Team Romney calls out Obama for misspelling 'Ohio' at campaign stop

Smartest President In The History Of The World Can’t Spell ‘Ohio’…

President Obama needed a do-over to spell “Ohio” correctly on the campus of Ohio State University this week. 

Although Obama and several students at a campaign stop Tuesday morning at Sloopy’s Diner on the campus of OSU tweeted out photos of the president correctly posing as the “I” in Ohio, another student supplied a photo of a spelling mishap to Mitt Romney’s campaign.

The photo, tweeted by Romney’s Ohio communications director, Christopher Maloney, shows Obama and three students all a little confused about how to spell the state’s name, with Obama holding his hands up in what seems to be an “H” and as the third letter. 

“A word of advice to @BarackObama: It's ‘O-H-I-O’ that has 18 electoral votes, not 'O-I-H-O,’ ” Maloney tweeted.

Christopher Maloney@CHRISMAL0NEY

A word of advice to @BarackObama: it's "O-H-I-O" that has 18 electoral votes, not "O-I-H-O" pic.twitter.com/babXzAtp

22 Aug 12

The Washington Post incorrectly reported the photo was doctored, but Maloney told The Hill it is authentic. He said the photo was passed along to him directly by a student. There were several photos being taken by students at the diner.

Via: The Hill

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California poised to grant driver's licenses to young illegal immigrants

California is on the verge of allowing hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to receive driver's licenses for the first time in nearly two decades.

The key question is how to do it.

The issue of granting driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants has raged in the Legislature for much of the past decade, without resolution, but fighting is largely moot now due to a new federal policy.

President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals gives a select group of undocumented immigrants the right to live and work in the United States for two years without fear of deportation.

California is laying the groundwork for extending the privilege to driving, too, for an estimated 400,000 immigrants.

"It appears that young people who receive federal deferrals will be eligible for California driver's licenses," the Department of Motor Vehicles said in a written statement Tuesday.

"But it remains uncertain whether clarifying legislation or regulations will be necessary," the DMV statement said.

Gil Duran, spokesman for Gov. Jerry Brown, said the DMV statement reflects the governor's position but that he could not elaborate.

The glitch is that state regulations allow only certain types of federal immigration documents to support the issuance of a driver's license.

If President Obama's Deferred Action program provides participants with "new or different immigration documents," then legislation or regulatory clarification may be needed, the DMV said.

Via: Sacramento Bee

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Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2012/08/22/4746634/california-poised-to-grant-drivers.html#storylink=cpy#storylink=cpy

In 1991 Harvard Law School yearbook, Obama called for ‘mutual respect and tolerance’

A copy of Harvard Law School’s yearbook from 1991 — the year Barack Obama graduated — is for sale on eBay, and it provides an as-yet-unseen look into the future president’s views on the kind of “mean-spirited” campaign discourse that some Republicans say has characterized his own re-election campaign.

The seller, who first listed the item for sale July 17, provided scanned images of pages where Obama appeared, including his self-written “Student Profile.” In the essay, Obama mentioned “diversity” twice, including one mention of “faculty diversity,” a concept for which future first lady Michelle Obama — then Michelle Robinson — argued strongly in a 1988 Harvard Black Law Students Association (BLSA) essay.(RELATED: In Harvard essay, young Michelle Obama argued for race-based faculty hiring)

A note next to Barack Obama’s official yearbook photo also identifies him as a member of the BLSA.

His central message in 1991 concerned his desire for greater civility.

“After three years, I continue to be struck by the tremendous talent and energy among HLS students and faculty,” Obama wrote. “The diversity of campus life challenges all of us to question our assumptions, listen to other viewpoints, and articulate our values in a spirit of mutual respect and tolerance.”

By contrast, Republicans both inside and outside of GOP presidential contender Mitt Romney’s campaign have complained in recent weeks that the tone of Obama’s re-election effort has grown in coarseness and aggression.

Obama deputy campaign manager Stephanie Cutter accused Romney on July 12 of being either a liar or a felon, following the Boston Globe’s disclosure that Romney maintained legal title to Bain Capital well after his departure in 1999 to run the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics.

Via: Daily Caller

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Jarrett Towers White House senior adviser Valerie Jarrett’s real-estate investment jumped in value between 2010 and 2011, documents show

President Obama with Valerie Jarre

Senior White House adviser and long-time Obama confidant Valerie Jarrett’s role in a number of controversial Chicago housing developments has garnered her investments worth millions of dollars while highlighting the administration’s extensive business ties to presidential donors.

Before joining the Obama administration in 2009, Jarrett was president and chief executive officer of the Habitat Company, a real estate development firm founded by major Democratic donor Daniel Levin. Before that, she served three years as commissioner of the Chicago Department of Planning and Development under Mayor Richard Daley.

Jarrett currently owns an 11-percent equity interest in Kingsbury Plaza, a 46-story luxury apartment complex developed by Habitat between 2005 and 2007 at a cost of more than $100 million.

She valued the investment at between $1 million and $5 million on her 2011 financial disclosure form, up from $250,001 in 2010. A Jarrett spokesmantold the Washington Times that the investment was “a direct result of her 13 years working for Habitat.”

Cook County records show the Kingsbury property is worth around $27.2 million, but thanks to a series of legal appeals beginning in 2003, the land and building are assessed at a much lower value for tax purposes. Since 2008, the property has been designated a “special commercial structure” and is taxed at a value of just $6.8 million, or 25 percent of the actual value.

Asked how such a property could enjoy such a low taxable value, an official with the Cook County Assessor’s Office told the Free Beacon that the property’s owners “must have good attorneys.”

Via: Free Beacon

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Labor Department spends stimulus funds for ads during Olbermann, Maddow shows

The Labor Department paid out hundreds of thousands of dollars in federal stimulus funds to a public relations firm to run more than 100 commercials touting the Obama administration’s “green training” job efforts on two popular MSNBC cable shows, records show.

The commercials ran on MSNBC on shows hosted by Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann in 2009, but the contract didn’t report any jobs created, according to records recently reviewed by The Washington Times.

Spending reports under the federal Recovery Act show $495,000 paid to McNeely Pigott & Fox Public Relations LLC, which the Labor Department hired to raise awareness “among employers and influencers about the [Job Corps] program’s existing and new training initiatives in high growth and environmentally friendly career areas” as well as spreading the word to prospective Job Corps enrollees.

Ultimately, the firm negotiated ad buys for “two approved spots” airing 14 times per week for two months on “Countdown with Keith Olbermann” and “The Rachel Maddow Show,” according to a project report, which listed the number zero under a section of the report asking how many jobs had been created through the stimulus contract.

Via: The Washington Times

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Obama National Campaign Co-Chair Donated $10,000 to Paul Ryan

A big-time donor to President Barack Obama is also a financial supporter of Paul Ryan. Marc Benioff, a national campaign co-chair for President Obama's reelection campaign, donated $10,000 to Ryan's political action committee earlier this summer, in June, according to CNN.

Benioff has helped raise more than $500,000 for Obama's re-election effort, and even hosted a $35,800-a-plate fundraiser featuring Stevie Wonder and hip-hop artist Will.i.am.

The founder and CEO of Salesforce.com is also an Obama national campaign co-chair, a distinction awarded to select Democratic heavyweights like Rahm Emanuel, Dick Durbin and Russ Feingold.

"I'm squarely a supporter of the president, and he is absolutely the right man for the job," Benioff said Monday.

But the tech executive is also a fan of Ryan -- Mitt Romney's running mate and a rising Republican star. In June, Benioff donated $10,000 to Ryan's political action committee after meeting with the candidate, who at the time had not been named to the GOP ticket and was running for re-election in the House.

Benioff tells CNN: "The nation's fiscal difficulties must be addressed, the CEO said, and Ryan's ideas offer 'a lot of the right long-term thinking for the country.'"

Via: The Weekly Standard

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VA under investigation over $5M conferences featuring 'Patton' parody

• Secretary Eric Shinseki's Veterans Affairs Department is under fire for $5 million spent on two conferences, featuring a pricey parody of the movie "Patton."

On the heels of the GSA spending scandal in Vegas, employees at the Department of Veterans Affairs are now under investigation over a pair of Orlando conferences that ran $5 million and featured a pricey video parody of the movie "Patton." 

The price tag on those conferences, held last summer, far exceeds the roughly $830,000 spent by the General Services Administration in Las Vegas. The VA inspector general's office says it's been investigating since April and is preparing to release a report by next month. 

The potential spending scandal sequel has now caught the eye of House oversight committee Chairman Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who fired off a letter to Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki last week pressing the department for answers. 

Issa revealed several conference details, including the claim that $52,000 was spent "to produce an 18-minute video starring a paid actor satirizing the opening scene from the movie Patton" -- the 1970 film starring George C. Scott as Gen. George Patton. 

Issa questioned why the VA hired an outside group to make the video when the department "has videographers and editors on staff." 

Issa also wrote that another $84,000 was spent on "promotional items such as branded pens, highlighters, hand sanitizers and USB drives." 

Via: Fox News

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BEST PLACES FOR JOB GROWTH LARGELY RED STATES

Texas is a great place to move if you’re looking for work.

Duh.

Of course it is; Texas is a red state. And one example is Fort Bend County, which once was famous for farming, but now attracts company after company looking for a business-friendly environment. Texas doesn’t kill businesses with taxes, the county has a strong school system, and it’s close to Houston, so corporations are flocking to Fort Bend. Among them are a Fluor Enterprises, an engineering firm that is purchasing land for a plant that will add 2,000 jobs; oil services firm Schlumberger, which has a 240-acre campus; CVR Energy, whose headquarters reside there; and Team Industrial Services, which intends to relocate its headquarters and 100 jobs to Fort Bend.

It’s not just Texas; in this era of rampant unemployment, guess which color states had the lowest unemployment in July? The top four were red: North Dakota, at 3.0%, Nebraska, 4.0%, South Dakota, 4,4%, and Oklahoma, 4.9%. 

And the elites on the coasts think they’re so much smarter.

Via: Breitbart

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DNC TO PROMOTE 'SUCCESS' OF AUTO BAILOUT

The DNC has plenty of good elected official seats still available. 

The (Convention planning) documents also give a glimpse of what parts of Obama’s record will get the most attention in the campaign, with one piece — the auto bailout — rating several mentions in the plan....

President Barack Obama claims the $82 billion auto bailout “created or saved” one million jobs.  But this is the Administration that claimed the $1 trillion so-called “Stimulus” bill “created or saved” jobs - in non-existent Congressional districts.

Chevy Volt

The administation spent $80 billion on “green jobs” - but couldn’t define what a “green job” was.  And when they finally started defining it - counted things like oil industry lobbyist, bus driver and garbage man. Suffice to say, President Obama and his Democrat cohorts have a long history of being...disingenuous.  And having a great deal of difficulty with math. 

We think the auto bailout rates several mentions - though we’re sure ours won’t come up at the Charlotte, North Carolina Democrat Lie-A-Thon.  Behold:

Taxpayers are poised to lose over $42 billion on the $82 billion auto bailout.  President Obama in late 2009 said we would make money on it.

$26.5 billion of the loss was a straight payoff to the Democrat-apparatchik United Auto Workers (UAW) union.

During the bankruptcy process, President Obama illegally paid off the UAW first and in full - before secured bondholders who should have been made whole before anyone else got a dime.  Which was incredibly disruptive and destructive of the entire bond market. 

President Obama illegally carried forward through the bankruptcy the ridiculously exorbitant UAW contracts, a huge contributing factor to GM going under in the first place - and are again, predictably, helping to wreck the bottom line.

Via Breitbart

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DRUDGE: BIDEN PREPPING STUNT FOR GOP CONVENTION

AP File

Secret Service prepping for Biden to appear at GOP convention, says Drudge

By Alex Pappas, The Daily Caller

 

Vice President Joe Biden is reportedly planning to crash the party next week when Republicans gather in Tampa, Fla., for the GOP convention.

 

The Drudge Report cited sources Tuesday saying that Secret Service agents have been spotted in Tampa telling people that they are doing advance work for Biden’s trip. He’s expected to be in Tampa on Monday or Tuesday, the news website reported.

 

A spokeswoman who answered the phone in the vice president’s office directed questions to the campaign when reached by The Daily Caller. The Obama campaign didn’t immediately return a request for comment.

 

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WaPo: The vice president will be rallying supporters in Tampa on Monday, Aug. 27 — during the Republican National Convention — according to a Democratic source.

Read more here

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Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus said the GOP will respond tenfold to any Democratic efforts to upstage the party's national convention, amid reports that Vice President Joe Biden will visit Tampa next week.

"I think it's pretty common among parties to play with each other's conventions, and we'll have a pretty big presence in Charlotte as well," Priebus said. "The nice thing about going first is that whatever they do to us, we can do ten times over to them."

Does that mean that Romney may counter-program the Democratic convention in Charlotte next month? Priebus replied "You never know where we are going to be."

"I'm a big believer in: if they punch us, we put on the brass knuckles and punch back," he added.

Read more at Buzzfeed

Via: Fox News

OBAMA TAKES DIG AT ROMNEY'S UPBRINGING

President Obama portrayed Mitt Romney on Tuesday as an out-of-touch elitist while pitching education reform in front of college students at a campaign event at Capital University in Columbus, Ohio.

Obama focused on a comment Romney made earlier this year in which he said if someone wants to go to college or start a business, he or she could just “borrow money if you have to from your parents.”

“When a high school student in Youngstown asked him what he would do to make college more affordable for families like his, Governor Romney didn’t say anything about grants or loan programs that are critical to millions of students to get a college education; nothing about work-study programs, or rising college tuition; he didn't say a word about community colleges, or how important higher education is to America’s economic future,” Obama said. “He said the best thing you can do is shop around.”

“That’s it — that’s his plan. That’s his answer to young people who are trying to figure out to go to college and make sure they don't have a mountain of debt — shop around and borrow money from your parents."

Taking a dig at Romney's wealthy upbringing, Obama added: “Not everybody has parents who have the money to lend."

Via: The Hill

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Obama praised Supreme Court affirmative action ruling in 2003, applauded racial ‘set aside plans’

In a June 25, 2003 interview with the Chicago Defender, an urban newspaper serving the city's African-American community, President Barack Obama praised the U.S. Supreme Court for preserving the practice of affirmative action in U.S. university admissions.

Nine years later, Obama's Department of Justice filed an amicus curiae brief with the Supreme Court on Aug. 13, arguing in favor of racial preferences in the admissions department of the University of Texas.

Speaking at Columbia University on Feb. 23, Attorney General Eric Holder said affirmative action may never become obsolete. “The question," Holder said, "is not when does it end, but when does it begin. ... When do people of color truly get the benefits to which they are entitled?” (RELATED: In Harvard essay, young Michelle Obama argued for race-based faculty hiring)

Obama, a state senator and a candidate for U.S. Senate in 2003, praised the late Maynard Jackson in the Defender interview. Jackson, an African-American mayor of Atlanta, died on the day the high court ruled race could be a factor in college admissions. Mayor Jackson, Obama said, was “the architect among big city mayors of effective affirmative action and set aside plans.”

"He structured it in ways that other mayors across the country ended up emulating," said Obama. "His passing is enormous to all of us, but, it is fitting that on the same day he passed we had a Supreme Court that narrowly did the right thing by affirming the basic principle of affirmative action.”

Gov. Chris Christie: No Chance I’ll Tone It Down During Keynote Address

'It's A Great Opportunity For Me Personally, It's Great Opportunity For Our State'

ASBURY PARK, N.J. (CBSNewYork) –Governor Chris Christie is on his seventh draft of his keynote address for next week’s Republican National Convention in Tampa, Fla.

“I’m not nervous, no. I’m excited. It’s a great opportunity for me personally, it’s a great opportunity for our state,” Christie said on Monday.

WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell reports

Christie told WCBS 880′s Peter Haskell that likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney reached out the day before he announced his running mate.

“I called him and he told me that he had decided to go in a different direction for vice president. [He] asked me if I’d be willing to do the keynote address. I told him that I would be,” Christie told Haskell.

Romney chose Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan as his running mate, but Christie said there are no hard feelings.

“I think it’s about the record we’ve established here and I think Gov. Romney is an admirer of that record and I think that’s why he asked me,” Christie told Haskell.

The famously brash governor said he has no plans to tone it down for the national audience.

“I don’t think they have any expectation nor have they requested that I have a personality-ectomy between now and next Tuesday,” Christie told Haskell. “They know what they’re buying,” Christie added.

The governor said he worked on his speech while he was on vacation last week.

The keynote speech is the highest-profile spot for someone not accepting the party’s presidential or vice presidential nomination. The slot has launched many political figures including President Barack Obama, who was the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2004. Four years later, he won the White House.

The Republican National Convention will kick off from Tampa next Monday and wraps up Thursday, Aug. 30.

How do you think Gov. Christie will do at the Republican National Convention? Do you think he’s a rising national star in the party? Please share your thoughts below…

Via: CBS New York

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Obama Takes On Navy SEALS: 'I Don't Take These Folks Too Seriously'

President Obama said Monday that he isn't too worried about two groups of military veterans running campaign ads against him.

Last week, two groups — Special Operations Speaks and Special Operations OPSEC Education Fund - formed to criticize Obama on national security policy, the Osama bin Laden raid and intelligence leaks.

“I don’t take these folks too seriously. One of their members is a birther who denies I was born here, despite evidence to the contrary," Obama told The Virginian-Pilot. "You’ve got another who was a tea party candidate in a recent election."

"This kind of stuff springs up before election time," Obama said.

The founder of one group, ex-Navy SEAL Larry Bailey, told Foreign Policy magazine last week: "I have to admit that I'm a birther."

In another interview with a Virginia TV station, Obama attacked the latest OPSEC film that accused him of leaking too many details about the bin Laden raid. That group maintains that it is nonpartisan, but its founder Scott Taylor is a former GOP candidate for office.

"My attitude towards leaks and disclosure of our military operations has been to crack down on it," Obama said in an interview with WVEC.

"I've been criticized by some for being too vigorous in going after folks who leak information that impacts our national security. I don't have a lot of tolerance for it," Obama said. 

Last week, the Obama campaign also got Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) — himself the victim of a group of military veterans during his 2004 presidential run — to denounce the attacks in a mass email. "I honor and appreciate the service of my fellow veterans, but a false attack is a false attack -- no matter who's making it," Kerry wrote.

Via: Politico

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Obamacare’s Threat of Centralized Control

I don’t like much about Obamacare. But most urgently, I oppose its imposition of anti-American centralized control–in the sense that it is the antithesis of the Founders’ governing philosophy–and hopeless complexity over a huge sector of the American economy, as much about the seizure of raw power as it is about restraining costs.

That’s the NHS model.  No, not in the method of its funding but the flawed presumption that bureaucrats somehow know best, a point made very well in by Theodore Dalyrimple’s interesting article about the NHS, entitled “Universal Mediocrity” (my emphasis):

In obeying directives not because they are right but because they are directives, doctors lose their self-respect, their probity, and their intellectual honesty. Gogolian absurdity can result—with a hint of Kafkaesque menace and Orwellian linguistic dishonesty. When the British government decreed that every patient arriving in the emergency room should be admitted to a hospital ward within four hours if admission was necessary (and that hospitals would face fines if they failed to adhere to the rule), traffic jams of ambulances formed outside one famous hospital, with their patients prevented from entering the emergency rooms until the hospital could comply with the directive. Other hospitals redesignated their corridors as wards so that they could claim that patients on stretchers had been admitted in time. In a centralized system, the setting of targets will encourage organized deception, as well as distortion of effort.
In the United States, after President Obama’s health-care law proposed fining hospitals that readmitted too many patients within 30 days of discharge, editorials in the New England Journal of Medicine pointed out the dangers posed by that rule. They omitted to say that when giant bureaucracies set targets for others to reach, they intend not so much to procure improvement as to impose control.

They say that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. We already see some of that. But more primarily, it is also the enemy of excellence and innovation. Deprofessionalizing medicine into a technocracy–already in its early stages–will not make our doctors and hospitals better, but instead, equalize increasingly mediocre results.

Via: First Things

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