Month: April 2012

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Talking Points Memo: AFP Launches $6.1 Million Multi-State, Anti-Obama Ad Campaign

April 26, 2012- Americans for Prosperity announced its biggest ad buy yet on Thursday: $6.1 million attacking President Obama.

The ad will hold the president “accountable,” AFP says in a press release, for “sending billions of taxpayer dollars to ‘green energy’ companies overseas, even while Americans suffer with rising energy prices and a lack of jobs.”

“Billions of taxpayer dollars spent on green energy went to jobs in foreign countries,” the narrator says. The ad cites money that went to a solar plant in Mexico, an electric car company in Finland and to build traffic lights in China. “Taxpayers are paying to send their own jobs to foreign countries.”

The ad will run for two weeks in battleground states Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. AFP says it will also hold rallies and “educational townhalls” throughout the country.

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New York Times: Obama Campaign Grapples With New Voter ID Laws

-By Michael D. Shear

April 29, 2012- Field workers for President Obama’s campaign fanned out across the country over the weekend in an effort to confront a barrage of new voter identification laws that strategists say threaten the campaign’s hopes for registering new voters ahead of the November election.

In Wisconsin, where a new state law requires those registering voters to be deputized in whichever of the state’s 1,800 municipalities they are assigned to, the campaign sent a team of trainers armed with instructions for complying with the new regulations.

In Florida, the campaign’s voter registration aides traveled across the state to train volunteers on a new requirement that voter registration signatures be handed in to state officials within 48 hours after they are collected.

And in Ohio, Mr. Obama’s staff members have begun reaching out to let voters know about new laws that discourage precinct workers from telling voters where to go if they show up at the wrong precinct.

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New York Magazine: Sugar Daddies

The old, white, rich men who are buying this election.

-By Frank Rich

April 22, 2012- If you want to appreciate what Barack Obama is up against in 2012, forget about the front man who is his nominal opponent and look instead at the Republican billionaires buying the ammunition for the battles ahead. A representative example is Harold Simmons, an 80-year-old Texan who dumped some $15 million into the campaign before primary season had ended. Reminiscing about 2008, when he bankrolled an ad blitz to tar the Democrats with the former radical Bill Ayers, Simmons told The Wall Street Journal, “If we had run more ads, we could have killed Obama.” It is not a mistake he intends to make a second time. The $15 million Simmons had spent by late February dwarfs the $2.8 million he allotted to the Ayers takedown and the $3 million he contributed to the Swift Boat Veterans demolition of John Kerry four years before that. Imagine the cash that will flow now that the GOP sideshows are over and the president is firmly in Simmons’s crosshairs.

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Reuters: New curbs on voter registration could hurt Obama

-By Deborah Charles

April 21, 2012- New state laws designed to fight voter fraud could reduce the number of Americans signing up to vote in this year's presidential election by hundreds of thousands, a potential problem for President Barack Obama's re-election bid.

Voting laws passed by Republican-led legislatures in a dozen states during the past year have sharply restricted voter-registration drives that typically target young, low-income, African-American and Hispanic voters – groups that have backed the Democratic president by wide margins.

A further 16 states are considering bills that would end voter registration on election days, impose a range of limits on groups that register voters and make it more difficult for people to sign up, according to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School.

The new laws – many of which include measures requiring voters to show a photo ID at the polls – could carve into Obama's potential support in Florida, Ohio and a few other politically divided states likely to be crucial in the November 6 election, analysts say.

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The Brad Blog: Baked Again in Alaska: Yet Another Election Crashes and Burns in The Last Frontier

Municipal election officials see no problems despite unexplained ballot shortages, broken op-scan seals and a 25-point swing that 'defeats' an LGBT anti-discrimination ballot measure…

-By Brad Friedman

April 17, 2012- I know I shouldn't be, but I'm still amazed at the absolute cluelessness of far too many election officials. Yes, some of them are great, know exactly what they're talking about, and realize that the electronic voting systems we use in this nation — every single one of them — are complete garbage.

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