Israel: Obama maintains jewish support

Haaretz

Gallup tracking puts U.S. Jews' support for Obama at 64 percent

Gallup results show wider gap than those of other polls in support for Obama over Romney.

Gallup has started tracking Jewish voters for the 2012 presidential elections, and its findings are commensurate with other polling, with U.S. President Barack Obama enjoying a 35 point lead over Mitt Romney.

The poll of 576 Jews culled from the pollster's daily tracking of registered U.S. voters from April 11 - June 5, found that Jewish voters favored Obama over the former Massachusetts governor and all-but-certain Republican nominee 64-29.

With a margin of error of 5 percentage points, that's a statistical dead heat with recent polls commissioned by the Workmen's Circle, which had Obama-Romney at 59-29, and by the American Jewish Committee, which had them at 61-28 percent.

It also is commensurate with polling in the same period by Gallup during the 2008 election, when Obama vs. John McCain, the then GOP candidate, scored 61-32, 57-35 and 62-31 in April, May and June of that year, respectively.
 

http://www.haaretz.com/news/u-s-elections-2012/gallup-tracking-puts-u-s-jews-support-for-obama-at-64-percent-1.435309

UK: Obama urges European leaders to act quickly

The Guardian

Obama urges Europe to act swiftly to prevent economic collapse

President says eurozone crisis remains threat to America's economic recovery as Spain prepares to ask EU for bailout

Europe must act quickly to stem its economic crisis, president Barack Obama said on Friday as he called on European leaders to strengthen their banks and urged Greece to remain in the eurozone.

Obama addressed reporters at the White House as it emerged that Spanish officials would meet EU officials this weekend and ask for help shoring up their troubled banks.

"There is a path out of this challenge. These decisions are in the hands of Europe's leaders; they understand the urgent need to act. There are specific steps they can take right now to prevent the situation from getting worse. One of those steps is taking clear action as soon as possible to inject capital into weak banks," said Obama.

The president said he had been in "constant contact" with European leaders and his own financial advisers as the crisis developed. He urged Greece to act to stay within the eurozone before elections next week arguing that "hardships will likely be worse" if it leaves.

Obama said the US was strong enough to absorb "some of the shocks from across the Atlantic" but that the European crisis was still a threat to America's fragile recovery.

"If Europe goes into recession, that means we are selling fewer goods, fewer services – and that's going to have some impact," he said.

Read it at The Guardian
http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/2012/jun/08/obama-europe-act-economic-collapse

International edition of the New York Times: Do nothing Congress

The International Herald Tribune

Editorial

The Bills to Nowhere

Published: June 7, 2012 

This is now the pattern of business in the House of Representatives: Spend most of the time passing bills designed not to become law but to satisfy the ideological desires of conservative voters. And block laws that actually need to get passed.

This colossal waste of time, punctuated by moments of real destruction, has been going on since early last year, and is well-illustrated this month. The House voted Thursday to repeal crucial parts of the health care reform law, and an upcoming bill would make government regulation virtually impossible. None of these bills have a chance of enactment. In the meantime, though, House Republicans won’t bring up a desperately needed transportation bill. 

Political-message bills have sprouted like weeds in the last few years, the product of extreme polarization and stalemate. Elected officials have to show that they’re doing something, so they propose bills designed only to create a talking point against the other side. Senate Democrats do it, too. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which was predictably filibustered to death by Republicans on Tuesday, was the latest example. We supported that bill as an important vehicle for reducing the wage gap between men and women, but the principal reason Democrats introduced it was to embarrass Mitt Romney and other Republicans over their pronounced indifference to the issue.

Nonetheless, House Republicans have refined this practice into an art and have passed nearly two dozen of these bills. The latest example was Thursday’s vote to repeal the tax on companies that sell more than $5 million in medical devices, a component of the health care reform law. Another provision in the bill would let people use health savings accounts to pay for over-the-counter drugs, changing an aspect of the health care law in a way that would primarily benefit higher-income taxpayers.

Read it at IHT:  http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/opinion/the-bills-to-nowhere.html?_r=1

UK: The Stimulus "created plenty of jobs"

PJ: Of all the countries affected by the international recession, the US is one of only a few that is showing growth, albeit slow growth. Perhaps critics of Mr. Obama's economic policy need to look further than their partisan noses to see the evidence that the stimulus actually worked and that the fault of the Obama Administration was in not asking for a bigger stimulus package (although he was unlikely to have been granted one by Congress). Contrast the US policies with those in Europe whose support of painful austerity measures has thrown many countries such as the UK into double-dip recessions. As European economies slide and threaten to damage the US's fragile economic recovery, more voices can be heard in support of stimulus vs austerity: http://www.economist.com/node/21556577.

The Economist

Stimulus

The same old debate

Jun 7th 2012, 22:30 by R.M. | WASHINGTON, DC

WHEN nothing is happening in Washington politicians tend to rehash old debates. So it was at Wednesday's hearings of the House Budget Committee, where Tim Huelskamp, a Republican representative from Kansas, confronted Douglas Elmendorf, the director of the Congressional Budget Office, over the supposed failure of the 2009 stimulus package. "Where did Washington mess up?" Mr Huelskamp asked. "Because you’re saying most economists think it should’ve worked. It didn’t."

For Mr Huelskamp, the evidence of failure is the fact that the unemployment rate rose above 8%, despite promises from the administration that it would not. This is a useful argument for Republicans, nicely encapsulated in what Henry Blodget described as "the chart that will get Obama fired". It's also rather flimsy. As Mr Blodget notes, what the chart (and Mr Huelskamp's evidence) really shows is that the administration drastically underestimated the severity of the recession it had inherited and, therefore, overestimated its capacity to turn things around. But the stimulus? Mr Elmendorf says it created plenty of jobs.

Read it at The Economist
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2012/06/stimulus

Australia: Russia works with US on Syrian solution

The Sydney Morning Herald

Russia to talk Syria transition with US

Flavia Krause-Jackson

AS SYRIA slides towards civil war, Russia is signalling that it no longer views President Bashar al-Assad's position as tenable and is working with the US to seek an orderly transition.

A US delegation headed by Fred Hof, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's special adviser on Syria, is scheduled to meet Russian counterparts tomorrow in Moscow. They will try to forge a common approach to moving Dr Assad aside - or even out of the country - with a goal of replacing him with someone acceptable to both sides in the conflict.

Under newly elected Russian President Vladimir Putin, an evolution from support for Russia's main Middle East ally could break a diplomatic deadlock.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/russia-to-talk-syria-transition-with-us-20120606-1zwhj.html#ixzz1xCq4Q8Qd

 

 

International Edition: Reagan's economic policy

International Herald Tribune

Op-Ed Columnist

Reagan Was a Keynesian

By PAUL KRUGMAN

There’s no question that America’s recovery from the financial crisis has been disappointing. In fact, I’ve been arguing that the era since 2007 is best viewed as a “depression,” an extended period of economic weakness and high unemployment that, like the Great Depression of the 1930s, persists despite episodes during which the economy grows. And Republicans are, of course, trying — with considerable success — to turn this dismal state of affairs to their political advantage. 

They love, in particular, to contrast President Obama’s record with that of Ronald Reagan, who, by this point in his presidency, was indeed presiding over a strong economic recovery. You might think that the more relevant comparison is with George W. Bush, who, at this stage of his administration, was — unlike Mr. Obama — still presiding over a large loss in private-sector jobs. And, as I’ll explain shortly, the economic slump Reagan faced was very different from our current depression, and much easier to deal with. Still, the Reagan-Obama comparison is revealing in some ways. So let’s look at that comparison, shall we?

Read it at IHT
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/08/opinion/krugman-reagan-was-a-keynesian.html?_r=1&ref=global-home#

Romney now says that he longed to serve in Vietnam but records show that he sought numerous deferments

‘Nam Qualm: What Mitt Romney Thought Was ‘Tough’ About His Vietnam-Era ‘Missionary Work’

by Tommy Christopher | 12:13 pm, June 7th, 2012

On Wednesday night’s The Rachel Maddow Show, host Rachel Maddow rightly questioned why the media has, so far, given Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney a pass on his avoidance of service in Vietnam, and his subsequent contradictory and misleading (to put it kindly) statements about it.

However, Maddow’s segment, and the Associated Press report it was pegged to, fail to acknowledge that Romney faced his own “tough” times during Vietnam.

One of the things that sets Rachel Maddow apart from other cable news commentators is her non-linear rhetorical style. Rather than a typical beginning-middle-end structure, Rachel Maddow’s video essays employ a technique involving repetition. It’s a technique involving repetition of what she has said so far, but adding something new with each repetition. The repetition of what she has said so far reinforces each of those points, plus the new points she adds with each repetition. It’s an effective technique that accomplishes two things: driving home the premise of the segment in a powerful way, and building anticipation for the main point of the segment. Rather than setting up a series of dominoes, she’s setting up stacks of them, so when they fall, the impact is greater.

Rachel used that signature style to great effect in discussing Mitt Romney’s relationship to the Vietnam-era draft, from his early support for the war (and the draft specifically), to his multiple deferments, to his 1994 statement that “It was not my desire to go off and serve in Vietnam, but nor did I take any actions to remove myself from the pool of young men who were eligible for the draft,” to his 2007 statement that he “longed in many respects to actually be in Vietnam,” to the present day, in which Mitt Romney supports sending troops pretty much everywhere:

With that professionally-done build-up in place, there’s one Romney quote that serves as the perfect punchline to this whole story. Not a “ha ha” funny punchline, but one that sums up the sense of entitlement that allows Mitt Romney to take to the streets in favor of the draft, yet avoid serving himself.

While campaigning in New Hampshire in December, Mitt Romney reminisced about his time as a missionary in France, knocking on doors looking for Mormon converts, an activity which kept him out of the draft, and out of Vietnam. There were a lot of things that Romney didn’t like about the experience (slamming doors, lack of English), but only one that he described as “tough”:

Many French people at the time were “not happy to see Americans, because we were in Vietnam at the time. That was tough,” (Romney) added.

 read more and watch the video:  http://www.mediaite.com/tv/nam-qualm-what-mitt-romney-thought-was-tough-about-his-vietnam-era-missionary-work/