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White House Response to Your Message

January 26, 2012   Dear Friend: Thank you for writing.  In his 2012 State of the Union Address, President Obama laid out a blueprint for an economy that is built to last—an economy built on American manufacturing, American energy, skills for American workers, and a renewal of American values.    The President believes this is a make or break moment for the middle class and those trying to reach it.  What is at stake is the very survival of the basic American promise that if you work hard, you can do well enough to raise a family, own a home, and put a little away for retirement.    The defining issue of our time is how to keep that promise alive.  We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well, while more Americans barely get by, or we can build a nation where everyone gets a fair shot, everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.  At stake right now are not Democratic or Republican values, but American values—and for the sake of our future, we have to reclaim them.    The economic security of our middle class has eroded for decades.  Long before the recession, good jobs and manufacturing began leaving our shores.  Hard work stopped paying off for too many Americans.  Those at the top saw their incomes rise like never before, but the vast majority of Americans struggled with costs that were growing and paychecks that were not.    In 2008, the house of cards collapsed.  Mortgages were sold to people who could not afford or understand them.  Banks made huge bets and bonuses with other people's money.  It was a crisis that cost us more than 8 million jobs and plunged our economy and the world into a crisis from which we are still fighting to recover.    Three years later, thanks to the President's bold actions, the economy is growing again.  Over the past 22 months, our businesses have created 3.2 million jobs.  Last year, we added the most private sector jobs since 2005.  American manufacturing is creating jobs for the first time since the late 1990s.  The American auto industry is back.  Today, American oil production is the highest it has been in eight years.  Together, we have agreed to cut the deficit by more than 2 trillion dollars.  The President signed into law new rules to hold Wall Street accountable, so a crisis like the one we have endured never happens again.    When we act together, in common purpose and common effort, there is nothing the United States of America cannot achieve.  That is why the President's blueprint for action contains policies that businesses can take, actions that Congress needs to take, as well as actions that the President will take on his own.  The President intends to keep moving forward and rebuild an economy where hard work pays off and responsibility is rewarded—an economy built to last.   Over the next few days, there are plenty of ways to get involved and ask your questions about the President's speech: To learn more about the President's State of the Union address, read the blueprint for an American built to last, and connect with the President and Administration officials, please visit: WhiteHouse.gov/SOTU.   On Thursday, January 26, Vice President Biden answered questions submitted by people from across the country in his first Twitter interview.  Be sure to follow @VP to see his responses. On Monday, January 30, President Obama will answer your questions about the State of the Union in a first-ever Google+ Hangout from the White House. You can submit your questions and vote for your favorite questions on YouTube.com/WhiteHouse. Senior White House officials will be answering your questions about the speech through a series of Office Hours on Twitter. Check out the full lineup of over 30 White House officials, and start submitting your questions using the hashtag #WHChat and follow along at @WHLive.  Thank you, again, for writing.  Sincerely, The White House   The White House • 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, N.W. • Washington, D.C.  20500 • 202-456-1111

Thursday's Daily Brief

Thursday, January 26, 2012 Dramatic New Pictures From The Night The Costa Concordia Ran Aground POLITICS Brewer, Obama Face Off NEW YORK NYPD Commissioner's Son Accused Of Rape COMEDY WATCH: Jon Stewart Mocks State Of The Union Highs And Lows TECHNOLOGY $6.68 BILLION LOSS BUSINESS Morgan Stanley CEO To Disgruntled Workers: 'If You're Really Unhappy, Just Leave' BLOG POSTS Gordon Brown: A Global Fund for Education It is time for governments around the world to take urgent action on behalf of the millions of children in need of a decent primary education. A Global Fund for Education would be a bold step in the right direction. Mandy Moore: Listen Up, Davos: Global Health Is Good for Business I am really hoping that the leaders of the world's most powerful companies walk away from Davos understanding the economic importance of global health. And that they make improving global health part of their business plans. Rick Sanchez: First, They Came for the Mexicans... Regardless of whether Cubans see themselves as being different than Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Hondurans or other Hispanics, the fact is that the rest of the world tends to see us as one big homogenous group. And so whether we like it or not, these are our issues. Lee Woodruff: Dementia: Caring For Parents With Alzheimer's And Coping With Grief We are all very much still on this journey. We are the parents now in so many ways, the executors and the advocates, the decision makers, accountants and the schedulers. We no longer act like children with our parents. The see saw has tipped. Menachem Rosensaft: Exploiting the Memory of Child Holocaust Victims Is Obscene My brother and every other child murdered in any genocide deserve to be remembered as fragile flames extinguished in tsunamis of hatred, intolerance and bigotry. Exploiting their memory to score cheap political points is obscene.

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Barack Obama 2012: The Anti-Reagan

Thursday, January 26, 2012

The Big Story, By E.J. Dionne Obama 2012: The Anti-Reagan In 1984, Ronald Reagan's State of the Union laid out what became the major themes of his campaign, including not only the nation's recovery from economic turmoil but also his central philosophical purpose: a continuing battle against "the tendency of government to grow." Obama's speech was Reagan's turned on its head. He may have previewed his election arguments in a philosophically aggressive way, but his argument was exactly the opposite. Obama spoke of government's essential role in ensuring shared prosperity and in creating an America "built to last" -- a slogan drawn, perhaps not accidentally, from truck commercials for General Motors, the company whose rescue Obama engineered. READ MORE

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Law & Order Watchdog Group: Feds Should Release Results Of Gingrich Corruption Probe Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) filed Freedom of Information Act requests with the IRS and the Department of Justice yesterday, requesting access to documents that the House Ethics Committee sent to the federal agents after investigating then-Speaker Newt Gingrich's misconduct. The request came one day after Nancy Pelosi hinted that she knew "something" that could torpedo Newt's campaign. "A self-styled historian, Mr. Gingrich's true talent lies in revising history. Contrary to what he tells voters now, his ethical transgressions were quite serious," said Melanie Sloan, executive director of the nonpartisan watchdog organization. READ MORE

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Featured Column: Leonard Pitts Jr. Gingrich Follows GOP Playbook On Racism There has been a lot of talk about whether Gingrich's recent language, including his performance at last week's South Carolina debate and his frequent declaration that Barack Obama has been America's best "food-stamp president," amounts to a coded appeal to racist sentiments. The answer is simple: yes. READ MORE

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Featured Column: Jim Hightower How Closing Parks Amounts To Stealing The People's Property So many spiritually shriveled, small-minded and short-sighted state officials are snuffing out the invaluable, uniting social force of state parks. They are stupidly treating parks as nothing but a budget number or a piece of the "nanny state" to be axed in the name of ideological purity. Worse, they are sacrificing parks in order to keep the tax-dodging moneyed elites who pay for their campaigns from paying even a dime more in taxes. READ MORE

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Featured Column: Mark Schmitt What Obama Missed In State Of The Union President Obama's third State of the Union address was certainly a masterful performance, delivered with a sense that he'd finally gained command of both the political and policy demands of the office. Plenty of praise will be heaped on his speech, so instead of layering on, I have two small gripes: He didn't effectively lay out why the Mitt Romney's of the world live in another tax universe than you and I (it's not just a lower rate); and he didn't effectively take on the increasingly important problem of money in politics. READ MORE

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Social Security And You Geezers And Floozies A question: I'm part of a group of old geezers who get together every week at the local coffee place. Social Security is a frequent topic of conversation. At our last meeting, the subject of benefits for divorcees came up. One of our geezers was married to his first wife for 16 years and to his second wife for 30 years. His first wife remarried, but she is now divorced from that guy after 20 years of marriage. If our geezer pal dies, who will get what? READ MORE

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