one witness. “Obama started asking questions about it. ‘What happens to the people in these cities when the cities fall? When you say Qaddafi takes a town, what happens?’” It didn’t take long to get the picture: if they did nothing they’d be looking at a horrific scenario, with tens and possibly hundreds of thousands of people slaughtered. (Qaddafi himself had given a speech on February 22, saying he planned to “cleanse Libya, house by house.”) The Pentagon then presented the president with two options: establish a no-fly zone or do nothing at all. The idea was that the people in the meeting would debate the merits of each, but Obama surprised the room by rejecting the premise of the meeting. “He instantly went off the road map,” recalls one eyewitness. “He asked, ‘Would a no-fly zone do anything to stop the scenario we just heard?’” After it became clear that it would not, Obama said, “I want to hear from some of the other folks in the room.”

Obama then proceeded to call on every single person for his views, including the most junior people. “What was a little unusual,” Obama admits, “is that I went to people who were not at the table. Because I am trying to get an argument that is not being made.” The argument he had wanted to hear was the case for a more nuanced intervention—and a detailing of the more subtle costs to American interests of allowing the mass slaughter of Libyan civilians. His desire to hear the case raises the obvious question: Why didn’t he just make it himself? “It’s the Heisenberg principle,” he says. “Me asking the question changes the answer. And it also protects my decision-­making.” But it’s more than that. His desire to hear out junior people is a warm personality trait as much as a cool tactic, of a piece with his desire to play golf with White House cooks rather than with C.E.O.’s and basketball with people who treat him as just another player on the court; to stay home and read a book rather than go to a Washington cocktail party; and to seek out, in any crowd, not the beautiful people but the old people. The man has his stat­us needs, but they are unusual. And he has a tendency, an unthinking first step, to subvert established stat­us structures. After all, he became president.

Asked if he was surprised that the Pentagon had not presented him with the option to prevent Qaddafi from destroying a city twice the size of New Orleans and killing everyone inside the place, Obama says simply, “No.” Asked why he was not surprised—if I were president I would have been—he adds, “Because it’s a hard problem. What the process is going to do is try to lead you to a binary decision. Here are the pros and cons of going in. Here are the pros and cons of not going in. The process pushes towards black or white answers; it’s less good with shades of gray. Partly because the instinct among the participants was that … ” Here he pauses and decides he doesn’t want to criticize anyone personally. “We were engaged in Afghanistan. We still had equity in Iraq. Our assets are strained. The participants are asking a question: Is there a core national-security issue at stake? As opposed to calibrating our national-­security interests in some new way.”

The people who operate the machinery have their own ideas of what the president should decide, and their advice is pitched accordingly. Gates and Mullen didn’t see how core American security interests were at stake; Biden and Daley thought that getting involved in Libya was, politically, nothing but downside. “The funny thing is the system worked,” says one person who witnessed the meeting. “Everyone was doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. Gates was right to insist that we had no core national-security issue. Biden was right to say it was politically stupid. He’d be putting his presidency on the line.”

*

Public opinion at the fringes of the room, as it turned out, was different. Several people sitting there had been deeply affected by the genocide in Rwanda. (“The ghosts of 800,000 Tutsis were in that room,” as one puts it.) Several of these people had been with Obama since before he was president—people who, had it not been for him, would have been unlikely ever to have found themselves in such a meeting. They aren’t political people so much as Obama people. One was Samantha Power, who won a Pulitzer Prize for her book A Problem from Hell, about the moral and political costs the U.S. has paid for largely ignoring modern genocides. Another was Ben Rhodes, who had been a struggling novelist when he went to work as a speechwriter back in 2007 on the first Obama campaign. Whatever Obama decided, Rhodes would have to write the speech explaining the decision, and he said in the meeting that he preferred to explain why the United States had prevented a massacre over why it hadn’t. An N.S.C. staffer named Denis McDonough came out for intervention, as did Antony Blinken, who had been on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council during the Rwandan genocide, but now, awkwardly, worked for Joe Biden. “I have to disagree with my boss on this one,” said Blinken. As a group, the junior staff made the case for saving the Ben­gha­zis. But how?

The president may not have been surprised that the Pentagon hadn’t sought to answer that question. He was nevertheless visibly annoyed. “I don’t know why we are even having this meeting,” he said, or words to that effect. “You’re telling me a no-fly zone doesn’t solve the problem, but the only option you’re giving me is a no-fly zone.” He gave his generals two hours to come up with another solution for him to consider, then left to attend the next event on his schedule, a ceremonial White House dinner.

*

Back on October 9, 2009, Obama had been woken up in the middle of the night to be informed that he’d been given the Nobel Peace Prize. He half thought it might be a prank. “It’s one of the most shocking things that has happened in all of this,” he says. “And I immediately anticipated that it would cause me problems.” The Nobel Prize Committee had just made it a tiny bit harder for him to do the job he’d just been elected to do, as he could not at once be commander in chief of the most powerful force on earth and the face of pacifism. When he sat down some weeks later with Ben Rhodes and another speechwriter, Jon Favreau, to discuss what he wanted to say, he told them he intended to use the acceptance speech to make the case for war. “I need to make sure I was addressing a European audience that had recoiled so badly from the Iraq war, and that may have been viewing the conferring of the Nobel Prize as a vindication of inaction.”

Both Rhodes and Favreau, who have been with Obama since early in his first presidential campaign, are widely viewed as his two most adept mimics when it comes to speeches. They know how the president sounds: his desire to make it seem he is telling a story rather than making an argument; the long sentences strung together by semicolons; the tendency to speak in paragraphs rather than sound bites; the absence of emotion he was unlikely to genuinely feel. (“He really doesn’t do artifice well,” says Favreau.) Normally, Obama takes his speechwriters’ first draft and works from it. “This time he just threw it in the garbage can,” says Rhodes. “The main reason I’m employed here is I have an idea of how his mind works. In this case, I totally screwed up.”

The problem, in Obama’s view, was his own doing. He’d asked his speechwriters to make an argument he had never fully made and to state beliefs that he had never fully expressed. “There are certain speeches that I have to write myself,” says Obama. “There are times when I’ve got to capture what the essence of the thing is.”

Obama asked his speechwriters to dig up for him writings about war by people he admired: Saint Augustine, Churchill, Niebuhr, Gandhi, King. He wanted to reconcile the non­violent doctrines of two of his heroes, King and Gandhi, with his new role in the violent world. These writings came back to the speechwriters with key passages underlined and notes by the president to himself scrawled in the margin. (Beside Reinhold Niebuhr’s essay “Why the Christian Church Is Not Pacifist,” Obama had scribbled “Can we analogize al-Qaeda? What level of casualty can we tolerate?”) “Here it wasn’t just that I needed to make a new argument,” says Obama. “It was that I wanted to make an argument that didn’t allow either side to feel too comfortable.”

He’d received the unusable speech on December 8. He was due to be onstage in Oslo on December 10. On December 9 he had 21 meetings, on every subject under the sun. The only slivers of time on his schedule for that day that even faintly resembled “free time to write a speech to the entire world that I have to give in two days” were “Desk Time” from 1:25 to 1:55 and “potus Time” from 5:50 to 6:50. But he also had the night, after his wife and children had gone to bed. And he had something he really wanted to say.

That evening he sat down at his desk in the White House residence, in the Treaty Room, and pulled out a yellow legal pad and a No. 2 ­ ­pencil. When we think of a presidential speech we think of the bully pulpit—the president trying to persuade the rest of us to think or feel in a certain way. We do not think of the president sitting down and trying to persuade himself to think or feel a certain way first. But Obama does—he subjects himself to a kind of inner bully pulpit.

Actually, he didn’t toss his speechwriters’ work in the garbage can, not right away. Instead he copied it out, their entire 40-minute speech. “It helped organize my thoughts,” he says. “What I had to do is describe a notion of a just war. But also acknowledge that the very notion of a just war can lead you into some dark places. And so you can’t be complacent in labeling something just. You need to constantly ask yourself questions.” He finished around five in the morning. “There are times when I feel like I’ve grabbed onto the truth of something and I’m just hanging on,” he says. “And my best speeches are when I know what I’m saying is true in a fundamental way. People find their strength in different places. That’s where I’m strong.”

A few hours later he handed his speechwriters six sheets of yellow paper filled with his small, tidy script. In receiving a prize for peace, speaking to an audience primed for pacifism, he’d made the case for war.

When the president handed him this speech, Rhodes had two reactions. The first was that there is no obvious political upside to it. His second reaction: “When did he write it? That’s what I wanted to know.”

On the plane to Oslo, Obama would fiddle with the speech a bit more. “We were actually still putting in edits as I was walking onto the stage,” he tells me, laughing. But the words he spoke that evening were mainly those he wrote that long night at his desk in the White House. And they explained not only why he might respond, as he was about to do, to an impending massacre of innocents in Ben­gha­zi, but also why, if the circumstances were even a little bit different, he might respond in another way.

*

The principals reconvened in the Situation Room at 7:30 p.m. The Pentagon now offered the president three options. The first: do nothing at all. The second: establish a no-fly zone, which they had already conceded would not prevent a massacre in Ben­gha­zi. The third: secure a resolution from the U.N. to take “all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians and then use American airpower to destroy Qad­da­fi’s army. “By the time I go to the second meeting I’m viewing the choices differently,” says Obama. “I know that I’m definitely not doing a no-fly zone. Because I think it’s just a show to protect backsides, politically.” In his Nobel speech he’d argued that in cases such as these the United States should not act alone. “In these situations we should have a bias towards operating multilaterally,” he says. “Because the very process of building a coalition forces you to ask tough questions. You may think you are acting morally, but you may be fooling yourself.”

He was trying to frame the problem not just for America but for the rest of the world too. “I’m thinking to myself, What are the challenges, and what are the things we can do uniquely?” He wanted to say to the Europeans and to other Arab countries: We’ll do most of the actual bombing because only we can do it quickly, but you have to clean up the mess afterward. “What I didn’t want,” says Obama, “is a month later a call from our allies saying, ‘It’s not working—you need to do more.’ So the question is: How can I cabin our commitment in a way that is useful?”

*

Obama insists that he still had not made up his mind what to do when he returned to the Situation Room—that he was still considering doing nothing at all. A million people in Ben­gha­zi were waiting to find out whether they would live or die, and he honestly did not know. There were things the Pentagon might have said to deter him, for instance. “If somebody had said to me that we could not take out their air defense without putting our fliers at risk in a significant way; if the level of risk for our military personnel had been ratcheted up—that might have changed my decision,” says Obama. “Or if I did not feel Sarkozy or Cameron were far enough out there to follow through. Or if I did not think we could get a U.N resolution passed.”

Once again he polled the people in the room for their views. Of the principals only Susan Rice (enthusiastically) and Hil­lary Clinton (who would have settled for a no-fly zone) had the view that any sort of intervention made sense. “How are we going to explain to the American people why we’re in Libya,” asked William Daley, according to one of those pres­ent. “And Daley had a point: who gives a shit about Libya?”

From the president’s point of view there was a certain benefit in the indifference of the American public to whatever was happening in Libya. It enabled him to do, at least for a moment, pretty much whatever he wanted to do. Libya was the hole in the White House lawn.

Obama made his decision: push for the U.N resolution and effectively invade another Arab country. Of the choice not to intervene he says, “That’s not who we are,” by which he means that’s not who I am. The decision was extraordinarily personal. “No one in the Cabinet was for it,” says one witness. “There was no constituency for doing what he did.” Then Obama went upstairs to the Oval Office to call European heads of state and, as he puts it, “call their bluff.” Cameron first, then Sarkozy. It was three a.m. in Paris when he reached the French president, but Sarkozy insisted he was still awake. (“I’m a young man!”) In formal and stilted tones the European leaders committed to taking over after the initial bombing. The next morning Obama called Medvedev to make sure that the Russians would not block his U.N. resolution. There was no obvious reason why Russia should want to see Qad­da­fi murder a city of Libyans, but in the president’s foreign dealings the Russians play the role that Republicans currently more or less play in his domestic affairs. The Russians’ view of the world tends to be zero-sum: if an American president is for it, they are, by definition, against it. Obama thought that he had made more prog­ress with the Russians than he had with the Republicans; Medvedev had come to trust him, he felt, and believed him when he said the United States had no intention of moving into Libya for the long term. A senior American official at the United Nations thought that perhaps the Russians let Obama have his resolution only because they thought it would end in disaster for the United States.

And it could have. All that exists for any president are the odds. On March 17 the U.N. gave Obama his resolution. The next day he flew to Brazil and was there on the 19th, when the bombing began. A group of Democrats in Congress issued a statement demanding Obama withdraw from Libya; Ohio Democratic congressman Dennis Kucinich asked if Obama had just committed an impeachable offense. All sorts of people who had been hounding the president for his inaction now flipped and questioned the wisdom of action. A few days earlier Newt Gingrich, busy running for president, had said, “We don’t need the United Nations. All we have to say is that we think slaughtering your own citizens is unacceptable and that we’re intervening.” Four days after the bombing began, Gingrich went on the Today show to say he wouldn’t have intervened and was quoted on Politico as saying, “It is impossible to make sense of the standard of intervention in Libya except opportunism and news media publicity.” The tone of the news coverage shifted dramatically, too. One day it was “Why aren’t you doing anything?” The next it was “What have you gotten us into?” As one White House staffer puts it, “All the people who had been demanding intervention went nuts after we intervened and said it was outrageous. That’s because the controversy machine is bigger than the reality machine.”

The minute the president made his decision a lot of people were obviously waiting for it to go wrong—for something to happen that could be seized upon to symbolize this curious use of American power and define this curious president. On March 21, Obama flew from Brazil to Chile. He was on a stage with Chilean leaders, listening to a folk-rock band called Los Jaivas singing the story of the earth’s formation (their signature piece) when someone whispered in his ear: one of our F-15s just crashed in the Libyan desert. On his way to dinner afterward his national-security adviser Thomas Donilon told him that the pilot had been rescued but the navigator was missing. “My first thought was how to find the guy,” recalls Obama. “My next thought was that this is a reminder that something can always go wrong. And there are consequences for things going wrong.”

*

The soldiers from the Libyan rebel militia who found Tyler Stark weren’t entirely sure what to make of him, as he didn’t speak Arabic and they didn’t speak anything else. At any rate, he didn’t seem inclined to talk. The Libyans were now of course aware that someone was dropping bombs on Qad­da­fi’s troops, but they were a little unclear about who exactly was doing it. After taking a good long look at this pilot who had fallen from the sky they decided he must be French. And so when Bubaker Habib, who owned an English-language school in Tripoli, and was then hunkered down with fellow dissidents in a hotel in Ben­gha­zi, received the phone call from a friend of his in the rebel army, the friend asked him if he spoke French. “He tells me there is a French pilot,” says Bubaker. “He’s crashed. Because I spent 2003 in France, I still have some French words. So I said yes.”

The friend asked if Bubaker would mind driving the 30 kilometers or so out of Ben­gha­zi to talk to the “French pilot,” so they could figure out the best way to help him. Even though it was the middle of the night, and you could hear bombs exploding and guns firing, Bubaker jumped in his car. “I found Stark sitting there, holding his knee,” says Bubaker. “He was, to be honest with you, frantic. He doesn’t know what is going on. He was surrounded by the militia. He doesn’t know if they are friends or enemies.”

“Bonjour,” said Bubaker, or maybe not—he has forgotten the first thing out of his mouth. But in response Tyler Stark said something and Bubaker instantly recognized the accent. “Are you American?” asked Bubaker. Stark said he was. Bubaker leaned over and told him that he actually had friends in the U.S. Embassy who had fled in the early days of the war, and that if Stark would come with him back to Ben­gha­zi he could put them in touch. “He looked at me, astonished,” remembers Bubaker.

On the drive to Benghazi, Bubaker sensed that Stark was both shocked and wary. At any rate, as much as Bubaker might have wanted to know more about why America was dropping bombs on Libya, Stark would not tell him. And so Bubaker put on some 80s music and changed the subject to something other than war. The first song that came on was Diana Ross and Lionel Richie singing “Endless Love.” “You know what,” said Bubaker. “This song reminds me of my second marriage.” They talked the rest of the way, says Bubaker, “and we didn’t mention anything of any military action.” He drove the “American pilot” back to the hotel and instructed the militia to surround the place. Even in Libya they understood the fickle nature of American public opinion. “I told them, ‘We have an American pilot here. If he gets caught or killed it’s the end of the mission. Make sure he is safe and sound.’” Bubaker then called his friend, the former staffer in the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli, now removed to Washington, D.C.

It took a few hours for someone to come and fetch Stark. As he waited with Bubaker inside the hotel, word spread of this French pilot who had saved their lives. When they’d arrived at the hotel a man had handed Tyler Stark a rose, which the American found both strange and touching. Now women from across the city came with flowers to the front of the hotel. When Stark entered a room full of people they stood up and gave him a round of applause. “I’m not sure what I was expecting in Libya,” he says, “but I was not expecting a round of applause.”

Bubaker found doctors to treat Stark’s leg and one of the doctors had Skype on his iPod. Stark tried to call his base, but he couldn’t remember the country code for Britain, so he called the most useful phone number he could remember, his parents’.

At some point Bubaker turned to him and asked, “Do you know why you are in Libya?”

“I just have my orders,” said Stark.

“He didn’t know why he’d been sent,” says Bubaker. “So I showed him some video. Of kids being killed.”

*

At that moment there was a curious balance of power between the leader and the led. Tyler Stark was in harm’s way because of a decision Barack Obama had made, more or less on his own. He was at the mercy of another man’s character. The president’s decision reached forward into the impersonal future—Qaddafi would be killed, Libya would hold its first free elections—but it also reached back into the personal past, to the things that had made Obama capable of walking alone into a room with a pencil and walking out a bit later with a conviction.

At the same time, the president was exposed to Tyler Stark. “That pilot” is the first thing Obama mentioned when asked what might have gone wrong in Libya. He was especially alive to the power of a story to influence the American public. He believed he had been elected chiefly because he had told a story; he thought he had had problems in office because he had, without quite realizing it, ceased to tell it. If the pilot had fallen into the wrong hands, or landed badly, or shot the dog, it would have been the start of a new narrative. Then the story would no longer have been a complex tale ignored by the American public about how the United States had forged a broad international coalition to help people who claimed to share our values rid themselves of a tyrant.

The story would have become a much simpler one, ripe for exploitation by his foes: how a president elected to extract us from a war in one Arab country got Americans killed in another. If Stark had come to grief, the Libyan intervention would no longer have been the hole in the White House lawn. It would have been the Churchill bust. That is why Obama says that, as obvious as it seems in retrospect to have prevented a massacre in Benghazi, it was at the time “one of those 51–49 decisions.”

On the other hand, Obama had helped make his own luck. This time when we invaded an Arab country we Americans were genuinely treated as heroes—because the locals didn’t see our incursion as an act of imperialism.

The president’s schedule on a recent summer day wasn’t quite as full as usual: 30 minutes with Hillary Clinton, another 30 with Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta, lunch with the vice president, a long talk with his secretary of agriculture to discuss the drought. He’d also hosted the Lady Bears of Baylor national-championship basketball team, done one TV interview, taped his weekly address, stopped in at a fund-raiser in a Washington hotel, and sat down, for the first time, to prepare for the coming debates with Mitt Romney. “The days that are challenging are not when you have a lot on your schedule,” he said. “Today was a little bit tougher than usual.” What made it tough was the bomb that had exploded on a Bulgarian tour bus, killing a bunch of Israeli tourists, and some reports out of Syria about civilians’ being murdered.

A few days earlier I’d asked him the same question I’d put to him on his airplane, about the range of emotional states that the presidency now required, and the speed with which the president was expected to move from one to the other. “One of my most important tasks,” he’d said, “is making sure I stay open to people, and the meaning of what I’m doing, but not to get so overwhelmed by it that it’s paralyzing. Option one is to go through the motions. That I think is a disaster for a president. But there is the other danger.”

“It’s not a natural state,” I had said.

“No,” he had agreed. “It’s not. There are times when I have to save it and let it out at the end of the day.”

I asked if he would take me to his favorite place in the White House. Leaving the Oval Office he retraced his steps along the South Portico. The private elevator rose to the second floor. On the way up Obama seemed just a tiny bit tense, as if for the first time calculating the effects on his own domestic politics of bringing a stranger home unannounced. We exited into a great hall, half the length of a football field, which appeared to function as the family living room. The space, ridiculously impersonal, still felt homey compared with the rest of the White House. Michelle was in Alabama at a public event, but Obama’s mother-in-law sat reading in a deep, soft chair. She looked up, curiously: she wasn’t expecting company.

“Sorry to invade your house,” I said.

She laughed. “It’s his house!” she said.

“My favorite place in the White House,” said the president, “is this way.”

We walked down the living room, passing his study—a huge, formal room with a well-used feel to it. “You know,” he’d said to me once, after I’d asked him what it was like to move into the White House, “the first night you sleep in the White House, you’re thinking, All right. I’m in the White House. And I’m sleeping here.” He laughed. “There’s a time in the middle of the night when you just kind of startle awake. There’s a little bit of a sense of absurdity. There is such an element of randomness in who gets this job. What am I here for? Why am I walking around the Lincoln Bedroom? That doesn’t last long. A week into it you’re on the job.”

We turned right, into an oval room painted yellow, apparently known as the Yellow Room. Obama marched to the French doors on the far end. There he flipped a few locks and stepped outside. “This is the best spot in the whole White House,” he said.

I followed him out onto the Truman Balcony, to the pristine view of the South Lawn. The Washington Monument stood like a soldier in front of the Jefferson Memorial. Potted poinsettias surrounded what amounted to an outdoor living room. “The best spot in the White House,” he said again. “Michelle and I come out here at night and just sit. It’s the closest you can get to feeling outside. To feeling outside the bubble.”

*

Aboard Air Force One, I’d asked him what he would do if granted a day when no one knew who he was and he could do whatever he pleased. How would he spend it? He didn’t even have to think about it:

When I lived in Hawaii, I’d take a drive from Waikiki to where my grandmother lived—up along the coast heading east, and it takes you past Hanauma Bay. When my mother was pregnant with me she’d take a walk along the beach. . . . You park your car. If the waves are good you sit and watch and ponder it for a while. You grab your car keys in the towel. And you jump in the ocean. And you have to wait until there is a break in the waves. . . . And you put on a fin—and you only have one fin—and if you catch the right wave you cut left because left is west. . . . Then you cut down into the tube there. You might see the crest rolling and you might see the sun glittering. You might see a sea turtle in profile, sideways, like a hieroglyph in the water. . . . And you spend an hour out there. And if you’ve had a good day you’ve caught six or seven good waves and six or seven not so good waves. And you go back to your car. With a soda or a can of juice. And you sit. And you can watch the sun go down …

When he was done, he thought again and said, “And if I had a second day … ” But then the airplane landed, and it was time for us to get off.

“If I were president I think I might keep a list in my head,” I said.

“I do,” he said. “That’s my last piece of advice to you. Keep a list.”

Now, standing on the Truman Balcony, little came between him and the outside world. Crowds milled about on Constitution Avenue, on the other side of the south gate. Had he waved, someone might have noticed him and waved back. He motioned to the place from which, last November, a man with a high-powered rifle fired at the White House. Turning, with only the slightest trace of annoyance, Obama pointed to the spot directly behind his head where the bullet struck.

Back inside I had had a feeling unhelpful to the task at hand: I shouldn’t have been there. When a man with such a taste and talent for spacing is given so little space in which to operate it feels wrong to take the little he does have, like grabbing water to brush one’s teeth from a man dying of thirst. “I feel a little creepy being here,” I said. “Why don’t I get out of your hair?” He laughed. “C’mon,” he said. “As long as you’re up here, there’s one more thing.” He led me down the hall and into the Lincoln Bedroom. There was a desk, upon which rested some obviously sacred object, covered by a green felt cloth. “There are times when you come in here and you’re having a particularly difficult day,” said the president. “Sometimes I come in here.” He pulled back the cloth and revealed a handwritten copy of the Gettysburg Address. The fifth of five made by Lincoln but the only one he signed, dated, and titled. Six hours earlier the president had been celebrating the Lady Bears of Baylor. Four hours earlier he’d been trying to figure out what, if anything, he would do to save lives of innocents being massacred by their government in Syria. Now he looked down and read the words of another president, who also understood the peculiar power, even over one’s self, that comes from putting your thoughts into them.

Vanity Fair © Condé Nast Digital (emphasis in original)

http://www.vanityfair.com/politics/2012/10/michael-lewis-profile-barack-obama [with comments]


--


Todd Akin: Obama Is 'Apologizing Because He Didn't Like America'


Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.) said President Obama apologizes to countries around the world because he doesn't "like America."
(AP Photo/Sid Hastings, File)

By Amanda Terkel
Posted: 09/13/2012 10:47 am Updated: 09/13/2012 3:03 pm

Rep. Todd Akin (R-Mo.), a member of the House Armed Services Committee, responded to the protests in the Middle East on Wednesday, saying he believed President Barack Obama was "apologizing" to hostile countries around the world.

"First of all, apologizing to all people, [to] a lot of countries who are enemies, and apologizing to them and everything. You know, if we did something wrong, that's one thing. But he's just apologizing because he didn't like America? I think that's the wrong thing to do," said Akin, outlining why he disagreed with Obama's foreign policy.

Akin added that right now, the United States should wait and see how the situation in Libya "develops" before deciding how to act.

But according to his analysis, "the situation in Libya has been kind of iffy to begin with."

WATCH [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ieG6ypAPRX8 ]:

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/todd-akin-obama-apologizing-america_n_1880664.html [with comments]


--


Romney's Team Turns On The Press



A frustrating week in Boston. “The polls are close, and so the media starts cheering on their guy,” says one adviser.

McKay Coppins
BuzzFeed Staff
Posted Sep 13, 2012 12:26pm EDT

DULLES, Va. — As Mitt Romney finishes his second week of dismal news coverage — with slipping polls and a combustible international crisis driving the narrative that the campaign is flailing — the campaign's frustation with the media that covers it is approaching the boiling point.

Despite the usual sparring between press and campaign — and the occasional piece of red meat tossed to the conservative blogosphere — Romney and his senior aides had generally avoided the common Republican complaint that the mainstream media is fundamentally biased in favor of the Democratic Party. That has begun to change, however, with top aides now privately grumbling that they have given up the hope of a level media playing field.

"I love all these reporters saying that they thought the Democratic convention was better," said one senior adviser sarcastically. "Of course they did. It's like a steak lover saying they like a steak house. They served what 90 percent of reporters love. And they liked it? Shocking."

Officially, the campaign's response to the media's Romney-in-disarray storyline has been a cavalier shrug.

"Look, I know it exists, but it is neither a compelling message or an effective tactic," senior adviser Kevin Madden told BuzzFeed. "Instead, we just make sure to work hard, extra hard, to get the governor's message to voters. The voters are the ones who get to decide who wins this race. We remain focused on that task every day and we're confident in our mission."

But frustration is building behind the scenes, egged on by a conservative media and Twitter conversation that has blamed the media for accusing Romney of a premature response to the crises in Libya and Egypt.

The adviser, granted anonymity to criticize a press corps the campaign still relies on every day, went on to blame a "green room, green zone kind of divide," saying the national press, most of whom live in New York or DC, "pockets of prosperity," are isolated from the realities of the harsh economy — and therefore, unable to grasp Romney's message.

Instead, they are preoccupied by concerns akin to war reporters relaxing in the green zone: "Too much chlorine in the pool, the parties are going on too late, why can't we get the right flavors of Haagen Dazs? Most people aren't living in that world."

Another adviser expressed frustration with horserace reporters declaring Romney's campaign fatally behind, as President Obama pulls ahead in the polls. He said he suspects the press is projecting their own hopes for an Obama re-election at best — and purposefully cheerleading the incumbent, at worst.

"I mean, I was expecting this narrative in October," he said. "You know, the polls are close, and so the media starts cheering on their guy, saying Romney's doomed. But I didn't expect it to happen this early. They just seem really eager."

He singled out New York Times polling blogger Nate Silver [ http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/ ] — whose predictive model currently Obama an 80 percent change of re-election — as a left-leaning journalist who is churning out questionable analysis with partisan motives.

"It was kind of alarming when we found out that [Obama aide David] Axelrod was feeding him all this internal polling data and he wasn't disclosing it," the adviser said, referring to the 2008 election. (Silver acknowledged that he examined the Obama campaign's polling in that race, but said it didn't impact his objective analysis.)

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/right-turn ], a leading Romney defender with unique access to the campaign, has been pressing the biased-media message on her blog this week, suggesting reporters writing off the Republican's campaign "get a grip."

"There is a lot of thesis writing and not enough reporting," Rubin told BuzzFeed. "Ohio is in disarray! Anyone contact the campaign, check with local media, talk to people on the ground or independent pollsters, look at the 2008 exits, etc.? The ratio of quality reporting to hyped-up, unsubstantiated punditry is dangerously out of whack."

The complaints about a overhyped media narrative — as with most critiques of the press — have at least a kernel of validity. Since the conventions, Romney has been experiencing the short end of horserace political coverage: When polls start to go south, every gaffe is amplified, and every misstep becomes a data point.

But the Romney campaign has also given plenty of fodder to the media in recent days, including an incendiary response to the attacks on the Libya consulate and Egypt Embassy that received bipartisan blowback. And Romney was the beneficiary of this type of coverage at the beginning of the summer: When Obama was in a weaker-than-expected position in the polls, the press corps and pundits piled on.

Blaming the press is often a first reflex for campaigns eager to deny bad public polls and rally their supporters against a common enemy. Still, one plugged-in Republican who spoke with top advisers earlier this week, said the campaign's frustration with the press is unfeigned.

"Boston is a bit amazed," the Republican said. "Experienced political operatives say they've never seen the press be so unhinged and determined to write 'Republican in disarray' stories. Many conservatives concerned this is becoming a self-fulfilling prophesy are urging Boston to change the tone and the topic; they think the best way is to go on offense and be substantive, talk about the big issues."

Copyright © 2012 BuzzFeed, Inc.

http://www.buzzfeed.com/mckaycoppins/romneys-team-turns-on-the-press [with comments]


--


New York Times Wipes Story Detailing Mitt Romney's Attack On Obama

09/13/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/13/new-york-times-mitt-romney_n_1879529.html [with comments]


--


Libya attack puts spotlight on Al Qaeda terror affiliates

The Rachel Maddow Show
September 13, 2012

Rachel Maddow describes the evidence that points to the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, Libya as having been an organized terrorist attack, and shows how Al Qaeda affiliates and Al Qaeda-like terror groups have established themselves throughout Africa.

© 2012 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/49027233#49027233 [show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/13/13851555-links-for-the-913-trms (with comments0]


--


Explaining free speech more necessary than merely defending it

The Rachel Maddow Show
September 13, 2012

Rachel Maddow outlines what details are known about the origins of the video that has sparked protests across the Middle East, and reviews the history of violent reactions by Muslims to slights both perceived and actual, and points out that a large part of the problem with the current round of protests is the flat-out misunderstanding of the American right to free speech.

© 2012 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/vp/49027504#49027504 [the above YouTube of the segment at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eoIm59RfOis ] [show links at http://maddowblog.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/13/13851555-links-for-the-913-trms (with comments)]


--


(linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=39465524 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79426562 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79470738 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79472311 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79482600 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79496402 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79506679 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79507755 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79527404 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79551923 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79553291 (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79553380 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79553354 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79554227 and preceding (and any future following)


===


The Shallow End of the Campaign

Editorial
Published: September 10, 2012

If the first weekend of Mitt Romney’s general election campaign is any indication, the country is in for eight weeks of wild, often random answers to some of the most important policy questions. Voters trying to understand the positions of Mr. Romney and Representative Paul Ryan are going to have a harder time than ever.

On issue after issue raised in the first weekend of interviews after the conventions, Romney and Ryan actively tried to obscure their positions, as if a clear understanding of their beliefs about taxes, health care or spending would scare away anyone who was listening. Aware that President Obama’s policies in these areas are quite popular once people learn about them, the Republicans are simply sowing confusion. Here are a few examples:

HEALTH CARE After more than a year of denouncing Mr. Obama’s health care law, Mr. Romney said on “Meet the Press [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48959273/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/t/september-mitt-romney-ann-romney-julian-castro-peggy-noonan-ej-dionne-bill-bennett-chuck-todd/ ]” on NBC on Sunday that maybe parts of it weren’t so bad. “There are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place,” he said, such as coverage of pre-existing conditions.

There’s just one problem: guaranteeing coverage to people with serious diseases means that sick people would sign up en masse for coverage, driving premiums up for everyone. That’s why Mr. Obama’s law required everyone to have insurance to spread the risk around.

Mr. Romney remains opposed to the mandate (though he supported it in Massachusetts). So his campaign was forced to issue a clarification [ http://www.nationaljournal.com/healthcare/romney-backtracks-on-health-care-law-20120910 ]: he supports coverage for pre-existing conditions only for those with continuous insurance coverage. That jettisons sick people who have lost their jobs or never had coverage. It’s been the law since 1996. But those who only watched the interview won’t know that.

TAXES As an important independent tax study [ http://www.taxpolicycenter.org/publications/url.cfm?ID=1001628 ] showed, Mr. Romney’s plan to cut tax rates for the wealthy by 20 percent and offset the lost money by eliminating loopholes won’t work because there aren’t enough available loopholes to make up for the rate cut. Taxes on the middle class would have to go up to keep the plan from lowering overall revenues.

Asked about this on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Romney said the study was wrong and promised that the plan would work. He cited a Harvard study, among others, that backed him. But that Harvard study, by Martin Feldstein, Ronald Reagan’s chief economist, does no such thing. As The Washington Post has noted [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/10/is-romneys-tax-plan-mathematically-possible-after-all/ ], Mr. Feldstein’s study showed Mr. Romney’s plan would require substantial tax increases on taxpayers making between $100,000 and $200,000, which most people would consider the upper end of the middle class.

DEFENSE SPENDING On “Face the Nation” on CBS [ http://www.cbsnews.com/2102-3460_162-57509126.html ], Mr. Ryan tried to wriggle out of admitting that he voted for the law that led to the sequester of $500 billion in defense spending that he is now blaming on Mr. Obama. He told the interviewer, Norah O’Donnell, that she was mistaken in stating the plain fact of his vote. He fully supported the Republican Party’s decision to hold the government’s credit rating hostage for spending cuts and is trying to hide from that.

Mr. Romney thought the weak economy would give him a pass on specifics. But voters expect answers, and the Republicans are demonstrating only shallowness.

*

Related

Romney, Easing, Says Health Law Isn’t All Bad (September 10, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/us/politics/romney-adopts-softer-tone-in-critique-of-obama.html

Washington Memo: Romney’s Tax Plan Leaves Key Variables Blank (September 10, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/10/us/politics/romneys-tax-plan-leaves-key-variables-blank.html

Related in Opinion

Times Topic: United States Elections
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/united-states-politics/index.html

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/opinion/the-shallow-end-of-the-campaign.html [with comments]


--


The Ryan Sinkhole


Paul Ryan t-shirt.
Mary Altaffer/Associated Press

By THOMAS B. EDSALL
September 9, 2012, 11:45 pm

Unlike the Republican platform [ http://whitehouse12.com/republican-party-platform/ ], which has mostly been ignored outside of the abortion issue, the Paul Ryan budget is the core document of the 2012 campaign. It is the most explicit expression of the Republican agenda, endorsed by the party’s presidential candidate, Mitt Romney, and backed by decisive majorities of House and Senate Republicans.

That much is known. What people have not been talking about enough is that the Ryan budget contains an $897 billion sinkhole: massive but unexplained cuts in such discretionary domestic programs as education, food and drug inspection, workplace safety, environmental protection and law enforcement.

The scope of the cuts – stunning in their breadth — is hidden. To find the numbers, turn to page 16 of the Concurrent Resolution on the Budget [ http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/CRPT-112hrpt421/pdf/CRPT-112hrpt421.pdf ] – Fiscal Year 2013. In Table 2, Fiscal Year 2013 Budget Resolution Discretionary Spending, in the far right hand column, you’ll see the nearly $897 billion figure, which appears on the line marked “BA” for Budget Authority under Allowances (920) as $896,884 (because these figures are listed in millions of dollars).

According to [ http://budget.house.gov/budgetprocess/budgetfunctions.htm ] the House Budget Committee, of which Ryan is the chairman:

The federal budget is divided into approximately 20 categories known as budget functions. These functions include all spending for a given topic, regardless of the federal agency that oversees the individual federal program. Both the president’s budget, submitted annually, and Congress’ budget resolution, passed annually, comprise these approximately 20 functions.

Within the 20 “budget functions” lurks — at number 19 — “Function 920.” In a masterpiece of bureaucratic obscurantism, the explanation provided by budget committee reads as follows [ http://budget.house.gov/budgetprocess/budgetfunctions.htm ]:

FUNCTION 920: ALLOWANCES

Function 920 represents a category called “allowances” that captures the budgetary effects of cross-cutting proposals or contingencies that impact multiple functions rather than one specific area of the budget. It also represents a place-holder category for any budgetary impacts that the Congressional Budget Office has yet to assign to a specific budget function. C.B.O. typically reassigns the budgetary effects of any legislation enacted within Function 920 once a new baseline update is released.

The importance of the nearly $1 trillion in unexplained and unspecified cuts that Ryan and the Republican party are proposing, under the catch-all rubric of “Function 920: Allowances,” cannot be overestimated. These invisible cuts are crucial to the Republican claim [ http://budget.house.gov/uploadedfiles/pathtoprosperity2013.pdf ] that the Ryan budget proposal will drastically reduce the federal deficit (eliminating it entirely in the long run) and ultimately erase the national debt.

Ryan’s plan was passed 228-191 by the House on March 29, 2012 [ http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/29/usa-budget-idUSL2E8ETABC20120329 ], with no Democrats voting yes. On May 16, the Senate rejected the plan by a vote of 58-41. The vote among Senate Republicans was 41-4 in favor.

While the Ryan budget does specify cuts in programs serving the poor, many of whom are Democratic constituents (Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment benefits), it hides under the abstruse veil of “Function 920 allowances” the cuts in programs popular with many other voters.

This maneuver stands in stark contrast to Ryan’s campaign rhetoric. At a rally last Tuesday in Westlake, Ohio, Ryan declared [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u1he6GbK770 ]:

We will not duck the tough issues. We will not kick the can down the road.

Romney and Ryan have made their willingness to stand tall and to confront forthrightly the problems facing the nation a central theme of their campaign. In Ryan’s words, again from Westlake:

We will lead. We will not blame others for four years; we will take responsibility and fix this country’s problems.

The lack of detail in the Ryan budget applies mainly to programs of importance to the voters Republicans continue to angle for, including swing voters concerned about programs like education, environmental protection and food safety.

Interviews I conducted with New Hampshire voters last month reveal the political liabilities of telling potential Republican voters exactly what the Romney-Ryan ticket intends to cut. Two voters, both Republicans, told me they could not bring themselves to vote for their party this year because the Ryan budget cuts spending for veterans’ benefits.

In an interview days after Romney announced on a Saturday that he had picked Ryan, George Lemieux said, “Based on what Romney did this weekend, I would not vote for him.” Lemieux, a 67-year-old Vietnam War veteran who spent 26 years in the Army, declared that “Ryan wants to decimate Medicare; he wants to decimate the V.A. I have a brother who is dependent on V.A. disability, and he wants to cut it out entirely.”

“The Ryan budget will kill everybody,” said Aura-Lee Nicodemus, another woman I met, who works at the V.A. Medical Center in White River Junction, Vt. and is active in the advocacy organization, Disabled American Veterans. “I’m a registered Republican and I can’t vote for Romney. His actions speak louder than words.”

There is a clear rationale for their concerns.

Under the Ryan budget, “Mandatory and Defense and Nondefense Discretionary Spending” – which includes Function 920 Allowances, but excludes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid — would fall from 12.5 percent of Gross Domestic Product in 2011 to 6.75 percent in 2023, 5.75 percent in 2030, 4.75 percent in 2040 and 3.75 percent in 2050, according to an analysis [ http://www.cbo.gov/sites/default/files/cbofiles/attachments/03-20-Ryan_Specified_Paths_2.pdf ] by the Congressional Budget Office.

The C.B.O. cautiously notes how difficult it would be to cut such spending to 3.75 percent of G.D.P.:

By comparison, spending in this category has exceeded 8 percent of G.D.P. in every year since World War II. Spending for defense alone has not been lower than 3 percent of G.D.P. in any year during that period.

Romney, in fact, has committed himself [ http://money.cnn.com/2012/05/10/news/economy/romney-defense-spending/index.htm ] to keeping the Pentagon budget (Function 050) at 4 percent of G.D.P. By 2050, that would leave zilch under the Ryan plan for such separately funded programs as Veterans Benefits (Function 700); the administration of justice, including the F.B.I. (Function 750); Education, Train and Social Services (Function 500), and pretty much anything else [ http://democrats.budget.house.gov/budgets/budget-functions ].

The big question posed by the comments of the two defecting Republicans I interviewed in New Hampshire is: are Romney and Ryan so committed to the principle of deficit reduction that they are willing, in an election year, to take on veterans? That would be extraordinary. The answer is no.

I emailed the Romney campaign. Here’s what I asked:

Talking to voters in New Hampshire, some veterans voiced strong concerns over the scope of likely cuts to the V.A. in the Ryan budget. Has Governor Romney said what will happen to veterans’ benefits under his administration?

The campaign immediately disputed any suggestion that the ticket supported cuts in services for veterans. Here is the Romney campaign’s emailed response:

That is false. Here are the facts:

- The House-passed Fiscal Year 2013 budget matches the President’s discretionary request for veterans for fiscal year 2013: $61.3 billion. Over the ten-year window, the House-passed budget is actually above the President’s request on both the mandatory and discretionary side of the ledger.

- On the mandatory side, the House Republican budget calls for $270 million more than President’s request. On the discretionary side, the House Republican budget calls for $16.4 billion more than President’s request, increasing America’s funding for services and benefits earned by veterans.

In an accompanying statement, Andrea Saul, the Romney campaign spokeswoman, said:

Gov. Romney opposes President Obama’s plan of drastic cuts to veterans’ benefits and the military while exploding the federal budget elsewhere. President Obama’s own V.A. Secretary has admitted that Obama’s devastating defense budget cuts put veterans’ funding at risk for an arbitrary across-the-board cut. Gov. Romney and Paul Ryan are committed to keeping faith with our veterans and providing the care they so richly deserve.

Hmm. How does this fit with the deficit-reducing claims of the Ryan budget and with Ryan’s boast that “We will not duck the tough issues? We will not kick the can down the road?”

It turns out that a reading of the Ryan budget — if you don’t parse Function 920 — is deceptive. In the case of veterans’ benefits, for example, Andrea Saul’s claim that the Romney-Ryan ticket is “committed to keeping faith with our veterans” appears, on the surface, to be legitimate, because none of the mysterious Function 920 cuts show up in her computations.

If veterans’ benefits are to be protected, what programs will be on the chopping block to achieve the $897 billion in cuts listed under the mysterious “Function 920 allowances” category? Will it be education or food inspectors, air traffic controllers or homeland security?

The Ryan budget does, in fact, “duck the tough issues.” Ryan claims to be proposing major steps toward a balanced budget and long-term debt reduction, but he doesn’t really tell voters how he is going to get there.

Interestingly, the budget proposed by President Obama [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/overview ] does specify where cuts would be made, including those called for in the Budget Control Act, the measure approved by Congress [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20086971-503544.html ] and signed into law on August 2, 2011, as part of the deal to raise the debt ceiling and to avoid default on government debt.

A statement in the Obama administration budget claims credit for making explicit the “difficult trade offs” to reach spending reduction goals:

In the Budget Control Act, both parties in Congress and the President agreed to tight spending caps that reduce discretionary spending by $1 trillion over 10 years. This budget reflects that decision. Thus, for all the priority areas we are investing in, difficult trade-offs had to be made to meet these very tight caps. Discretionary spending is reduced from 8.7 percent of G.D.P. in 2011 to 5.0 percent in 2022.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of the omissions in the Ryan budget is the failure of Obama and other Democrats to capitalize on it.

Leading Democrats I spoke to, who refused to be identified because they did not want to be quoted faulting their own party, cited two factors limiting their ability to mount a counter-attack. First, the complexity of the issue makes it difficult for reporters to understand and write about the subject. After wading my way through all of this, I know what they mean. Second, the Ryan tactic of obscuring the cuts successfully plays to a fundamental ambivalence that amounts to an internal contradiction in public opinion: strong support for spending cuts in the abstract, but opposition to many specific cuts in programs that have popular support.

In a speech [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/photos-and-video/video/2012/04/03/president-obama-speaks-associated-press-luncheon#transcript ] on April 3 at the Associated Press luncheon in Washington, Obama tried to make the case against Ryan well before he was picked to run for vice president. Applying the $897 billion in cuts under “Function 920 Allowances” to domestic spending programs, Obama projected a future scenario:

The year after next, nearly 10 million college students would see their financial aid cut by an average of more than $1,000 each. There would be 1,600 fewer medical grants, research grants for things like Alzheimer’s and cancer and AIDS. There would be 4,000 fewer scientific research grants, eliminating support for 48,000 researchers, students, and teachers. Investments in clean energy technologies that are helping us reduce our dependence on foreign oil would be cut by nearly a fifth.

If this budget becomes law and the cuts were applied evenly, starting in 2014, over 200,000 children would lose their chance to get an early education in the Head Start program. Two million mothers and young children would be cut from a program that gives them access to healthy food. There would be 4,500 fewer federal grants at the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. to combat violent crime, financial crime, and help secure our borders. Hundreds of national parks would be forced to close for part or all of the year. We wouldn’t have the capacity to enforce the laws that protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, or the food that we eat.

Cuts to the F.A.A. would likely result in more flight cancellations, delays, and the complete elimination of air traffic control services in parts of the country. Over time, our weather forecasts would become less accurate because we wouldn’t be able to afford to launch new satellites. And that means governors and mayors would have to wait longer to order evacuations in the event of a hurricane.

Ryan, in the meantime, remains consistent. Two days after his speech in Westlake, on Sept. 6, he reiterated his claims [ http://www.mittromney.com/news/press/2012/09/paul-ryan-we-will-fix-mess-washington ] at a rally in Colorado Springs:

So here is our commitment. We are not going to duck the tough issues and kick the can down the road. We are going to lead and fix this mess in Washington. And we are not going to spend the next four years blaming people from the last four years. We’re going to take responsibility and get the job done, reach across the aisle and fix this problem, get people back to work, create jobs, growth.

In an interview, Christopher Van Hollen Jr. of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Budget Committee, told me that the Ryan budget “is a shell game designed to hide the damage to the country.” Van Hollen is frustrated that the damage to which he alludes has not become a campaign issue: “The magnitude of this budget gimmick takes your breath away.”

Thomas B. Edsall [ http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/author/thomas-b-edsall/ ], a professor of journalism at Columbia University, is the author of the book “The Age of Austerity: How Scarcity Will Remake American Politics [ http://www.amazon.com/The-Age-Austerity-Scarcity-ebook/dp/B0050DIX2E ],” which was published earlier this year.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://campaignstops.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/09/edsall-the-ryan-sinkhole/ [with comments]


--


Jeff Flake Opposes Farm Subsidies; Flake Family Farm Took Subsidies

09/12/2012
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/jeff-flake-farm-subsidies_n_1874696.html [with comments]


--


The End of the Middle Class Century: How the 1% Won the Last 30 Years

By Derek Thompson
Sep 11 2012, 12:31 PM ET

Between 1921 and 2008, the top 10% and the bottom 90% shared income gains equally. The split was 50-50 exactly, according to a new fun interactive graphic built by the Economic Policy Institute [ http://stateofworkingamerica.org/who-gains/#/?start=1921&end=1971 ] with data from economist Emmanuel Saez.



But between 1971 and 2008, real income declined for the bottom 90%. All the growth went to the top 10%, and more than half went to the top percentile.



Saez' income data is widely used, but also controversial, since it focuses on market wages and discounts gains from government programs to help the lower-income. But this is a familiar story. The remarkable gains of the (broadly-defined) "middle class" in the middle of this century stopped cold in the last quarter of the 1900s. The all-important and impossible-to-answer question is whether the next generation will look more like the 30 years after World War II or the last 30 years.

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/the-end-of-the-middle-class-century-how-the-1-won-the-last-30-years/262221/ [with comments]


--


Every Job We Created and Lost in the Last 5 Years—in 2 Graphs

By Derek Thompson
Sep 10 2012, 5:51 PM ET

The Great Recession hit rock bottom in February 2010. If you compare jobs lost two years before the trough with 30 months after the trough, you'll find only three large sectors have made up their losses:

-- Mining (extractors, operators, engineers), which is up 90,000.

-- Utilities (repairers, installers, more engineers), which is up 11,000.

-- Leisure & Hospitality (fitness trainers, artists, plus everybody who works with food, hotels, or parks), which is up 102,000.

Besides health care and education, which never stopped growing, every other major job sector is net negative compared to five years ago. These graphs from today's Bloomberg Brief [ http://www.bloomberg.com/ (took a look, particular direct link not evident in quick searches)] by Scott Johnson.





An amazing thing about the health care sector is that it expanded at the same rate both approaching the unemployment trough and coming out of it. Government is the odd duck, growing as unemployment increased and shedding jobs as the economy grew.

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/09/every-job-we-created-and-lost-in-the-last-5-years-in-2-graphs/262176/ [with comments]


--


Obama Hits Romney With New Medicare Study



Sep 9, 2012
By Associated Press

ORLANDO, Fla. — President Barack Obama is drawing new attention to Medicare in the all-important battleground of Florida, taking on his Republican challenger Mitt Romney on an issue that has been more favorable to Democrats.

Campaigning for a second day in Florida, where older voters and workers approaching retirement hold sway, Obama on Sunday was expected to highlight a study by a Democratic leaning group that concluded that on average a man or woman retiring at age 65 in 2023, would have to pay $59,500 more for health care over the length of their retirement under Romney’s plan.

The numbers are even higher for younger Americans who retire later, the study found. A person who qualifies for Medicare in 2030 – today’s 48-year-old – would see an increase of $124,600 in Medicare costs over their retirement period.

While Romney’s changes to Medicare would affect future retirees, the study also said that Romney’s plan to get rid of Obama’s health care law could raise health care costs in retirement by $11,000 for the average person who is 65 years old today by reinstating limits on prescription drug coverage.

The study was conducted by David Cutler, a Harvard professor and health policy expert who served in the Clinton administration and was Obama’s top health care adviser during the 2008 presidential campaign. Cutler conducted the study for the liberal Center for American Progress Action Fund.

A senior administration official said Obama would draw attention to the study on Sunday as part of an overarching economic message as he takes his two-day Florida bus tour to Melbourne and West Palm Beach on Florida’s Atlantic Coast.

Romney would seek to contain Medicare costs by giving retirees voucher-like government payments that they could use to either buy regular Medicare or private health insurance. But Cutler says older Americans would have to pay more out of pocket to cover the rising costs of health care.

Obama aides believe they successfully forced Romney to temporarily drop his emphasis on the sluggish economy last month by raising the Medicare issue in the wake of Romney’s selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as his running mate. Romney and Ryan countered by arguing that Obama planned to cut hundreds of billions of dollars in Medicare spending over 10 years to pay for his health care plan.

Whether either side gained politically from that debate is unclear. But Republican analysts say it did take Romney off his economic focus, which they say is essential for him to win the election, especially after a bleak jobs report that showed meager job growth and more unemployed people choosing not to seek work.

Campaigning in Kissimmee, Fla., on Saturday, Obama had already worked Medicare into rally speeches.

“I want you to know I will never turn Medicare into a voucher,” he told a high energy crowd of 3,000 at the Kissimmee Civic Center. “I believe no American should ever have to spend their golden years at the mercy of insurance companies. After a lifetime of labor, you should retire with dignity and respect.”

Vice President Joe Biden, campaigning in Ohio, called the GOP plan “Vouchercare.”

Biden said the Romney and Ryan plan would force “Mom” to go out into the insurance market and look for the best deal she can find. If the plan costs more than the voucher amount, “They say, `Mom go borrow somewhere,’ to pay for it, Biden said.

Cutler’s Democratic affiliations make him vulnerable to accusations of partisanship. But much of his data is drawn from studies by the independent Congressional Budget Office, which has projected even higher costs to future retirees under a 2011 budget plan written by Ryan, a Wisconsin Republican who chairs the House Budget Committee.

The budget agency said future retirees would pay more under Ryan’s plan than if they went into traditional Medicare. By 2030, a typical 65-year-old would be paying two-thirds of his or her health costs, the agency said.

Romney spokeswoman Amanda Henneberg said the vice president’s comments were “further proof that the Obama campaign is unable and unwilling to talk honestly or substantively about the most important issues driving the country.”

Romney and Ryan were planning to be off the campaign trail Sunday, although both men taped appearances on several Sunday talk shows.

As the campaign moves in to its post-convention frenetic pace, the Obama campaign also began to tar Romney with guilt by association, accusing him of embracing extreme partisan policies.

The campaign accused Romney of not standing up to “the most strident voices in his party” because he acknowledged Rep. Steve King at an Iowa rally. King is a conservative congressman from Iowa who has taken tough anti-immigration stances, including suggesting an electrified fence along the Mexican border.

“This man needs to be your congressman again,” Romney said at an event Friday. “I want him as my partner in Washington D.C.”

The Democratic National Committee followed with a Web video Saturday that concluded in bold letters: “Mitt Romney & Steve King. Partners in extremism.”

Watch the video here [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A5SkTFZkQKI ]:

Romney spokesman Kevin Madden brushed aside the criticism. King “has been supportive of the governor and he’s come to a number of our events in the past,” Madden told reporters.

The Obama camp again accused Romney of “associating with some of the most strident and divisive voices in the Republican Party,” after a Romney aide told reporters that the GOP nominee “spoke briefly” with conservative televangelist Pat Robertson at a campaign event on Saturday.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://newsone.com/2035005/obama-romney-medicare/ [with comments]


--


Hey Republicans! Stop Misusing My Medicare Study!



David Cutler
August 21, 2012 | 12:31 pm

Supporters for the Romney-Ryan approach to Medicare have a new talking point. They say a new study [ http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1273025 ] by “three liberal Harvard economists” proves that the plan’s competition will reduce health care costs without harming beneficiaries. But the study doesn’t say that.

And I should know. I’m one of the economists who wrote it.

Both Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan have said they would like to convert Medicare into a "premium support" (nee voucher) system. Their plans are different, and Ryan himself has proposed several versions. But they share a basic architecture. Starting ten years from now, new retirees would not receive a Medicare card, as they would today. Instead, they would receive a voucher and shop for an insurance policy in a specially regulated market.

The voucher would equal the price of the second-cheapest plan in the market, although its value would be less if insurance prices rose faster than a pre-determined spending cap (of gross domestic product plus half a percentage point)—as they are projected to do. Both Romney and Ryan now say that traditional Medicare, the government-run insurance program, would be among the options in the marketplace. But they would not guarantee that voucher can pay for it. In fact, that’s very much the point of the proposal: To create more competition between Medicare and private plans, even if that means Medicare ends up costing more than the vouchers are worth.

How would this affect seniors? In particular, how many seniors would end up paying more to stay in traditional Medicare?

That’s the question that Zirui Song, Michael Chernew, and I set out to answer in the study, which was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association [id.]. To do this, we examined what would have happened if, today, something like the Romney-Ryan plan were in place: In other words, if today’s seniors were getting vouchers, how much would those vouchers be worth?

We found that 24 million seniors, or about two-thirds of the people presently enrolled in the traditional Medicare program, would have to pay more—specifically, an average of $64 per month or $768 per year. Some seniors already enroll in private plans, as part of the “Medicare Advantage” option that has existed, in one form or another, for many years. About 7 million seniors or more than 90 percent of that group would have to pay more.

Supporters of voucher schemes have taken this to be vindication. Among them are James Capretta and Yuval Levin [ http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/more-mediscare_649725.html ], writing for the Weekly Standard. After all, hadn’t we found that the private plans were cheaper than old-fashioned, government-run Medicare? Doesn’t that prove competition can really lower costs?

Here’s how Capretta and Levin put it:

The Harvard researchers looked at the (limited and constricted) private-plan option already operating in Medicare today—a program called Medicare Advantage … and found that, on average, the Medicare Advantage plans cost far, far less than federally run fee-for-service Medicare.

This is the opposite of what Democrats were saying a year ago. Then, they were touting a Congressional Budget Office study that estimated the private plans offered to Medicare beneficiaries in the system Ryan envisions would cost much more than traditional fee-for-service Medicare, and thus require higher premiums—$6,400 higher in 2022—to be paid by beneficiaries. This new study shows otherwise, and proves the very point that champions of premium support have been making for years.

The $64-per-month estimate is based on the study’s finding that private plans can deliver the full Medicare package of benefits at a significantly lower cost—nearly 10 percent lower, on average—than the government-administered fee-for-service program. That’s precisely the win-win proposition Paul Ryan has been touting: Beneficiaries could get their comprehensive Medicare benefits for no additional premium if they selected the less expensive private plans, and taxpayers would spend 10 percent less on the subsidies for the Medicare program.

But this is a distortion of our findings, for several reasons. First, it confuses costs and payments. Medicare Advantage plans bid less than traditional Medicare, but they are paid more. The plans are officially supposed to use these higher payments to sweeten the pot—add additional benefits, reduce cost sharing, and the like—though some likely go for profit as well. This is why the Affordable Care Act reduced the amount that the government pays to managed care plans, over howls of protest from conservatives. Bidding less does no good for the program if the government then overpays relative to what was bid.

Second, they miss a key part of the reason why the Congressional Budget Office estimated that Ryan’s voucher proposal would cost seniors more. Medicare Advantage plans can only cost what they do because the traditional Medicare program is in place to help them. Specifically, Medicare sets very low payment rates to providers, and Medicare Advantage plans bargain up a bit from those rates. Get rid of the traditional Medicare program, or even reduce its enrollment substantially, and the estimated cost of Medicare Advantage premiums skyrockets.

Third, determining whether the private plans are really more efficient than traditional Medicare requires more than just knowing that they bid less. The question is why private plans come in cheaper. We take a cautious, nuanced view:

Private plans can cost less than traditional Medicare because: (1) they may use medical resources more efficiently; (2) they may enroll healthier patients relative to the risk-adjusted payment; or (3) their negotiated prices may not fully reflect the costs of indirect medical education or payments for disadvantaged hospitals, which traditional Medicare explicitly pays. The magnitudes of efficiency, selection, and avoided add-on payments are unclear... To the extent that the 9% cost advantage reflects efficiency, it suggests there are better ways to provide the traditional Medicare benefit.”

To put it a bit more plainly, it’s possible that the private plans are cheaper because they really do offer the same benefits at a lower cost. It’s also possible that the private plans are cheaper because the insurers are very good at attracting the best risks—that is, the healthiest seniors least likely to run up medical bills—or because they don’t also subsidize other parts of our health care system, such as medical education. In effect, they may be gaming the system. At this point, we really don’t know which answer is correct, although it’s entirely possible all three are true, to an extent.

Making the wrong assumption here could be fatal, particularly to those seniors with the gravest health needs. If managed care plans are able to select healthier enrollees—by skimping on benefits in ways that get around whatever regulations (if any) the Romney-Ryan plan put in place—traditional Medicare will end up with less healthy seniors, driving up its costs. The system will spiral out of control. The costs will proportionately rise and the guarantee of benefits that is the core of the Medicare program would erode. That is why many economists are wary of a pure premiums support model.

At the very least, it makes sense to see how premium-support works in the non-elderly population, since their health needs overall are less severe. The Affordable Care Act does that, by creating “exchanges” for people who don’t have employer-sponsored coverage. Watching and learning from that initiative would help in designing a workable system for the elderly. That is why, on many counts, the biggest lesson is that allowing the Affordable Care Act to work—rather than trying to take it off the books—might be the best way for premium support to succeed.

David Cutler [ http://scholar.harvard.edu/cutler/ ] is Otto Eckstein Professor of Applied Economics at Harvard University. In 2008, he was senior health care advisor to the Obama Presidential campaign.

Copyright 2012 The New Republic

http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/106324/cutler-chernew-medicare-study-ryan-voucher-premium-support-competition [with comments]


--


Increased Costs During Retirement Under the Romney-Ryan Medicare Plan


Gov. Mitt Romney writes on a white board as he talks about Medicare during a news conference. The increase in health care costs under the Romney-Ryan plan for Medicare would be financially debilitating for all seniors.
SOURCE: AP/ Evan Vucci


[ http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/healthcare/news/2012/08/24/33897/infographic-how-much-more-will-the-romney-ryan-medicare-plan-cost-you/ ]

Download the report [this item]:
http://www.americanprogressaction.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/RomneyUHealthPlan2.pdf [PDF]

By David Cutler, Topher Spiro, and Maura Calsyn | August 24, 2012

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) want to convert our nation’s Medicare program into a voucher system for people who are under 55 years of age. Under their plan seniors beginning in 2023 would receive vouchers to purchase health insurance from private insurance companies or from traditional Medicare. If premiums for traditional Medicare or the private plan they choose cost more than the voucher amount, then seniors would have to pay the difference themselves.

The Romney-Ryan plan would also convert the joint state-federal Medicaid program into a so-called block grant program, designating a reduced amount of fund s for each state. And the Romney-Ryan plan would repeal the Affordable Care Act, which reduces drug costs and Medicare premiums and increases access to preventive services for all seniors.

Using data from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and other government agencies along with parameters from published academic research studies, this study analyzes the impact of the Romney-Ryan plan on current and future seniors and shows that the increase in health care costs under the Romney-Ryan plan would be financially debilitating for all seniors. We detail these findings in the pages that follow, but briefly here are the findings.

Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan claim that no one over 55 will be affected by their health care plan. This claim is false. Their plan would harm all seniors. The Romney-Ryan plan would hurt current seniors in two important ways:

- Increased drug costs and higher Medicare premiums. By repealing the Affordable Care Act, the Romney-Ryan plan would raise health care costs in retirement by $11,000 for the average person who is 65 years old today.

- Increased long-term care costs, including increased costs for nursing home care, because of cuts to Medicaid. A substantial share of Medicaid spending pays for health care costs for Medicare beneficiaries. The Romney-Ryan Medicaid cuts mean a loss of over $2,500 annually for seniors currently on Medicare who also rely on Medicaid. Unlike the Medicare voucher system that would begin in 2023 the cuts to Medicaid would begin almost immediately.

For seniors who will become eligible for Medicare after 2022, the financial harm would be even worse.

- Increasingly unaffordable costs for all seniors who qualify for Medicare after 2022. For seniors turning 65 in 2023, Medicare costs during retirement would increase by $59,500 in 2012 dollars under the Romney-Ryan plan. Because under the Romney-Ryan plan the amount of seniors’ vouchers will not keep pace with rising health care costs, these numbers are even worse for future generations. In today’s dollars seniors who qualify for Medicare in 2030 would see an increase of $124,600 in Medicare costs over their retirement. Seniors who qualify for Medicare in 2040 will see an increase of $216,600. And by 2050 newly eligible seniors will pay $331,200 more in Medicare costs over their retirement.

- Additional costs from private plans cherry picking healthier patients. Three-fourths of all Medicare beneficiaries are currently in traditional Medicare. The Romney-Ryan plan would include traditional Medicare as an option in the proposed program, but the costs for seniors who choose to remain in the traditional Medicare program would likely increase even more sharply than for seniors who chose a private plan. Most analysts expect the traditional Medicare plan to attract Medicare beneficiaries with the greatest health needs. In that case, Medicare would no longer enjoy a balanced risk pool and seniors choosing traditional Medicare could wind up paying an extra $29,000 on average over their retirement lifetime above and beyond the costs described above.

These estimates are conservative because we modeled the plan that Rep. Ryan released—and that Gov. Romney endorsed—earlier this year. As the Congressional Budget Office has estimated, Rep. Ryan’s original 2011 plan would result in increased costs that are several orders of magnitude greater than those modeled here.

Let’s examine each of these troubling consequences in turn.

Increased costs for current seniors

Increased drug costs and higher premiums

The Affordable Care Act saves money for both current and future seniors, but Gov. Romney has promised to repeal the Affordable Care Act if he is elected president. Repealing the Affordable Care Act will harm the 36 million current seniors in the traditional Medicare program in four ways.

First, cost sharing for parts A (hospital care) and B (physician services) will increase because the Affordable Care Act’s adjustments to payment rates for health care providers other than physicians will be repealed. Since costs per hospitalization or nursing home stay will rise, the costs that beneficiaries have to pay will also rise.

Second, this change will lead to increases in premiums paid by beneficiaries for Medicare part B. Third, the “donut hole” in the prescription drug plan, which will be closed by the Affordable Care Act, would be reopened, meaning both current and future seniors would pay more for the medicines they need.

Finally, cost sharing for preventive services, which is eliminated under the Affordable Care Act, would be reinstated, meaning that seniors would have to pay for important preventive care, including cancer screenings that they now access for free.

Despite Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan’s claims that their plan will not affect current seniors, estimates of the costs to seniors of repealing the Affordable Care Act suggests that annual costs for current seniors in traditional Medicare would rise by more than $200 in 2013, and that added cost would increase to more than $700 in 2021.

To assess the long-term impact of these cost increases on seniors, we used the Social Security Administration’s life tables to translate these annual increases into Medicare costs over the course of their retirement. To account for inflation, we express all future amounts in 2012 dollars.

Figure 1 shows our results.



We estimate that a current 70 year old will pay nearly $8,000 more for Medicare in retirement as a result of the Romney-Ryan plan. A current 65 year old will pay over $11,000 more for Medicare in retirement. And a current 55 year old will pay over $18,000 more for Medicare in retirement.

Increased long-term care costs, including nursing home costs

Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan propose turning Medicaid into a block grant and cutting Medicaid spending by indexing the growth of the program to economywide inflation and population growth. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that by 2022, federal spending on Medicaid will fall 35 percent relative to a baseline that excludes the Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. By 2030 federal Medicaid spending will be 49 percent lower than the non-Affordable Care Act baseline.

Because the Romney-Ryan plan would not implement reforms that reduce health spending overall, but only reduce the amount that the federal government will pay toward that spending in Medicaid, states and Medicaid beneficiaries will have to shoulder the total burden of the 49 percent reduction in federal spending. This would have a significant effect on seniors, as 9 million Medicare recipients currently depend on Medicaid funds, including 1.9 million seniors who rely on Medicaid to support their long-term care needs.

To focus on how the Romney-Ryan plan affects current seniors, we focus only on Medicare beneficiaries who are 65 or older. Currently, 23 percent of Medicaid expenditures are paid on behalf of seniors who are also enrolled in Medicare. We apply this percentage to the total Medicaid cuts (excluding the increased Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act) in the first 10 years of the Romney-Ryan budget. We then divide this product by the projected number of seniors who would rely on Medicaid over the next 10 years.

On average, the Romney-Ryan Medicaid cuts would mean an annual decrease of $2,500 in benefits for each senior who relies on Medicaid to help pay for long-term care. To compensate for these cuts, either seniors or their families would have to pay more for their current levels of care or be forced to cut back on care.

Increased costs for future seniors

Beginning in 2023 the Romney-Ryan plan would convert Medicare spending into “premium support,” providing vouchers to beneficiaries to purchase either a private health insurance plan or the traditional Medicare plan. Private insurance plans would submit bids for how much they would charge to provide coverage. The voucher would be tied to the premium of the private plan with the second-lowest cost, or the premium for traditional Medicare—whichever is lower. If beneficiaries choose a plan that costs more than the voucher, they must pay the difference.

In some geographic areas traditional Medicare might make the lowest bid, but in others some private plans might make lower bids. In areas where private plans make bids that are lower than the cost of traditional Medicare, the voucher would be tied to the premium of a private plan. As a result many beneficiaries would be forced to pay sharply higher premiums to stay in traditional Medicare.

The Romney-Ryan plan not only would shift costs to seniors who wanted to stay in a traditional Medicare plan but would also increase costs to all seniors. The plan would set the initial voucher amount at $7,500 in 2023. The plan caps the rate of growth in the voucher amount to the rate of growth of gross domestic product plus 0.5 percentage points. This growth rate is much slower than the projected growth in health care costs, which means that the voucher would become increasingly insufficient to cover the costs of insurance, therefore shifting an increasing share of insurance premium costs to seniors. There are no provisions in the Romney-Ryan plan that would be expected to reduce the rate of growth of these costs.

Seniors will face higher costs not only because of this cost shift from the government but also because the Romney-Ryan plan increases systemwide costs by promoting private insurance that will be more costly than the existing Medicare system. The Romney-Ryan plan would cost more than the current Medicare system because, as the Congressional Budget Office has documented, private insurance companies have higher profits and administrative costs than Medicare does, and because the plan would reduce the market share, and therefore the purchasing power, of traditional Medicare.

Gov. Romney and Rep. Ryan claim that privatizing Medicare will increase competition among health plans, allowing market forces to lower costs. But the Romney-Ryan plan does not address underlying health care costs or consider that the health care market functions differently than other consumer markets. Ample evidence exists that premium support would not foster the type of competition that reduces prices. The Congressional Budget Office concludes that premium-support plans would achieve much of their federal savings from “increases in the premiums paid by beneficiaries, not from increases in the efficiency of health care delivery.”

There also is evidence that “Medicare beneficiaries are less responsive to differences in premiums when choosing a health plan than the privately insured population is, so plans may have less incentive to compete on the basis of premiums in the Medicare market than in the privately insured market.” These concerns have played out in the part D market, where most savings achieved by the program are a result of factors other than competition, including lower enrollment and greater generic utilization.

Increased costs to all seniors who qualify for Medicare after 2022

Because the Romney-Ryan voucher would grow more slowly than health care costs, seniors would become responsible for a greater share of the premium over time. We find that the Romney-Ryan plan’s cost-shifting effect alone would raise the average health care bill:

- For seniors reaching age 65 in 2023 by $32,900

- For seniors reaching age 66 in 2030 by $73,600

- For seniors reaching age 67 in 2040 by $139,100

- For seniors reaching age 67 in 2050 by $225,200

This significant increase in health care costs for seniors in the future due to this cost-shifting effect would consume 8 percent of their lifetime Social Security benefits for those turning 65 in 2023, 17 percent of lifetime Social Security benefits for those turning 66 in 2030, 30 percent of lifetime Social Security benefits for those turning 67 in 2040, and 42 percent of lifetime Social Security benefits for those turning 67 in 2050.

The Romney-Ryan plan would also raise systemwide health care costs, adding even more to what seniors would pay under this plan. As the share of the population participating in traditional Medicare declines, Medicare’s market share would fall and neither Medicare nor any single private insurer would have sufficient market share to negotiate provider prices as low as Medicare can achieve now. In addition, with more private insurance companies involved in Medicare, administrative costs and profits would rise.

In analyzing the 2011 version of the Ryan plan, the Congressional Budget Office projected that these factors would raise Medicare costs by 39 percent starting in 2022. Because there is considerable uncertainty about how many seniors would switch to the private plans and how rapidly Medicare’s bargaining power would decline, we decided to be conservative and assume that costs would rise by only half as much as in the CBO model, and that it would take 10 years for the loss in bargaining power to phase in. Even with these conservative assumptions, we find very large additional costs for seniors. The total additional retirement cost to seniors who reach retirement age after 2022 under the Romney-Ryan plan is shown in Figure 2.



Once you add the systemwide costs to the cost-shifting effects listed above the total increase is:

- $59,500 for seniors reaching age 65 in 2023

- $124,600 for seniors reaching age 66 in 2030

- $216,600 for seniors reaching age 67 in 2040

- $331,200 for seniors reaching age 67 in 2050

While retirees’ incomes will also increase over time as the cost-of-living adjustment to Social Security rises, it will not increase as rapidly as these required payments. The total additional costs to seniors would consume 15 percent of lifetime Social Security benefits by 2023, 29 percent by 2030, 46 percent by 2040, and 62 percent by 2050.

Additional costs from private plans cherry picking healthier patients

The impact of the Romney-Ryan plan would be even greater for seniors who want to remain in traditional Medicare. Over time, the costs associated with enrolling in traditional Medicare under the Romney-Ryan voucher system are likely to rise, potentially quite dramatically. The figures above reflect costs for the average Medicare patient, whether they are enrolled in traditional Medicare or a private plan. But the traditional Medicare program is likely to attract a disproportionate share of Medicare patients with the greatest health needs because these patients are most dependent on the broad choice of providers available in traditional Medicare.

Since the mid-1980s, private Medicare plans have attracted the healthiest, lowest-cost enrollees from the Medicare population—a phenomenon known as “adverse selection.” This trend would accelerate under the Romney-Ryan plan. If less healthy, more costly beneficiaries are left behind in traditional Medicare, then premiums for traditional Medicare would rise. In turn, more beneficiaries would leave traditional Medicare, causing premiums to rise further, and so on—creating a so-called “death spiral.”

The Romney-Ryan plan would adjust the voucher for health status—redistributing payments from plans with healthier enrollees to plans with less healthy enrollees. This “risk adjustment” mechanism would certainly help, but would still be insufficient at controlling costs. Current risk-adjustment methods are still far from perfect. The current risk-adjustment model used to calculate payments to Medicare Advantage plans can account for only 11 percent of the total variation in Medicare enrollees’ annual costs.Current methods tend to overpay plans with healthier enrollees and underpay plans with less healthy enrollees. Moreover, recent studies show that private health plans have become increasingly sophisticated at manipulating how they code the health status of their patients, undermining the risk-adjustment procedures.

Thus, even with risk adjustment, premiums for traditional Medicare would likely rise and enrollment would likely decline over time under the Romney-Ryan plan. This outcome is made more probable by the fact that the Romney-Ryan plan would not require private plans to provide a standard set of benefits—allowing them to design benefits that attract healthier beneficiaries.

To our knowledge, there is only one peer-reviewed study, “The Distributional Consequences of a Medicare Premium Support Proposal,” by University of California-Los Angeles professor Thomas Rice and health consultant Katherine A. Desmond, that analyzes the effects of a Medicare voucher system that both retains traditional Medicare and uses risk adjustment to calculate payments to plans. This study simulates the additional costs that enrollees would face if they wish to remain in traditional Medicare under various assumptions about the effectiveness of risk adjustment.

The plan modeled in this study and Romney-Ryan are remarkably similar in that both are premium support plans with risk adjustment and a traditional Medicare option. Some differences will doubtlessly occur, but we do not believe these differences are likely to change our results. Moreover, we focus on the results that use the most favorable assumptions for the Romney-Ryan plan. We use the Rice-Desmond results and update them to reflect expected Medicare costs in 2022 instead of 1996, the baseline year they use. Table 1 shows the additional costs that would be paid in each calendar year by participants in traditional Medicare because of adverse selection.



Even assuming highly successful risk-adjustment of 75 percent, far beyond what policy-makers have currently achieved, added lifetime retirement costs from adverse selection would likely exceed $29,000 in 2012 dollars.

Conclusion

Under the Romney-Ryan plan, all Americans would be forced to spend substantially more money on health care during their retirements—from tens of thousands of dollars for current seniors to hundreds of thousands of dollars more for future seniors. Those who are unable to afford these significantly increased health care costs would be forced to reduce other retirement spending or forgo necessary care.

There is no question that the long-term costs of medical care need to be addressed. But forcing seniors to shoulder the entire burden of rising health care costs is not the solution. A better, more just solution is to address the underlying causes of high health care costs, reducing costs overall, and enabling everyone to pay less without compromising access. The Affordable Care Act takes many steps in this direction, but as we have outlined elsewhere, there is more to be done to make the system more efficient overall and create better value for both individuals as well as the government.

David Cutler is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund and the Otto Eckstein professor of applied economics at Harvard University, Topher Spiro is the Managing Director for Health Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund, and Maura Calsyn is the Associate Director for Health Policy at the Center for American Progress Action Fund.

© 2012 Center for American Progress Action Fund

http://www.americanprogressaction.org/issues/healthcare/report/2012/08/24/33915/increased-costs-during-retirement-under-the-romney-ryan-medicare-plan/


--


Aurora’s Aftermath

Editorial
Published: September 11, 2012

Nearly two months after the shooting spree [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/21/us/shooting-at-colorado-theater-showing-batman-movie.html ] in Colorado that left 12 dead and 58 wounded, survivors, civic leaders and generous citizens are confronting the victims’ traumas and a future of costly care. This is the painful challenge that communities across America typically have to face after the national spotlight moves elsewhere. It is a little-noticed part of the repetitious ritual of gun tragedy — the reckoning in fuller measure of the damage shooters inflict in the absence of sensible gun controls.

Donations have poured in after the Aurora shootings, topping $5 million [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/29/us/families-of-aurora-shooting-victims-criticize-aid-fund.html ]. But no one can tell what the true cost will be for gravely wounded survivors like Ashley Moser, a 25-year-old mother who was pregnant and had sought a night’s fun at the movies. Ms. Moser’s 6-year-old daughter, Veronica, was shot to death. The mother miscarried at the hospital where she was treated for severe neck and abdomen wounds. She is paralyzed, with doctors hoping she can regain use of her arms, according to her family.

Other victims were also permanently disabled, some without medical insurance, and might need millions of dollars to survive. A man with a severed spine has been on a ventilator. A woman who lost her spleen and a kidney is rehabbing a shattered leg. Angry and confused, needy victims — some in wheelchairs — have suffered the added pain of open discord, voiced in local meetings, over how the charity funds should be distributed. This, too, is part of the shooter’s damage to the community.

Rich Audsley, a civic leader, has been appointed as an adviser to the 7/20 Recovery Committee, the charity dispersal group, on the basis of the sobering expertise he gained in aiding survivors of the 1999 Colorado gun massacre at Columbine High School.

The grim prognoses of Aurora victims struggling beyond the mayhem should be required reading for all the many politicians who mouth sympathy but ritualistically genuflect to the gun lobby. There are innocent citizens bearing such wounds all across the nation; there will be more after the shootings next time.

*

Related

Times Topic: James Holmes (Batman Shootings, Aurora, Colo.)
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/h/james_holmes/index.html

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/opinion/auroras-aftermath.html


--


Gosh, Could Obamacare Be Working?

September 14, 2011
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/94924/uninsured-young-adult-affordable-care-act-census [with comments]

*

Gosh, Could Obamacare Be Working? (Part 2)
September 15, 2011
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/94992/hhs-medicare-advantage-data-premiums-enrollment-republican [with comment]

*

Gosh, Is Obamacare Working? (Part 3)

September 21, 2011
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/95227/obamacare-insurance-young-adults-working [with comment]

*

More Obamacare News: 2.5M Young Adults Got Insurance
December 14, 2011
http://www.tnr.com/blog/jonathan-cohn/98525/young-adults-under-25-insurance-obamacare-cdc-hhs [with comments]

*

Obamacare Is Working, Cont’d

September 12, 2012
http://www.tnr.com/blog/plank/107163/obamacare-young-adults-census-uninsured-rate-change-2010-2011 [with comment]


--


New Medical Care Networks Show Savings

By ABBY GOODNOUGH
Published: September 11, 2012

A new model for delivering medical care, one promoted by the federal health care law [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/health_insurance_and_managed_care/health_care_reform/index.html ], holds promise for slowing the cost of treating the sickest, most expensive patients, according to a new study.

The sweeping law, enacted in 2010 and upheld by the Supreme Court this summer, encourages the creation of “accountable care organizations” — networks of hospitals, doctors groups and other health care providers that collaborate to keep a defined group of patients healthier. The groups share in the savings if they meet quality and cost targets.

The study [ http://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?articleid=1357260 ], which is being published Wednesday in The Journal of the American Medical Association [ http://jama.jamanetwork.com/journal.aspx ( http://jama.jamanetwork.com/collection.aspx?categoryid=5488 )], found that a predecessor to accountable care organizations achieved particular savings in caring for patients eligible for both Medicare [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicare/index.html ] and Medicaid [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/health/diseasesconditionsandhealthtopics/medicaid/index.html ].

Many of those patients have multiple, severe health conditions and are especially expensive: The nation’s nine million “dual eligibles,” as they are known, make up 15 percent of the Medicaid population but account for 39 percent of the program’s spending.

In the predecessor program, a Medicare experiment that ran from 2005 to 2010, 10 doctors groups from around the country received bonus payments if they met quality targets and achieved lower cost growth compared with Medicare spending on other patients in their region.

The study, conducted by researchers from the Dartmouth Institute for Health Policy and Clinical Practice [ http://tdi.dartmouth.edu/ ], found that the growth in spending per “dual eligible” patient slowed by $532 a year, or 5 percent, after doctors groups joined the demonstration program.

Over all, spending on dual eligibles in the program grew at only 60 percent of the rate of the control group.

“The fact that they saved any money at all is a pretty significant finding,” said Carrie H. Colla, the study’s lead author. “It shows promise in that they did significantly improve quality while modestly improving spending.”

The study found that for dual eligibles, the savings came largely from reducing hospital stays.

Savings for the overall patient population in the experiment was more modest: Spending per patient slowed by $114 a year after the 10 doctors groups joined the demonstration program.

The groups varied significantly in how much they spent per patient and how much they slowed the growth of spending over time. The doctors group that spent the most before joining the program — the University of Michigan Faculty Group Practice, based in Ann Arbor — also saved the most, an average of $2,499 per dual eligible patient annually.

But the group that spent the least on such patients before entering the program — Marshfield Clinic, in Wisconsin — also achieved notable savings, the study found, slowing the growth of spending per dual eligible patient by an average of $987 per year.

The findings come as accountable care organizations are forming around the country. According to the Department of Health and Human Services, more than 150 such groups now serve about 2.4 million Medicare patients.

In the predecessor program, the Medicare Physician Group Practice Demonstration, participating doctor groups were eligible for up to 80 percent of any savings they generated if they could also show improvement on 32 quality measures.

*

Related

Study of U.S. Health Care System Finds Both Waste and Opportunity to Improve (September 12, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/health/policy/waste-and-promise-seen-in-us-health-care-system.html

Health Care Premiums Rise Slightly (September 12, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/health-care-premiums-rise-modestly-report-says.html

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/health/policy/medical-care-networks-show-savings-study-finds.html


--


Fewer Uninsured People

Editorial
Published: September 12, 2012

The number of Americans who lack health insurance declined last year [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/us/us-incomes-dropped-last-year-census-bureau-says.html ], the first drop since 2007. This is, in large part, the result of the health care reform law and better coverage under public programs like Medicaid. This also shows why repealing the health care law or revamping and shrinking Medicaid, as many Republicans want to do, would be disastrous moves.

The Census Bureau reported [ http://www.census.gov/prod/2012pubs/p60-243.pdf ] on Wednesday that the number of people without health coverage fell to 48.6 million in 2011, or 15.7 percent of the population, down from 49.9 million, or 16.3 percent of the population, in 2010. Health experts attributed a big chunk of the drop to a provision in the health care reform law that allows children to remain on their parents’ policies until age 26. Some three million young adults took advantage of that provision, other surveys show.

The bureau also reported that the percentage of people covered by private insurance stayed flat at 63.9 percent, the first time in a decade it has not fallen. The percentage of Americans covered by government programs, like Medicare, Medicaid, a related children’s health program, and military plans, increased for the fifth consecutive year to reach 32.2 percent in 2011. That is a testament to the importance of government programs in troubled economic times.

In other good news, a survey [ http://ehbs.kff.org/ ] by the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Health Research and Educational Trust showed that average premiums for employer-sponsored health insurance for family coverage rose 4 percent from last year and individual coverage rose 3 percent — well below the double-digit increases in the past decade. The recession accounts for some of this moderation in costs. The spread of high deductible health plans may also have reduced spending, and some experts think the health care reforms, which don’t fully kick in until 2014, are already pushing health care providers and insurers to lower their costs.

The Census Bureau also reported that median household income, adjusted for inflation, declined last year to $50,054, a level not seen since the mid-1990s, and that income inequality grew significantly worse, as incomes rose for the top earners. Still, the percentage of Americans living in poverty declined slightly after rising in the previous three years, largely because more people shifted from part-time to full-time work. The census data underscore the importance of retaining the health care reforms, which will increasingly make insurance more affordable for middle-class families.

*

Related

U.S. Income Gap Rose, Sign of Uneven Recovery (September 12, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/us/us-incomes-dropped-last-year-census-bureau-says.html

Census Bureau Chart and Report on Income Change and Poverty (September 12, 2012)
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/13/us/13census-doc.html

*

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/13/opinion/fewer-uninsured-people.html


--


Census: Middle class shrinks to an all-time low


[ http://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/public-school-students-and-poverty/2012/09/09/358fa79a-facf-11e1-ab03-6dd8b366b547_graphic.html ]
September 12, 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/poverty-was-flat-in-2011-percentage-without-health-insurance-fell/2012/09/12/0e04632c-fc29-11e1-8adc-499661afe377_story.html [with comments]


--


The Romney family’s pretend poverty


Ann Romney waves with her husband Mitt Romney during the Republican National Convention in Tampa.
J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Ann and Mitt's unconvincing attempt to connect with ordinary Americans

Richard Cohen
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
Monday, September 10, 2012, 8:00 PM

When I was 19, I lived in a room on Manhattan’s upper West Side. My kitchen table was the bathtub with a cover over it. I had no shower and the common toilet was down the hall where some guy named Michael kept trying to get in. I was going to college at night, working in the mailroom of an insurance company by day and taking home something like $48 a week.

I was what is sometimes called “voluntarily poor.” I could have gone home to my parents, where a guest bedroom awaited. I probably could have hit up some relative for a short-term loan. What mattered most, however, was that I was in college. I would graduate someday, get a job, a wife, 21/2 kids, a split-level in the suburbs and live the conventional American Dream. I was not stuck. I was on my way.

Ann and Mitt Romney had similar days. In her speech to the Republican National Convention, Ann referred to those times of jolly penury. “We were very young. Both still in college. There were many reasons to delay marriage, and you know what? We just didn’t care. We got married and moved into a basement apartment. We walked to class together, shared the housekeeping, ate a lot of pasta and tuna fish. Our desk was a door propped up on sawhorses. Our dining room table was a fold-down ironing board in the kitchen. But those were the best days.” Oh, what fun to be poor!

Of course, Mitt was the son of an auto company CEO who became governor of Michigan and Ann had gone to the tony Kingswood School (since merged with Cranbrook), where the present-day tuition is $28,300 for day students and $38,900 for boarders. They were, in fact, living on the American Motors stock Mitt’s father, George Romney, had given them.

The theme of Ann Romney’s speech — we are like you — resonates through American politics. It was sounded at the conventions not just by Ann Romney but also by Joe Biden, Chris Christie and Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama recalled that Barack used to pick her up “in a car that was so rusted out, I could actually see the pavement going by in a hole in the passenger-side door.” Of course, the couple in that car had both graduated from Harvard Law, but Barack Obama forsook a lucrative law career and plunged into community organization. Romney, in contrast, plunged into finance. So the onus was on Ann to show that Mitt could connect. She swung and she missed. Poverty, after all, is not about bookcases made of planks and bricks, but about utter hopelessness. The poor do not have affluent parents. The poor do not have college degrees. The poor often do not even have high school degrees. The poor often don’t have a man in the house or, to be perfectly frank, sometimes the discipline and work habits to lift themselves out of poverty.

America now is busy shrinking its middle class. The homes of millions of people have been plunged under water. Jobs have been off-shored and unions have been weakened so that wages are lower, hours longer and job security a virtual oxymoron. What is it like to be 50 and suddenly out of work? What is it like to send out your 100th or 500th résumé? What is it like to spend your savings on long-term medical care so that you get reduced to poverty?

Not for a second did I think that Ann Romney got it. This has nothing to do with wealth. After all, the Kennedys were rich. So were the Roosevelts. Someone who appreciated the plight of the poor would not have trivialized it with campy stories from her let’s-pretend past.

The challenge is not the isolated person who has fallen on hard times whom Mitt and Ann have helped — I applaud that! — but the utterly impoverished, the erstwhile homeowner, the financially precarious old and those who have flunked out of the middle class. They, too, have stories about eating off an ironing board and stuffing themselves with pasta and tuna fish — only it’s not about the past, but about the present and, worse, the future.

© Copyright 2012 NYDailyNews.com (emphasis in original)

http://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/romney-family-pretend-poverty-article-1.1156143 [with comments]


--


How the government fights poverty, in one chart

Posted by Dylan Matthews on September 13, 2012 at 11:28 am

The official poverty measure has a lot of problems [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/12/the-official-poverty-rate-last-year-was-15-percent-heres-what-that-misses/ ], and we’ll have to wait until November for the better alternative measure from the census.

For one thing, the official measure totally ignores the big impact of government programs on the poverty rate. But yesterday’s income, poverty and health insurance report also included a few adjusted measures [ http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/poverty/data/incpovhlth/2011/tables.html ] that can be informative. In particular, the report estimated what the poverty rate would be if you adjusted peoples’ income to not count Social Security benefits and unemployment insurance (which are included in the official poverty measure), and to take into account the Earned Income Tax Credit and food stamps (which are not included in the official measure). Here’s how these programs have affected the poverty rate, from 1981 to 2011 (the gray dashed line is the official measure; SNAP is food stamps):



In 2011, the poverty rate not including unemployment insurance or Social Security would have been 7.8 percentage points higher, and it would have been 3.1 points lower if you take food stamps and EITC into account. So all told, these four government programs reduced poverty by 10.9 percent, or 33.6 million people. This is borne out in cross-country comparisons [ http://jaredbernsteinblog.com/international-poverty-comparisons-what-do-they-tell-us-about-causes/ ] that show the main difference [ http://www.lisdatacenter.org/wps/liswps/188.pdf ] (pdf) between developed countries’ high and low poverty rates isn’t their geography or culture, but the size of the income transfers they implement.

What happens if you exclude retired people? Presumably that would blunt the effects of Social Security on poverty, given that, in general, only people on disability draw benefits before age 62. It does, but the effects of the government programs are still large. The programs reduced poverty for children under 18 by 8.8 percent (or 6.5 million children) and for people 18-64 by 6.1 percent (or 11.8 million people). The biggest program for working-age people is still Social Security, whereas the Earned Income Tax Credit is the most effective tool against child poverty, which it reduces by 4.3 percent. But the really startling numbers are for people 65 and older. Government programs reduce poverty among seniors by 36 percent, and 34.9 percent of that decrease is due to Social Security. Were it not for Social Security, 43.6 percent of seniors would be poor. That’s 14.5 million seniors that one program is keeping afloat.

Maybe there are better ways to reduce poverty than through government programs like these. But there’s no doubting that they’re keeping millions of people above the poverty line.

© 2012 The Washington Post

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/13/how-the-government-fights-poverty-in-one-chart/ [with comments]


--


Ryan, Mitt Don't Want To Talk About It (VIDEO)



By Mike Barry
Posted: 09/11/2012 10:59 am Updated: 09/11/2012 11:00 pm

The Romney/Ryan campaign has some big goals--lower taxes for everyone without sacrificing revenue, 12 million new jobs in 4 years, and a full "repeal and replace" of Obamacare--but they don't want to bore you with details. In the video above [embedded], we gathered a trove of the best Romney/Ryan campaign dodges on the specifics of big issues.

Watch Mitt, Paul, and even Ann dance their way through a minefield of questions without ever uttering a word of fine print!

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/11/ryan-mitt-dont-want-to-ta_n_1873888.html [with embedded video, and comments]


--


Financial Crisis Cost U.S. $12.8 Trillion Or More: Study

By Mark Gongloff
Posted: 09/12/2012 5:09 pm

The 2008 financial crisis cost the U.S. economy at least $12.8 trillion, a new study found -- and that's a "very conservative number," according to the authors.

The study [ http://bettermarkets.com/sites/default/files/Cost%20Of%20The%20Crisis_0.pdf ], timed to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy, is a direct counter to the banking industry's relentless warnings of the potential costs of new financial regulations.

The cost of letting the banks wreck the global economy again is far, far higher.

The crisis-cost estimate, generated by Better Markets [ http://bettermarkets.com/reform-news/cost-crisis-caused-wall-street-no-less-128-trillion-dollars ], a non-profit group lobbying for financial reform, is only a measure of actual and potential lost economic growth due to the crisis. It does not include many other costs, including the costs of extraordinary government steps taken to avoid "a second Great Depression." It does not include unquantifiable costs like the "human suffering that accompanies unemployment, foreclosure, homelessness and related damage," the authors noted.

The study also does not include figures related to any damage done to American productivity by long-lasting, widespread unemployment, which is eroding the ability of Americans to earn money and posing a threat to future economic growth.

"Lower growth means, among other things, less innovation and, therefore, less technological progress," the study's authors wrote. "The consequences of such losses to a society are indeterminable, but potentially very far-reaching and long-lasting."

The study mentions, but leaves out of its $12.8 trillion estimate, the $11 trillion or so in household wealth that was vaporized by the crisis and an estimated $8 trillion hole that might be blown in the federal budget deficit between 2008 and 2018 as a result of the crisis.

Banks would like you to know that they are suffering, too, of course. The stock prices of the biggest five U.S. banks have lost more than $500 billion in market value [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/wall-street-financial-crisis-penalties_n_1858738.html ] since the crisis began. The industry has been docked more than $2 billion in crisis-related penalties [id.].

And the banks constantly warn that new regulations could disrupt financial markets and slow economic growth. The Better Markets study points to one frequently-cited estimate, that the "Volcker Rule," which prohibits banks from proprietary trading, could cost the bond market $315 billion in "liquidity" on its own.

The banking industry's whiner-in-chief, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, on Tuesday warned again of the risks of too much reform [ http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/09/11/dimon-defends-big-banks/ ]. Here's DealBook:

The United States, he added, has the "best, widest, deepest and most transparent capital markets in the world." Cautioning against needless reform, Mr. Dimon said, "Let's make sure we keep that before we do a bunch of stupid stuff that destroys that."

The man who just oversaw a $6 billion trading loss on credit derivatives [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-gongloff/jamie-dimon-economy_b_1755732.html ] continues to lecture the rest of us against doing a bunch of stupid stuff.

In any event, you can stipulate that Dimon has a point -- there are costs to reform. But it is impossible to argue that these costs are anywhere close to the horrific damage the banks have shown they can do to an economy when they're allowed to do whatever they want to do.

Banks might also quibble with Better Markets' $12.8 trillion figure, which is admittedly a little hard to wrap your head around. One part of the number is easy to understand -- it's the amount of potential gross domestic product that has already been lost due to the crisis and recession. A second part is based on economic models, predicting future lost GDP through 2018. That's obviously squishier, as economic models helped us into this mess in the first place. But together these two components make up $7.6 trillion of the $12.8 trillion cost estimate.

The other $5.2 trillion cost is a measure, again generated by economic models, of how much economic damage we avoided through stimulus packages and Federal Reserve rate cuts and bond-buying and emergency lending and the like. That one's even squishier, because you're hanging a number on a counterfactual.

But given all of the costs this study does not even try to estimate, $12.8 trillion is arguably in the ballpark. And the cost is clearly larger than any costs we might incur by trying to keep banks from causing such damage again.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-gongloff/financial-crisis-cost-128-trillion_b_1878857.html [with comments]


--


How the consumer protection bureau raided one firm

By Daniel Wagner on September 12, 2012

WASHINGTON (AP) — As it announced its first big enforcement action against Capital One Financial this summer, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was preparing to raid a California company that had offered to help lower at-risk homeowners' monthly payments.

In court papers, the government accused Chance Gordon and Abraham Michael Pessar of misleading homeowners about their chances of negotiating reduced payments. It said the two charged illegal, upfront fees and did little to help clients who signed up.

Homeowners who paid the steep fees often ended up in foreclosure, while Gordon and Pessar used their money to "to fund a lavish lifestyle, including expensive cars, dinners and nightclubs," the government said. Among the company's assets is a 2004 Lamborghini Gallardo with an original cost of $88,321.

A federal district court in central California allowed the consumer bureau to raid the men's offices, freeze their assets and investigate claims that homeowners in at least 25 states were misled about the company's services.

On his Facebook page, Gordon described officials storming into his offices on the morning of July 19 and disconnecting the phones. The bureau had used details from Gordon's bank statements and earlier investigations by the California State Bar to make its case, he said in the Facebook account, which is part of the court record.

Agents were aggressive, obtaining a restraining order in secret, raiding the offices without warning and freezing defendants' assets even before confirming that they had done anything wrong. Now officials are in settlement talks with Pessar, he said last week. He has agreed not to dispute many of the allegations, court papers show.

Gordon maintains his innocence. His lawyer, Gary Kurtz, said the upfront fees actually were for "pre-litigation services," a claim the government disputes. Kurtz said Pessar was responsible for the communications with homeowners that the government criticized.

Gordon and Pessar marketed their service to struggling homeowners with mailed flyers and phone marketing, the government said in its complaint. Some of the flyers included the logos of government agencies and a Washington, D.C., mailbox address. It is illegal to imply falsely that a loan modification service is endorsed by the government.

The businesses' phone operators sometimes suggested that people should stop paying their mortgages in order to qualify for lower payments, the government said. That also would violate consumer protection laws.

The action grabbed fewer headlines than the Capital One Financial case, which required the card issuer to refund millions in fees charged for add-on products like identity-theft protection and credit protection.

The two cases are early examples of how the bureau will enforce federal consumer protections at both ends of the spectrum — for one of the biggest card issuers, and for a small operation that the government says existed only to prey on consumers.

Both cases are seen as bellwethers of its approach to enforcing consumer laws. Companies, lawyers and advocates are dissecting them for hints about how tough the new regulator will be and what practices it will target.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-09-12/how-the-consumer-protection-bureau-raided-one-firm [no comments yet]


--


Equity Firms Like [sic -- Including] Bain Are Depicted as Colluding


Stephen Schwarzman runs the Blackstone Group, one of the firms accused of colluding with others to deflate takeover bids.
Peter Foley/Bloomberg News

Document: A Lawsuit Against Private Equity
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/12/business/12bain-docs.html

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and PETER LATTMAN
Published: September 11, 2012

WASHINGTON — In court documents [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/12/business/12bain-docs.html ] that lawyers for Bain Capital [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/bain_capital/index.html ] sought to keep secret, the company and other leading private equity [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/p/private_equity/index.html ] firms are depicted as unofficial partners in a bid-rigging conspiracy aimed at holding down the prices of businesses they were seeking to buy.

In Bain’s biggest acquisition, the $32.1 billion purchase of the hospital giant HCA in 2006, competitors agreed privately to “stand down” and not bid on the company as part of an understanding with Bain to divvy up companies targeted for leveraged buyouts, according to internal e-mails.

The documents have become part of a lawsuit in Federal District Court in Boston brought against Bain and other firms by shareholders who say the firms’ bid-rigging artificially deflated the sales price of more than two dozen companies and cost them billions of dollars.

Bain, founded by the Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney [ http://elections.nytimes.com/2012/primaries/candidates/mitt-romney ], is a defendant in the lawsuit, which also names Goldman Sachs [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/goldman_sachs_group_inc/index.html ]’s private equity arm and the Blackstone Group [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/news/business/companies/blackstone_group/index.html ], the firm run by the investor Stephen A. Schwarzman.

The New York Times brought a motion last month to make public the most recent allegations in the case, which were filed under court seal. In response, lawyers for Bain and the other defendants filed a heavily blacked-out version of a 217-page complaint that details evidence compiled to date in the case.

The corporate takeovers at issue in the lawsuit include the acquisition of prominent companies like Neiman Marcus, Toys “R” Us, Michaels Stores, Univision and the Loews and AMC movie chains, and they date from 2003 to 2007. The class-action shareholders’ lawsuit, which was first filed in 2007, has grown since then after a series of court rulings.

Mr. Romney is not mentioned in the publicly released portion of the documents, and lawyers for Bain said in opposing The Times’s motion to unseal the entire filing that he “could not have been involved in the deals at issue here” because he had already left Bain by the time the first deal was finalized.

Lawyers for Bain and the other equity firms said in their court filing opposing The Times’s motion that the documents include confidential company information that would inevitably become “washed into the spin of the campaign news cycle” because of Mr. Romney’s presidential run.

“This case has nothing to do with Mitt Romney or the presidential election,” the lawyers wrote in arguing to keep some of the records private. “The election should not serve as an excuse to allow the press to get at confidential documents and upend competitive sensitivities.”

Michele Davis, a spokeswoman for the Romney campaign, said on Tuesday that the accusations regarding the takeovers are “not related” to Mr. Romney. “All of these things are long after he left Bain,” she said.

Mr. Romney and his advisers say that he has played no “active role” in the company since 1999, when he took a leave from the firm to run the Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City.

But he did not complete a retirement deal with Bain until 2001, and his name appeared on dozens of corporate documents in that time period. Moreover, he has continued to receive profits from the firm as a retired partner and has maintained holdings in some of its investment funds.

Bain Capital has become a central focus of the campaign for both Mr. Romney and President Obama. Mr. Romney has frequently cited his success at the firm in presenting himself as a proven businessman who can turn around the lagging economy. But Mr. Obama has attacked Bain for its takeovers of companies that then laid off workers, sent jobs overseas or declared bankruptcy after they were acquired.

Documents filed in the lawsuit this week show that many of Bain’s takeovers last decade did exceedingly well for the company — a result, the lawsuit charges, of buying the businesses at deflated prices because of collusion with other equity firms. Plaintiffs in the case are former shareholders of the acquired companies.

The case centers on the “club deals” that became popular during the leveraged buyout boom of 2003 to 2007, a period that the complaint calls the “Conspiratorial Era.” It claims there was a complex web of collusive arrangements involving 11 of the world’s largest buyout firms on 19 deals.

In the buyout of HCA, for instance, Bain, K.K.R. and Merrill Lynch bought the company in 2006 for $32.1 billion, then a record. Documents produced by the defendants and filed this week showed e-mails and meetings indicating that other equity firms had agreed to “stand down” and avoid bidding with the understanding that they would be brought into future deals.

E-mails cited in the lawsuit indicate that another private equity firm, TPG, said it had discussed the HCA acquisition with executives for Bain and K.K.R. and had decided not to bid on the company because “our relationship with them, K.K.R. and Bain, was more important.”

In another deal, according to the plaintiffs, K.K.R. and Silver Lake Partners brought Bain into its $9.4 billion acquisition of Philips’s semiconductor unit, despite Philips’s insistence that Bain bid separately for the business.

“Disregarding Phillips’ demand that they remain competitors, Bain and K.K.R. and Silver Lake continued to collude and before final bids were to be submitted,” said the lawsuit, “cemented a secret deal whereby Bain would permit K.K.R. and Silver Lake to submit the winning bid and then invite Bain into its deal on equal terms.”

The plaintiffs also claim that the Blackstone Group, for instance, declined to compete against TPG and Apollo Global Management in the sale of Harrah’s Entertainment and instead made a small co-investment in the deal, according to the suit.

“Blackstone’s quid pro quo relationships with TPG and Apollo prevented it from submitting a competing bid,” the complaint said.

“I think you can tell, even though there are substantial redactions, there is enough to show that there was very active collusion going on between the leading private equity firms, including Bain,” said K. Craig Wildfang, a lawyer for the plaintiffs.

Lawyers representing the private equity firms have rejected the allegations. In an earlier filing in the case, they said that the lawsuit merely described routine dealmaking tactics and labels them anticompetitive.

And while the firms’ lawyers acknowledge there are some embarrassing e-mails still under seal, they say their clients want to keep the court filings private mostly to avoid disclosing confidential competitive information. Private equity executives also deny that they colluded to drive down the prices of their acquisitions, saying that companies were bought at record high premiums during the buyout boom.

“These shareholders should be grateful that we purchased their companies when we did, right before the financial crisis hit,” said a senior buyout executive who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the litigation.

Peter Lattman reported from New York.

© 2012 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/documents-depict-equity-firms-like-bain-as-colluding.html [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/12/business/documents-depict-equity-firms-like-bain-as-colluding.html?pagewanted=all ]


--


Memo to Governor Romney: The Constitution Is Not a Conservative Document

By Menachem Rosensaft
Professor of law and son of Holocaust survivors

A comment [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48959273/ns/meet_the_press-transcripts/t/september-mitt-romney-ann-romney-julian-castro-peggy-noonan-ej-dionne-bill-bennett-chuck-todd/ ] by Governor Mitt Romney during his Meet the Press interview caught my attention. Asked by David Gregory whether he was "the moderate from Massachusetts who championed Universal Health Care, who at one time was for abortion rights" or "a severe conservative," the Republican presidential nominee answered that "I'm as conservative as the Constitution."

This one sentence helps to explain why Governor Romney continues to struggle to connect with many of us on the issue of civil and human rights. In the words [ http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/65551.html ] of John Podesta, White House Chief of Staff under President Clinton, and John Halpin, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, Governor Romney has embraced "the conservative interpretation of the Constitution as an unchangeable document that endorses laissez-faire capitalism and prohibits government efforts to provide a better existence for all Americans."

Others view the Constitution through a different prism. Justice Louis D. Brandeis once wrote [ http://books.google.com/books?id=eEoyK7ZCXjsC&pg=PA107&lpg=PA107&dq=%22Our+Constitution+is+not+a+strait-jacket%22&source=bl&ots=MQ3Squuz9g&sig=p8C8KuXTNnaQXszrahjDg3ABOUs&hl=en&sa=X&ei=2GZQUOehK8r50gGPj4GgAw&ved=0CC4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22Our%20Constitution%20is%20not%20a%20strait-jacket%22&f=false ] that it "is not a strait-jacket. It is a living organism capable of growth -- of expansion and of adaptation to new conditions. Growth implies changes, political, economic and social. Growth which is significant manifests itself rather in intellectual and moral conceptions than in material things. Because our Constitution possesses the capacity of adaptation, it has endured as the fundamental law of an ever-developing people."

Professor Geoffrey R. Stone, former law school dean and provost at the University of Chicago, has eloquently described [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/geoffrey-r-stone/our-progressive-constitut_b_967800.html ] the Constitution as "the vehicle through which generations of Americans have made and remade their nation ... Almost without exception, our constitutional amendments have been progressive in nature, expanding both individual freedoms and the opportunity for individual Americans to participate more fully in the political and economic life of the nation ... As understood by the American people, by our elected officials and by our Supreme Court, the Constitution has enabled the national government to enact laws that helped us through the devastation of the Great Depression; prohibited private discrimination on the basis of race, religion, gender, national origin and disability; promoted workplace safety and the environment; and provided a critical safety net for the aged, the infirm and the needy."

This ideological clash is nowhere more evident than in the debate over whether a woman has a constitutional right to determine whether or not to terminate a pregnancy in accordance with her religious and moral beliefs, or whether the government can impose draconian restrictions on that right. In his Meet the Press appearance, Governor Romney reiterated that his priority, his focus as it were, is "preserving and protecting the life of the unborn child. And I recognize there are two lives involved: the mom and the unborn child. And I believe that people of good conscience have chosen different paths in this regard. But I am pro-life and will intend [sic], if I'm president of the United States, to encourage pro-life policies."

Governor Romney proceeded to expand [ http://livewire.talkingpointsmemo.com/entry/romney-its-my-preference-that-supreme-court-reverse ] on his "pro-life" philosophy: "I'll reverse the president's decision on using U.S. funds to pay for abortion outside this country. I don't think also the taxpayers here should have to pay for abortion in this country. Those things I think are consistent with my pro-life position. And I hope to appoint justices to the Supreme Court that will follow the law and the constitution. And it would be my preference that they reverse Roe v. Wade and therefore they return to the people and their elected representatives the decisions with regard to this important issue."

Governor Romney's stated position has enormous constitutional implications in and of itself. According to his website mittromney.com [ http://www.mittromney.com/issues/courts-constitution ], [ http://www.mittromney.com ], "Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito." This was clearly written before Chief Justice John Roberts joined with the four more liberal members of the Supreme Court in upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate. Following that landmark decision, Governor Romney sharply criticized [ http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/07/romney-hits-roberts-for-not-accurate-health-care-ruling/ ] Chief Justice Roberts for reaching "a conclusion I think that was not accurate and not an appropriate conclusion."

Asked by Jan Crawford of CBS News whether "knowing what we know now" he would still nominate someone like Chief Justice Roberts to the Supreme Court, Governor Romney replied [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505263_162-57466611/romney-roberts-health-care-ruling-not-accurate/ ] that, "I certainly wouldn't nominate someone who I knew was gonna come out with a decision I violently disagreed with or vehemently, rather, disagreed with."

One can safely assume, therefore, that a President Romney would go to great pains to appoint federal judges and Supreme Court justices in the mold of Justices Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas who have never surprised or disappointed conservatives by deviating from their originalist judicial ideology [ http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=3 ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin ; http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/08/29/110829fa_fact_toobin?currentPage=1?currentPage=all )].

There is no question that Governor Romney is a decent man who is guided by his religious and moral beliefs. The same is true of Representative Paul Ryan. Unfortunately, they both seem intent on imposing their beliefs on the rest of us even when these clash with our religious and moral convictions.

In this context, incidentally, Governor Romney's willingness to allow abortions to save the mother's life or where the pregnancy resulted from a rape is not a sign of moderation but rather an adherence on his part to the tenets of his Mormon Church [ http://mormon.org/faq/church-position-on-abortion ] which "opposes abortion and counsels its members not to submit to or perform an abortion except in the rare cases where, in the opinion of competent medical counsel, the life or good health of the mother is seriously endangered or where the pregnancy was caused by rape and produces serious emotional trauma in the mother [note, however, that after saying he'd allow abortions for the 'life or health' of the mother (along with cases of rape and incest), he shortly later retracted the 'health' part, e.g. http://www.lifenews.com/2012/08/31/romney-opposes-pro-abortion-health-of-the-mother-exception/ , which has the video next below http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azl_S20FNsA embedded]."

Governor Romney also advocates a constitutional amendment [ http://www.rightwingwatch.org/content/romney-blasts-obamas-assaults-life-religion-and-marriage ] that would "define marriage as a relationship between a man and a woman." While such rhetoric is red meat to conservative evangelicals and other doctrinal fundamentalists, it utterly ignores those no less devout Christian, Jewish and other faith communities that have integrated same-sex marriage into their respective theologies. In essence, what Governor Romney and his GOP colleagues seek to accomplish is the denial of freedoms of religion and conscience to those individuals and groups who believe same-sex marriage to be both a religious and a civil right.

President Obama's two Supreme Court appointments, Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are very much part of the judicial mainstream. Romney appointees, on the other hand, would certainly be chosen for their willingness to turn back the clock on the constitutional protections of women's reproductive rights, a litmus test as it were. And there can be little doubt how they would rule in a case involving same-sex marriage.

While the stewardship of the U.S. economy, jobs, health care, immigration, and foreign policy are all important considerations in this year's election, the safeguarding of constitutional rights for all Americans is at least as critical. The prospect of Governor Romney appointing Supreme Court justices who share his social world view is reason enough to vote for President Obama.

Menachem Z. Rosensaft [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/menachem-rosensaft/ ] teaches about the law of genocide and World War II war crimes trials at the law schools of Columbia, Cornell and Syracuse universities.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/menachem-rosensaft/memo-to-governor-romney-t_b_1880022.html [with comments]


--


Cardinal Dolan’s parting shot


New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, delivers the closing benediction during the final session of the Republican National Convention in Tampa, Florida August 30, 2012. Picture taken August 30, 2012.
REUTERS/Mike Segar

The anti-abortion and anti-gay marriage messages that followed Obama

By Irin Carmon
Thursday, Sep 6, 2012 10:34 PM CDT

This time, both sides really are doing it.

There was only one person who appeared onstage at both the Republican National Convention and the Democratic National Convention, and he used his platform tonight to not-too-subtly snipe at the agenda we’ve been hearing defended all week, including a mention of those “waiting to be born, welcomed and protected.” That would be New York Cardinal Timothy Dolan, who was hastily added [ http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/under-god/post/cardinal-timothy-dolan-to-also-give-benediction-at-democratic-national-convention/2012/08/28/525c07ce-f124-11e1-adc6-87dfa8eff430_blog.html ] to give a benediction at the DNC after he agreed, to some controversy, to do the same at the RNC.

Tonight, he was given pride of place immediately after President Obama. ”Grant us the courage to defend life,” he said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/06/cardinal-dolan-benediction-rnc-dnc_n_1861440.html ], and added, “Renew in all our people a profound respect for religious liberty, the first, most cherished freedom.”

But lately, when Dolan has said “religious liberty,” he’s really been talking about your birth control. This is the same man who was successfully courted by Romney in their mutually rabid opposition to the contraceptive coverage mandates in the Affordable Care Act, and who is suing the Obama administration over the policy — the same man who has called [ http://www.usccb.org/news/2012/cardinal-dolan-president-obama-remarks-on-marriage-deeply-saddening.cfm ] Obama’s stance on gay marriage “saddening.” (At the RNC, the statement was more muted [ http://www.religionnews.com/politics/election/transcript-and-video-of-cardinal-dolans-blessing-to-the-republican-conventi ]: “We ask your benediction upon those yet to be born, and on those who are about to see you at the end of this life.)

And here was a very coded kick at the platform support for gay marriage: “Show us anew that happiness is found only in respecting the laws of nature and of nature’s God. Empower us with your grace so that we might resist the temptation to replace the moral law with idols of our own making, or to remake those institutions you have given us for the nurturing of life and community.”

Before the appearances were symmetrical, several Catholics criticized the Tampa appearance as an unnecessarily partisan move, despite the Archdiocese’s insistence that the appearance was not an endorsement. “Cardinal Dolan’s appearance in Tampa will damage the church’s ability to be a moral and legitimate voice for voiceless, as those who view the Catholic Church as being a shill for the GOP have just a bit more evidence to prove their case,” wrote [ http://www.americamagazine.org/blog/entry.cfm?entry_id=5309 ] Michael O’Loughlin.

We heard a lot about a different sort of Catholicism tonight — from Caroline Kennedy, who said pointedly, “As a Catholic woman, I take reproductive health seriously, and today, it is under attack,” to Jill Biden, who cited pro-choice Joe Biden’s “strong Catholic faith.” Yesterday, we heard [ http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/dnc-simone-campbell-echoes-bishops-ryan-budget-fails-moral-test ] from a nun who has been traveling around the country arguing [ http://ncronline.org/blogs/ncr-today/dnc-simone-campbell-echoes-bishops-ryan-budget-fails-moral-test ] that the Ryan budget “failed a moral test.” In order to defuse the implied Romney endorsement, the DNC and the Obama campaign saw fit to welcome in a man who has shown little interest in compromising with them or working with them at all, and whose faithful adherents are hardly persuadable. It was a rare discordant note in a week of remarkably consistent and coherent declarations of principle.

Copyright © 2012 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2012/09/07/cardinal_dolans_parting_shot/ [with comments]


--


How to Determine If Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened in Just 10 Quick Questions

By Rev. Emily C. Heath
Clergy, United Church of Christ
Posted: 09/05/2012 10:14 am

It seems like this election season "religious liberty" is a hot topic. Rumors of its demise are all around, as are politicians who want to make sure that you know they will never do anything to intrude upon it.

I'm a religious person with a lifelong passion for civil rights, so this is of great interest to me. So much so, that I believe we all need to determine whether our religious liberties are indeed at risk. So, as a public service, I've come up with this little quiz. I call it "How to Determine if Your Religious Liberty Is Being Threatened in Just 10 Quick Questions." Just pick "A" or "B" for each question.

1. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to go to a religious service of my own choosing.
B) Others are allowed to go to religious services of their own choosing.

2. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to marry the person I love legally, even though my religious community blesses my marriage.
B) Some states refuse to enforce my own particular religious beliefs on marriage on those two guys in line down at the courthouse.

3. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am being forced to use birth control.
B) I am unable to force others to not use birth control.

4. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to pray privately.
B) I am not allowed to force others to pray the prayers of my faith publicly.

5. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) Being a member of my faith means that I can be bullied without legal recourse.
B) I am no longer allowed to use my faith to bully gay kids with impunity.

6. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to purchase, read or possess religious books or material.
B) Others are allowed to have access books, movies and websites that I do not like.

7. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) My religious group is not allowed equal protection under the establishment clause.
B) My religious group is not allowed to use public funds, buildings and resources as we would like, for whatever purposes we might like.

8. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) Another religious group has been declared the official faith of my country.
B) My own religious group is not given status as the official faith of my country.

9. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) My religious community is not allowed to build a house of worship in my community.
B) A religious community I do not like wants to build a house of worship in my community.

10. My religious liberty is at risk because:

A) I am not allowed to teach my children the creation stories of our faith at home.
B) Public school science classes are teaching science.

Scoring key:

If you answered "A" to any question, then perhaps your religious liberty is indeed at stake. You and your faith group have every right to now advocate for equal protection under the law. But just remember this one little, constitutional, concept: this means you can fight for your equality -- not your superiority.

If you answered "B" to any question, then not only is your religious liberty not at stake, but there is a strong chance that you are oppressing the religious liberties of others. This is the point where I would invite you to refer back to the tenets of your faith, especially the ones about your neighbors.

In closing, no matter what soundbites you hear this election year, remember this: Religious liberty is never secured by a campaign of religious superiority. The only way to ensure your own religious liberty remains strong is by advocating for the religious liberty of all, including those with whom you may passionately disagree. Because they deserve the same rights as you. Nothing more. Nothing less.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-emily-c-heath/how-to-determine-if-your-religious-liberty-is-being-threatened-in-10-questions_b_1845413.html [with comments]


--


Joe Walsh Slams Sandra Fluke On Contraception Issue: 'Go Get A Job' (VIDEO)



The Huffington Post | By Chris Gentilviso Posted: 09/08/2012 5:32 pm Updated: 09/09/2012 12:20 pm

Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) [ http://2012.talkingpointsmemo.com/2012/09/joe-walsh-attacks-sandra-fluke.php ] took aim at Georgetown University Law graduate Sandra Fluke on Saturday, attacking her on the issue of birth control.

In a video [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-KSbsU20yi0 (next below)]

captured by CREDO Super PAC [ http://act.credoaction.com/take_down/about.html ] at a campaign event in Addison, Ill., Walsh pointed to Fluke's Wednesday evening speech at the Democratic National Convention, calling her remarks "embarrassing."

“Think about this, a 31-32 year old law student who has been a student for life, who gets up there in front of a national audience and tells the American people, ‘I want America to pay for my contraceptives,'" Walsh told the crowd. "You’re kidding me. Go get a job. Go get a job Sandra Fluke.”

Fluke entered the national conversation in February, when Democrats invited her to attend a House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/16/contraception-hearing-house-democrats-walk-out_n_1281730.html ] hearing. The topic at hand was the Obama administration's contraception rule [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/08/obama-contraception-rule_n_1262429.html ], requiring health insurers to offer birth control coverage. But committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) barred Fluke from speaking in favor of access to contraceptives, on the grounds that she was "not appropriate or qualified."

Conservative media host Rush Limbaugh [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/02/29/rush-limbaugh-sandra-fluke-slut_n_1311640.html ] added to the controversy, linking Fluke's thoughts on birth control to an endorsement for casual sex.

"It makes her a slut, right?," Limbaugh said. "It makes her a prostitute. She wants to be paid to have sex. She's having so much sex she can't afford the contraception. She wants you and me and the taxpayers to pay her to have sex."

Fluke weaved that experience into her DNC speech [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/05/sandra-fluke-speech-text-_n_1852635.html ], explaining that this presidential campaign presents "two profoundly different futures" for women, with one "look[ing] like an offensive, obsolete relic of our past."

In that America, your new president could be a man who stands by when a public figure tries to silence a private citizen with hateful slurs. Who won't stand up to the slurs, or to any of the extreme, bigoted voices in his own party. It would be an America in which you have a new vice president who co-sponsored a bill that would allow pregnant women to die preventable deaths in our emergency rooms. An America in which states humiliate women by forcing us to endure invasive ultrasounds we don't want and our doctors say we don't need. An America in which access to birth control is controlled by people who will never use it; in which politicians redefine rape so survivors are victimized all over again; in which someone decides which domestic violence victims deserve help, and which don't. We know what this America would look like. In a few short months, it's the America we could be. But it's not the America we should be. It's not who we are.

Walsh saw the address differently, telling voters on Saturday that Fluke's remarks were offensive in light of the economic struggles many Americans are facing.

"We’ve got parents in this country who are struggling to buy sneakers that their kids can wear to school that just started," Walsh said. "We’ve got parents up and down my district who are barely keeping their house. And, and, and, we have to be confronted by a woman, the Democratic Party this is what they stand for. They're going to put a woman in front of us who is complaining that the country — you, me and you — won’t pay the 9 dollars per month to pay for her contraceptives."

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/08/joe-walsh-sandra-fluke_n_1867469.html [with comments]


--


We're Not 'The Entitlement Generation'

By Sandra Fluke
Public Interest Law Scholar, Georgetown University Law Center
Posted: 09/12/2012 8:37 am

Last weekend, Representative Walsh said [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/08/joe-walsh-sandra-fluke_n_1867469.html (the item above)] he was "offended" by me, a "life-time student," and that he wanted me to stop acting "entitled" and "get a job." He explained that it wasn't my fault because my generation has been raised this way and doesn't know how to take care of ourselves.

Over the last seven months, I hope I've made it clear that I won't let personal attacks (or lies about my professional history) stop me from fighting for the policies I believe in. But I also won't stand by when a U.S. Representative blatantly misrepresents a policy that benefits struggling women in this country, or when he disparages my generation.

I testified before members of Congress [ http://democrats.oversight.house.gov/images/stories/Testimony_-_Sandra_Fluke.pdf ] not because "I wanted the American people to pay for my contraception," but because I wanted the private insurance that women pay for themselves to cover the contraception they need. I was there to tell, not my own, but the story of a close friend who, despite paying her deductible, lost an ovary when she was unable to afford the contraception her insurance failed to cover, but that she needed to treat her polycystic ovarian syndrome.

My friend was not alone. Hart Research Associates found [ http://www.plannedparenthood.org/about-us/newsroom/press-releases/survey-nearly-three-four-voters-america-support-fully-covering-prescription-birth-control-33863.htm ] that 55% of young women ages 18-34 report having had difficulty affording the contraception they need to treat medical conditions or to prevent unintended pregnancies. That's no surprise when you realize that for some women contraception can cost as much as $960 per year [ http://www.americanprogress.org/wp-content/uploads/issues/2012/02/pdf/BC_costs.pdf ] ($1,210 with the doctor's appointment), according to the Center for American Progress.

But what if I had been there to ask that the government help fund contraception? Federal programs like Title X exist to guarantee the poorest women in our communities affordable access to birth control. Those programs are under attack in Congress and by Gov. Romney [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/08/romney-ryan-family-planning-clinics ], but they're good public policy. They ensure that all American women can control the timing of when they start a family, not just more privileged women. That allows women to set the course of their lives, pursuing their educational dreams and career goals, and allowing the rest of us to benefit from all that they accomplish. Not only do those policies help us create a more equitable society, they prevent unintended pregnancies that can add to the strain on our society's safety nets.

Rep. Walsh and many conservative voices would reduce that sound public policy to evidence of my generation's "entitlement," our reliance on "government [to] take care of [us]."

But my generation doesn't deserve to be labeled 'The Entitlement Generation.' We've supported Title X and fought for the Affordable Care Act's contraception policy, not necessarily because we believe we are automatically entitled to them, but because our vision for the future doesn't leave our fellow citizens behind. We've stood against Representative Ryan's budget attacks [ http://www.care2.com/causes/with-ryan-as-vp-culture-wars-come-front-and-center.html ] on Pell Grants, food stamps, housing assistance and Medicaid because we believe in a future in which we come together as a society to help those who are struggling financially, not one in which we tell them that they're on their own. This isn't about not knowing how to take care of ourselves -- it's about knowing we should take care of each other.

Yet, we're not entirely altruistic either. By fighting to protect our nation's social safety net, we ensure that all members of society have a chance to contribute, producing a diversity of ideas that benefits society as a whole. We've seen that affordable access to contraception allows women to contribute their talents to our companies, and the same is true of the host of economic supports under attack. Without President Obama's investment in Pell Grants, over three million additional students [ http://educationvotes.nea.org/2012/06/08/president-obama-announces-steps-to-help-students-afford-loan-payments/ ] (nearly ten million total [ http://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/omb/budget/fy2013/assets/education.pdf ]) might not have been able to afford to attend college last year. The majority of Pell Grant recipients are students of color from economically depressed backgrounds [ http://www.finaid.org/scholarships/20110902racescholarships.pdf ], so we know exactly which perspectives and voices the rest of us would be deprived of.

So we agree that "we've got Americans who are struggling." Our question is why so many elected officials have only one answer for them: cutting their safety net while telling them to "go get a job." My generation is looking for better answers than that.

Sandra Fluke [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sandra-fluke/ ] is an activist for women and women's health and a recent graduate of the Georgetown Law Center.

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sandra-fluke/sandra-fluke-joe-walsh_b_1876782.html [with comments]


--


What Work Is Really For


Leif Parsons

By GARY GUTTING
September 8, 2012, 3:00 pm

Is work good or bad? A fatuous question, it may seem, with unemployment such a pressing national concern. (Apart from the names of the two candidates, “jobs” was the politically relevant word most used by speakers [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/06/us/politics/convention-word-counts.html ] at the Republican and Democratic conventions.) Even apart from current worries, the goodness of work is deep in our culture. We applaud people for their work ethic, judge our economy by its productivity and even honor work with a national holiday.

But there’s an underlying ambivalence: we celebrate Labor Day by not working, the Book of Genesis says work is punishment for Adam’s sin, and many of us count the days to the next vacation and see a contented retirement as the only reason for working.

We’re ambivalent about work because in our capitalist system it means work-for-pay (wage-labor), not for its own sake. It is what philosophers call an instrumental good, something valuable not in itself but for what we can use it to achieve. For most of us, a paying job is still utterly essential — as masses of unemployed people know all too well. But in our economic system, most of us inevitably see our work as a means to something else: it makes a living, but it doesn’t make a life.

What, then, is work for? Aristotle has a striking answer: “we work to have leisure, on which happiness depends.” This may at first seem absurd. How can we be happy just doing nothing, however sweetly (dolce far niente)? Doesn’t idleness lead to boredom, the life-destroying ennui portrayed in so many novels, at least since “Madame Bovary”?

Everything depends on how we understand leisure. Is it mere idleness, simply doing nothing? Then a life of leisure is at best boring (a lesson of Voltaire’s “Candide”), and at worst terrifying (leaving us, as Pascal says, with nothing to distract from the thought of death). No, the leisure Aristotle has in mind is productive activity enjoyed for its own sake, while work is done for something else.

We can pass by for now the question of just what activities are truly enjoyable for their own sake — perhaps eating and drinking, sports, love, adventure, art, contemplation? The point is that engaging in such activities — and sharing them with others — is what makes a good life. Leisure, not work, should be our primary goal.

Bertrand Russell, in his classic essay “In Praise of Idleness [ http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html ],” agrees. ”A great deal of harm,” he says, “is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work.” Instead, “the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work.” Before the technological breakthroughs of the last two centuries, leisure could be only “the prerogative of small privileged classes,” supported by slave labor or a near equivalent. But this is no longer necessary: “The morality of work is the morality of slaves, and the modern world has no need of slavery.”

Using Adam Smith’s famous example of pins, Russell makes the solution seem utterly simple:

Suppose that, at a given moment, a certain number of people are engaged in the manufacture of pins. They make as many pins as the world needs, working (say) eight hours a day. Someone makes an invention by which the same number of men can make twice as many pins: pins are already so cheap that hardly any more will be bought at a lower price. In a sensible world, everybody concerned in the manufacturing of pins would take to working four hours instead of eight, and everything else would go on as before.

We are, Russell thinks, kept from a world of leisure only by a perversely lingering prejudice in favor of work for its own sake.

But isn’t Russell making an obvious mistake? He assumes that the only reason to continue working eight hours a day would be to make more pins, which we don’t need. In modern capitalism, however, the idea would be to make better pins (or perhaps something even better than pins), in that way improving the quality of our lives. Suppose that in 1932, when Russell wrote his essay, we had followed his advice and converted all gains in productivity into increased leisure. Antibiotics, jet airplanes and digital computers, then just glimmers on the horizon, would likely never have become integral parts of our lives. We can argue about just what constitutes real progress, but it’s clear that Russell’s simple proposal would sometimes mean trading quality of life for more leisure.

But capitalism as such is not interested in quality of life. It is essentially a system for producing things to sell at a profit, the greater the better. If products sell because they improve the quality of our life, well and good, but it doesn’t in the end matter why they sell. The system works at least as well if a product sells not because it is a genuine contribution to human well-being but because people are falsely persuaded that they should have it. Often, in fact, it’s easier to persuade people to buy something that’s inferior than it is to make something that’s superior. This is why stores are filled with products that cater to fads and insecurities but no real human need.

It would seem, then, that we should increase leisure — and make life more worthwhile — by producing only what makes for better lives. In turn, workers would have the satisfaction of producing things of real value. (For a recent informed and vigorous defense of this view, see Robert and Edward Skidelsky, How Much Is Enough? [ http://www.randomhouse.com/book/216918/how-much-is-enough-by-robert-skidelsky-and-edward-skidelsky ])

But this raises the essential question: who decides what is of real value? The capitalist system’s own answer is consumers , free to buy whatever they want in an open market. I call this capitalism’s own answer because it is the one that keeps the system operating autonomously, a law unto itself. It especially appeals to owners, managers and others with a vested interest in the system.

But the answer is disingenuous. From our infancy the market itself has worked to make us consumers, primed to buy whatever it is selling regardless of its relevance to human flourishing. True freedom requires that we take part in the market as fully formed agents, with life goals determined not by advertising campaigns but by our own experience of and reflection on the various possibilities of human fulfillment. Such freedom in turn requires a liberating education, one centered not on indoctrination, social conditioning or technical training but on developing persons capable of informed and intelligent commitments to the values that guide their lives.

This is why, especially in our capitalist society, education must not be primarily for training workers or consumers (both tools of capitalism, as Marxists might say). Rather, schools should aim to produce self-determining agents who can see through the blandishments of the market and insist that the market provide what they themselves have decided they need to lead fulfilling lives. Capitalism, with its devotion to profit, is not in itself evil. But it becomes evil when it controls our choices for the sake of profit.

Capitalism works for the good only when our independent choices determine what the market must produce to make a profit. These choices — of liberally educated free agents — will set the standards of capitalist production and lead to a world in which, as Aristotle said, work is for the sake of leisure. We are, unfortunately, far from this ideal, but it is one worth working toward.

Gary Gutting [ http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/author/gary-gutting/ ] is a professor of philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and an editor of Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. He is the author of, most recently, “Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960 [ http://www.amazon.com/Thinking-Impossible-Philosophy-History-Philosopy/dp/0199227039 ]? and writes regularly for The Stone.

© 2012 The New York Times Company (emphasis in original)

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/08/work-good-or-bad/ [with comments]


--


ALEC And House Republicans Explore Partnership To Push Conservative Legislation


Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) is chair of the Republican Study Committee, which will be meeting with the American Legislative Exchange Council to explore a partnership.

By Sarah Bufkin
Posted: 09/12/2012 6:23 pm Updated: 09/12/2012 6:47 pm

After generating months of controversy for its championing of right-wing policies in state houses, the American Legislative Exchange Council is turning to the federal level. On Friday, the Heritage Foundation will host a policy gathering for both current ALEC members and the Republican Study Committee -- a group of staunchly conservative House Republicans -- in hopes of beginning a partnership between the two organizations.

A senior GOP aide told Roll Call that the meeting could be the first of many [ http://www.rollcall.com/issues/58_19/ALEC-Finds-New-Friends-217478-1.html ] aimed at exploring how conservatives at the federal and state levels could work together to further their policy aims. At least 18 state representatives and six House members are expected to attend, including RSC Chairman and former ALEC member Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).

Paul Teller, the executive director at the RSC, strongly supported the partnership in a statement:

Frankly, this gathering is long overdue. As Washington encroaches more and more into state and local spheres, it’s important that conservative legislators at the federal and state levels collaborate on policies to stop and roll back the ever-expanding federal government.

The partnership comes as corporations have rapidly abandoned ALEC. The group, which represents corporate interests in state houses by drafting model legislation, drew fire for its role in promoting the Stand Your Ground laws [ http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/18/us/trayvon-martin-death-spurs-group-to-readjust-policy-focus.html ], which may shield George Zimmerman from jail time for the fatal shooting of the 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in February.

ALEC was also at the front of pushing controversial voter ID laws [ http://www.thenation.com/article/161969/rigging-elections ]. Since it began lobbying for its own voter photo-ID bill in 2009, state legislators have introduced 33 similar bills. Seventeen U.S. states currently have either strict photo-ID laws or provisionally require some form of photo verification -- which a newly released study argues could disenfranchise up to 700,000 voters [ http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-250_162-57511312/study-voter-id-law-would-exclude-up-to-700000-young-minorities/ ] in those races.

Recently, advocacy groups like Color of Change have led campaigns to force big-name corporations to drop their ALEC ties [ http://act.colorofchange.org/sign/alec/ ]. Thus far, 38 companies and 70 state lawmakers [ http://prwatch.org/news/2012/08/11724/six-more-corporations-dump-alec-38-companies-have-now-cut-ties-corporate-bill-mil ] have heeded the call.

In addition to voter ID and Stand Your Ground, ALEC has focused on environmental deregulation [ http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/09/11012/cantor-introduces-alecs-agenda-house ], tort reforms [ http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/08/04/286164/perrys-legislative-agenda-bears-strong-resemblance-to-alecs-corporate-backed-model-bills/ ], privatization [ http://www.dailykos.com/story/2012/06/13/1099650/-ALEC-Battle-Over-Public-vs-Private-Education ] and overturning of the Affordable Care Act [ http://www.alec.org/initiatives/health-care-freedom-initiative/ ]. It argues that these policies help return power to the state governments [ http://www.alecexposed.org/w/images/a/a2/4B3a-Resoluting_Reaffirming_Tenth_Amendment_Rights_Exposed.pdf ].

The RSC shares a similar political vision. According to its site, the RSC and its members are "dedicated to a limited and Constitutional role for the federal government [ http://rsc.jordan.house.gov/aboutrsc/ ], a strong national defense, the protection of individual and property rights, and the preservation of traditional family values."

Invite to the meeting, provided by the RSC to The Huffington Post:

[embedded]

Copyright © 2012 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/alec-house-republicans_n_1879027.html [with comments]


--


Money, Power, Ruses, and the Right to Vote


Voting in 1923, four-plus decades before the right was finally protected for all citizens.
(Library of Congress)

A Senate Judiciary Committee hearing highlights the hypocrisy of restrictive voter laws in the age of Citizens United.

By Andrew Cohen
Sep 13 2012, 8:10 AM ET

On March 15, 1965, in the heat of the moment for what would become known as the Voting Rights Act [ http://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?flash=true&doc=100 ], just eight days after a young John Lewis had his skull cracked by a lawman [ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/rep-john-lewis-make-some-noise-on-new-voting-restrictions/261549/ ] on the Edmund Pettus Bridge, just a few hours after President Lyndon Johnson addressed a joint session of Congress on civil rights [ http://www.historyplace.com/speeches/johnson.htm ], Republican Senator Everett Dirksen issued his own weekly radio and television report to his Illinois constituents.

At the time, Sen. Dirksen was the ranking Republican member of a Senate Judiciary Committee controlled by James Eastland, the racist Democratic senator from Mississippi, the man who had called the ominous disappearance in his state of civil rights workers Schwerner, Cheney, and Goodman "a publicity stunt." Of the need for federal legislation to protect the rights of minority voters, Sen Dirksen, the Senate Minority Leader, said this [ http://www.congresslink.org/print_basics_histmats_votingrights_radio.htm ]:

There has to be a real remedy. There has to be something durable and worthwhile. This cannot go on forever, this denial of the right to vote by ruses and devices and tests and whatever the mind can contrive to either make it very difficult or to make it impossible to vote.... All this is then by way of saying that the job of freedom in all its glorious aspects never seems to be quite consummated. Freedom and its attributes, the right of a free citizen to vote is somehow a battle that is never quite fully won in any time or generation and so now the torch is lighted for us and the mantel falls on our shoulders to carry on where those before us left off.

The measure, as everyone now knows, passed into law. And it is fair to say that, in the intervening 47 years, tens of millions of Americans have been able to exercise, freely and fairly, without harassment or intimidation, a basic right of citizenship that had been broadly denied in law and fact to their ancestors. No reasonable Republican today would dare argue against the principles of the Voting Rights Act. But no Senate Republican has spoken out against state voter identification laws that federal judges have found to be discriminatory, either. America, and the GOP, have both come a long way since Sen Dirksen's eloquent appeal.

2012

On Wednesday, in the heat of another pitched American battle over voting rights, one that is playing out in courthouses and state capitals all across the nation, the Senate Judiciary Committee met yet again [ http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=e655f9e2809e5476862f735da1187bec ] to remind us of how tenuous the right to vote still is in this country. Perhaps the stakes aren't as high in 2012 as they were in 1965. Perhaps the new generation of "ruses and devices and tests" employed to suppress the vote will be rejected by the courts. Or perhaps not. It's simply too soon to know. But it's not too soon to worry. And it is certainly not too soon to begin to see disheartening patterns.

The hearing was called "The Citizens United Court and the Continuing Importance of the Voting Rights Act [ http://www.judiciary.senate.gov/hearings/hearing.cfm?id=a5b4c7cd6c0eca6c8671e1d4d06fded6 ]" and, as the title suggests, it was an attempt by the Democratic leadership on the Committee to connect together on Capitol Hill two legal trends of recent vintage, each beginning in 2010. The "Citizens United Court" part of the presentation focused on the United States Supreme Court and the five-member conservative majority which dramatically increased the role of corporate power in American elections (and gutted campaign finance regulations) when it gave the world the Citizens United [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/08-205.ZX.html ] ruling in January 2010.

The "Continuing Importance of the Voting Rights Act" portion of the Committee program focused on the relentless conservative offensive against voting rights this election cycle -- the restrictive voter identification laws, the renewed bans on early voting hours, the restrictions on voter registration efforts, all of which are designed to make it harder for millions of Americans, millions of Americans who have voted fairly and accurately for years, to do so again this year. Voter fraud is the battle cry of these ALEC-infused efforts and there are, indeed, plenty of allegations [ http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/06/06/495769/voter-fraud-extremely-rare-in-florida-state-data-reveals/ ] about it. So far, however, there has been precious little proof.

TWO SHIPS IN THE NIGHT

So what do these two themes have in common? Nothing-- and that's the point. On the one hand the conservative Court reached out (in Citizens United) to make it easier for corporate interests, and special interests, to play a role in elections and the result this cycle has been dismaying and obvious. In the name of hoary first amendment principles, granted for the first time to corporations, the richest and most powerful interests in America have been given even more power to influence the outcome of elections. Anyone with a television or a computer or a mailbox, anyone living in a swing state, knows this is so.

On the other hand, while corporate power over elections has increased, GOP lawmakers have enacted a new generation of state voter laws to make it harder for individuals to play a role in elections. And not all individuals, mind you, but those American citizens, those registered voters, who are most likely to have the fewest resources or the best access to the machinery of politics. These voter laws aren't about requiring voters to prove who they are when they vote-- voters already have to do that. They are about further dividing elections into "haves" and "have nots" by requiring people who can't afford cars, for example, to get certain kinds of ID.

The combination of these two trends suggest the makings of a remarkable shift in voting power. The people who are tripping over each other to defend the election rights of corporate interests, or special interests, the folks who say there should be more money as "speech" in elections, are the very same people who say that they must protect the integrity of the vote. They say they must root out even the type of "voter fraud" they concede they cannot find by making the old and the infirm, minorities and students, bear the burden of traveling to state offices to pay for new identification cards they have never before needed.

EVIDENCE

The right to vote, under the Constitution and federal statutory law, is not the same as the right to speak under the First Amendment and I am not making any doctrinal argument to the contrary. The standards are different. The precedent is different. The text of the governing law is different, obviously. Citizens United rests on a different branch of the tree than does the Supreme Court's 2008 decision in Crawford v. Marion County [ http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/07-21.ZS.html ], the Indiana case in which the justices opened the doors to all these restrictive voter laws all around the country. But the two cases, and the way they've been interpreted subsequently, do have certain common themes.

One is the de-emphasis on evidence. When the Supreme Court this spring summarily rejected a Montana case that challenged the factual premises of Citizens United, when the five conservative justices behind the Citizens United ruling reversed a Montana Supreme Court ruling without even bothering to hold a hearing on the matter, the Court did so with a flip phrase [ http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/11pdf/11-1179h9j3.pdf ]--Montana had "failed to meaningfully distinguish" its case from the Citizens United case. That was it. The Court's conservatives weren't at all interested in evaluating how real evidence "on the ground" interacted with the logic of their recent precedent [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudence/2012/01/montana_supreme_court_citizens_united_can_montana_get_away_with_defying_the_supreme_court_.html ].

Rendering evidence irrelevant also is a theme in the Crawford case. There, the justices declared that state lawmakers did not need to prove actual voter fraud in order to justify the burden of requiring registered voters, American citizens, to get new forms of government identification. The mere threat of such fraud, the mere specter of it, was enough to justify laws that make it harder for millions of Americans to cast a ballot. And, indeed, when a Pennsylvania judge last month upheld that state's onerous voter ID law, one which could disenfranchise approximately 750,000 citizens, he cited that point: evidence doesn't matter when it comes to voter fraud (the case goes today before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court).

THE HEARING

It's a pity, in many ways, that Wednesday's hearing was overshadowed by the tragic news from Libya and the resulting political furor it caused. The issue of voting rights this election season is an enormous one. On the right, activists are organizing to place "poll watchers" at ballot boxes to challenge the votes of millions of American citizens. On the left, activists are mustering to watch the watchers. Unless there is clear direction from the federal courts, and ideally from the Supreme Court itself, the coming election could be even uglier, and more chaotic, than the Florida recount.

The Judiciary Committee is right to try to bring focus to the national fight over voting rights and voter fraud. It's right to try to point out that voting "integrity" and voting "accuracy" won't be heightened merely by precluding poor people, and minorities, and the elderly and students, from voting. The "accuracy" and "integrity" of our elections also will be heightened by the return of reasonable restrictions on the corrupting influence of the unfettered money that is pouring into our campaigns. It's not logical, it's not credible, to be in favor of one form of election restriction without being in favor of the other.

Which is why reading Everett Dirksen again after all these years is both enlightening and unnerving. He was right to say that "the right of a free citizen to vote is somehow a battle that is never quite fully won in any time or generation." Clearly, relentlessly, forcefully, one restrictive law, one court ruling, one bureaucrat choice at a time, the moment has come for our own generation to confront these choices, these challenges, these efforts to manipulate the law into disenfranchising American citizens. And with 53 days left until the election it is by no means certain how the challenge will be met or how the battle will turn out.

Copyright © 2012 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/money-power-ruses-and-the-right-to-vote/262253/ [with comments]


--


The GOP war on the Voting Rights Act
9/11/12
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0912/81050.html [with comments]


--


The Republicans’ Keep-Down-the-Vote Strategy
Sep 11, 2012
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-11/the-republicans-keep-down-the-vote-strategy.html [with comments]


--


US campaigns prepare for post-election court fights on voting laws
Sep 13, 2012
http://in.reuters.com/article/2012/09/12/usa-campaign-vote-laws-idINL1E8KBCO620120912 [no comments yet]


--


Is Obama mobilizing 1000s of lawyers for Voter ID battle?

Published on Sep 11, 2012 by TheBigPictureRT

Mike Papantonio, Attorney, Host, Ring of Fire Radio & Hilary Shelton, NAACP join Thom Hartmann. While Republicans are relying on billionaires to win the election this year - Democrats are enlisting the help of lawyers. In response to a rash of Voter Suppression ID laws and restrictions on early voting and voter registration, President Obama's re-election team and the DNC are deploying teams of lawyers in states around the country to challenge right-wing anti-voting laws. The voter-protection teams, as they're called, are monitoring any new law changes, putting pressure on local election officials, and training poll watchers to keep an eye on any "shenanigans" come Election Day. It's a crime that such efforts are necessary in America - the beacon for democracy around the world. But with the Republican Party committed to kicking millions of Democratic voters off the polls by November, what other choice is there?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u6SbrewvCvQ


--


Voter ID Laws Could Disenfranchise 1 Million Young Minority Voters: Study

09/13/2012
An estimated 700,000 young minority voters could be barred from voting in November because of photo ID laws passed across the country in recent years, according to a new study.
The number of minority voters under the age of 30 likely to be disenfranchised by these new voting laws -- passed overwhelmingly by Republican-led legislatures across the country -- is a conservative estimate, according to the study's authors. The actual number of voters in that category who could be disenfranchised is probably closer to 1 million, they said.
The projections include African Americans, Latinos, Asian Americans, Native Americans and Pacific Islanders.
“It’s a reminder that our voting rights have always been under attack and probably always will be,” said Cathy Cohen [ http://news.uchicago.edu/profile/cathy-cohen ], a professor of political science at the University of Chicago who co-authored the report, Turning Back the Clock on Voting Rights: The Impact of New Photo Identification Requirements on Young People of Color [ http://research.blackyouthproject.com/files/2012/09/Youth-of-Color-and-Photo-ID-Laws.pdf ].
The study was created by the Black Youth Project [ http://www.blackyouthproject.com/ ], a nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that aims to increase civic engagement and voter participation among minority youth.
[...]
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/12/voter-id-laws-minorities_n_1878893.html [with comments]


--


Kansas board delays decision on Obama, ballot

By John Hanna
Associated Press
Published Friday, Sep. 14, 2012, at 7:03 a.m.
Updated Friday, Sep. 14, 2012, at 7:04 a.m

TOPEKA — Kansas election officials said Thursday that they want more information before deciding whether to remove President Obama from the state’s November ballot.

The all-Republican State Objections Board heard arguments Thursday on a claim from a Manhattan resident that Obama is not eligible to be president because his father was from Kenya. The resident, Joe Montgomery, also questions whether Obama has a valid birth certificate.

The notion that Obama was born anywhere other than in Hawaii has long been discredited, and the White House released his long-form birth certificate last year. Hawaii officials also have repeatedly confirmed his citizenship.

The Kansas board is led by Secretary of State Kris Kobach, an ardent voter-ID proponent who during his successful 2010 campaign once suggested Obama should produce his long-form birth certificate.

The board, which would have the final say on the ballot absent a court challenge, plans to meet again Monday and may rule then. Time to make changes is running out, however, as ballots to overseas military personnel must be mailed before the end of September.

Montgomery, 51, said Thursday that he has been researching issues surrounding Obama’s eligibility to serve as president for the past four years. The same arguments Montgomery made Thursday have circulated widely on the Internet and among so-called "birthers," who doubt Obama’s citizenship.

“I’m here to uphold the rule of law, and the Constitution of the United States," Montgomery said after his objection was considered. “Somebody has to do it."

But the Kansas board — including Kobach, Attorney General Derek Schmidt and Lt. Gov. Jeff Colyer — said Thursday it wants certified documents from Hawaii and two other states that have looked into the issue.

After Kobach’s assertion in 2010, an aide attempted to clarify Kobach’s stance and said he didn’t subscribe to “birther theories." Kobach said Thursday the board is obligated to do a thorough review of Montgomery’s objections and not make “a snap decision."

“I do think the factual record could possibly be supplemented," Kobach said during the meeting.

Specifically, Kobach said the board would like certification from Hawaii officials that the long-form birth certificate made public by the White House and available online is authentic. Hawaii officials have repeatedly stated that it is and even sent Arizona official verification of Obama’s birth records amid an inquiry there.

No one from the Democratic Party attended the Kansas meeting. Ahead of the meeting, Dakota Loomis, executive director of the Kansas Democratic Party, had dismissed the objection as "frivolous."

In a letter to Kobach, Kip Wainscott, an attorney for Obama’s campaign, said Montgomery’s claims are "without merit."

“These tired allegations are utterly baseless," Wainscott wrote.

Copyright 2012 The Associated Press

http://www.kansas.com/2012/09/14/2488381/kansas-board-delays-decision-on.html [with comments]


--


'New York Post' Runs Boldest Anti-Obama Ad Yet


Undated photo of Frank Marshall Davis

By Julian Sancton on September 11, 2012

Even casual readers of the New York Post will find it hard to miss the full-page ad immediately following the paper’s must-read gossip section, Page Six, that claims President Obama’s biological father is not Barack Hussein Obama Sr., but rather poet and labor activist Frank Marshall Davis. Or as the ad puts it, “Communist Party Propagandist Frank Marshall Davis.” The ad, headlined “Obama’s Big Lie Revealed,” is a promotion for a DVD titled Dreams from My Real Father, which is billed as “Amazon’s #1 documentary.”


The “Dreams from My Real Father” ad in the “New York Post”

The ad comes as Obama’s presidential campaign is polling ahead of Mitt Romney’s following last week’s Democratic National Convention. Though the documentary was released earlier this year, mainstream publications have largely ignored the film and its claims. The majority of press mentions on the film’s site [ http://www.obamasrealfather.com/ ] link to WND.com, which calls itself “America’s Independent News Network.”

The top story on WND.com right now strikes a triumphant tone as it explains how—after being rejected by the New York Times, among other publications—director Joel Gilbert personally showed up at the New York Post’s offices and convinced the right-leaning paper to run the ad. The story is titled “New York Post Ad Exposes Obama’s Real Father [ http://www.wnd.com/2012/09/new-york-post-ad-exposes-obamas-real-father/ ].” So apparently ads are news sources now. Then again, this comes from a site that considers Rush Limbaugh’s every pronouncement newsworthy, and gives bylines to Jerome Corsi, an outspoken birther who led the charge in the Swift Boat smearing of John Kerry in 2004.

The ad’s one irrefutable claim is that the DVD is topping Amazon’s documentary sales. With few exceptions, reviewers are giving it five stars and gushing reviews. They give less credence to some of Gilbert’s other films, including Elvis Found Alive and Paul McCartney Really Is Dead.

Frank Marshall Davis moved to Honolulu in 1948 [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/barackobama/2601914/Frank-Marshall-Davis-alleged-Communist-was-early-influence-on-Barack-Obama.html ] and became friends with Obama’s maternal grandfather, Stanley Dunham. In his bestselling 1995 memoir, Obama identifies him only as “Frank.” Understandably, the Obama campaign will not dignify the ad with a response.

It’s difficult to square Gilbert’s claim that Obama is Davis’s Hawaii-born love child with the equally preposterous but resilient theories from the uninformed right that Obama is a secret Muslim born in Kenya. The only “evidence” the ad provides is a pair of side-by-side photos of Obama and Davis, who bear no resemblance to each other aside from the fact that both men are black and, in the photos, are facing the same direction.

Rubinstein Communications, which handles the Post’s media relations, declined to comment.

@2012 Bloomberg L.P.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2012-09-11/new-york-post-runs-boldest-anti-obama-ad-yet [with comments]


--


Paul Ryan gives most awkward pregame speech ever


Paul Ryan's pregame speech before Saturday's Miami-Ohio vs. Ohio State game won't be remade for any movies.
(AP Photo)

John Turner
Sporting News
Published Sunday, Sep 2, 2012 at 3:09 pm EDT

Vice presidential hopeful Paul Ryan happened to be in the neighborhood campaigning Saturday when Ohio State hosted Miami-Ohio, his alma mater, in its college football season opener.

He also happened to get into the Redhawks' locker room, where coach Don Treadwell allowed him a brief pregame speech.

And it also happens that Paul Ryan isn't very good at giving pep talks. Unless of course you like your pep talks to have false statistics, awkward pauses and a decided lack of pep.

"They tell me that Ohio State hasn't beaten an in-state team in about 100 years," Ryan said in a video that has since been removed from YouTube. "Let's change that today."

Oops. Might want to switch those around there, congressman. Move on to the grand close!

"Your best is the best," Ryan said. "Your best is what we got. We're really proud of you. Go out there and make us proud and do your jobs, and make it … count."

Miami-Ohio subsequently went out and was beat 56-10.

Al Pacino [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WO4tIrjBDkk ] and Gene Hackman [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDJS9rFGCHE ], your epic locker room speeches are safe for another day.

[...]

© 2012 SportingNews.com

http://aol.sportingnews.com/ncaa-football/story/2012-09-02/paul-ryan-pregame-speech-video-watch-miami-ohio-state-locker-pep-talk-vp [with comments]


--


(linked in):

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=76907301 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78454289 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78944571 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78991579 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79167486 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79179126 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79411912 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79414166 and preceding and following;
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79400626 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79416405 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79417074 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79419100 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79463058 and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79467854 and preceding (and any future following);
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79468171 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79468765 and preceding (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79503605 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79512033 (and preceding) and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79532898 (and any future following)

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79549949 and preceding and following

http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=79550908 and preceding and following