One who complained publicly said he was later handed a check but also got a little something extra in his envelope.

Said the campaign worker: "Basically he handed me a check with a condom in it, told me I was screwed. That's the rudest gesture you can ever do to a person, it's like spitting in a person's face."

His check also bounced.

Throughout his trip in South East Asia he was constantly on the phone with both Morsi and Netanyahu, before and after his meetings with the leaders of China and Japan. The president even made time to speak with both leaders during a dinner held as part of a summit of East Asian leaders.

His goal - creating the conditions needed for a ceasefire. Publically he praised Morsi and Netanyahu, and behind the scenes he was pressuring them to bring the conflict between Israel and Hamas to an end

The American president realizes he has no choice but to work with Morsi. The US administration identified the risks but also the great opportunities of restoring US influence to Egypt. In White House reports regarding a phone call between Morsi and Obama, Obama is reported to praised Morsi's part in the ceasefire as well as reiterating the importance of close cooperation between the two on issues of regional security.

The ceasefire remains fragile, but the process seems to have created a very positive basis for future cooperation between the US and the Muslim Brotherhood administrations, returning a hope for stability to the region.

Obama promised Netanyahu to assist in preventing arms and munitions smuggling into the Strip as well as restating his commitment to help seek funding for an additional Iron Dome missile defense battery, as well as additional supplementary systems required for securing Israel's safety.

There is no doubt that President Obama has delivered the goods Israel needs for protection against ballistic as well as short range rockets, specifically in light of Iron Dome's success.

However, the real test for American and Egyptian relations lies in creating an apparatus for preventing rockets from reaching the Gaza Strip.

But because “Obamacare” has been so controversial, and its fate caught up in the presidential campaign, there has been little public discussion about the specifics of putting it into action. States such as Texas and Florida, where opposition to the legislation was strong, have been slow to embrace the law and critics have been loath to promote it.

Seventy-eight percent of the uninsured Americans who are likely to qualify for subsidies were unfamiliar with the new coverage options in a survey by Democratic polling firm Lake Research Partners. That survey, sponsored by the nonprofit Enroll America, also found that 83 percent of those likely to qualify for the expansion of Medicaid, which is expected to cover 12 million Americans, were unaware of the option.

Currently, 48.6 million U.S. residents lack health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that 30 million will gain coverage. That would leave nearly 19 million uninsured.
About a quarter of those are illegal immigrants, who aren’t eligible for the reform law’s subsidies. Two million, the CBO projects, live in states that will opt out of the Medicaid expansion.
The rest, however, probably are eligible for new benefits. The CBO, for example, expects that nearly 6 million of those newly eligible for Medicaid just won’t sign up for the program.
Even though the subsidies for currently uninsured people won’t go out until Jan. 1, 2014, the state exchanges that will offer health plans are being set up now, and participants will need to start signing up next Oct. 1. Supporters of the health-care law say the plan won’t be a success without a massive public relations campaign to build awareness.

Mr. Obama’s margin in Colorado has expanded to 5.5 percentage points from 4.7 percentage points as more ballots have been counted, however. He now leads there by a wider margin than in Pennsylvania, where his margin is 5.0 percentage points. Neither state has certified its results, so the order could flip again, but if the results hold, then Pennsylvania, not Colorado, will have been the tipping-point state in the election.

The Democratic vote, of course, is highly concentrated in Philadelphia and other counties in the southeastern portion of the state, along with Pittsburgh. Republicans do pretty well everywhere else, and very well in central Pennsylvania.

(So pronounced are the regional variations in Pennsylvania that Republicans were able to devise a restricting plan in which Democrats won just 5 of the 18 seats for the House of Representatives this year despite their House candidates winning more votes over all throughout the state.) We can quantify this by means of the FiveThirtyEight elasticity scores. Mr. Obama leads in Pennsylvania by 5.0 percentage points, but it has an elasticity score of 0.94. Scores below one indicate that a state is more stubborn than average to shifting its vote.

That does not provide much margin for error. Virginia, for example, could become a problematic state for Republicans. Mr. Obama leads there by 3.9 percentage points, and it is also a relatively inelastic state. (Like Pennsylvania, Virginia contains some very Democratic and very Republican counties, but does not necessarily have all that many swing voters.) If Virginia becomes slightly Democratic-leaning, it could be a difficult state for Republicans to win back.

Of course, it is a bit ridiculous to apply this precise an analysis four years in advance of the next election.The relative order of the states will be affected by the identity of the Democratic and Republican candidates, and by the strategies they apply.

In a contest between Hillary Rodham Clinton as the Democratic nominee and Marco Rubio as the Republican nominee, for example, Pennsylvania might not figure so prominently. Mrs. Clinton performed very well in Pennsylvania in the Democratic primaries in 2008, while Mr. Rubio might give Republicans a better opportunity to win back states like Colorado and Nevada, which have a larger number of Hispanic voters.

But if the trends of the past few election cycles continue, and Democrats continue to make gains among minorities and with white voters that have high socioeconomic status, while Republicans perform strongly with working-class whites, then Pennsylvania could become more and more pivotal – and perhaps even essential to the Republican electoral math.

pacino wrote:How Obama engineered the cease fire:

Throughout his trip in South East Asia he was constantly on the phone with both Morsi and Netanyahu, before and after his meetings with the leaders of China and Japan. The president even made time to speak with both leaders during a dinner held as part of a summit of East Asian leaders.

His goal - creating the conditions needed for a ceasefire. Publically he praised Morsi and Netanyahu, and behind the scenes he was pressuring them to bring the conflict between Israel and Hamas to an end

f

The American president realizes he has no choice but to work with Morsi. The US administration identified the risks but also the great opportunities of restoring US influence to Egypt. In White House reports regarding a phone call between Morsi and Obama, Obama is reported to praised Morsi's part in the ceasefire as well as reiterating the importance of close cooperation between the two on issues of regional security.

The ceasefire remains fragile, but the process seems to have created a very positive basis for future cooperation between the US and the Muslim Brotherhood administrations, returning a hope for stability to the region.

Obama promised Netanyahu to assist in preventing arms and munitions smuggling into the Strip as well as restating his commitment to help seek funding for an additional Iron Dome missile defense battery, as well as additional supplementary systems required for securing Israel's safety.

There is no doubt that President Obama has delivered the goods Israel needs for protection against ballistic as well as short range rockets, specifically in light of Iron Dome's success.

However, the real test for American and Egyptian relations lies in creating an apparatus for preventing rockets from reaching the Gaza Strip.

Bucky wrote:

pacino wrote:How Obama engineered the cease fire:

His goal - creating the conditions needed for a ceasefire. Publically he praised Morsi and Netanyahu, and behind the scenes he was pressuring them to bring the conflict between Israel and Hamas to an end

NY Times wrote:After the deputies cut the first pair free, they moved them over to a backhoe, where they left them for more than an hour while they tried to free the second pair. Unable to do so, they pepper-sprayed the second pair until they unlocked themselves [hard to picture the pepper-spraying speeding up the self-unlocking process, but it's in the paper so it must be true - drsmooth].

Around noon, on the advice of a lawyer, the landowners hosting the sit-in revoked the protesters’ permission to be there. Sheriff’s deputies came with a cherry picker on a flatbed truck to remove the protesters from the trees. When other protesters blocked the truck, deputies warned them to get out of the road and then began firing pepper spray into the crowd. [75-year-old protester Jeannette ] Singleton was unable to get out of the road in time and was hit in the face with the spray....After the police had left, protesters sat her in a wheelchair on the shoulder of the highway and dabbed her eyes with milk of magnesia to alleviate the burning.

“I don’t believe it,” Ms. Singleton kept saying. “I just don’t believe it.”

A TransCanada spokesman said the company had nothing to do with the police response.

“TransCanada doesn’t determine who to arrest or how to handle a situation,” said the spokesman, David Dodson. “When there’s contact with protesters, we contact law enforcement, and law enforcement takes appropriate action.”

bleh wrote:2 day old news really, but needs to be said about how the conspiracy nuts were wrong about Benghazi
http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld ... 5477.story

*cough*

Werthless wrote:The running theme of the Romney/Ryan campaign, at least according to the liberal side of this board, is to lie their asses off. And because of all this lying, Romney may wiggle his way into the White House, where he will proceed to be a worse President than Obama. This is the current state of the board, basically. And now, when evidence arises that the Obama administration lied about evidence surrounding a terrorist attack on 9/11, and they continue to dig deeper by making false claims about how the security detail is funded, how does the board react? Predictably. Now, I don't expect any Obama supporter to really dive in and say "The President is wrong on this," but it's amazing that liberals will are trying to spin this into Romney/Ryan misleading the public. It's absurd. We should expect the truth.

YOU WERE WRONG

pacino wrote:wow, Walmart is somehow claiming only 50 workers protested on Black Friday. considering i personally know 4 people, i somehow doubt that

jerseyhoya wrote:

pacino wrote:wow, Walmart is somehow claiming only 50 workers protested on Black Friday. considering i personally know 4 people, i somehow doubt that

You personally know four people who work for WalMart?