USA Today - Many college students watching the party conventions were probably dissatisfied — neither party directly matched their beliefs. Partly this is an unfortunate effect of any two-party political system.
However, significant changes in our national political outlook create a growing segment of the population with beliefs that cut across the current conception of the conservative vs. liberal debate.
A growing number of people, particularly youth, identifies as socially liberal while being fiscally conservative. Earlier this year, a Reason poll showed that 61% of people aged 18-29 would be open to electing a president who is socially liberal and fiscally conservative.
This should have major implications — not just in this election, but also for the foreseeable future. A survey conducted late last month by The Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation showed that the “socially liberal, fiscally conservative” voting bloc was essentially the only persuadable group in 2012. While so-called independents make up about one-third of the electorate, most lean toward one party or the other.
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To many, creating a coalition catering to fiscal conservative/social liberals may appear illogical.
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The stirring visions that essentially founded both parties have cooled from their once white-hot magma, calcifying into the hard rock that characterizes today’s political paralysis.
The current political alignment produces stalemate after stalemate in Congress and the myth of an America split between two minds. But however toxic today’s polarization may be, it’s hard to imagine it’s any scarier than uniting a racially-divided party during segregation.
Both parties have chance to forge a coalition that re-shuffles the deck in a way that fiscal conservatives and social liberals can be a part of a big-tent coalition.
Whichever gets to it first is the party that will “win the future.”
MEDIAITE - MSNBC host Chris Matthews said on his program that he thought Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was displaying a suspicious level of arrogance by thinking that he could run for president against Barack Obama. He said he “didn’t like the look” of what Romney could have been thinking, although he said he opted to refrain from getting “into his head on this.”
“I thought the decision by Romney to run for president, even as this president had not yet even been inaugurated, Mayor, showed a certain kind of disdain,” said Matthews. “I don’t want to get into his head on this – I don’t like the look of it – but he seemed to think, ‘Well, this guy could be beat by me.’”
Matthews said that Romney’s suspicion that he could defeat President Obama in 2012, even though he knew that he was not “a first-rate politician,” was an “arrogant point of view.”
“I’ve got a message for Mitt Romney – I wouldn’t do any head games with Barack Obama,” said former San Francisco Mayor Willy Brown. “He’s not smart enough, I don’t think he’s clever enough and he clearly has no street about him at all.”
How long had it been since President Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting in the lead-up to the Sept. 11 attacks on U.S. diplomatic facilities in Egypt and Libya? After all, our adversaries are known to use the anniversary of 9/11 to target the United States.
According to the public schedule of the president, the last time the Obama attended his daily intelligence meeting was Sept. 5 — a week before Islamist radicals stormed our embassy in Cairo and terrorists killed our ambassador to Tripoli. The president was scheduled to hold the intelligence meeting at 10:50 a.m. Wednesday, the day after the attacks, but it was canceled so that he could comfort grieving employees at the State Department — as well he should. But instead of rescheduling the intelligence briefing for later in the day, Obama apparently chose to skip it altogether and attend a Las Vegas fundraiser for his re-election campaign. One day after a terrorist attack.
When I asked National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor if the president had attended any meetings to discuss the Presidential Daily Brief (PDB) since Sept. 5, he repeatedly refused to answer. He noted that Obama had attended a principals meeting of the National Security Council on Sept. 10 and reiterated that he reads the PDB. “As I’ve told you every time you ask, the President gets his PDB every day,” Vietor told me by e-mail, adding this swipe at Obama’s predecessor, George W. Bush: “Unlike your former boss, he has it delivered to his residence in the morning and not briefed to him.” (This new line of defense was echoed this morning by my Post colleague, Dana Milbank, who writes that Bush was briefed every day by his intelligence advisers because he “decided he would prefer to read less.”)
Vietor’s reply is quite revealing. It is apparently a point of pride in the White House that Obama’s PDB is “not briefed to him.” In the eyes of this administration, it is a virtue that the president does not meet every day with senior intelligence officials. This president, you see, does not need briefers. He can forgo his daily intelligence meeting because he is, in Vietor’s words, “among the most sophisticated consumers of intelligence on the planet.”
Truly sophisticated consumers of intelligence don’t see it as a sign of weakness to “be briefed” by the experts. Most of us, if we subscribed to a daily report on, say, astrophysics, would probably need some help interpreting it. But when it comes to intelligence, Obama is apparently so brilliant he can absorb the most complicated topics by himself in his study. He does not need to sit down for up to an hour a day with top intelligence officials, or hold more than 100 “deep dives” in which he invites CIA analysts into the Oval Office and gives them direct access to the commander in chief to discuss their areas of expertise. Such meetings are crutches this president does not need.{Read More}
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Yahoo News - SANAA, Yemen (AP) — Chanting "death to America," hundreds of protesters angered by an anti-Islam film stormed the U.S. Embassy compound in Yemen's capital and burned the American flag on Thursday, the latest in a series of attacks on American diplomatic missions in the Middle East.
American missions have been attacked this week in three Arab nations — Yemen, Egypt and Libya — that have faced persistent unrest and are struggling to restore law and order after last year's revolts deposed their authoritarian regimes.
The protests in Yemen and Egypt point to an increased boldness among Islamists who have become more powerful amid the turmoil since the revolts. In the past, protests have broken out over perceived insults to Islam from the West, but in Arab countries they never escalated to the degree of breaching embassies, suggesting now Islamists feel they can act with impunity.
The violence this week in Libya was of a different degree altogether. While protesters in other countries were unarmed, a crowd bristling with machine guns and rocket-propelled grenades overwhelmed the American Consulate in Benghazi late Tuesday, killing the ambassador and three other Americans and ransacking the building. U.S. officials suspect the assault may have been a planned operation rather than a spontaneous mob assault.
In the Yemeni capital on Thursday, protesters smashed windows as they breached the embassy perimeter and reached the compound grounds, although they did not enter the main building housing the offices.
Angry young men brought down the U.S. flag in the courtyard, burned it and replaced it with a black banner bearing Islam's declaration of faith — "There is no God but Allah."
Yemeni security forces who rushed to the scene fired in the air and used tear gas to disperse the demonstrators, driving them out of the compound after about 45 minutes and sealing off the surrounding streets. It was not immediately clear whether anyone was inside the embassy at the time of the attack.
Demonstrators removed the embassy's sign on the outer wall, set tires ablaze and pelted the compound with rocks.
The Yemeni Embassy in Washington condemned the attack and vowed to ensure the safety of foreign diplomats and to step up security measures around their missions in the country.
It was similar to an attack on the U.S. Embassy in the Egyptian capital on Tuesday night. A mob of Libyans also attacked the U.S. consulate in the eastern city of Benghazi on Tuesday, killing American Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans.
Yemen is home to al-Qaida's most active branch and the United States is the main foreign supporter of the Yemeni government's counterterrorism campaign. The government on Tuesday announced that al-Qaida's No. 2 leader in Yemen was killed in an apparent U.S. airstrike, a major blow to the terror network.
The spreading violence comes as outrage grows over a movie called "Innocence of Muslims" that mocked Islam's Prophet Muhammad. The amateurish video was produced in the U.S. and excerpted on YouTube. {Read More}
(CNN) -- Gary Johnson says there are three keys to his campaign being successful: he needs you to know who he is, he needs to be on the ballot in as many states as possible and he needs other libertarians to support him.
And for the next two months, Johnson, the Libertarian party candidate for president and acknowledged underdog, will be zig-zagging across the country to make those admittedly unique goals a reality.
That is the thrust of his argument: Once you get to know me, I swear you'll like me.
Johnson has fashioned himself the "clear alternative" to Republican candidate Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama in November's presidential election.
The most recent CNN/ORC International poll shows that 3% of likely voters and 4% of registered voters say they'd vote for Johnson. But the fact he is even included in a poll is enough to get Johnson excited.
"It is one thing if it gets reported that I am at 4% nationally," said Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico, "but I don't think I go down when people take a look at who I am and what I have done, I think it actually goes up."
And in some ways, he has proof to back that up.
Johnson first ran for governor of New Mexico -- a state with a majority of Democratic voters -- in 1994 as a Republican. He won in the Republican primary, defeating three other Republicans, and then defeated an incumbent Democratic governor by 10 points. After four years in office, Johnson ran again and won in 1998.
Johnson's popularity remained consistently high through his time as governor, leading one paper to remark that he was "arguably the most popular governor of the decade." {Read More}
The short film was shot on 11 September 2010 in New York from 8pm to 11pm. The Tribute in Light is 88 searchlights placed next to the site of the World Trade Center to create two vertical columns of light in remembrance of the September 11 attacks.
This song has so much meaning behind it. The lyrics are truly beautiful, and you paint an amazing picture. People don't realize how much that day affected the children of the people who died. God Bless AMERICA!! Never Forget.
OPPOSING VIEWS - Gary Johnson, this year’s Libertarian Party candidate for president, spoke at a rally on Tuesday outside the Democratic National Convention. He criticized both President Obama and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney for avoiding one of the nation’s most important political issues. Obama has laughed off or ignored persistent questions about marijuana legalization, while Romney is equally dismissive, calling the issue insignificant.
During his two terms as governor of New Mexico, Johnson established himself as the highest-ranking public official to call for a dramatic shift in the nation’s drug laws. He explains that during his two terms, he applied a cost-benefit analysis to every issue. Regarding costs of the war on drugs, he has cited the United States’ world-record incarceration rate and the fact that approximately half of current criminal justice expenditures deal with drug cases.
On his campaign website, the former governor also refers to the harms of alcohol prohibition and the parallel harms of current drug prohibitions, including the enrichment of organized crime and the associated violence. The site clearly states his support for legalizing marijuana, specifying that the federal government should “end its prohibition mandate” and allow the states to determine their own policies. This is one area where he agrees with former Republican presidential contender and libertarian icon Ron Paul, to whom he has compared himself and whose supporters he may be courting. {Read More}
CNS News - Seventy-nine percent of the 8th graders in the Chicago Public Schools are not grade-level proficient in reading, according to the U.S. Department of Education, and 80 percent are not grade-level proficient in math.
Chicago public school teachers went on strike on Monday and one of the major issues behind the strike is a new system Chicago plans to use for evaluating public school teachers in which student improvement on standardized tests will count for 40 percent of a teacher’s evaluation. Until now, the evaluations of Chicago public school teachers have been based on what a Chicago Sun Times editorial called a “meaningless checklist.”
In 2011, the U.S. Department of Education administered National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) tests in reading and math to students around the country, including in the Chicago Public Schools. The tests were scored on a scale of 0 to 500, with 500 being the best possible score. Based on their scores, the U.S. Department of Education rated students’ skills in reading and math as either “below basic,” “basic,” “proficient” or “advanced.”
Nationally, public school 8th graders scored an average of 264 on the NAEP reading test. Statewide in Illinois, the 8th graders did a little better, scoring an average of 266. But in the Chicago Public Schools, 8th graders scored an average of only 253 in reading. That was lower even than the nationwide average of 255 among 8th graders in “large city” public schools.
With these NAEP test results, only 19 percent of Chicago public school 8th graders rated proficient in reading while another 2 percent rated advanced—for a total of 21 percent who rated proficient or better. {Read More}
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| {Tamara Kaye-Honey} |
Again, we expect politicians to shade and shape their version of reality. But getting a reputation for doing this, as Ryan is doing during the campaign, is a particular problem for someone who has been set up as a uniquely honorable truth-teller.
Which brings us to Ryan and Norah O'Donnell today on Face the Nation. She presented him with another of the partial-truths from his convention speech, which he has repeated afterward. This is his slam of Obama for cutting defense spending, without mentioning that he has voted for these same cuts. I mention this less for what it shows about Ryan than for what it shows about O'Donnell. Take a look for yourself.
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On the merits of what O'Donnell was asking Ryan about, see Think Progress. This is an issue I have followed. Ryan's thinly shaved rationalization here is consistent with the three I mention from his convention speech, in that each involves the deliberate omission of a major, elephant-in-the-room complicating truth. And, before you ask, when Joe Biden, Barack Obama, or other Democrats go as far as Ryan has -- not in presenting their opinions, or political "visions," but offering gross distortions-through-omission of their own records -- they deserve exactly the same treatment. {Read More}
TPM - Mitt Romney said Sunday that he likes parts of ‘Obamacare’ and will keep key provisions involving pre-existing conditions and young people.
“I’m not getting rid of all of health care reform. Of course there are a number of things that I like in health care reform that I’m going to put in place,” he said on NBC’s “Meet The Press. “One is to make sure that those with pre-existing conditions can get coverage. Two is to assure that the marketplace allows for individuals to have policies that cover their family up to whatever age they might like.”
The remarks appear to contradict Romney’s strong, unequivocal support for full repeal of the Affordable Care Act, which he has consistently held since the Republican primaries.
Politically, his comments risk drawing the ire of conservatives, who have been adamant that Republicans repeal the law in its entirety if elected. It’s a major gamble that could reflect Romney’s need to win over more independent voters, who support those provisions. {Read More}
