White House dismisses Sen. Marco Rubio’s claims that it is actively working to torpedo his version of the DREAM Act: “If this proposal fails, the reason will be the Republicans,” a White House official tells TPM.

The five stages of GOP reaction to the killing of Osama Bin Laden.

As you know, on the eve of the anniversary of the targeted killing of arch-terrorist Osama bin Laden, the Obama reelection campaign launched a frontal attack on Mitt Romney. They not only celebrated Obama’s decision but freely suggested that Romney wouldn’t have had the focus or the guts to make the call.

As it happens, of course, Romney has provided plenty of evidence to back up this attack. In line with the late Bush administration policy and messaging on OBL, Romney repeatedly said that the US shouldn’t focus on hunting him down. The point wasn’t that OBL was off the hook but that we shouldn’t be focusing on this one guy. Romney followed by attacking Obama in 2008 for suggesting that he would unilaterally send American troops into Pakistan to kill bin Laden. In both cases, Romney was doing little more than repeating the strategic or political orthodoxy of the GOP leader of the moment, in the first case George W. Bush in 2007 and then John McCain in 2008. Read More

Are parts of the enduring narrative of Woodward and Bernstein’s Watergate investigation not true?

The forgotten front in the war on voting: the disenfranchisement of some 5.3 million felons.

Did the Obama administration just roll over for the Jim Inhofe / Fox News rage machine? Kind of feels that way.

Have we seen this before? I mentioned earlier that Obama’s bin Laden hit on Romney is as much a dominance move as something about actual policy. We saw something very similar back in 2004. Here’s what I wrote about it back then. Curious to hear your thoughts.

At a press availability with a foreign head of government no less, President Obama just pressed reporters to look back at Mitt Romney’s earlier statements about not prioritizing hunting down Osama bin Laden and not invading Pakistani sovereign territory to do it.

On what this back and forth is all about, see this post from earlier this morning.

Also note Obama’s actual words — “I assume that people meant what they said when they said it” — another smack at Romney’s vulnerability as a perceived flip-flopper or political weathervane, and I suspect how the Chicago team plans to box Romney in.

The Romney campaign is calling President Obama “feckless” on the bin Laden raid. As TPM Reader TC just put it, maybe ‘reckless’, maybe ‘obvious’. But pretty hard to see how he can qualify as ‘feckless’ on this count.

One World Trade Center today became the tallest building in New York. Take a look.