The publication: The New Yorker
The endorsement: Obama
The key quote: “The reëlection of Barack Obama is a matter of great urgency. Not only are we in broad agreement with his policy directions; we also see in him what is absent in Mitt Romney — a first-rate political temperament and a deep sense of fairness and integrity.
The context: “If you spell reelection with an umlaut,” one GOP insider tells Politico, “odds are your endorsement will go for Obama.”

The publication: Reno Gazette-Journal
The endorsement: Romney
The key quote: “It wasn’t an easy decision. A recommendation against an incumbent can’t be taken lightly… However, while [Obama] had to contend with a Republican Party that was determined to deny him a second term at any cost, Obama cannot avoid the consequences of poor decisions and misplaced priorities.”
The context: “Somewhat offsetting the pro-Romney votes of the Gazette-Journal and the Las Vegas Review-Journal,” says The Associated Press, the Las Vegas Sun has endorsed Obama for president, “taking a different direction than Nevada’s two other largest newspapers” in this swing state.

The publication: Cleveland Plain-Dealer
The endorsement: Obama
The key quote: “Four years ago, this newspaper’s editorial board enthusiastically endorsed Barack Obama… our endorsement this year comes with less enthusiasm or optimism. Obama has changed — and it’s more than gray hair. The unifier of 2008 now engages in relentless attacks on his Republican challenger, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. The big dreamer of 2008 offers little in the way of a second-term agenda. There is a world-weariness unseen four years ago.”
The context: Obama won the backing of two of the three most important newspapers in this critical swing state, says Leigh Ann Caldwell at CBS News, but both — the Plain-Dealer and the Akron Beacon Journal, “offered less-than-ringing support.”

8 major news outlets’ presidential endorsements

In 2008, 79.8 percent of Americans making $100,000 or more voted, vs. just 51.9 percent of people making less than $20,000.

Here, a deeper look at How America Votes.

(By the way, we’ll be doing infographics like this one every week from now on!)

“This may go down in history as the Big Bird debate,” says Nina Strochlic atThe Daily Beast. As far as the Twitter consensus went, threatening to fire Big Bird to recoup the 0.00014 percent of the federal budget that goes to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting was mean, and bad politics. “Obama killed Osama Bin Laden. Romney wants to kill Big Bird. I think that says enough,” tweeted @BigBirdRomney. “If Romney had grown up with me, he wouldn’t have his numbers all screwed up,” added @BIGBIRD, capping off his tweet with a frowny-face emoticon. @FiredBigBird was on a roll, posting a photo of Big Bird holding a sign that read “Will Work for Food,” and taunting Romney: “If you think [you] REALLY won this debate just know I have nearly 27,000 followers and we all remember your 47% remarks.” 

‘Unemployed Big Bird’ and 3 other debate-inspired memes

The Obama-Romney debate fact-check: Who told the biggest whoppers? 

• Romney: Obama is “cutting $716 billion” from Medicare
  The verdict: “Half-True”
  What’s true is the number — ObamaCare reduces the growth of Medicare spending by $716 billion over 10 years, primarily in what’s paid to hospitals and insurers, says PolitiFact. But Romney “gives the impression that the law takes money already allocated to Medicare away from current recipients,” and that’s not true. In fact, “Medicare money isn’t being taken away,” period, adds FactCheck.org. And the slower growth, if successful, will actually keep the depleting Medicare trust fund solvent for eight years longer.
   
• Obama: Romney “would give millionaires another tax break and raise taxes on middle class families by up to $2,000 a year”
  The verdict: “Mostly true”
  This claim is based on a reputable analysis of Romney’s incomplete plan by the Tax Policy Center. Number-crunchers agree that to meet Romney’s stated goals of cutting taxes by 20 percent while not increasing the deficit, the closed loopholes and scrapped exemptions can’t just hit the wealthy. The Tax Policy Center’s view that middle class families would lose exemptions up to $2,000 fits with what we know of Romney’s proposal.
   
• Romney: Obama “doubled the deficit”
  The verdict: “Not true”
  When Obama took office in January 2009, the Congressional Budget Office had already estimated that the federal deficit in fiscal 2009 (ending in September) would be $1.2 trillion, says Jackie Calmes at The New York Times. It ended up being $1.4 trillion. For fiscal 2012, the deficit was $1.1 trillion lower than when he took office. And “measured as a share of the economy, as economists prefer, the deficit has declined more significantly — from 10.1 percent of the economy’s total output in 2009 to 7.3 percent for 2012.”

More fact checking

When the Supreme Court ruled to uphold ObamaCare, Mitt Romney responded by vowing to repeal the president’s signature domestic achievement, and to replace it with his own. However, Romney has given few hints of how he would actually address the serious deficiencies in America’s health care system, which has left tens of millions of people without insurance, made medical emergencies the country’s top cause of bankruptcy, and resulted in abysmal infant mortality ratesfor a developed nation, to take just one metric of public health. Romney’s website has few specifics, but his past statements reveal a loose outline of where he stands on the issue, say Trip Gabriel and Robert Pear at The New York Times.

Here, a guide to what health care would look like under a President Romney:

• What are Romney’s health care proposals? 
  Romney “would give a tax break to people who buy insurance individually on the open market,” say Gabriel and Pear, so that they “would enjoy the same advantage as workers who get insurance as a benefit at work.” Romney says he would take the federal government out of the equation, and leave it up to the states to figure out how to make health care more affordable. He also supports transforming Medicaid, the joint state-federal insurance program for the poor and the disabled, into a block-grant program, which would see the federal government give the states a lump sum of money with looser requirements on how they spent it.

• Would these plans work? 
  It depends on what Romney’s health care goals are. A presumably similar tax-credit plan from Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in 2008 was estimated to increase the number of uninsured. Democrats say turning Medicaid into a block-grant program would only encourage local governments to purge their Medicaid rolls and use the money for other purposes. However, Romney’s ideas “put more emphasis on controlling health costs and less on reducing the ranks of the uninsured, the primary goal of the Obama plan,” say Gabriel and Pear. Without more specifics from Romney, it’s impossible to calculate if his policies would result in lower health costs.

• What about patients with preexisting conditions? 
  Romney says he would make surethose with preexisting conditions don’t lose their coverage, but opposes a provision in ObamaCare that makes it illegal to deny them coverage. Romney also would not require insurance companies to allow children to stay on their parents’ plans until they’re 26. Those two provisions are among the most popular elements of ObamaCare.

• Why is he reluctant to put out a plan of his own? 
  Romney “has spent much of the presidential campaign shying away” from the subject,says Kasie Hunt at The Associated Press, because of the health care law he passed as governor in Massachusetts. RomneyCare is very similar to ObamaCare, replete with an individual mandate requiring nearly all citizens to buy health insurance. As a result, any discussion of health care invariably raises uncomfortable questions about why Romney suddenly opposes a mandate. That has left Romney with a “huge void” when it comes to replacing ObamaCare, and his campaign “calculates it can finesse until after the election,” says Albert R. Hunt at Bloomberg.

• Has RomneyCare created other political problems? 
  Yes. Republicans have seized on the Supreme Court’s interpretation of the mandate as a tax to hammer Obama for raising taxes. (Democrats maintain that it is a penalty for failing to buy insurance, not a tax.) However, conflating a mandate with a tax would mean Romney himself raised taxes as governor of Massachusetts. On Monday, Romney’s top aide, Eric Fehrnstrom, argued that the mandate is not a tax, straying “wildly from the coordinated comments” of Republicans in Congress, says Michael D. Shear at The New York Times.

A taped ‘X’ marks the spot for former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney as introductions are made at a rally in Cornwall, Pa., on June 16. The stop was one of many during Romney’s six-state “Believe in America” bus tour, during which the GOP presidential candidate tried to connect with undecided voters and brush up on his ”small talk” skills. 

More revealing photos from the campaign trail

5 failed Obama campaign slogans

President Obama’s iconic 2008 slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” isn’t a good fit for an incumbent, so this week, Team Obama rolled out what appears to be the official word of Obama 2012: “Forward.” This isn’t the first trial-balloon slogan Obama and his surrogates have trotted out, however.

Here’s a nostalgic look back at some catch phrases Obama auditioned, then pulled offstage:

1. Win the Future
   Team Obama broke out “Win the Future” in January 2011 to frame his State of the Union addressand fiscal 2012 budget. “He used the phrase (or a variant) 11 times” in his State of the Union address, says John Dickerson at Slate, but he was wise to drop it soon afterward. Win the Future “sounded more like the title of a self-help seminar, with Obama in the role of Tony Robbins,” than a governing vision. There’s also “that whole ‘WTF’ acronym to work around,” says Jazz Shaw at Hot Air.
    
2. We Can’t Wait
   This slogan appeared in October 2011, as Obama’s American Jobs Act floundered in Congress and he rolled out a series of initiatives aimed at unilaterally boosting the economy. Obama came up with this phrase himself, and it wasn’t bad, says Jonathan Chait at New York, but he needed to “hit the theme a little harder” if he wanted it to stick. After months of pushing “We Can’t Wait” measures, and using them to throw jabs at a do-nothing Congress, Obama wasn’t even able to make “high information voters” aware of the slogan.
    
3. An America Built to Last
   The White House unveiled this phrase as the theme of Obama’s 2012 State of the Union address. And thank goodness it didn’t last, says Lee Siegel at The Daily Beast. The slogan, apparently lifted from old Ford or Chevy ads, had a “weaselish quality” — instead of “framing a political vision,” it was “clearly” meant to address the swing voters in states like Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, the heartland of the U.S. auto industry. Obama can’t be all poetry, but “borrowing from decades-old car commercials is a new rhetorical low, and a futile one at that.”

In 1998, after months of mysterious weakness and numbness, Ann was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, an often debilitating neurological disorder. She took steroids to stabilize the disease, but now relies mostly on a combination of alternative treatments, including acupuncture, craniosacral therapy, and her“joy therapy,” horseback riding. She has become quite skilled at dressage, a form of horse training and riding involving “seven-figure horses and four-figure saddles,” and competes at amateur and even professional-level competitions, winning several medals. She’s so into her hobby-therapy that son Josh Romney got his father a horse mask for Christmas in 1996, with the advice: “Maybe Mom will pay as much attention to you as she does to the horses.”

Many Americans still know very little about the wife of presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney. Here, 7 surprising facts about Ann Romney

Is the world ready for a “Trekkie” President? President Obama’s unabashed love for Star Trek, the most popular sci-fi TV show of all time, is just the latest sign that he has ’impeccable’ taste in pop culture. Here, some others: 

1. He called The Wire the greatest show of all time
   New York recently named the HBO crime drama The Wire the best drama of the past 25 years — but President Obama upped the ante when he insisted in an interview with Bill Simmons that The Wire is actually “one of the best shows of all-time.” (”Our president’s a cool dude,” says Tanya Ghahremani at Complex.) Obama named Omar Little as his favorite character, which is so awesome that it may just sew up the election, says Videogum.
    
2. He sneaks in episodes of Homeland: When does the president find time to watch the series? “He said, ‘Michelle goes out with the kids [to] play tennis on a Saturday afternoon,’” Lewis explained to TV Guide. “‘I tell her I’m going to work and then I go in my room and watch Homeland.’” 
    
3. His Spotify playlist is impressive: Obama’s Spotify playlist is “actually pretty good!” With tracks from the likes of Arcade Fire, Noah and the Whale, and Florence + the Machine, it’s certainly “hipster-friendly,” but balanced with a range of artists from different genres including country (Sugarland), R&B (Raphael Saadiq), and rock (Bruce Springsteen).

8 insights into Barack Obama’s pop culture tastes

(Source: theweek.com)

“Let’s face it: Poll numbers don’t mean all that much. But here’s a pair of numbers that mean everything: 247 to 206. That’s the number of electoral votes that Democrats and Republicans, respectively, appear to have either a lock or a lead on with less than eight months months until election day. The magic number needed to win the White House, of course, is 270 — meaning Obama needs just 23 more, and Mitt Romney 64. For both men, that’s easier said than done.”

— Paul Brandus

The battle for the White House comes down to just seven states — and anyone could win.