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2011年6月27日星期一

Romney criticizes Obama economic policies in Utah (AP)

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SALT LAKE CITY – Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney criticized President Barack Obama's economic policies Friday at campaign stops in his one-time home state of Utah.

"Gasoline is too expensive, food's too expensive, there's too many people out of work, and there's nothing to be proud of in Barack Obama's economic policies," Romney said from the back of a bright red pickup outside a popular Salt Lake City drive-in restaurant. "My policies will get Americans back to work and let America lead the world as it has in the past."

Romney's stop at the locally owned Hires Big H was his first public appearance in heavily Republican Utah since he announced his bid for the nomination. The event drew about 200 supporters and was bookended by a pair of private fundraisers, including a $1,000-a-plate luncheon at a private home in Orem and a $2,500 per-person reception at a downtown Salt Lake City.

It wasn't clear Friday how much money Romney had raised during his swing through the state.

This is Romney's second bid for the GOP nomination. He's considered the front-runner in a primary field that includes former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, Minnesota Rep. Michele Bachman and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman.

Romney said that by the end of his first term, Obama will have racked up more debt than all previous U.S. presidents combined — a remark that drew loud booing from the crowd.

"He has spent too much money, he has borrowed too much money ... he's put in place the greatest takeover of states' rights with his Obamacare, which we're gonna repeal and reverse," Romney said with his wife of 42 years, Ann, by his side.

Merle and Robert Fullmer, republicans from Midvale, waited about an hour in the hot sun to see the candidate. They said they think Romney, who like the couple is a member of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, can tackle the nation's economic and foreign policy problems.

"He seems to have integrity and he seems to have the right experience at this particular time in politics," said Robert Fullmer, 78.

A registered Democrat, Anne Ryan, of Portland, Ore., interrupted her Utah visit to bring her husband and two teenage sons to the rally.

"I am a Mitt fan. I've followed his campaign for a long time ... and also this is just such an experience for my son to come see a campaign event," said the 43-year-old, who is also a Mormon.

Ryan, a former computer systems engineer, said it was Romney's performances as Massachusetts' governor and head of the 2002 Olympic Winter Games in Salt Lake City that drew her interest and support.

After the rally, Romney munched on a cheeseburger and talked with local small-business owners and state government leaders about their concerns, including taxes, health insurance costs, entitlement programs and energy policy.


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Obama, GOP radio duel over government debt ceiling (The Christian Science Monitor)

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Washington – Saturday's radio addresses by President Obama and a Republican legislator offered a preview of the challenge the White House faces next week in restarting stalled talks over raising the federal debt ceiling and averting an August government shutdown.

Congressional Republicans last week pulled out of debt reduction talks led by Vice President Joe Biden citing their opposition to any tax increases being included in a final plan. House Speaker John Boehner warned of “job killing tax hikes.” White House spokesman Jay Carney countered that “millionaires and billionaires and special interests” should have to contribute to cutting the deficit.

On Monday, President Obama is slated to meet separately with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D) of Nevada and with Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R) of Kentucky to try and restart the talks. So it is not surprising that the Saturday addresses from both parties continued the on-going debate about government fiscal policy.

President Obama’s address was recorded Friday during his trip to Carnegie Mellon University’s Robotics Institute in Pittsburgh. Speaking in front of a display of robots used to find leaks and breaks in water and sewer pipes, Obama said “advanced manufacturing can help spur job creation and economic growth across the country.”

His remarks on the debt ceiling debate – and related efforts to trim the massive federal budget deficit – were pointed.

“I am committed to working with members of both parties to cut our deficits and debt,” the president said. But he added, “We can’t simply cut our way to prosperity.”

Rep. Renee Ellmers of North Carolina gave the Republican response, criticizing the Obama administration for wanting to raise taxes. Ellmers, who owns a small medical practice with her husband, accused the Obama administration of wanting to "stay the course, keep spending money we don't have, and raise your taxes – all in the name of 'stimulus.'"

She added that “The job creators we hear from, they don’t have their hand out. They don’t want a bailout. All they ask us to do is get government out of the way.”

The economy’s continuing weakness remains a major concern for the Obama administration.

Weak economic growth, high unemployment, and a lagging housing sector are major factors in the president’s poor approval ratings. The latest Real Clear Politics average of major polls shows 47.7 percent of Americans approve of the job President Obama is doing while 47 percent disapprove. An approval rating under 50 percent generally indicates tough re-election prospects for an incumbent.

The war of words over economic policy will continue Saturday evening when Vice President Biden speaks at the Ohio Democratic Party’s annual state dinner. Biden has been a frequent defender of the administration’s economic policies, speaking of the economic challenges his family faced when he was a boy.

“He obviously has deep, deep roots in the industrial Midwest running from Pennsylvania right across and he’ll be very valuable there,” the Associated Press quoted Obama strategist David Axelrod as saying in Chicago last week.


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2011年6月26日星期日

GOP-leaning group launches ads criticizing Obama (AP)

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NEW YORK – A Republican-leaning independent fundraising group announced Friday it would launch a $20 million television campaign criticizing President Barack Obama's handling of the economy.

The ads, produced and financed by Crossroads GPS, will begin running Monday in 10 states, many of which are presidential battlegrounds.

Spokesman Jonathan Collegio said the group would spend $5 million initially on cable television nationwide and on broadcast TV in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, New Mexico, Nevada and Virginia. Crossroads will spend a total of $20 million on the campaign over two months, Collegio said.

The 30-second ad illustrates how unemployment, the national debt and gas prices have all gone up since Obama took office in January 2009. It also suggests the $850 billion federal stimulus plan failed, with Obama acknowledging there weren't as many "shovel ready" infrastructure projects to fund with stimulus dollars as the administration had originally hoped.

"It's time to take away Obama's blank check," the announcer says.

The campaign represents Crossroads' first major national effort to shape the political debate in Washington. Crossroads GPS is an affiliate of American Crossroads, a Republican-leaning group with ties to Karl Rove, President George W. Bush's former top political adviser. Together, the groups spent more than $38 million to defeat Democrats in the 2010 midterm elections.

In a statement, Crossroads GPS president Steven Law said, "President Obama may have inherited a recession, but his policies have made things worse for everyday Americans by running up the debt and causing economic uncertainty."

The ad airs as Republican and Democratic congressional leaders are negotiating an increase in the nation's $14.3 trillion debt ceiling.

Obama plans to get involved in the negotiations next week as Democrats warn of catastrophic economic consequences if the ceiling is not increased. Republicans leaders say they will not agree to any debt ceiling increase unless it's paired with deep spending cuts.

American Crossroads was one of many groups formed to help Republicans after the Supreme Court eased restrictions on corporate spending in political campaigns in early 2010. Crossroads GPS, organized as a nonprofit group, is not required to disclose its donors.

Obama has criticized the Supreme Court ruling and the kind of unregulated, undisclosed spending it allowed. But Democrats lost control of the House and lost several Senate seats in 2010, in part because of the spending imbalance between Republican and Democratic leaning groups.

Several new Democratic groups have formed this year hoping to go compete with Crossroads and other conservative groups. One of those is Priorities USA, founded by former Obama White House aides Sean Sweeney and Bill Burton.

In a statement, Burton blamed Rove and other Republicans for the country's economic mess and said the Crossroads ad campaign showed they don't want to help fix it.

"Whether it's by running millions of dollars in negative ads about the economy or by walking away from critical economic talks in Congress, Washington Republicans are demonstrating an unwavering commitment to stopping any real progress on the economy," Burton said.


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Obama Slow-Rolls GOP on Budget Talks (Daily Caller)

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The White House is slow-rolling demands by Republicans that President Barack Obama join the debt ceiling talks, which are now deadlocked because of Republican opposition to Democrats’ demands for tax increases.

A Friday announcement by the White House’s press office said Obama will meet with the Republican Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell early Monday evening “to discuss the status of the negotiations to find common ground on a balanced approach to deficit reduction.” Prior to that Obama will meet with Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. No meeting was announced with leaders of the Republican majority in the House.

White House spokesman Jay Carney declined to say when the president would meet with House Speaker John Boehner, even though he was asked repeatedly by reporters in a Friday press conference. “The President hasn’t had any conversations with the Speaker since the Speaker visited the White House the other night… We are in constant contact with leaders of Congress.?? I just told you that the Vice President of the United States has been in touch with both Republicans and Democrats on the Hill in the last 24 hours, and that continues… I have no other meetings to announce at this time,” Carney said.

Following the Thursday breakdown in the talks, both Biden and Obama were out of town on Friday. Biden traveled to Delaware and Obama flew to a high-tech center in Pittsburgh, Pa.

Obama is avoiding the negotiations to concentrate public and media attention on the Republicans, said Wes Anderson, a partner of OnMessage Inc., a polling firm in Crofton, Md., that mostly works for GOP candidates.

“As long as this is an argument about Republicans saying ‘How do we make sure we meet the expectations of the voters who sent us?’ then no one is blaming the Democrats for not providing leadership and not getting this done,” he said. “When the president is only tangentially in the the conversation, that’s good for them, it’s not good for us,” he said.

The debt ceiling controversy is politically critical because it is likely to have an impact on the 2012 election, not just on the government’s balance sheet.

Obama is already riding low in the polls, and the Democrats will lose control of the Senate if Republicans win just 4 of the 23 Democrat-held seats up for election in 2012.

Republicans worry their fired-up base will lose heart if the GOP fails to win a good deal on the debt ceiling. They’re less likely to get a good deal if Obama slow-rolls the talks until a financial crisis arrives in late July.

In such a crisis, administration officials can allocate budget cuts and direct media coverage to maximize the political pain for Republicans, said a GOP Senate staffer. The resulting public anger would likely pressure Republicans into a deal that splits their base, the staffer said. Democrats have already used that strategy during government-shutdown talks in April and in the mid-1990s, he said.

Democrats “believe if we get to the [August 2] deadline and there’s no deal there would be panic in the [financial] markets, and the voters will blame the Republicans,”Anderson said.

The deadline exists because the federal government has already incurred cumulative debts of $14.3 trillion, and this year’s budget has an extra deficit of more than $1 trillion. The government has to give itself legal authority to borrow more money by Aug. 2 , or else White House officials must start making cuts in programs and debt payments that will spur public anger towards Washington.

GOP activists also worry that a mishandled deal could prompt swing voters to shift from anti-Obama attitudes to a general anti-incumbent mood. “The real questions is if there is [only] $2 trillion in budget cuts, do we meet the expectations among independents and Republicans that we have done what we need to do?” said Anderson, who completed a mid-June poll of 1,000-likely voters for the small-government group, Let Freedom Ring. The poll, he said, shows that swing voters want “$2 trillion plus something that shows permanency, that shows systematic change and and reform,” he said.

The swing voters, he said, “are more angry and nervous and scared about out-of-control government now than they were in October last year,” he said. If Republicans manage the debt negotiations well, he said, the 2012 election ”will be an anti-Democratic cycle, but if we don’t live up to the expectations of the voters, it will be anti-incumbent.”

On Thursday, Rep. Eric Cantor, the leading House Republican in the talks, said there would be no budget deal unless the negotiators also agree to changes to Congress budget-making process. Those budget rules, which were set by a wave of left-wing Democrats elected in 1974, tend to ratchet government spending up each year.

On Friday, House Speaker John Boehner repeated this demand for budget reforms. “The American people voted for a new majority in the House with clear orders to end the spending binge in Washington,” he said in a statement. “The American people will not accept an increase in the debt limit that is accompanied by job-crushing tax hikes and fails to dramatically cut and reform government spending.”

Democrats, however, emphasize polls that show support for tax increases.

An April New York Times/CBS News poll showed that 72 percent supported tax increases on people earning more than $250,000 a year. In recent days, several top Democrats, including Biden and House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, have said the budget talks should raise taxes.

Meanwhile, the president is using his public appearances to shape the debate. “What you’re going to see over the next several months, but also over the next several years, is a debate about who we are — because there’s a way for us to solve our deficit problems and our debt problems in a way that’s fair and balanced and that shares sacrifice so that we’re not just doing it on the backs of the poor,” he told attendees at a June 23 fundraiser attended mostly by African-Americans, who paid $100 for their tickets to the Broadway Theatre in New York.

The speech was mostly upbeat, but repeated a frequent Democratic criticism of the GOP. “The notion that [the wealthy] should not have to pay a little more; the notion that [wealthy people] would get a $200,000 tax break, and as a consequence of that tax break, hundreds of kids might not be able to go to Head Start, or… senior citizens might end up having to pay thousands of dollars more for their Medicare… that’s not who I think we are,” he said.

White House spokesman Carney repeated the same message in the Friday press conference. “We won’t support an approach that gives millionaires and billionaires $200,000 in tax cuts annually while 33 seniors pay for that with a $6,000 per person increase in their Medicare costs.? We just don’t believe that that’s a fair or balanced approach to solving this problem.”

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