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The New Republic: Obama Loses The Cavalry Vote

Ramsey watched the presidential debate last night, and, yes, he noticed Obama’s remark. He and his wife are both voting for Romney. (I hope I haven’t just committed him to appearing in a Romney ad.) It doesn’t actually have anything to do with what Obama said about horses. Even in 1942, Ramsey concedes, horse cavalry were a rarity. “They weren’t obsolete,” Ramsey says, “but there were very few of them. The Russians had some. The Poles in Europe, they still had some horse cavalry. As far as ours was concerned, so far as I know or remember, the 26th Cavalry, which [consisted of] Philippine scouts, was one of the last cavalry regiments.”

Foreign Policy: Is the Obama campaign taking commercial ideas from Vladimir Putin?

“Your first time shouldn’t be with just anybody. You want to do it with a great guy,” she says, referring to casting your first ballot for Obama. (What were you thinking?) It’s a clever conceit, but feels a bit familiar. Perhaps because the same joke was used in an ad for Vladimir Putin’s presidential campaign earlier this year:


The New Yorker: The voter-fraud myth

The letter, which cited arcane legal statutes and was printed on government letterhead, was dated September 4th. “You are hereby notified that your right to vote has been challenged by a qualified elector,” it said. “The Hamilton County Board of Elections has scheduled a hearing regarding your right to vote on Monday, September 10th, 2012, at 8:30 a.m. . . . You have the right to appear and testify, call witnesses and be represented by counsel.”

The New York Times: For President, a Complex Calculus of Race and Politics

‘But his seeming ease belies the anxiety and emotion that advisers say he brings to his historic position: pride in what he has accomplished, determination to acquit himself well and intense frustration. Mr. Obama is balancing two deeply held impulses: a belief in universal politics not based on race and an embrace of black life and its challenges.’

The New Republic: Growing Up Romney

This was supposed to be the race that Tagg Romney took easy. When his father ran for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, Tagg signed on as a full-time staffer and even served as the campaign manager for Mitt’s running mate. Four years later, when Mitt began to run for president, Tagg moved his family back to Boston from Los Angeles so he could man a desk at campaign headquarters. But by the beginning of this campaign season, Tagg had a daughter in high school and twins on the way. He’d recently started a private-equity firm called Solamere. He was in his early forties and gave the impression of someone who had better things to do than hole up in a cubicle piled high with pizza boxes.

Mother Jones: Romney-Ryan’s Real Poverty Plan: Soak the Poor

So what would Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan do for the poor and the working class if they were elected? They would allow the payroll tax holiday to expire. This would immediately raise taxes on everyone, and would hit the working poor especially hard.

DesMoinesRegister: After editor’s blog, President Obama releases transcript of Register interview

The second thing I’m confident we’ll get done next year is immigration reform. And since this is off the record, I will just be very blunt. Should I win a second term, a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community. And this is a relatively new phenomenon. George Bush and Karl Rove were smart enough to understand the changing nature of America. And so I am fairly confident that they’re going to have a deep interest in getting that done. And I want to get it done because it’s the right thing to do and I’ve cared about this ever since I ran back in 2008.

Rolling Stone: Obama and the Road Ahead: The Rolling Stone Interview

It was the election of Ronald Reagan that started the Grand Reversal. Reagan had voted four times for FDR, but by 1980 he saw the federal government – with the notable exception of our armed forces – as a bloated, black-hatted villain straight out of one of his B movies. His revolution – and make no mistake that it was one – aimed to undo everything from Medicare to Roe v. Wade. Ever since Reagan, both the New Deal and the Great Society have been under continuous siege by the American right. Bill Clinton survived two terms only by co-opting traditional GOP issues like welfare reform and balanced budgets.

Matt Taibbi: Obama Defends His Finance Reform Record to Rolling Stone: A Brief Response

President Obama’s point about the repeal of Glass-Steagall follows a mantra that Tim Geithner and other members of the president’s administration have been preaching for years. This oddly straw-man-ish, syllogistic argument goes something like this:

The repeal of Glass-Steagall created mega-merged “supermarket” firms that blended insurance, commercial banking, and investment banking services – companies like Citigroup. Lehman Brothers, whose collapse was a major event in the 2008 crisis, was not one of those companies. Therefore, the repeal of Glass-Steagall did not cause the financial crisis.

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