At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

This week 43 Catholic institutions, including the Archdioceses of New York and Washington DC as well as Notre Dame University, sued the Obama administration over its mandate requiring employers to provide contraception in their health insurance plans.

The move not only escalated an unusual fight between church and state but also threatened to cause splits within the Catholic Church itself.

The Catholic Bishop of Stockton, California, Stephen Blaire, told America magazine that he was concerned the campaign against the mandate was becoming too political.

He said he was worried his fellow bishops were being co-opted by political conservatives.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

Mr. Powell, a retired four-star general and Republican former secretary of state, praises Mr. Obama for having “stabilized the financial system.”

And Mr. Powell is supportive of the president’s Afghanistan policy.

Nearly four years after lending his military stature and his political prowess to Mr. Obama with a critical endorsement, Mr. Powell sounds happy with the result. And yet, he is not quite ready to endorse the president again.

“I don’t want to throw my weight behind somebody,” Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s “Today Show” on Tuesday morning. “I feel as I private citizen I ought to listen to what the president says and what the president’s been doing. But I also have to listen to what the other fellow says. I’ve known Mitt Romney for many years, good man.”

The decision by Mr. Powell could just be a gracious delay from a man who served President George W. Bush during wartime. He said on NBC that he does “owe the Republican Party some consideration.”

And if Mr. Powell decides to endorse Mr. Obama again, he might want to time the announcement to have more impact that it might in late May.

Senator John McCain, who refused to make President Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright an issue during his 2008 presidential campaign, repudiated a proposal by Republican strategists to “do exactly what John McCain would not let us do” — open an incendiary, racially tinged attack on the president.

Mr. McCain also shrugged off the slights against him in a proposal for the political ad campaign, which was brought to light by The New York Times.

“I don’t know whether to be offended or not,” Mr. McCain said with a smile. “It is what it is. Look, my life has moved on.”

He added that such third-party attacks are “a way for political operatives to continue to make money.”

The authors of the ad campaign, timed to rock the Democratic National Convention in September, asserted that “if the nation had seen that ad, they’d never have elected Barack Obama.”

But I wanted to make another point. If you scan through all the media attention Romney’s speech received, you are hard-pressed to find any news accounts that tell readers the following rather relevant points:

1) Nonpartisan experts believe Romney’s plans would increase the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

2) George W. Bush’s policies arguably are more responsible for increasing the deficit than Obama’s are.

Oh, sure, many of the news accounts contain the Obama campaign’s response to Romney’s speech; the Obama campaign put out a widely-reprinted statement arguing that Romney’s plans would increase the deficit and that he’d return to policies that created it in the first place.

But this shouldn’t be a matter of partisan opinion. On the first point, independent experts think an actual set of facts exists that can be used to determine what the impact of Romney’s policies on the deficit would be. And according to those experts, based on what we know now, Romney’s policies would explode the deficit far more than Obama’s would.

The nonpartisan Tax Policy Center has taken a close look at this question. It has determined that relative to current policy — that is, if you keep the Bush tax cuts in place, as Romney wants to do — Romney’s tax cutting plans would increase the deficit by nearly $5 trillion over 10 years. That’s on top of keeping the Bush tax cuts for the rich. Romney has promised to close various loopholes to pay for his tax cuts, but he hasn’t specified which ones. Until he does, the Tax Policy Center concludes, his plan would cost $5 trillion — which would be added, yes, to the deficit.

By contrast, Obama’s plans would not increase the deficit by anything close to that amount. Relative to current policy, the Tax Policy Center has found, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by approximately $2 trillion over the next decade. Now, under Obama, the deficit would still increase. That’s because current policy means we’re forgoing the $4.5 trillion in revenues we’d gain if we let all the Bush tax cuts expire. But neither candidate is going to do that. Obama, however, would end the Bush tax cuts for the rich and bring in revenues through a variety of other tax increases. Bottom line: relative to current policy, Obama’s plan would reduce the deficit by bringing in $180 billion or more in revenues a year, or approximately $2 trillion over 10 years; Romeny’s plan would increase the deficit by nearly $500 billion a year — $5 trillion over ten years.

Federal spending is lower now than it was when President Obama took office. I’ll pause to let you absorb the news.

In January 2009, before President Obama had even taken the oath of office, annual spending was set to total 24.9 percent of gross domestic product. Total spending this year, fiscal year 2012, is expected to top out at 23.4 percent of GDP.

Here’s another interesting fact. Taxes today are lower than they were on inauguration day 2009. Back in January 2009, the CBO projected that total federal tax revenue that year would amount to 16.5 percent of GDP. This year? 15.8 percent.

One last nugget. The deficit this year is going to be lower than what it was on the day President Obama took office. Back then, the CBO said the 2009 deficit would be 8.3 percent of GDP. This year’s deficit is expected to come in at 7.6 percent.

The US says it will seek an effective treatment for Alzheimer’s by 2025, as it faces an ageing population and spiralling health costs.

Health Secretary Kathleen Sebelius announced the goal as part of the first National Alzheimer’s Plan.

An additional $50m will be added to research funding during 2012.

About 5.4 million Americans have Alzheimer’s or related dementias, a number expected to reach 16 million by 2050, at a cost of $1tn (£625m).

President Barack Obama has earmarked an additional $80m in his 2013 budget plan for Alzheimer’s research in what was described as an effort to “jumpstart” efforts to reach the 2025 goal.

In addition, the plan calls for better training of doctors in a bid to better recognise the symptoms of the disease, increased support for care-givers and public awareness of the disease, as well as better data tracking.

EUCLID, Ohio — At a town hall Monday afternoon, Mitt Romney at first did not offer a public rebuke to a female supporter who stood and said that President Obama “should be tried for treason,” but he later clarified to reporters on the rope line that he did not agree with the woman’s remarks.

“We have a president right now who is operating outside the construction of our Constitution,” Mr. Romney’s supporter said aloud at the campaign event at Stamco Industries, an engineering and metal-stamping plant in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland. “And I do agree he should be tried for treason. But I want to know what you are going to be able to do to help restore balance between the three branches of government and what you’re going to be able to do to restore our Constitution in this country?”

“As I’m sure you do, I happen to believe that the Constitution was not just brilliant, but probably inspired,” Mr. Romney said, sidestepping the woman’s comments about treason, a crime still punishable by death in the United States. Mr. Romney also allowed the woman a follow-up question.

Later, when specifically asked by reporters if he agreed with the woman’s assertion, Mr. Romney clarified that he did not believe Mr. Obama should be charged with treason.

“No, no, no, of course not,” Mr. Romney told reporters, vigorously shaking his head, when asked on the rope line after the event if he agreed with his supporter’s assertion that the president should be tried for treason.

Explaining his reluctance to correct the woman publicly, Mr. Romney told CNN: “I don’t correct all of the questions that get asked of me. Obviously I don’t agree that he should be tried.”

In 2008, Senator John McCain of Arizona famously corrected a voter at one of his town halls who stood up and declared that she could not trust Mr. Obama, who she called “an Arab.”

“No, ma’am,” Mr. McCain said at the time, taking the microphone away from the questioner. “He’s a decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign is all about.”

Mr. McCain’s comments, which occurred during a period of increasing heated oratory during the 2008 campaign, were largely heralded as an example of courage on his part, and were even reprised in the HBO movie “Game Change.”

A Romney spokesman at the event had no immediate comment as to why Mr. Romney did not choose to correct the inflammatory statement during the town hall, and the presumptive Republican nominee’s campaign did not offer a comment beyond what was said on the rope line. The Obama campaign, however, criticized Mr. Romney’s in-the-moment silence.

It’s well known that presidential approval ratings are a powerful predictor of election outcomes. President Obama’s current 47 percent approval rating would be among the lowest approval ratings of any incumbent president who went on to be re-elected.

What’s striking, however, is that Mr. Obama may be more popular than he should be. That is the result of some new analysis that will be included in a book I’m writing with a fellow political scientist, Lynn Vavreck, on the 2012 election. I’ll preview a bit of it here.

Presidential popularity hinges primarily on several factors. There is, for many presidents, an inexorable decline in popularity that comes with time. The longer a president is in office, the less popular he is. Popularity is also affected, positively or negatively, by salient events like scandals, wars and foreign policy crises. Finally, and most important, there is the economy.

Mr. Obama’s approval rating has thus far experienced relatively few ups and downs linked to singular events. There have been no big scandals, for example. The Solyndra bankruptcy, the General Services Administration’s over-the-top Las Vegas conference and the Secret Service prostitution debacle haven’t quite proven to be Watergate, Iran-contra or even Whitewater. The killing of Osama bin Laden in May 2011 produced only a temporary increase in approval. Instead, Mr. Obama’s initial popularity in the “honeymoon” after he was inaugurated has generally been on a gradual decline — a trend that is most likely traceable to the damaging recession and weak recovery, which have created persistent pessimism about the economy.

But this pessimism never eroded Mr. Obama’s approval as much as it arguably should have. There are several ways to show this. One way is to predict Mr. Obama’s approval based on the economy and other fundamental factors, and then see whether his actual approval matches, exceeds, or falls short of the prediction. To do so, we use 60 years of quarterly data on presidential approval, which contain polls from 1948 to 2008, and construct a statistical model of approval that includes these factors:

The Obama administration on Monday offered its first extensive explanation of how American officials decide when to use drones to kill suspected terrorists — a tactic that the government often treats as a classified secret even though it is widely known around the world.

“Yes, in full accordance with the law — and in order to prevent terrorist attacks on the United States and to save American lives — the United States government conducts targeted strikes against specific Al Qaeda terrorists, sometimes using remotely piloted aircraft, often referred to publicly as drones,” John O. Brennan , President Obama ’s top counterterrorism adviser, said before the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars.

The use of armed drones to strike at suspected militants in places like Pakistan and Yemen has grown dramatically under the Obama administration, and the emergence of the new technology — which has sharply reduced the cost and risk of warfare to its operators, making it easier to engage in sporadic combat in far-flung regions — has led to growing concerns both about civilian casualties and about a future in which other countries also acquire drones.

The United States government has been reluctant to talk openly about its use of drones, apparently in part because foreign governments that granted permission for strikes did so on the condition that the deals would remain secret.

Defending drone strikes as “legal, ethical, and wise,” Mr. Brennan said the president had directed officials to be more open about how they “carefully, deliberately and responsibly” decide to kill terrorism suspects — including what he described as “the rigorous standards and process of review to which we hold ourselves today when considering and authorizing strikes against a specific member of Al Qaeda outside the ‘hot’ battlefield of Afghanistan.”

Merely being a member of Al Qaeda or one of its allies is not enough to be targeted, Mr. Brennan said, because that describes many thousands of people. Rather, policymakers approve the killing of only those who pose a particular threat, he said, like operational leaders who are planning attacks against United States interests, lower-level militants training for such an attack, and those who possess “unique operational skills that are being leveraged in a planned attack.”

Mr. Brennan also said the administration preferred capturing such suspects alive — usually by telling a foreign government where to arrest them — and would authorize a strike only if that was not feasible.

Mitt Romney hasn’t appreciated the fact that President Obama’s campaign released a new video pointing out that Romney said in 2007 that he would not order military action similar to the one Obama ordered that ended up killing Osama bin Laden.

Romney now says that “of course ” he would have done what Obama did. “Even Jimmy Carter would have given that order,” he said yesterday. And this morning during an interview with Charlie Rose on CBS, Romney reiterated that sentiment. “Of course I would have,” he said, “any thinking American would have ordered exactly the same thing.”

Apparently some of Obama’s top advisers don’t fit into the “thinking American” category. Vice President Joe Biden said in January that he advised the president against the raid. “Mr. President, my suggestion is, don’t go. We have to do two more things to see if he’s there,’” Biden recalled. Biden added that “every single person in the room” expressed reservations about going forward with the raid, “except Leon Panetta.”

Obama’s top counterterror adviser John Brennen, in an interview to be aired this Sunday, confirmed Biden’s account . “It was a divided room as far as, you know, some of the principal sentiments on this issue were concerned,” he said.

The New Yorker reported last August that Obama’s “military advisers were divided” and “Robert Gates, the Secretary of Defense, was one of the most outspoken opponents of a helicopter assault,” recalling President Carter’s failed attempt to rescue American hostages in Iran in 1980.

When Charlie Rose pointed this out to Romney this morning, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee stuck to his talking points:

ROMNEY: Well you can look at the different military options but clearly if you’ve identified where Osama bin Laden is , the United States of America is going to take action, capture him or kill him. And that was the right action to be taken, that was the right course to be taken. We haven’t heard all the different military options there were .

Watch the clip:

It seems that Romney hasn’t been paying much attention to reports on the bin Laden raid. In fact, U.S. intelligence had not “identified” bin Laden, as Romney claimed. “My worry was the level of uncertainty about whether bin Laden was even in the compound,” Gates said in an interview with 60 Minutes. “There wasn`t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.”

Moreover, while it’s possible that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid, as Romney also said, various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported .

US President Barack Obama has pledged to “finish the job” and end the Afghan war, addressing the US public live from a military base in Afghanistan.

Speaking on the anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death, he thanked US troops and hailed plans to combat operations.

Mr Obama arrived in Afghanistan on a surprise visit to sign an agreement on future Afghan-US ties with President Hamid Karzai, ahead of a Nato summit.

At the signing, Mr Obama said it was “a historic moment” for both nations.

Mr Obama’s address comes as correspondents say public patience with the war in Afghanistan is wearing thin.

In the prime-time speech beamed back to the US, the president said that at the upcoming Nato summit, to be held in Chicago, the alliance would “set a goal for Afghan forces to be in the lead for combat operations across the country next year”.

For the Romney campaign, however, a paucity of small-dollar donations is inauspicious not because it means that it will have trouble raising enough money (it probably won’t, and if it does, Mr. Romney has considerable personal wealth at his disposal). Rather, a lack of small-dollar donors could indicate tepid support for Mr. Romney among the Republican base.

Research by Adam Bonica of the political science department at Stanford University suggests that small donations tend to come from the wings of the ideological spectrum. For Mr. Romney, donations of less than $200 would most likely come from the most conservative camp in the Republican Party, a group that resisted his candidacy throughout the nominating process.

“In the primaries, there were a lot of small donors, but they weren’t giving to Romney,” Professor Bonica said. “I think it does have something to do with Romney being perceived to be more moderate.”

The Romney campaign’s continuing dearth of small-dollar contributions suggests that very conservative voters, like those who supported Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, have yet to warm completely to Mr. Romney, which could potentially mean not only less money but also fewer lawn signs and bumper stickers, fewer volunteers and, ultimately, fewer votes.

It is too early to call the problem chronic. The Republican primary was only recently resolved. Mr. Gingrich is expected to drop out of the race officially on Wednesday. Mr. Gingrich, as well as Mr. Santorum and Michele Bachmann, who appealed to more conservative voters, will presumably endorse Mr. Romney eventually. And at that point, conservative Republicans may begin coalescing around Mr. Romney in earnest, enabling his campaign to construct a robust small-donor network.

Michelle Obama ’s summer vacation to Spain in 2010 cost taxpayers more than $467,000 in transportation and security expenses, according to a watchdog group that obtained federal records.

The disclosure came at a time when Republicans were already pressing President Obama about billing trips to the government that seem campaign-oriented. Speaker John A. Boehner , Republican of Ohio, called on the president Thursday to reimburse taxpayers for this week’s trip to three battleground states.

The first lady’s trip to Spain caused a stir because it seemed jarring to some in the midst of economic turmoil at home. For the Mediterranean beach getaway, Mrs. Obama took her younger daughter, two friends and four of their daughters. A columnist for The Daily News in New York branded her “a modern-day Marie Antoinette.”

The Obama administration is expected to announce a broad plan on Thursday to foster development of the nation’s “bioeconomy,” including the use of renewable resources and biological manufacturing methods.

The National Bioeconomy Blueprint, as the plan is called, discusses a variety of measures and strategies to spur research and development of medical treatments, crops, biofuels and biological manufacturing processes that would replace harsher industrial methods.

Use of biology “can allow Americans to live longer, healthier lives, reduce our dependence on oil, address key environmental challenges, transform manufacturing processes, and increase the productivity and scope of the agricultural sector while growing new jobs and industries,” the report says.

Much of what is in the 43-page-report, which the administration released before its planned announcement on Thursday, is a list of government programs that are already under way. So it is not clear what concrete changes, if any, will result.

Still, some biotechnology industry executives and scientists welcomed the plan as a sign of the government’s commitment, saying it would now be easier to push for specific new programs to foster biotechnology development.

“This may be the first time the country has recognized the total impact that biological sciences has for the current and future economy,” Dr. Phillip A. Sharp, a Nobel laureate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the project, said in an e-mail.

The government is expected to announce some fairly new efforts on Thursday that fit with the blueprint. One would strengthen a program that encourages federal agencies to procure bio-based products, like lubricants made from soybeans. Another would allow a repository of clinical trial data at the Food and Drug Administration to be used for disease research.

President Obama is under pressure to create jobs and has long supported innovation as a key to the future of the American economy. But some people in the biotechnology industry have grumbled that the White House’s idea of innovation focused on electronic devices, social media and solar energy.

I was just watching Andrea Mitchell on MSNBC and had the pleasure of seeing the always lovely Haley Barbour. Barbour went through a list of attacks the Obama campaign is allegedly making against Mitt Romney. When he said the Obama campaign was attacking Romney for being Mormon, Mitchell had to but in and remind Barbour that they had made no anti-Mormon statements whatsoever. So, Barbour, always quick on his feet, brought up Elie Wiesel as an Obama surrogate who is anti-Mormon and wants Mormons to “stop certain practices.” Mitchell basically told Barbour that if he wants to play the surrogate game, it goes both ways. But, the bigger point is that Barbour is basically saying that opposing the posthumous baptisms of Jews, including Anne Frank, is somehow anti-Mormon. Because that is the practice that the Holocaust survivor and writer was against. Well, Haley, by that logic, and if Wiesel, and Obama, by extension, is anti-Mormon, then you, and Romney, by extension, support baptizing Anne Frank. So, please, keep speaking for Mitt!

A TV ad by a conservative group gives some factually challenged answers to its own rhetorical question, “How exactly does President Obama spend your tax dollars?”

It wrongly claims that the boss of the General Services Administration “couldn’t make it to Vegas because she had meetings planned … at Solyndra.” That’s not true. The claim linking the two scandals is based on an inaccurate April 10 report that was quickly corrected — nearly two weeks before the ad first aired.
The ad incorrectly characterizes federal loan guarantees to clean-energy firms as “handouts.” In fact, the low-interest loans are supposed to be repaid and only 2 percent have gone bad.
It displays the flag of China while stating that $2.3 billion in clean-energy stimulus money went for “jobs overseas.” But Chinese firms got a small fraction of that, and it’s not known how many jobs were created in China or any other foreign country. Companies in Spain, Germany, Portugal, Australia, Japan, Italy, France and the United Kingdom received nearly all of that money, and some foreign-based companies have manufacturing facilities in the U.S.
The American Future Fund, a conservative group started by Republican activists in Iowa, announced on April 24 that it would spend $2 million on a TV ad called “On the Hook.”

It opens with a couple working on their taxes and asks the question, “How exactly does President Obama spend your tax dollars?” The answer, of course, is on big-ticket items like Social Security ($735 billion), defense ($700 billion), Medicare ($480 billion) and Medicaid ($480 billion) — which combined accounted for nearly $2.2 trillion of the $3.6 trillion budget in fiscal year 2011, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Instead, though, the ad focuses on a few recent examples of misspent federal money that amount to a minuscule slice of the federal pie.

Need any evidence of the effort by President Obama to woo young people, as reported by The Times’s Peter Baker on Wednesday morning?

If so, here’s some: a slow jam by Mr. Obama and Jimmy Fallon on Mr. Fallon’s late-night NBC show.

After chatting with Mr. Fallon, Mr. Obama and the comedian slow-jammed the news as both men tried to keep from laughing.

“What we said is simple: Now is not the time to make school more expensive for our young people,” Mr. Obama said.

“You should listen to the president,” Mr. Fallon responded, smoothly. “Or as I like to call him, the Preezy of the United Steezy.”

A US Marine sergeant who criticised President Barack Obama on Facebook is to be discharged.

Sgt Gary Stein will receive an other-than-honourable discharge for violating a policy that limits speech of military service members, the Marine Corps said.

The action means Sgt Stein, who served nearly 10 years in the Marine Corps, will lose all benefits.

He had argued that his comments were covered by his constitutional right to freedom of speech.

Sgt Stein had put a disclaimer on Facebook that his opinions, which included calling President Obama an enemy, were his own.

He had put Mr Obama’s face on mocked-up film posters, including one for the movie Jackass.

A disciplinary board recommended earlier this month that he be given an “other-than-honourable” discharge.

The panel heard he had said he would not follow orders from the president if it involved violating the rights of US citizens.

Prosecutors said Sgt Stein repeatedly ignored warnings from superior officers, and that the postings were in breach of military regulations.

The US military has a long-standing policy of restricting the free speech of service members, including criticism of the president, who is commander-in-chief of America’s armed forces.

Sgt Stein’s supporters - who include two congressmen, and the American Civil Liberties Union - argued that the defence department’s regulations are vague, and that commanders do not understand them.

Mitt Romney vowed to oust Barack Obama and build “a better America”

Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney has vowed to take the White House from President Barack Obama and end four years of “disappointments”.

Speaking while racking up a series of primary night victories, he said a “new campaign” was beginning.

“Hold on a little longer. A better America begins tonight,” he said.

The presumptive Republican nominee easily won primaries in Connecticut, Delaware, New York, Pennsylvania and Rhode Island.

As the results began to come in on a night with the most electoral delegates at stake since Super Tuesday, Mr Romney took the stage in New Hampshire, the site of his first primary win of the year.

He focused on the forthcoming general election campaign, saying America needed a new direction and a renewal of its greatness.

“Tonight is the start of a new campaign to unite every American who knows in their heart that we can do better,” he said.

Mitt Romney circled back at the end of a brief news conference Monday afternoon to clarify an issue he had failed to mention before: his support of a temporary extension of a low interest rate on federal student loans, which President Obama also favors .

“There’s one thing I want to mention that I forgot to mention at the very beginning, and that was that particularly with the mention of the number of college graduates that can’t find work or that can only find work well beneath their skill level, I fully support the effort to extend the low interest rate on student loans,” Mr. Romney said. “There was some concern that that would expire halfway through the year, and I support extending the temporary relief on interest rates for students as a result of – as a result of student loans, obviously – in part because of the extraordinarily poor conditions in the job market.”

Though House Republicans oppose such an extension, Mr. Obama has been urging Congress to extend the existing interest rate on federal student loans. If Congress fails to act, the interest rate on the loans, which are taken out by nearly eight million students each year, will double on July 1, to 6.8 percent.

WASHINGTON — President Obama, seeking to expand his administration’s response to oppression in the Middle East, announced new sanctions on Monday against those who provide Syria and Iran with cutting-edge technology to track down dissidents for abuse, torture or death.

The measures underscored the role that computers, social media and cellphones have played not just in organizing resistance to authoritarian governments but also in helping security services crack down on those dissidents. The new sanctions are meant to put technology providers on notice that they will be held responsible for enabling human rights abuses.

The announcement came as Mr. Obama continues to search for a more effective response to the killings in Syria, where more than 9,000 people have died over the last year as the government of President Bashar al-Assad has tried to suppress a popular uprising. Critics have described Mr. Obama’s response as too passive and have called for more robust action to halt the violence. Mr. Obama argued on Monday that the focus on technology reflected an ever-widening set of actions that would eventually stop Mr. Assad.

“These technologies should be in place to empower citizens, not to repress them,” Mr. Obama said in a speech at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “It’s one more step toward the day that we know will come, the end of the Assad regime that has brutalized the Syrian people.”

The president, who toured the museum alongside Elie Wiesel, the Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate, presented himself as a champion of Israel in the face of Republican complaints that he has not been supportive enough of America’s closest ally in the Middle East.

He noted that his administration had voted against United Nations resolutions condemning Israel and had worked to counter any threat from Iran. “The United States will do everything in our power to prevent Iran from getting a nuclear weapon,” he said.

The executive orders, which Mr. Obama signed on Sunday and were first reported by The Washington Post, authorize restrictions on financial assets and bar those who provide technology to Iran and Syria from entering the United States. The restrictions primarily target those based inside the two countries.

Mitt Romney is facing a severe crisis of popularity.

He has the weakest favorability ratings on record for a presumptive presidential nominee at this stage of the campaign, according to new polling by ABC News and The Washington Post . The organizations have been measuring such popularity since 1984.

Mr. Romney is in a situation that pollsters call “underwater”: more people view him negatively than view him positively. His favorable rating is 35 percent, and his unfavorable rating stands at 47 percent.

He was the first nominee to be underwater in the Washington Post/ABC News poll in the eight presidential primary seasons it has been surveying the subject, the poll said. The pollsters attributed the results in part on the Republican primary process, which Americans viewed negatively overall, and on Mr. Romney’s unpopularity among women.

President Obama, by contrast, is more popular than he is unpopular: 56 percent viewed him positively, while 40 percent of those polled viewed him negatively.

Mr. Obama is more popular than he has been for two years, which the pollsters ascribed to the improving economy.

Senate Republicans have blocked the Buffett Rule, President Barack Obama’s proposal to raise tax rates for top earners to at least 30%.

Senators largely voted on party lines and failed to win the 60 votes to move the bill forward for a full debate.

Republicans have resolutely opposed the measure, saying it is a political gimmick that will not create jobs.

The bill is named after tycoon Warren Buffett, who complained his secretary paid a higher rate of tax than he does.

Asking the wealthy to pay their “fair share” is viewed as a core theme of Mr Obama’s re-election campaign.

The Democratic president has argued that raising taxes on Americans earning more than $1m (£628,772) per year would help reduce the deficit and make the US tax code fairer.

After the bill was blocked, Mr Obama said in a statement that Senate Republicans chose “once again to protect tax breaks for the wealthiest few Americans at the expense of the middle class”.

Correspondents say Mr Obama will use this vote to attack Republicans in the upcoming November election.

While Democrats control the majority of the Senate, they were nine votes short of moving the debate forward, at a final tally of 51-45.

So long, flip-flopper. Hello, right-wing extremist.

Mitt Romney may be inclined to start moving to the political center now that he’s practically got the Republican nomination won and done, but the Obama campaign would much rather keep him right where he’s been for the past few months: in the conservative territory he staked out while battling for Republican primary voters.

After months of depicting Mr. Romney as the ultimate squishy, double-talking, no-core soul, Team Obama is shifting gears. Senior administration officials, along with Democratic and campaign officials, all say their strategy now will be to tell the world that Mr. Romney has a core after all — and it’s deep red.

Mr. Romney’s overheard remarks at a fund-raiser in Florida on Sunday night that, if elected, he planned to slash government programs (though he has not spelled that out for the voters) gave Obama backers the perfect opening, and they jumped on it. “Mitt Romney Tells Rich Voters His Secret Plan to Cut Housing Assistance,” said a headline from ThinkProgress , a blog put out by the left-leaning Center for American Progress. Democratic officials followed that up with a call to reporters on Thursday charging that Mr. Romney’s proposal would “cut critical funds for homeless veterans.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Obama’s advisers saw another chance, and they were all over that, too. Hours after Mr. Romney accepted the endorsement of Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, the Democratic National Committee was out with an ad “Mitt Romney and Tom Corbett: Too Extreme for Women.” The traditional spooky music accompanies video of Mr. Corbett defending his advocacy of a proposal that could make women undergo ultrasounds before receiving abortions, and saying women could “close their eyes” if they didn’t want to see what was on the screen.

“Did Mitt Romney close his eyes to accept this endorsement?” the D.N.C. said in an e-mail it helpfully sent to reporters trumpeting the advertisement. “Probably not, since Mitt Romney’s positions mirror those of the extreme elements of his party,” the e-mail continued, going on to list a host of conservative Romney positions that Democrats hope will alienate women.

For Mr. Obama, the decision to start going after Mr. Romney from the left is as much a logical evolution as is any attempt by Mr. Romney to move to the center, in particular Mr. Romney’s effort now to try to woo Hispanic and female voters who may have been alienated by some of the talk coming out of the Republican primary.

As the general election heats up, a central battlefield promises to be the fights for suburban women in crucial swing states like Florida, Ohio and Colorado, and both camps are now trying to prove their bona fides with that population. When added to recent data that shows an increase in Hispanic voters in key states, the Obama campaign sees an opening to paint Mr. Romney as out of touch among both women and Hispanics.

The presidents of Sudan and South Sudan “must have the courage” to return to the negotiating table and resolve their differences peacefully, says US President Barack Obama.

He was speaking after South Sudan said it had ordered its troops to withdraw from the Heglig oil field in Sudan.

Within hours of Friday’s announcement, Sudan said it had retaken Heglig town.

South Sudanese forces captured the area last week, accusing Khartoum of using it as a base to launch attacks.

“We know what needs to happen,” said President Obama. “The government of Sudan must stop its military actions including aerial bombardments.

“It must give aid workers the access they need to save lives. And it must end its support for armed groups inside the South.”

Turning to the government of the newly independent South Sudan, Mr Obama said: “Likewise, the government of South Sudan must end its support for armed groups inside Sudan and it must cease its military actions across the border.

The escalating fighting and rhetoric between the two sides over the past week has led to fears of all-out war.

It is not clear whether Khartoum regained the area by force or whether South Sudanese troops withdrew, under intense international pressure.

South Sudan said its forces were still in the process of withdrawal; Information Minister Barnaba Marial Benjamin told AFP it would take three days to complete the operations.

President Omar al-Bashir on Friday told supporters at a victory rally in Khartoum: “We thank God that he made successful your sons; and the security forces and the police force and the defence forces - he has made them victorious on this Friday.”

South Sudan seceded last July following a 2005 peace deal that ended a two-decade civil war in which more than 1.5 million people died.

On Thursday, South Sudan issued a statement saying it was not interested in war with its northern neighbour and that it would only withdraw from Heglig if the UN deployed monitors there.

US President Barack Obama says American soldiers shown in photos apparently abusing Afghan corpses in 2010 should be held accountable, a spokesman said.

“The conduct depicted in those photos is reprehensible,” White House spokesman Jay Carney told reporters.

The pictures, published in the Los Angeles Times, shows the soldiers posing with the mangled remains of suspected suicide bombers.

Mr Carney also expressed disappointment that the Times published the photos.

It comes at a particularly sensitive time for US-Afghan relations, after a series of incidents - including the murder of 17 Afghan civilians in March - stirred up anti-Western sentiment.

Nato combat troops aim to leave Afghanistan in 2014.

Mitt Romney has made Afghanistan a showcase for his attacks on President Obama’s foreign policy. He says Mr. Obama has undercut American interests by setting timetables for withdrawing troops, providing the Taliban — who displayed their resilience with attacks over the weekend — further reason to wait things out. He called Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta “misguided and so naïve” for announcing plans to hand over primary combat responsibilities to Afghan forces next year and leave American troops mainly in training and other roles.

But despite the tough critique, Mr. Romney has loosely embraced the main thrust of White House policy for troop levels after the election: a timetable for pulling out nearly all troops by the end of 2014.

Now that Mr. Romney has emerged as the likely Republican nominee and Afghanistan is again being tested by a Taliban offensive, his position on the war is likely to come under more scrutiny after a primary fight that gave him few opportunities to offer nuanced national security positions. Even so, analysts say he has reasons to be less than precise on Afghanistan: The war’s declining support among voters means there is little space for him to stake out a policy that provides both a sharp political contrast with Mr. Obama and keeps the war’s unpopularity at a distance.

“He doesn’t want to own this war in the event he gets elected, but by the same token he can’t look like he’s advocating a precipitous withdrawal for all sorts of reasons, including alienating the Republican base, and yet he cannot take the same position as the president,” said Stephen Biddle, a military expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It’s difficult to square the circle and meet all those constraints at the same time.”

And domestic politics are only one tricky element. There are serious doubts that the broadly hoped-for exit strategy of both parties — that Afghan forces can progress to where they can keep the Taliban at bay with limited assistance by 2014 — will materialize that quickly, if at all.

The most sensible takeaways, I think, are as follows:

1) Mr. Romney’s mediocre favorability ratings at this early stage of the race are no death sentence. There have been clear reversals in favorability ratings in the recent past once the general election campaign got under way, such as in 1988 and 1992. At least one recent candidate (Mr. Clinton in 1992) won his election with similarly mediocre early favorability ratings. With that said, it would be foolish to suggest that this makes no difference at all. Mr. Romney would prefer to have a positive rating than a negative one. For that matter, Mr. Obama would prefer to have a clearly positive favorability rating than break-even numbers.

2) The favorability deficit between Mr. Romney and Mr. Obama is more likely to be meaningful the longer it persists. If, for instance, we still see this favorability deficit in July — and certainly if we see it in September or October — the odds are fairly good that Mr. Obama will perform more strongly than the economic fundamentals alone would dictate and could win an election that he is otherwise “supposed” to lose. Of course, this will probably be reflected in head-to-head polls between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney, which also become stronger predictors of the election outcome as November draws nearer.

My guess, for what it’s worth, is that we will see some improvement in Mr. Romney’s favorability numbers over the next month or two. It has not been uncommon in the past for a candidate’s numbers to decline while he is actively engaged in a primary, but for him to go through a honeymoon period once he begins to wrap up the nomination.

We’ll have a better sense for where Mr. Romney’s numbers are likely to settle in, and whether they represent a real concern for him or just a transient annoyance, once the general election campaign has become more substantive a couple of months from now. For the time being, I’d consider them a negative but fairly minor factor when we evaluate his chances at victory.

Even as the nation rebounds from the recession, its lingering effects are reflected in the adversities facing families. Nearly two-thirds of people are concerned about paying for their housing, the poll found, and one in five people with mortgages say they are underwater. Four in 10 parents say they have had to alter expectations for the type of college they can afford to send their children. More than one-third of respondents said high gas prices had created serious financial hardships.

The general election match between Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney is opening with evidence that economic conditions are providing ammunition for both candidates. For Mr. Obama, there is a gradually growing perception that the general outlook is turning brighter, and for Mr. Romney, there are those individuals who are still not feeling substantial improvement in their own lives.

The poll found that the two men are locked in a tight race, with each gathering 46 percent of the support. Nearly an equal number of voters say they are as confident in Mr. Romney’s ability to make the right decisions on the economy and to be commander-in-chief as express confidence in Mr. Obama.

WASHINGTON — The United States Secret Service placed 11 employees on leave on Saturday as the agency’s internal watchdog opened an investigation into accusations of misconduct involving prostitution in Cartagena, Colombia, where President Obama arrived on Friday for a summit meeting.

In addition, five United States military service members who were working with the Secret Service unit have been confined to quarters and are facing an investigation because they violated a curfew and might “have been involved in inappropriate conduct” in the same hotel as the agents, the military said.

The Secret Service employees, including both agents and officers, had been sent to Colombia to provide support to teams preparing security measures ahead of the president’s arrival. On Friday, the Secret Service abruptly replaced the entire unit.

Details about the episode, which took place on Wednesday night and involved at least two Secret Service supervisors, were coming into focus on Saturday night, though there were still some conflicting details in accounts of what had happened. Officials emphasized that the investigation was still in its early stages.

But in a phone interview, Representative Peter T. King, the New York Republican who is chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, which oversees the Secret Service, said that he was told in a briefing that the 11 agents and officers were suspected of bringing women back to their rooms.

While prostitution is legal in designated areas in Colombia, such behavior would violate agency rules of conduct, in part because it could expose the agents to blackmail or facilitate espionage, help an enemy get inside a security perimeter and otherwise distract agents when they are supposed to be focused on protecting the president, he said.

On Thursday, President Obama’s allies in organized labor are to announce an Internet-based effort to rally workers to the president’s corner using what they say will be the latest social media tools.

In an event at the Washington headquarters of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., organizers are scheduled to unveil a new Web site, workersvoice.org, along with ambitious plans to energize union and nonunion workers to participate in the presidential and Congressional elections.

“The labor movement is the original social network,” said Eddie Vale, the communications director for the new group. “Workers’ Voice will be revolutionizing it for today’s world by taking our traditional field and organizing knowledge and applying it to the digital era and making it available to all workers.”

In the last six months, Mr. Obama has increasingly focused his campaign for re-election on a populist argument that the policies of the Republicans would benefit the wealthiest in the country, leaving most workers behind.

This week, Mr. Obama is pushing Congress to pass what Democrats call the “Buffett Rule,” which would require anyone making over $1 million a year to pay at least 30 percent in taxes.

“Tell them to stop giving tax breaks to the wealthiest Americans who don’t need them and aren’t asking for them,” Mr. Obama said during an event on Wednesday. “Tell them to start asking everybody to do their fair share and play by the same rules.”

The new labor group describes itself as a counter to those allied behind Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama’s likely opponent in the fall. They include American Crossroads and other “super PACs” that have pledged to support Mr. Romney with advertising and voter mobilization efforts.

In fact, Mr. Romney has made clear in recent weeks that he intends to prosecute the same populist case against Mr. Obama, describing the sitting president as out of touch with the plight of everyday Americans and unable to develop solutions that will help them weather the economic turmoil.

Aides and leading donors to Mitt Romney are preparing a major expansion of the campaign’s fund-raising efforts to prepare for a general election contest against President Obama , with the goal of raising up to $600 million, according to several people involved in the discussions.

Republican-leaning outside groups and Democratic-leaning unions are planning to spend hundreds of millions more.

And Mr. Obama, who raised $750 million in 2008, is likely to meet or exceed that this year, according to people involved in his fund-raising operation.

Those goals make it virtually certain that neither party’s nominee will accept public funds for the general election or the spending limits that come with them — the likely death knell for a cornerstone of the post-Watergate campaign finance reforms intended to limit the influence of money in federal elections.

Mr. Obama opted out of the public financing program in 2008, breaking a campaign pledge, and went on to outspend the Republican nominee, John McCain, by four to one.

“This is going to be the most moneyed election in the history of the United States,” said Bob Edgar, the president of Common Cause, a group that favors greater restrictions on campaign spending. Mr. Edgar, a former congressman who was among the Democratic “Watergate babies” elected in the wake of the scandal, added, “There is a sense of coming full circle, of forgetting our history — the reason we installed a system for financing campaigns that didn’t rely on corporate or wealthy money.”

Mr. Obama has already held over a hundred major fund-raisers for his campaign, jointly raising large amounts with the Democratic National Committee , and Mr. Romney is moving quickly to catch up. His campaign is planning dozens of fund-raisers through the end of June, high-dollar events that will feature Mr. Romney as well as the campaign’s top allies and other elected officials.

The campaign is setting a goal of raising at least $1 million for most events featuring Mr. Romney personally.

What the graph shows clearly, and the numbers back up, is that men took a bigger hit than women, and the decline in jobs for men began much earlier. The downturn in male employment began in May 2007 — a full seven months before the official start (in December 2007) of what became the worst economic recession since the Great Depression. Female employment continued to rise for 10 months after the downturn in male employment, and it peaked in March 2008.

By the time Obama took office in January 2009, both male and female employment were in a steep decline that continued for over a year. Male employment hit bottom in February 2010, and female employment continued to slump for another seven months, bottoming out in September 2010. And as the chart clearly shows, the job recovery for women not only started later, the rate of recovery has been slower.

Why is that? “If you look back to the start of the recession, many of the industries (construction and manufacturing) that were very hard hit initially were male-dominated,” said Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce, in an interview with FactCheck.org.

It wasn’t until later that jobs like retail and government jobs, particularly teaching jobs, began to take a hit, affecting women more, Dorfman said. Those jobs have been slower to recover.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth, a chief economist at the U.S. Department of Labor under George W. Bush, says Romney’s statistic isn’t properly focused. She notes that the unemployment rate for women has been about one full percentage point below the unemployment rate for men for much of the recession. It is only fairly recently that the gender gap has begun to close. The unemployment rate is now 8.3 percent for men, 8.1 percent for women.

“That’s why many people have called this a man-cession,” said Furchtgott-Roth, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.

Men have fared worse in the recession, she said, mainly because industries such as construction and manufacturing – male-dominated industries – have been harder hit than education and health care – female-dominated sectors.

Furchtgott-Roth said she couldn’t think of any Obama policies that have led to a slower recovery for women.

“Obama’s policies have been anti-growth,” she said. “But if anything, they have been anti-male jobs.”

For example, she said, his policies have hurt coal mining and oil drilling, which are typically male-dominated jobs, whereas the health care law will expand the health care industry, which should disproportionately help women.

Mitt Romney’s campaign scrambled Wednesday afternoon to clarify his support for the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act after top aides were caught flat-footed by the question.

In a statement, Amanda Hennenberg, a campaign spokeswoman, said Mr. Romney “supports pay equity and is not looking to change current law.”

That came after top policy aides to the former Massachusetts governor seemed uncertain how to respond when a reporter asked about Mr. Romney’s position on it during a campaign conference call.

“We’ll get back to you on that,” the adviser told reporters.

The stumble comes as Mr. Romney’s campaign is searching for ways to address the large lead that President Obama holds among female voters. That lead developed during the last several months, as Mr. Romney expressed positions that have angered many women.

The fumble on the Lilly Ledbetter law is not likely to help his case.

The law, which makes it easier for women to sue in equal pay cases, was the first bill that Mr. Obama signed into law, just nine days after taking office. It is despised by conservatives who claim it is leading to a flurry of unnecessary and frivolous lawsuits.

But the law is hailed by many women’s organizations as a step forward toward rectifying discriminatory salary situations. Democrats immediately jumped on the campaign’s hesitance to support the law, quickly distributing audio of the conference call.

“If he is truly concerned about women in this economy, he wouldn’t have to take time to ‘think’ about whether he supports the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act,” Ms. Ledbetter said in a statement distributed by Mr. Obama’s campaign. “This act not only ensures women have the tools to get equal pay for equal work, but it means their families will be better served also.”

Mr. Romney’s campaign reacted quickly, putting out statements from women attacking the impact of Mr. Obama’s policies on women.

“Barack Obama talks a good game on women in the economy, but the facts don’t back him up,” Representative Mary Bono Mack, Republican of California, said in a statement. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions.”

The Democratic National Convention quickly noted that Ms. Bono Mack voted against the Ledbetter Act when it passed in Congress in 2009.

As Mitt Romney begins to pivot to the general election, President Obama’s campaign is working to remind voters of the things Mr. Romney said during the primary.

In a new “greatest hits” video, the Obama campaign highlights what it calls “memories to last a lifetime” from the campaign trail. They include some of Mr. Romney’s most oft-cited comments on issues that may come back to haunt him as he tries to attract swing voters, including:

“Corporations are people, my friend.”

“I like being able to fire people that provide services to me.”

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor.”

The video by Mr. Obama’s “Truth Team” makes no effort to put any of Mr. Romney’s statements into context. For example, the comment about liking to fire people was really said about being able to change health insurance providers.

But as the campaigns begin to engage each other more directly, it is clear that the competing narratives are set.

Mr. Obama and his advisers are hoping to portray Mr. Romney as an out-of-touch, wealthy conservative whose statements about a number of issues — immigration, women’s health, the budget — appear too extreme to moderate and independent voters.

As part of its bizarre strategy of blaming President Obama for the GOP’s “war on women,” the Romney campaign released statements today from two Republican Congresswomen, Reps. Mary Bono Mack (R-CA) and Cathy McMorris Rodgers (R-WA). The statements correctly note that women have been hit particularly hard by job losses in recent years, but misleadingly lay the blame for those losses on Obama, just as Romney himself has been doing recently .

“Mitt Romney supports pay equity for women and, as president, will do what President Obama has not — implement pro-growth economic policies that will allow women and all Americans to finally get back to work,” wrote McMorris Rodgers. “Women in the Obama economy are facing hardships of historical proportions,” added Bono Mack. “Simply put, women cannot afford four more years of Barack Obama.”

But their concern for pay equity and women in the workplace must be a recent development. Both congresswomen voted against the landmark Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009 — which empowers women to seek restitution for pay discrimination — and both voted against the proposed Paycheck Fairness Act , which would have made it easier for women to fight pay inequality.

This morning, the Romney campaign refused to say during a conference call whether Romney supports the Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, the first law that President Obama signed. The campaign later scrambled to assert that Romney “supports pay equity ” and “is not looking to change current law.”

Nein, nein, nein, Herman Cain.
Erstwhile Newt Gingrich–backer Herman Cain announced this morning that he is now “ready to get behind the nominee ,” Mitt Romney. And in one of his first acts as an official Romney supporter, Cain, in an interview with Fox News , offered his take on the trouble Romney is having with women (President Obama leads by 19 percent among female voters , according to a new Washington Post poll):

“Yes, President Obama is very likable to most people, if you just look at him and his family. But if you look at his policies, which is what most people disagree with, it’s a different story. And I think many men are much more familiar with the failed policies than a lot of other people, as well as the general public.”

Ha. Other people . Cain realized halfway through that last sentence that he was about to say something really sexist, so at the last second, he tried to subtly replace “women” with “other people,” hoping nobody would notice. Other options considered by Cain in that moment included “non-men” and “phallus-challenged.”

WASHINGTON — With a Republican opponent all but chosen and the general election campaign about to start, President Obama is preparing to emphasize an issue that few Democratic candidates have embraced in the past: national security, long the domain of the Republican Party.

At the same time, the Obama campaign is seeking to portray Mitt Romney, the likely Republican nominee, as a national security neophyte whose best ideas are simply retreads of what the president is already doing, and whose worst instincts would take the country back to the days of President George W. Bush: cowboy diplomacy, the Iraq war and America’s lowest standing on the international stage.

In the coming weeks, Obama advisers plan to release a list of national security “surrogates” — high-profile Democrats like former Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and Wesley K. Clark, a retired general — who will write newspaper op-ed articles, give speeches and take Mr. Romney to task every time he opens his mouth about foreign policy, Obama advisers said.

The plan is to draw a contrast between Mr. Obama — who, his advisers say, kept his word on ending the Iraq war, going aggressively after Al Qaeda and restoring alliances around the world — and Mr. Romney, who will be portrayed as playing both sides of numerous issues.

“He was for and against the removal of Qaddafi, for and against setting a timetable to withdraw our troops from Afghanistan, for and against enforcing trade laws against China, and while he once said he would not move heaven and earth to get Osama bin Laden, he later claimed that any president would have authorized the mission to do so,” said Ben LaBolt, press secretary for the Obama campaign.

The more aggressive posture is a break from the past, when Democrats on the national stage battled against the perception that the party was not as committed as Republicans were to a strong defense and an aggressive response to terrorism. Mr. Obama himself, during the 2008 campaign, drew criticism from both Republicans and his primary opponent, Hillary Rodham Clinton, for what they called his naïveté, particularly over his willingness to talk, without preconditions, to American foes like Iran.

changes in deficit projections since Jan. 2001

Today, the Obama campaign put out the second video that directly attacks Mitt Romney’s lies about President Obama using President Obama’s own words. It’s a strong political commercial:

There’s nothing better in a political advertisement than when you catch your opponent in a lie, and these videos do that over and over again. (You can find the first video here.) The trick will be in getting these videos seen by the right people. Democrats will love them, of course, because they play to their interests. Far-left progressives will see them as more evidence that President Obama is leaning rightward on all the wrong issues. Republicans will do a step-by-step fisking of the points to prove that Romney was right all along. But these commercials need to be seen by independents and moderates, and hopefully the DNC is working on building a reliable framework for getting their materials out there. It sounds like they’re building a network to do just exactly that.

US President Barack Obama thinks women should be allowed to join Augusta National, the male-only golf club that hosts the Masters golf tournament.

The president’s “personal opinion is that women should be admitted”, White House press secretary Jay Carney said.

He added that it was up to the club in the US state of Georgia to make changes to its membership policy.

The new female IBM head was not invited to join, even though the firm’s last four chief executives were all asked.

The exclusion of Virginia Rometty, chief executive of IBM, from the all-male club gained attention since the giant technology company is a major sponsor of the club’s annual golf tournament.

“We’re kind of long past the time when women should be excluded from anything,” Mr Carney told reporters on Thursday.

The chairman of Augusta National has said the club should be allowed to make its own decision on the matter.

But correspondents say Augusta National’s all-male policy could conflict with the non-discrimination goals of many sponsor companies.

The last time Augusta National’s membership policy came under scrutiny, the club stood firm and hosted its golf tournament without sponsors for two years.

Right-wing media have been on the attack against President Obama since he responded to a question about the Supreme Court’s consideration of the Affordable Care Act by pointing out that conservatives criticize “unelected” judges who engage in “judicial activism” to “overturn a duly constituted and passed law.” As we pointed out yesterday, Obama is correct: conservatives have for years railed against “unelected” judges who rule in ways they dislike.

Today, Fox News digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt found a new angle from which to approach the issue. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, the host of Fox “straight news” program America Live , Stirewalt criticized Obama for pointing out that conservative commentators criticize “unelected” judges, saying: “Now, no offense to Charles Krauthammer and no offense to any of the circuit judges in the country, but they’re not the president of the United States.” In fact, former President George W. Bush criticized “unelected” judges who made rulings he thought were incorrect.

US President Barack Obama has signed a bill banning insider trading by members of Congress.

The STOCK Act was supported by both parties as an attempt to restore trust in a Congress with historically low approval ratings.

Previously, lawmakers could trade stock unrestricted even though they may have had specialist knowledge.

Mr Obama used the signing to push for further limits on lobbying and money’s effect on Congress.

There is “obviously more that we can do to close the deficit of trust”, Mr Obama said at the bill signing.

“We should limit any elected official from owning stocks in industries that they have the power to impact,” he said.

“We should make sure people who bundle campaign contributions for Congress, can’t lobby Congress, and vice versa.”

Mitch McConnell incorrectly claimed that oil production is “up 96 percent on state-owned land and private land,” which isn’t close to being true. Production rose 11 percent on those lands in fiscal year 2011, the period to which McConnell alluded. Even over the last five fiscal years, the rise has been 15 percent — not even one-sixth as large as he claimed.

The latest fad seems to be articles claiming that if the Supreme Court declares President Obama’s health care bill to be unconstitutional, it would be good news for him politically. This position has been argued by the Democratic pollster Mark Penn , the Democratic strategist Bob Shrum and CNN’s James Carville, among others.

The theory seems to rest on the notion that Mr. Obama could use the health care bill to rally his base, either by railing against the Supreme Court or by trying to advance a new plan.

There are a few basic problems with it:

1. Mr. Obama does not face a major problem with his base, but his standing is tenuous with swing voters.

2. Among swing voters, the health care bill is not very popular.

3. The Supreme Court declaring the health care bill unconstitutional will not make it more popular among swing voters.

A poll of American Jewish voters shows that they overwhelmingly support Barack Obama for president, just as they did four years ago, and that Israel and Iran rank low on their list of priority issues in the presidential election.

The results cast doubt on the claim that Mr. Obama has alienated a significant swath of Jewish voters because of his rocky relationship with Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu.

“We show no slippage in Jewish support for President Obama,” said Robert P. Jones, chief executive of the Public Religion Research Institute, an independent research group based in Washington D.C., which conducted the poll of 1,004 Jewish adults from Feb. 23 to March 5. The margin of error is plus or minus five percentage points.

Support for Mr. Obama is still higher among Jews than among the general electorate, with 62 percent of Jewish voters saying they would like to see him elected, and 30 percent saying they preferred the Republican candidate. (That is almost identical to a Gallup poll of American Jewish registered voters taken in June 2008.)

Of the 30 percent of those polled who said they preferred a Republican candidate, 58 percent said they supported Mitt Romney, 15 percent supported Rick Santorum, 13 percent supported Newt Gingrich and 12 percent supported Ron Paul.

The Obama campaign is putting nearly $1.4 million behind its newest commercial, getting the president’s message on the air in some of the nation’s largest television markets, according to figures provided by a Republican strategist who tracks media purchases.

The ad buy covers six battleground states — Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Nevada and Virginia — and includes cities like Tampa, Fla.; West Palm Beach, Fla.; Des Moines; and Cleveland.

The ad will be shown on both broadcast and cable television.

In an online town-hall-style meeting last week, Mr. Romney accused Mr. Obama of having a presidential policy intended to “see energy prices rise,” and he mocked the president for once saying that he would like gasoline prices to “change gradually.”

“They have put in place policies that are designed to reduce our production of fossil-based fuels and drive up the cost of energy and therefore encourage people to move towards wind and solar which are of course much higher cost,” Mr. Romney said in the Google hangout .

But Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, has in the past appeared much more open to the notion that rising energy costs could be good for the American economy. In his 2010 book, “No Apology,” Mr. Romney described a gradual increase in the cost of energy as the kind of market-based incentive that conservatives could embrace.

While not suggesting particular policies that might lead to higher prices — like an increase in the gas tax , a carbon tax or a cap-and-trade plan — Mr. Romney praised the benefits that would flow from a slowly increasing cost of energy.

“Higher energy prices would encourage energy efficiency across the full array of American businesses and citizens,” Mr. Romney wrote. “It would provide industries of all kinds with a predictable outlook for energy costs, allowing them to confidently invest in growth.”

In the book, Mr. Romney called for greater domestic exploration and drilling. And he expressed concern about the collateral damage from higher energy prices on people who drive great distances, businesses that consume a lot of energy and people on fixed incomes.

But he acknowledged that allowing the price for gas and oil to rise could be the centerpiece of “game-changing incentives” that would alter consumer behavior when it came to buying cars and using electricity. That, he wrote, could help the country wean itself off an overreliance on foreign oil.

President Obama declared on Monday that he was confident that the Supreme Court would uphold his health care law , saying it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary” step to overturn legislation passed by a “strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”

Mr. Obama, in his first public comments since the Supreme Court heard oral arguments last week to strike down the 2010 Affordable Care Act, said the law’s constitutionality had been affirmed by legal scholars across the political spectrum, as well as in rulings by conservative appeals court judges.

But the president also put his defense of the law in real-world terms, arguing that the legislation had already brought affordable health care to 2.5 million young people and reduced the cost of prescription drugs for millions of older people.

“This is not an abstract argument,” Mr. Obama said at a news conference in the Rose Garden, after meeting with the leaders of Canada and Mexico. “People’s lives are affected by the lack of availability of health care, the unavailability of health care, or their inability to get health care because of pre-existing conditions.”

“There is not only an economic element to this and a legal element to this, but there is a human element to this,” he said.

Mr. Obama also challenged the Supreme Court justices not to practice the judicial activism that many conservative legal scholars often lament in the court, saying a negative ruling would amount to “an unelected group of people” overturning “a duly constituted and passed law.”

US President Barack Obama is hosting three-way talks at the White House with the leaders of Canada and Mexico.

Talks usually centre on border issues and the North American Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

This year the summit could also touch on a disputed US-Canada oil pipeline.

President Obama, Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Mexican President Felipe Calderon are meeting weeks before a broader regional summit to be held in Colombia.

The Summit of the Americas in Cartagena, Colombia, is to be held in two weeks’ time.

No major agreements are expected to be signed at Monday’s summit, which will see the three leaders hold a joint news conference.

The meeting was originally planned to take place in Hawaii in November, but had to be rescheduled after a top Mexican official was killed in a helicopter crash.

EVERYONE knows it’s dangerous to ingest gasoline or to inhale its fumes. But I am starting to believe that merely thinking about the price of gasoline can damage cognitive processing. Thus I may be risking some of my precious few remaining brain cells by writing about that topic.

Here is a one-item test to see whether you are guilty of cloudy thinking about gas prices: Do you believe that they are something a president can control? Many Americans believe that the answer is yes, but any respectable economist will tell you that the answer is no.

Consider a recent poll of a panel of economists conducted by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, where I teach. (Disclosure: I am a member of the panel; the other respondents are well-respected economists from top universities with varying political views.) The 41 panel members were asked whether they agreed with the following statement: “Changes in U.S. gasoline prices over the past 10 years have predominantly been due to market factors rather than U.S. federal economic or energy policies.”

Not a single member of the panel disagreed with the statement.

Here is why: Oil is a global market in which America is a big consumer but a small supplier. We consume about 20 percent of the world’s oil but hold only 2 percent of the oil reserves. That means we are, in economics jargon, “price takers.” Domestic production has increased during the Obama administration, but it has had minimal effects on global prices because, as producers, we are just too small to matter much. And even if domestic oil companies further increased production, they would sell to the highest global bidder.

If you’re not convinced by economic theory or the opinions of economists, consider some recent history. Presumably, no one would call President George W. Bush unfriendly to the oil industry. Yet the price of gasoline rose steadily during most of his administration. In February 2001, just after Mr. Bush took office, the average price of regular gasoline was $1.45 a gallon. By June 2008, that price had risen to $4.05. Still think presidents and oil-friendly policies can determine oil prices?

BURLINGTON, Vt. — President Obama said on Friday that there is enough oil in world markets to allow countries to rely less on imports from Iran, a step that could increase Western actions to deter Tehran’s nuclear ambitions.

Mr. Obama is required by law to decide by March 30, and every six months after, whether the price and supply of non-Iranian oil is sufficient to allow for countries to cut their oil purchases from Iran.

Mr. Obama’s decision was announced Friday afternoon in a conference call. He made the decision after consultations with a number of oil exporters that had agreed to increase production. The decision comes even as gas prices have risen in recent months, a rise that his political advisers say could hamper his re-election efforts.

The new sanctions, passed as part of the defense budget and mandated by the Senate in a rare 100-to-0 vote, penalize foreign corporations or other entities that purchase oil from Iran’s central bank, which collects payment for most of the country’s energy exports. The penalties are meant to pressure Iran to curb its nuclear program.

The law includes loopholes that allow Mr. Obama to waive the measures if they threaten national security or if gas prices increase.

Gas prices in the United States have climbed about 19 percent this year on worries about a confrontation with Iran, investor speculation about higher prices and other factors. A gallon of gas currently costs an average of $3.93, up from about $3.30 a gallon in December. The rising prices have weighed on economic confidence and cut into household budgets, a concern for an Obama administration seeking re-election.

But since the law was enacted in December, the White House has engaged in a broad effort to prevent supply disruptions that might cause prices to spike and to persuade countries around the world to buy less oil and demand discounts from Iran. In the last three months, a number of high-ranking officials, including Timothy F. Geithner, the Treasury secretary, have traveled around the world to rally support for the sanctions.

Countries including Saudi Arabia have increased production to make up for any lost production from Iran. “There is no rational reason why oil prices are continuing to remain at these high levels,” the Saudi oil minister, Ali Naimi, wrote in an opinion article in The Financial Times this week. “I hope by speaking out on the issue that our intentions — and capabilities — are clear. We want to see stronger European growth and realize that reasonable crude oil prices are key to this.”

American officials have also discussed a coordinated release of oil from national strategic reserves along with French and British officials, as publicly confirmed on Thursday by the French prime minister, François Fillon.

Additionally, the administration last week exempted Japan and 10 European countries, including Britain, France and Germany, from the new measures, given that the countries were already reducing oil imports from Iran.

In a statement, Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said that the country had “made progress in shrinking Iran’s oil export markets and isolating its Central Bank from the world financial system.”

Mr Obama said it was obviously a tragedy, and when he thinks about Trayvon he thinks about his kids.

US President Barack Obama has said the “tragedy” of an unarmed black teenager shot dead in Florida should prompt some national soul-searching.

The death of Trayvon Martin, 17, gunned down by a neighbourhood watchman, who has not been charged as he claimed self-defence, has sparked outrage.

“If I had a son he would look like Trayvon,” President Obama told reporters at the White House.

Thousands of protesters demanded justice in Florida on Thursday evening.

There have been calls for the arrest of George Zimmerman, 28, who opened fire on the teenager last month in the Orlando suburb of Sanford.

In Florida, a law known as “stand your ground” can prevent criminal or civil prosecution when deadly force is used in self-defence.

The law’s challengers — 26 states led by Florida, the National Federation of Independent Business and several individuals — present the central question as one of individual liberty. May the federal government, they ask, compel individuals not engaged in commerce to buy a product, here health insurance, from private companies?

The Obama administration, by contrast, urges the court to answer a different question. May Congress decide, in fashioning a comprehensive response to a national crisis in the health care market, to regulate how people pay for the health care they will almost inevitably need?

However the questions are ultimately framed, the Supreme Court’s answers will be grounded in the text of two provisions of the Constitution and in the precedents interpreting them.

The Constitution grants the federal government specified powers, reserving the rest to the states and to the people. The two powers at issue in the case, set out in Article I, Section 8, concern the regulation of interstate commerce and the imposition of taxes.

The administration’s primary argument is that the law is authorized by the commerce clause, which gives Congress the power to regulate commerce “among the several states.” The Supreme Court has read the clause broadly, saying it allows Congress to limit how much wheat may be grown on a family farm and to punish the cultivation of home-grown marijuana.

There have been only two modern exceptions to that broad interpretation. In 1995, the court struck down a federal law regulating guns near schools. In 2000, it struck down a federal law allowing suits over violence against women. In both cases, the court said the activity sought to be regulated was local and noncommercial.

The decision under review, from the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit, in Atlanta, said the health care law overstepped the limits imposed by the commerce clause by regulating inactivity and forcing people into the marketplace.

Q: Is President Obama giving away several Alaskan islands to Russia?

A: No. The U.S. has never claimed ownership of the islands identified in viral emails and websites. They lie far closer to the coast of Siberia than to Alaska.

WASHINGTON — The top allied commander in Afghanistan told Congress on Tuesday that he would not be recommending further American troop reductions until late this year, after the departure of the current “surge” forces and the end of the summer fighting season.

That timetable would defer one of the thorniest military decisions facing President Obama — the pace at which the United States removes its forces from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 — until after the November elections.

Gen. John R. Allen, a Marine four-star general who commands the American-led allied forces in Afghanistan, said that he remained optimistic about eventual success but that it was too early to begin shifting forces from battles in the south to the country’s turbulent eastern provinces.

He also acknowledged the deep sensitivities, especially given the current diplomatic crisis with Afghanistan, involved in handing over complete security control to Afghan forces, including over the commando night raids that American commanders say are critical to the war effort. These are the subject of intense negotiation, he testified.

General Allen said that only after reviewing the results of the next six months of fighting — at the end of which there will be 68,000 American troops remaining there — would he turn his attention to the pace of further reductions in the force.

But he repeatedly said that by the end of next year, Afghan forces would have taken over primary responsibility for operations across the country, allowing NATO’s combat role to be finished by the end of 2014, as currently scheduled.

US President Barack Obama has warned North Korea that it will “achieve nothing by threats or by provocations”.

The warning comes as Pyongyang prepares to launch a long-range missile which it says will put a satellite in orbit.

Mr Obama was speaking after talks in Seoul with South Korean President Lee Myung-bak, ahead of global summit on nuclear security.

The two leaders said North Korea risked further sanctions and isolation if it did not cancel its launch plans.

Mr Obama said Washington and Seoul were “absolutely united” that “bad behaviour” by North Korea would not be rewarded.

“North Korea knows its obligations and it must take irreversible steps to meet those obligations,” he said.

The launch will contravene an agreement Pyongyang reached last month which would have seen it receive food aid in exchange for a partial freeze on nuclear activities and an end to ballistics tests.

Mr Lee, who spoke alongside Mr Obama, said their countries had “agreed to respond sternly to any provocations and threats by the North and to continually enhance the firm South Korea-US defence readiness”.

But he said the international community stood ready to help North Korea improve the lives of its citizens if it chose a path of peace.

Mr Obama also criticised China, saying its refusal to challenge North Korea on the nuclear issue was not working as a policy.

As taglines go, “All of the above” is not exactly phenomenal, lacking the sex appeal of its energy-policy sister, “Drill, baby, drill,” and the historic resonance of, say, “Where’s the beef?” It conjures a standardized test more than economic stimulus.

But President Obama’s use of the phrase to describe his current energy policy leanings – signaling yes to a combination of domestic drilling, alternative energy and conservation — is driving Republicans nuts, because the phrase has been a product of their party’s energy platform for years.

They find it especially galling since Mr. Obama made moves to block, for now, part of the expansion of the Keystone XL pipeline.

Mr. Obama has used the phrase while visiting oil-rich areas of the country, and his administration is promoting it every chance it gets.

It is hard to know precisely how “all of the above” came to pertain to energy, although Senator John McCain and his running mate in 2008, former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, made good use of it in their presidential campaign, along with “drill, baby, drill” and that underdog maxim, “mine, baby, mine.”

But it may well have been conceived in 2000 on the floor of the House, when Representative Benjamin A. Gilman, Republican of New York, gave a lengthy speech on energy, saying: “We need to be exploring alternative energy sources, the use of coal, the use of hydroelectric power, of biomass, geothermal, photovoltaic, solar thermal and wind, utilizing ethanol, creating a system of electric reliability, increasing the exploration and supply of natural gas, and retrofitting or building cost-efficient oil refineries. In addition, we need to utilize government land for responsible oil and natural gas exploration.”

Mr. Gilman also said that the American Petroleum Institute at the time advocated “that an effective national energy policy must, at a minimum, allow for all of the above.”

US President Barack Obama has pledged to speed approval for the southern leg of the stalled Keystone oil pipeline.

Speaking in the oil hub of Cushing, Oklahoma, he ordered officials to “cut through the red tape” and make fast-tracking a federal review a “priority”.

Mr Obama’s speech comes on day two of an energy tour spanning four US states, including Nevada and New Mexico.

Analysts say he is politically vulnerable to rising fuel prices during an election year.

The entire Keystone XL pipeline would run from the oil sands of western Canada to refineries in Texas, but has become a controversial issue amid ongoing debate over its potential environmental impact.

In January, the White House put the plan on hold, saying more time was needed to assess the environmental impact of the $7bn (£4.4bn) plan.

But the following month the Obama administration approved construction for the southern leg of the pipeline.

The environmental concerns focus on a section of the route planned to cut through a Nebraska aquifer, and do not apply to the southern section.

In what has become a weekly ritual, President Obama on Thursday defended his administration’s energy policy, in the face of relentlessly rising gasoline prices, to an American public that believes he can do more to ease the pain at the pump.

Mr. Obama cycled through now-familiar themes, promoting his record of increased domestic oil and gas production; stricter fuel-efficiency standards for cars and trucks; and investments in alternative sources of energy, like biofuels, wind and solar power. The administration’s energy policy has been the focus of many speeches the president has given in recent weeks.

But on Thursday he delivered a notably sarcastic rebuttal to his Republican presidential challengers, particularly Newt Gingrich , who has promised, if elected, to bring down gas prices to $2.50 a gallon, and has ridiculed the president’s talk of making fuel from algae .

Without naming Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Obama said these gibes – by people “who are running for a certain office” – revealed a streak of ignorance similar to those who predicted that cars would not supplant horse-drawn buggies or that television would never elbow out radio.

“If some of these folks were around when Columbus set sail, they must have been founding members of the Flat Earth Society,” Mr. Obama said to a cheering crowd at Prince George’s Community College here. “They would not have believed the earth was round.”

Turning the spotlight on the remarks of his opponents may make sense because Mr. Obama’s defense of his role in rising gas prices rests on an uncomfortable claim: he cannot do much about it. It was a theme he struck again on Thursday

“There’s no silver bullet,” the president declared. “Anybody who tells you otherwise isn’t really looking for a solution; they’re trying to ride the political wave of the moment.”

Stephon stood just a few feet away from Barack Obama. The president, busy shaking hands, looked right at him. “It was like he was waiting for me to say something,” he said later.

So the 26-year-old Prince George’s Community College student took his cue and spoke to President Obama in his first language: American Sign Language. “I am proud of you,” Stephon signed. The president, almost involuntary, instinctively, immediately signed back.

“Thank you,” Obama replied.

This is one of those moments that humanize the office of the presidency:

Born deaf, and justifiably proud, Stephon told us later he had no idea he’d be seated in the VIP section so close to the president and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley at the March 15th event. But what a difference a seating assignment can make. “When I shook his hand it did not feel like he was superior to me,” Stephon said. “He was just a humble man.”

Even though Stephon’s story makes us giddy, this isn’t just another yarn from the lamestream lib’rul media about the majestic greatness of Barack Obama. If this were George W. Bush or Mitt Romney or Herbert Hoover, we’d be equally captivated. It’s a fleeting moment in the life of the president; it’s a tale to be told forever for Stephon.

Newt Gingrich said Tuesday night that “phase one” for himself and Rick Santorum in the days ahead must be stopping Mitt Romney from getting enough delegates to claim the Republican presidential nomination.

Having skipped campaigning in Illinois and faced with mounting campaign debts, Mr. Gingrich said on Fox News that he was staying in the race because he believes voters would choose him as the nominee after rejecting Mr. Romney.

If Mr. Romney fails to get the 1,144 delegates he needs to wrap up the nomination, Mr. Gingrich said that “then we’ll have a real conversation about who can best beat Barack Obama.”

Mr. Gingrich said that he believes voters would turn to him as the best person to debate Mr. Obama in the fall. He said his repeated discussion about the need to produce more energy in the United States was putting Mr. Obama on the defensive.

“If the key is who can stand here and take him on head to head, I think I’m proving every day,” Mr. Gingrich said. “He is losing this argument over expensive gasoline.”

Mitt Romney came to the University of Chicago Monday afternoon, the day before Illinoisans head to the polls to vote in their Republican primary, and assailed President Obama ’s economic policies in a 19-minute speech that was the first major policy address he has given in weeks.

“For the last three years, Mr. Obama has expanded government instead of empowering the American people,” Mr. Romney said. “He’s put us deeper in debt, he’s slowed the recovery, he’s harmed our economy, and he has attacked the cornerstone of American prosperity — economic freedom.”

Mr. Romney delivered his speech in a wood-paneled auditorium at the University of Chicago, a bastion of conservative economic thought, and a site right in Mr. Obama’s backyard. (In fact, some reporters drove past the Obamas’ Hyde Park neighborhood on their way to the speech.)

Mr. Romney offered a vision of what he called “economic freedom,” arguing for less regulation and less government intervention, and assailed the Obama administration, arguing that its “assault on freedom could damage our economy and the well-being of American families for decades to come.”

“As you know, this November, we face an important decision,” Mr. Romney said. “Our choice will not be one of party or personality. This election is going to be about principle. Our economic freedom will be on the ballot. And I intend to offer the American people a choice.”

Though Mr. Romney’s speech offered sharp attacks on Mr. Obama’s policies — he did not mention any of his Republican rivals — his remarks were light on new specifics of what he would do as president, instead reiterating many of his policies and proposals that had already been rolled out.

President Obama’s re-election team announced Monday that it had raised $45 million for the campaign and the Democratic National Committee in February, significantly more than the $29.1 million he raised for both committees during January. .

According to Twitter messages, 348,000 people donated last month, about 100,000 of them for the first time.

On the Republican side, Mitt Romney raised $11.5 million for the month , according to his campaign, but was closely trailed by Rick Santorum, now his leading rival for the GOP nomination, who raised over $9 million, according to his campaign. Unlike Mr. Obama, who is accepting maximum contributions for both the primary and general election campaign periods, Mr. Romney has been raising only primary contributions. That suggests that his actual pace of fundraising may not be as far behind Mr. Obama’s as those figures would at first suggest, since Mr. Romney’s can return to each of this primary donors again if he becomes his party’s nominee.

Mr. Obama has been raising money at a furious clip amid signs that he has been slow to reconnect with swathes of the vast network of high-dollar donors who, along with grassroots contributors, helped power his dollar haul during the 2008 campaign. On Friday, Mr. Obama’s traveled on a five-event, $4.8 million-dollar “money run ” which included an event featuring Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey.

The candidates are required to report detailed campaign finance reports with the Federal Election Commission by midnight on Tuesday.

Rick Santorum has garnered quite a bit of attention recently for his animated remarks against pornography, and on two separate Sunday shows the Republican presidential candidate refused to cede an inch, doubling down on his crusade against “hard-core pornography.”

A recently added section on the candidate’s website declares that America is “suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” and laments that the “Obama Administration has turned a blind eye to those who wish to preserve our culture from the scourge of pornography and has refused to enforce obscenity laws.” The site goes on to say that the Justice Department “seems to favor pornographers over children and families.”

Asked to defend this odd claim, Santorum argued Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union that the Justice Department is not enforcing pornography laws as rigorously as President George W. Bush’s DOJ did.

“Well you have to look at the proof that’s in the prosecution. Under the Bush administration, pornographers were prosecuted much more rigorously under existing law than they are under the Obama administration,” Santorum said. “My conclusion is they have not put a priority on prosecuting these cases, and in doing so, they are exposing children to a tremendous amount of harm. And that to me says they’re putting the un-enforcement of this law and putting children at risk as a result of that.”

It’s not clear what data there is to back up Santorum’s claim, and his spokesman did not immediately return TPM’s inquiry for evidence. A Justice Department spokesperson also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The former senator made the same argument on ABC’s This Week .

“There are laws against purveying hard-core pornography,” he said. “And that — we have attorney generals in the country, at least under the Bush administration, who did prosecute that. And this administration isn’t. And I simply said I would follow the law, which I know in the case of Barack Obama can be somewhat of a hefty challenge for him.”

The sudden emphasis on pornography is a questionable strategy for a candidate whom top Republicans, eager to keep the focus in 2012 on fiscal concerns, worry has a tendency to get sidetracked with culture-war issues that are often a dead end with swing voters. While it animates a segment of social conservatives, battling pornography doesn’t make the list of top concerns for most Americans.

Yet, Santorum isn’t confining his anti-pornography crusade to enforcement of the law — he’s passionately making the case against the broader concept.

“Congress in its wisdom understood that hard-core pornography is very damaging,” he said on ABC, “particularly to young people, and that exposure on the Internet can be very damaging, and of course it’s very damaging to a lot of folks.”

If the administration had exempted every university, hospital, or business with a religious connection, it would have meant that millions of women of all faiths–students, teachers, nurses, social workers, marketing and administrative staff and other employees of those schools and businesses–would have been singled out to lose access to this important coverage, without regard to their own needs, beliefs and conscience.

The Post wants to put the Church hierarchy ahead of the right of individual women to be free from discrimination in their health care plans. That’s where the Post is just wrong.

There may be no number stamped more frequently on the American landscape than the price of gas. And as the average price has climbed toward $4 a gallon nationwide, it has generated abundant chatter about the threat to the economic recovery, and to incumbent politicians.

Republicans have seized on the issue to attack President Obama’s management of the economy. The president has responded with speeches defending his energy policies, including increased domestic oil production.

But there is surprisingly little evidence that gas prices deserve an outsize reputation for economic and political influence.

Studies suggest that most voters agree with Ms. Hawks: they are angry about gas prices, but other factors, like the economy and the personal qualities of candidates, ultimately determine their votes.

Gas prices influence voters indirectly, because rising prices can slow the pace of growth. But the influence is modest, because spending on oil and its derivatives makes up only a small part of the nation’s economic activity. Gas purchases account for less than 4 percent of household spending. Prices would need to increase by at least 28 percent to lift that share by a single percentage point. So far this year, they have jumped by 15 percent.

“Presidential elections are based on evaluations of presidential performance and on the performance of the economy. You can’t reduce that to one small issue,” said Alan Abramowitz, a professor of political science at Emory University. “Are gas prices part of the equation that people think about? They probably are, but only a small piece.”

Rising gas prices also make Americans less confident in the nation’s economic prospects and less approving of political leaders, according to public opinion surveys. But these, too, are small effects. One study by a political scientist estimated that the impact of changes in unemployment was 27 times greater than the impact of equivalent changes in gas prices.

In part, the difference is that Americans are divided as to whether politicians should be held responsible.

The plans are said to be in papers found in the compound in Abbottabad where the al-Qaeda leader was killed by US special forces last year.

Bin Laden asked deputies to plan an attack against an aircraft carrying Mr Obama and General David Petraeus.

He said the killing would throw the US into crisis, as Vice President Biden was “totally unprepared” to take over.

The documents were seen by the Washington Post . There is growing anticipation in the US over government plans to publish all the papers seized at the compound when it was raided in May 2011.

Laptops, notepads and computer hard drives were also taken.

Bin Laden asked one of his deputies, Ilyas Kashmiri, to start preparing the attack.

ATLANTA — Friday marked another stage in President Obama’s springtime metamorphosis into full-fledged campaigner: his first daylong trip out of the capital devoted solely to fund-raising. He gripped and grinned through five campaign events in Chicago and Atlanta, where the actor and producer Tyler Perry played host to Mr. Obama at his house and television studio.

The 13-hour “money run” raised at least $4.8 million for the president’s re-election effort — more than $5 million if one counts a fund-raiser in Minneapolis with Michelle Obama.

How presidents use their time inevitably becomes a target for scrutiny and criticism, particularly when a campaign heats up. The White House insisted this week that Mr. Obama still spends “the vast preponderance of his time on his official duties.” But with his schedule increasingly crowded by fund-raisers and speeches that could easily double as campaign rallies, that case is getting harder and harder to make.

Except for a phone call he made on Friday to President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan shortly after midnight, Mr. Obama’s day was dominated by speeches like the one he gave in a hotel ballroom in Chicago, where he told a faithful crowd that he understood “it’s not as trendy to be involved in the Obama campaign as it was back then.”

White House CIO Brook Colangelo has revealed some harrowing details about his first days on the job. Entering the White House along with Barack Obama on Jan. 20, 2009, Colangelo "delivered the first presidential BlackBerry" and mobile devices to other top administration officials. Yet the White House's technology was in such poor shape that for the first 40 days, e-mail was down 23 percent of the time.

On January 26, "Our e-mail servers went down for 21 hours," Colangelo told attendees of the Computerworld Premier 100 IT Leaders Conference in Arizona this week. "In my professional career, there has not been a worst day since or ever."

Three or four more outages followed in those first 40 days. The White House proceeded to replace its e-mail systems and storage area networks, and started staffing its data center 24 hours a day. Uptime improved, but there was still a nine-hour outage in February 2011, taking down e-mail and Internet access, according to Computerworld. Colangelo resorted to faxing updates to Obama while he was on the road.

The 2011 outage spurred the White House to finally open a second data center for disaster recovery. Other modernization efforts included replacing desktops, which were still using floppy disk drives at the time Colangelo came on board. About 82 percent of the White House's technology had reached end of life when Obama's administration began.

The need for IT modernization in a government agency is nothing new, but the extent of the White House's problems is surprising. Computerworld has the full story.

As we reported: “A statistical analysis indicates that the strongest predictors of supporting the Tea Party are views of Obama, ideology, partisanship and anger at the way the government is operating. Views on the extent of racism as a problem, and views on Obama’s efforts on behalf of African-Americans, are not significant predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.”

The full analysis is here , and I’m pasting the section dealing with race below.

From our May survey:

THE QUESTION OF RACE – Tea Party supporters broadly agree on motivations for backing the movement – economic concern (cited by 83 percent), distrust of government (79 percent) and opposition to President Obama and the Democrats (72 percent). Many fewer supporters, but still 39 percent, cite dissatisfaction with the Republican Party as a reason for favoring the Tea Party.

At the same time, the movement’s supporters broadly reject the suggestion of racial prejudice against Obama. Eighty-seven percent of Tea Party backers say this is not a reason people support it. (One in 10 say it is). Racism, rather, is suggested by many Tea Party opponents, 57 percent of whom suspect prejudice in the movement’s ranks. (Among people who are neutral toward the Tea Party, about a quarter, 24 percent, suspect prejudice is at play in its support.)

Tea Party supporters are less apt than others to see racism as a major problem in this country – a majority do so, 58 percent, compared with 75 percent of all Americans. However, this concern is about the same among Tea Party supporters as it is among all adults who define themselves as very conservative (61 percent say racism is a significant problem). And Tea Party supporters are more apt to be white – 81 percent, vs. 74 percent of all adults (and 65 percent of Tea Party opponents). Whites are less apt than nonwhites to see racism as a major problem.

Further, while 18 percent of Tea Party supporters say Obama is doing “too much” to represent the interests of African-Americans, exactly as many say he’s doing too little in this regard. And those proportions are about equal among all Americans – 12 percent say Obama’s doing too much for African-Americans, 13 percent too little.

Ultimately, a statistical analysis indicates that the strongest predictors of supporting the Tea Party are views of Obama, ideology, partisanship and anger at the way the government is operating. Views on the extent of racism as a problem, and views on Obama’s efforts on behalf of African-Americans, are not significant predictors of support for the Tea Party movement.

President Obama ’s re-election campaign is beginning an intensified effort this week to build support among women, using the debate over the new health care law to amplify an appeal that already appears to be benefiting from partisan clashes over birth control and abortion.

On Monday, mailings will go out to 1 million women in more than a dozen battleground states in three separate versions for mothers, young women and older women, campaign and party officials said.

An effort called “Nurses for Obama” will begin on Wednesday, with nurses nationwide enlisted to be advocates for the health care law in their communities. And a new Web site will include links to video testimonials about the health care overhaul signed by Mr. Obama in 2010, including from a former critic who subsequently was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Through the month, ending with what the campaign’s headquarters has designated a “Women’s Week of Action,” campaign field offices will organize phone banks, campus activities, house parties and media events featuring local residents helped by the law, officials say.

The campaign is trying to use the political climate to regain the traditional Democratic advantage among women, even as moderate Republican and independent women voice disenchantment with the Republican focus on social issues.

Women were 53 percent of the national vote in 2008, and given Mr. Obama’s and his party’s continuing weakness among white men, they are crucial to his re-election. Though Mr. Obama won 56 percent of their votes four years ago, women narrowly went for Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections that cost Democrats control of the House.

The campaign’s effort to rally women around the health care law had been long planned, campaign officials said. But the effort has gained intensity, the officials and local volunteers say, because of recent controversies over contraception, abortion and education in Washington and in state capitals that have energized people in the campaign’s far-flung field offices who are essential to putting any national strategy into action.

For example, in New Hampshire, a swing state, the seven field offices will hold 16 phone banks to contact female voters about the benefits for them in the health care law. On Wednesday, when the “Nurses for Obama” effort is to be announced, nurses in New Hampshire will be making the calls, field organizers say.

In Virginia, another battleground, Barbara Kanninen volunteered a month ago to help lead a “Women for Obama” network and said “it’s growing fast” thanks to the debates in Washington and Richmond. “The conversations at these house parties are very much dominated by women concerned about all this,” said Ms. Kanninen, a freelance economist and mother of two teenage boys. Her own house party drew women that she did not know and three members of her choral group with whom she had never discussed politics, Ms. Kanninen said, and each day brings at least one new message of interest on her Facebook page from some woman who has heard of the group.

“Up until six weeks ago, Democrats suffered from an intensity gap, but this has closed as women — particularly suburban women — have turned against the G.O.P. ,” said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster who is not affiliated with the campaign.

Some Republicans and independent analysts say the current debate over social issues will fade soon, trumped by whatever happens with the economy. “Nobody thinks it will matter in a couple months,” said Vin Weber, a Republican lobbyist and former congressman. “I certainly don’t.”

But other Republicans are worried.

Questions about women and womens’ health have dominated the political debate over the past weeks, and at least one female Republican lawmaker is unhappy with her party’s record. New York Assemblyman Teresa Sayward (R), who is retiring after serving a decade in Albany, told the New York political program Capital Tonight that she does not support any of her party’s presidential candidates, because of their stances on women.
She also took an apparent shot at Republicans’ opposition to President Obama’s birth control mandate, saying, “It’s disheartening for me to see our party move away from what it was always about and that is to stay out of people’s lives, let them live their lives, don’t impose their religion on anybody else.”

President Obama is not claiming mission accomplished, but on Friday he hailed the latest monthly report of jobs growth by saying, “Day by day, we’re restoring this economy from crisis.”

While the addition of 230,000 private-sector jobs in February was not enough to further shrink the 8.3 percent unemployment rate, the news did keep alive a positive trend that is perhaps the best Mr. Obama can hope for as he campaigns for re-election arguing that his policies are working.

Mr. Obama, speaking from the floor of a new manufacturing plant in this election battleground state, said the nation had “come a long way,” creating almost 4 million jobs in the past two years. But that total is about half the number of jobs lost in the recession and financial crisis since 2007. As usual, Mr. Obama tempered his optimism, having learned from the experience of the past two years that global events like the debt crisis in Europe can unexpectedly put a damper on economic growth.

In what has become almost routine on each Friday the government releases the monthly jobs report, Mr. Obama traveled outside Washington to deliver his response from a factory floor, reflecting his emphasis on the manufacturing sector. Not far from the state capital of Richmond, the site this month was Rolls-Royce North America’s Crosspointe plant, which makes precision-engineered discs for jet engines.

“More companies are bringing jobs back and investing in America,” Mr. Obama said. “And manufacturing is adding jobs for the first time since the 1990s.”

President Obama challenged his Republican critics to make a case to the American people for a military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities if they really believe that is the right course to follow, throwing down an election-year challenge to the men who are vying to succeed him and who say that his Iran policy has been too weak.

“This is not a game,” Mr. Obama said during a news conference at the White House timed to coincide with Super Tuesday voting in the Republican primaries in a number of crucial states. Mr. Obama gave a staunch defense of his administration’s actions to rein in Iran’s nuclear ambitions and said that tough sanctions put in place by the United States and Europe were starting to work and were part of the reason Iran had returned to the negotiation table.

“The one thing we have not done is we have not launched a war,” Mr. Obama said. “If some of these folks think we should launch a war, let them say so, and explain to the American people.”

The House voted on Tuesday to ensure that the United States could impose duties on subsidized goods from China and Vietnam , overwhelmingly rejecting a conservative group’s attempt to portray it as a tax increase.

The bill, which was passed 370 to 39 and addresses a court ruling, now goes to President Obama, who is expected to sign it into law. The Senate passed the bill on Monday.

“China distorts the free market by giving enormous subsidies to its producers and exporters, and our companies and workers should not be expected to compete against the deep pockets of the Chinese government,” Dave Camp, a Michigan Republican who is chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, said during debate.

The Obama administration helped draw up the bipartisan bill after an appeals court ruled in December that the Commerce Department did not have authority to impose countervailing — or antisubsidy — duties on goods from “nonmarket economies.”

The decision endangered countervailing duties on about two dozen goods from China and Vietnam worth more than $4 billion in trade, and potential new duties in cases involving solar panels and turbine towers from China.

Supporters say current duties protect 80,000 American jobs. They cover steel, aluminum, paper, chemicals, other products from China and plastic shopping bags from Vietnam.

The vote gave both Republicans and Democrats a chance to show they are being tough on China, which many Americans see as an unfair trader. Last year, United States imports from China totaled a record $399.3 billion.

Separately, the United States began action on Tuesday at the World Trade Organization to open India’s market for poultry meat and eggs, saying an Indian ban on United States imports intended to stop the spread of bird flu was not based on sound science.

India’s ban in the name of protecting local poultry producers from losses caused by avian influenza is “clearly a case of disguising trade restrictions by invoking unjustified animal health concerns,” Ron Kirk, the United States trade representative, said.

The poultry industry welcomed the move, which it said could pry open a market for poultry exports conservatively valued at more than $300 million.

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta pledged to an influential pro-Israel lobbying group on Tuesday that if the pressure of diplomacy and sanctions failed to stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon, the United States was fully prepared to take military action as a last resort.

“Make no mistake: When all else fails, we will act,’’ Mr. Panetta told the American Israel Public Affairs Committee.

Mr. Panetta’s remarks tracked closely with those of President Obama, who spoke to the same group on Sunday, and were meant to drive home the president’s message that Israel could trust the United States in the growing confrontation with Iran. Like Mr. Obama, Mr. Panetta said that United States “does not bluff’’ and “we will keep all options, including military action,’’ on the table.

The defense secretary also appeared to allude to the hard-hitting Iran talk coming from the Republican presidential candidates, who spoke by video feed to Aipac on Tuesday. “In this town, it’s easy to talk tough,’’ Mr. Panetta said. “Acting tough is a hell of a lot more important.’’

But he declared: “No greater threat exists to the security of Israel and to the entire region and indeed to the United States than a nuclear-armed Iran.”

President Obama , speaking publicly for the first time about Rush Limbaugh ’s slur of a law student on his radio show last week, said on Tuesday that he had called the woman, Sandra Fluke, in part to set an example for his daughters.

“I thought about Malia and Sasha , and one of the things I want them to do as they get older is to engage in issues they care about, even ones I may not agree with them on,” Mr. Obama said at a televised news conference at the White House. “I want them to be able to speak their mind in a civil and thoughtful way, and I don’t want them attacked or called horrible names because they’re being good citizens.”

Mr. Obama confirmed what had been known about the call only from Ms. Fluke’s account, which she has repeated since the Friday conversation to multiple reporters and television shows. He declined a reporter’s invitation to pass judgment on the sincerity of Mr. Limbaugh’s subsequent apology or on his loss of advertisers in the controversy.

Mr. Obama would neither criticize nor endorse the comments of other Democrats, including the party chairman, that Republicans are waging “a war on women” by stances like their opposition to the Obama administration proposal that insurers and employers provide health coverage for contraception — the policy that Mr. Limbaugh was criticizing when he attacked Ms. Fluke, who testified for the measure in Congress, as “a slut” and “a prostitute.”

“I don’t know what’s in Rush Limbaugh’s heart, so I’m not going to comment on the sincerity of his apology,” Mr. Obama said.

“What I can comment on,” he added, “is the fact that all decent folks can agree that the remarks that were made don’t have any place in the public discourse.”

Mr. Limbaugh responded to Mr. Obama on his radio show, in which he also flayed Democrats for exploiting the contraception controversy. “He doesn’t know what’s in my heart, but you do,” Mr. Limbaugh told his audience. “And that is the key.”