Visual source: Newseum
CBS News:
That means the relatively anemic job growth of Mr. Obama's first three years matters less then what happens in 2012; Silver suggests that every time the economy generates more than 150,000 jobs in a month between now and November, Mr. Obama's reelection odds go up. That's why today's news is so good for Mr. Obama: if January's numbers reflect a trend that lasts deep into the year, it's going to be awfully hard for Romney (or any Republican) to convince a majority of Americans that Mr. Obama has failed in his stewardship of the economy. And with polls showing that Americans are more concerned with the economy than any other issue - by a wide margin - Romney simply doesn't have any other argument on which to hang a viable presidential campaign.
WaPo:
Caught in a maelstrom of public reaction to its decision to cease funding Planned Parenthood, the Susan G. Komen for the Cure foundation announced Friday that it would reverse course...
But officials across the organization said they were still reeling from the fallout of what many described as a public relations fiasco created by Komen’s leadership.
“I felt like we were eaten alive,” said Logan Hood, executive director of Komen’s Aspen affiliate in Colorado. “We had no advance warning.. . . We were sent into battle without armor.”
That's because their leadership, including their board and their CEO, led them off a cliff. They can and should all be fired, but Komen's brand is already ruined.
Bay Area News Group:
Some of the sharpest criticism came from participants in Komen's benefit walks.
"I feel Susan G. Komen acted foolishly and hastily, and maybe they didn't realize the power of the Internet," said Teresa Tirado, of Castro Valley, whose eldest daughter has raised funds for the organization in its Walk for the Cure.
"It's almost like Occupy Susan G. Komen," she said.
LA Times:
Komen founder and chief executive Nancy Brinker insisted Friday that the foundation's new rules preventing grants to groups that were subject to government investigations had not been designed to target Planned Parenthood and had nothing to do with its role as an abortion provider. "We do not want our mission marred or affected by politics — anyone's politics," Brinker said in a statement.
By then, a key officer at its Dallas headquarters had resigned, and others in the group's local affiliates had threatened to follow suit if the decision was not reversed. Members of Congress admonished the foundation for playing politics with women's health. Irate women denounced Komen on the Internet and pledged to boycott its upcoming "Race for the Cure" events, which raise several million dollars each year.
The situation has been a "total embarrassment" for Komen, said Tom Madden, chief executive of TransMedia Group, a Boca Raton, Fla.-based public relations and crisis management company. "I can't believe an organization like Komen wasn't aware of what was going on."
The
LA Times story suggests that keeping affiliates in the dark was a strategy, not a consequence. Another reason the CEO and board need to be fired.
Gail Collins:
This week we had a huge political fight about breast cancer. Clearly, we have now hit the point where there’s nothing that can’t be divided into red-state-blue-state.
Nothing. The other day I saw a blog called “I Dig My Garden” that had a forum on whether Republicans could truly love gardening. And there was a little dust-up in Albany over politicization of a local pet blog, which had featured a discussion on Mitt Romney’s driving to Canada with the family dog strapped to the roof of the car.
But breast cancer would seem like the last thing to go. Everybody hates cancer and everybody likes breasts — infants, adults, women, men. Really, it’s America’s most popular body part.
Charles Blow on Romney:
This has nothing to do with context. This has everything to do with a caviar candidate’s inability to relate to a chicken-soup citizenry... Romney is not only cold and clumsy, he’s disastrously out of touch, and when talking about real people, out of sorts. If only he had a heart, and if only that heart was connected to his brain.
Kathleen Parker runs the table from trite to just plain awful in trying to make the case that freedom to discriminate is an inalienable right of the Komen Foundation and the Catholic Church, and those who disagree are practicing "ideological purity." And of course, it's all Planned Parenthood's fault for trying to impose its pro-choice way on poor, innocent victims like Komen.
And just when you think the tea party couldn't get any nuttier, the NY Times reports:
Across the country, activists with ties to the Tea Party are railing against all sorts of local and state efforts to control sprawl and conserve energy. They brand government action for things like expanding public transportation routes and preserving open space as part of a United Nations-led conspiracy to deny property rights and herd citizens toward cities.
There's no compromising with lunatics. Just sayin'.
