As The Ticket warned right here earlier on this tax day, President Obama flew to Florida today on the way to an evening of collecting $2.5 million at Miami Democratic Party fundraisers to try to explain his new space policy to a scientific community skeptical that his extremely expensive earthly priorities will exclude any serious investment in space beyond endless research and robot symbols.
His full explanation is below courtesy of the White House.
Here's what the president said in capsule form: Previous astronauts are not impressed by Obama's plane, Air Force One. A lot of historic things happened at the Kennedy Space Center. The Russians started the space race and America wasn't ready and recent White House administrations haven't been focused either.
Many good things came from the space race and it's American to reach for new heights. As a child, I waved a U.S. flag at an astronaut in Hawaii. Things have changed though -- no longer adversaries, not a competition, getting to the Moon not the object. He likes NASA 100%.
Some people question his commitment to the space program. But he knows that fear and uncertainty really stem from "folks in Washington – driven less by vision than by politics – have for
years neglected NASA’s mission and undermined the work." Somebody else decided to retire the space shuttles. We're adding $6 billion to NASA budget for....
As Republican superstar Sarah Palin puts the finishing touches on her state of the common-sense drive speech for this afternoon's Southern Republican Leadership Conference in New Orleans, a new poll emerged showing some improvement in her unfavorable image in the minds of many Americans.
As The Ticket reported here Thursday night, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and vice presidential daughter Liz Cheney got the GOP good times roiling last night with harsh criticism of what's-his-name in the White House.
The Obama healthcare bill is “one of the most arrogant power plays in American history,” Cheney said. Gingrich suggested the unfolding November midterm election campaign is “not Obama vs. anti-Obama but America vs. a secular socialist machine.”
Palin has been drawing loud, long cheers in recent speeches with her own attacks on....
When President Obama threw out the first ball at last year's Major League Baseball All-Star game, he wore jeans -- really comfortable, really worn, really vintage American jeans.
He got hammered, with critics decrying the selection as "Mom jeans."
This year when he threw out the first ball at the Washington Nationals Opening Day game this week, he wore khakis.
What presidents and other politicians wear to sports events may seem a trivial matter, and compared to weightier subjects like war, peace and taxes, of course it is. But in recent years, public figures have spent a great deal of time pondering their wardrobe, part of the....
Since Michael Steele was elected chairman of the Republican National Committee in January 2009, the once Grand Old Party has suffered a series of gaffes, scandals and other signals of a party in distress. Then the "tea party" activists came to town, further endangering the brand.
Now, in a development alarming for the RNC as an institution, a group of Republicans is starting an outside political group to go head-to-head with the RNC for wealthy donors and prominence. American Crossroads hopes to raise $52 million to help Republican candidates this fall. Steven Law is leaving his top post at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce to run the group, and lots of top-name Republicans, such as former RNC chairman Ed Gillespie, are on board.
None of this is to say that Republicans won't have a banner year at the polls in November. These are midterm elections, fraught with danger for any president, and Barack Obama is a lighting-rod figure who provokes tremendous distrust among the conservative base.
But for the RNC, the timing of this widespread defection from its base could not be worse. Tea party activists are promoting a different kind of model -- up from the grass roots, and emotional. And the Supreme Court has cleared the way for corporations to play a much larger role in this year's elections, a decision that already limits party influence.
The Angry Right is unlikely to take his suggestions -- movements of the heart rarely like hearing from establishment elders about how they should conduct themselves -- but Rove's gratuitous advice does show concern by party regulars about how uncontrollable -- and how destabilizing to the Republican Party's future -- the tea party activists are.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: Tea party activists gather in Salt Lake City on Tuesday. Credit: Associated Press
Nevada didn't invent dust, but it has perfected it. And Saturday in the dusty dump of Searchlight no one will need a searchlight to find the political dust-up with the campaign arrival of one Sarah Palin to headline a major Tea Party event, as she did in Nashville earlier this year.
Palin is drawing some tea party frowns today with her campaigning in Arizona for former Republican presidential running mate John McCain, undergoing a primary challenge from the right, as we described here the other day.
Palin will seek to bolster McCain's conservative credentials at a Tucson rally today, a Phoenix fundraiser tonight at the same hotel where they conceded to the Democrat ticket in 2008, and another rally in Phoenix Saturday.
McCain's opponent, former Rep. J.D. Hayworth, paints himself as the true conservative and....
In 2008, those who care about immigrants voted for change, hoping to end the plight of an estimated 10 million illegal immigrants who live in the shadows. For nearly 18 months, Democrats put them off, insisting that other issues -- healthcare, financial regulatory reform, climate change -- trumped theirs.
Now immigrants and their advocates are stepping up pressure, planning a march on Washington for March 21 and lobbying lawmakers to take action.
One of the overlooked details of the forever-fight over the widely-debated conservative leanings of the Fox News Channel (besides the fact that a third of its viewers are Democrats) is that it was Fox that broke the then-shocking story in 2000 of candidate George W. Bush's 24-year-old DUI charges.
Why, you wonder, would an old Maine story matter, regardless of the source?
The breaking story of Bush's unrevealed 1976 DUI charges in Maine came just four days before the 2000 election. The Bush-Cheney ticket was tied then in national polls with the Democrats' Gore-Lieberman ticket and was, in fact, ahead in Maine.
Bush ended up losing Maine to the Democrats the next Tuesday and several other states by narrow margins. Had the Republicans won those electoral votes, there never would have been any Florida recount, hanging chad controversy or Supreme Court case. Florida's electoral votes wouldn't have changed anything.
Mike Allen over at Politico reported Thursday night that in an upcoming memoir -- "Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight" -- Bush's chief strategist Karl Rove writes that getting that bad news out earlier in that political season is the single biggest thing he would do differently about that controversial campaign.
No kidding. Controlling the timing of bad news is campaign strategy rule No. 1A. Knowledge of the old arrest was so closely held among a few senior Bush aides that campaign spokesmen had no idea what to reply when the initial Fox News call came in. The story knocked the Bush and Cheney team off-message for days, much as the Rev. Jerremiah Wright revelations did to the Obama crew during the Democratic primaries of 2008..
In the new book, due out next week, Rove speculates that the Fox News story prompted enough changed votes or disappointed social conservatives to not vote that it cost the GOP ticket other states like New Mexico and Iowa.
Sarah Palin popped up on Jay Leno's revived NBC "Tonight Show" tonight and poked a little fun at herself by writing Jay's introduction cue notes on her hand. (See video below.)
The pair, both of whom have taken hits in the media in recent weeks, talked amiably about a wide variety of issues. Here are some:
On the media's treatment of her children:
I think, yes, that a line was crossed there. And I'm still waiting for that line to be uncrossed. Just some common decency, allowing the kids to not be the -- I guess kind of a victim in all this, because they certainly don't deserve it. I have very strong, independent, well-adjusted kids. And I so respected that the media had left other politicians' kids alone. I would just ask for the same treatment.
On the Tea Party movement:
It is an uprising of the people -- (Applause) -- an uprising of the people to say, "Hey, Government, we are not to be working for you. You are to be working for us. Let's get government back on our side." So heaven forbid the Tea Party movement think that they need an individual, a politician to put their faith in, to be their leader.
On campaigning for John McCain:
I stood by his side, wanting Americans to vote for him as our President. Of course I'm going to stand by his side as he runs for reelection in the great state of Arizona. He is an American hero, and I think he is fighting for Americans harder today than many of us had seen for many, many years. He's what we need.
Palin also did her debut standup routine as a comedian:
Hello. Thank you, Jay. Thank you. I'm so happy to get to be here. This is a thrill of....
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...a lifetime really. And Alaska, being so different from Los Angeles. Here when people have a frozen look on their face, I find out it's Botox. (Laughter.)
It is so beautiful here, though, so warm and beautiful. Back home, ooh, it was freezing. It was 5 degrees belowCongress' approval rating.....
Shaun White on the show. Oh, what an amazing athlete. I watched him do a double McTwist 1260, and the only other people to do a double McTwist 1260 was last week: the White House on healthcare.
If this is a politician on late-night TV, there must be a new book somewhere.
Sure enough, there's Republican Mitt Romney on David Letterman's CBS show talking about his new book, "No Apology: The Case for American Greatness."
New books are pretty good signs of candidate-positioning for a possible run in 2012. And, sure enough, the former businessman-governor-Olympics rescuer wisely says he's keeping the door open for a 2012 bid.
"He's running," quips Letterman. "Of course, he's running. I can tell by the cologne."
Then, speaking of "of course," Letterman asks the Republican the required question about fellow Republican Sarah Palin, who happens to be on tonight's Jay Leno show over on NBC. And had her own new book out before Christmas.
“Now what about that Sarah Palin," says Letterman, who had to apologize for an off-color joke about the former Alaskan governor's daughter last year. "She’s not ready to be president, is she?”
“She’s terrific,” Romney rapidly replies to derisive audience laughter. “She really is! She’s terrific. She’s got energy, passion – by the way, you know, be careful what you say about her.”
Letterman says he knows.
Romney adds with a smile, “She has a rifle, you know.”
A brief online kerfuffle raged this week over a perceived similarity between a newer military agency logo and that trademark Obama O circle from the presidential campaign.
According to an initial conspiratorial theory, the newest logo for the Pentagon's Missile Defense Agency (above, right) bears a remarkable resemblance to the Obama campaign logo. And is that perhaps some potentially sinister insinuation of the Muslim crescent in there too?
The answer is, simply: Not.
According to Richard Lehner of the MDA, the agency added the second, more contemporary, three-colored logo to its recruiting materials three years ago as a cost-saving procedure over the continuing five-color logo. The newer design was added to the agency's updated website last fall, where both now appear.
For those of us who in high school days may have been symbolically challenged by some Shakespearean lines, Lehner provides this explanation:
"The symbolism of the design is that it shows missile defense as a global system to defend the US, our deployed forces and allies and friends, as depicted by the path of an interceptor missile and a flash (not a star) denoting a missile intercept."
Another way to explain "missile intercept" is an intentionally premature explosion of an incoming enemy armament caused by our own missile, a super laser beam and/or a secret method that we'd have to kill you for if we told you about.
For 94 years, firearms have been banned in national parks. On Monday, with Congress running from the lobbying power of the National Rifle Assn., the ban was lifted. Guns are now also welcome to board Amtrak trains.
But these days, mindful of the need to corral Red State votes for issues like healthcare reform and financial regulation, Obama has swallowed whatever personal views he may hold on the issue in favor of political expediency. Those amendments on guns at the national parks and on Amtrak came as amendments to bills cracking down on credit card companies and funding transportation agencies.
Now comes word, via the New York Times, that states and local governments, responding to fear from gun owners that Obama would disarm them -- a fear that boosted gun sales after his election -- are considering an arsenal of bills (sorry, couldn't resist) to loosen gun laws.
Gun control advocates are angry. "It’s been a very disappointing year for us, especially considering what he campaigned on,” said Paul Helmke, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, which gave Obama a grade of F for his first year in office.
Ah, that must be it, a secret plan to help the economy.
-- Johanna Neuman
Photo: President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama place presidential coins at the Fallen Soldier Memorial at Ft. Hood on Nov. 10, 2009, during a ceremony honoring the 13 people killed in a shooting rampage at the Texas military base. Credit: Getty Images
President Obama is off on another gold-mining expedition across the West this week. On Thursday night he helped raised a few hundred-thousand at two Denver events for embattled Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet before flying on to Nevada's Sin City.
On Friday, going against his own advice to other Americans, Obama's still visiting Las Vegas, the capital of moneyed excess, to take away some dough for the benefit of equally embattled Democrats in general and Sen. Harry I Have No Negro Dialect Reid in particular.
Harry is behind in every poll to every Republican in his reelection effort for November. Obama's Vegas event Thursday night was at the home of Palms Casino and Sacramento Kings owner George Maloof Jr. and cost $30,000 per person; for that tab, the appetizer cheeses better be better than Kraft. The president hung around for about an hour, according to the press pool report.
Some people are now wondering, as we noted here on Thursday, if maybe Obama wouldn't mind HR and some other D's leaving DC with their boots on come 2010 election time. Though, of course,....
