“After attacking Mitt Romney and Bain Capital last week for their dealings with a Missouri steel company, the Obama campaign today is turning to the tale of a closed Indiana office supply company that then-Senator Edward M. Kennedy used to repel Romney in their 1994 race,” the Boston Globe’s Johnson writes. “Bain-owned American Pad & Paper bought SCM in 1994, only to cut wages and benefits before closing the Marion plant a year later. Over 200 workers lost their job. By 2000, Ampad itself was declaring bankruptcy, while the Romney-led Bain and its investors had reaped over $100 million in profits. ‘To me, Mitt Romney takes from the poor and the middle-class and gives to the rich,’ one former SCM employee says in the five-minute web video being released today by the Obama campaign. ‘He’s just the opposite of Robin Hood.’”
“Confronting an economic crisis that threatens them all, President Barack Obama and leaders of other world powers on Saturday declared that their governments must both spark growth and cut the debt that has crippled the European continent and put investors worldwide on edge,” the AP notes.
“As President Barack Obama and fellow NATO leaders herald the coming end of the deeply unpopular Afghanistan war, they face the grim reality of two more years of fighting ahead and more of their troops sure to die in combat,” AP writes.
The New York Times on Obama’s evolution on Afghanistan, and how he cut out military leaders: “[A]fter a highly contentious debate within a war cabinet that was riddled with leaks, Mr. Obama had reluctantly decided to order a surge of more than 30,000 troops. The aide told Mr. Obama that he believed military leaders had agreed to the tight schedule to begin withdrawing those troops just 18 months later only because they thought they could persuade an inexperienced president to grant more time if they demanded it. … A year later, when the president and a half-dozen White House aides began to plan for the withdrawal, the generals were cut out entirely. There was no debate, and there were no leaks.”
More: “Mr. Obama concluded in his first year that the Bush-era dream of remaking Afghanistan was a fantasy, and that the far greater threat to the United States was an unstable, nuclear-armed Pakistan. So he narrowed the goals in Afghanistan, and narrowed them again, until he could make the case that America had achieved limited objectives in a war that was, in any traditional sense, unwinnable.”
Obama in his weekly address, per Political Wire: "Unless you run a financial institution whose business model is built on cheating consumers, or making risky bets that could damage the whole economy, you have nothing to fear from Wall Street reform."
“Former President George W. Bush plans to return to the White House for the unveiling of his official portrait later this month, marking a rare visit by the two-term president who has largely shunned the spotlight since leaving office,” the New York Daily News notes. “The White House and Bush's office said Bush and former first lady Laura Bush will return to the White House on May 31 for the release of their portraits.”
Justice Stephen Breyer was robbed again – this time at his Georgetown home.
