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First Lady Michelle Obama spoke at a DNC Fundraiser at the Manhattan home of fashion designer Tory Burch Wednesday evening. TPM was in attendance to provide press pool coverage. Our unedited pool report is below: "Your pooler is currently composing this report in a Starbucks a few blocks from Manhattan's Hotel Pierre where First Lady Michelle Obama just gave a speech at a DNC fundraiser in the home of fashion designer Tory Burch. In her speech, Obama encouraged the crowd to remain politically engaged and active though "the excitement that comes with the presidential campaign has faded." Pool was led...

For centuries, Christians thought culture would change if we just had a majority of Christians in the culture. That has proven to be a false assumption. Culture is defined by a relatively small number of change agents who operate at the top of cultural spheres or societal mountains. It takes less than 3-5 percent of those operating at the top of a cultural mountain to actually shift the values represented on that mountain.For example, this is exactly what advocates in the gay rights movement has done through the "mountains" of media and arts and entertainment. They have strategically used these...

Given the battering President Obama took this past week on a trio of political scandals, any public opinion survey results that aren’t dreadful probably are viewed with some relief at the White House. That may be the clearest message from a CNN/ORC poll released Sunday morning. According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53 percent of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45 percent saying they disapprove, CNN reports. That’s actually a tick better than the 51 percent approval rating Obama had in early April – but not enough to break...

Sarah Palin reared her head in American airspace this weekend. As the country’s media, entertainment and political elite gathered in Washington, D.C., for the annual roast that is the White House Correspondents Dinner, Palin could not resist lobbing darts from afar. “Yuk it up media and pols,” she tweeted. “While America is buried in taxes and a fight for our rights, the permanent political class in DC dresses up and has a prom to make fun of themselves. No need for that, we get the real joke.” She panned the event again in a second tweet: “That #WHCD was pathetic....

Former Alaska governor and vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin, who has fiercely fought crony capitalism and the permanent political class, absolutely blistered the White House Correspondents Dinner on Saturday, tweeting that the dinner was "pathetic" and that "DC assclowns" were throwing "themselves a #nerdprom" while "the rest of America is out there working our assess off." @SarahPalinUSA: That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom In recent years, Washington veterans have expressed similar concerns. Tom Brokaw has compared Washington to "Versailles," Ron Fournier has said...

Here is Yale alum Leah Libresco responding with vigor to Keli Goff’s recent article entitled “Female Ivy League graduates have a duty to stay in the workforce”: Goff assumes that women who leave the workforce will cease to use the education that they paid for, but there’s nowhere you can go that learning about beauty and citizenship and character and tradition aren’t relevant. The liberal arts are supposed to have taken up philosophy’s mantle as preparation for death — the study of how we should live.[...] The college grad starting out as a junior staffer or an administrative assistant may...

The uncomfortable effects of government actions are being felt everywhere. Obamacare concerns are, anecdotally, delaying hiring, causing firms to change benefits for the people, and increasing taxes on the great majority. On the other hand, in the context of the "sequester", which is merely a slowdown in the breakneck rate of government spending, anyone who has traveled by plane in the last month knows the full court press efforts under way to ensure the American public knows just how 'devastating' the sequester cuts are - with delays rising exponentially with every dollar removed from the FAA budget. But there...

In the mid-seventies, Susan A. Patton was among the "200 pioneer women" to join Princeton University's previously all-male student body. As president of her alumni class, she recently attended an Anne-Marie Slaughter–endorsed "Women and Leadership" event that "allowed current undergraduate women to speak informally with older and presumably wiser alumnae." But the "girls" in attendance "glazed over" discussing careerism, she found. So today she wrote an open letter to The Daily Princetonian telling "the daughters I never had" what she wished she'd said: Forget about having it all, or not having it all, leaning in or leaning out ... Here’s...

Matthew Dowd, former chief strategist for the 2004 George W. Bush campaign, apparently doesn’t have much of a soft spot for CPAC or for Sarah Palin. Appearing on ABC’s “This Week” on Sunday, Dowd likened CPAC to no less than two prehistoric children’s cartoons, and not so subtly compared former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin to Kim Kardashian. National Review captured the one-minute statement from Dowd: “Matt, you’re just shaking your head. The whole thing, it makes you nervous, what do you say?” ABC host Martha Raddatz asked. “To me, imagery and who’s there [at CPAC] and what you say is...

While participating in a panel discussion Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” President George W. Bush’s former chief strategist Matthew Dowd continued the senseless attacks on former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin by political elitists on the right . Dowd was critiquing the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) for not inviting New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie (R), while welcoming Palin, who he said “wasn’t competent enough to keep a Fox News contract,” according to The Raw Story. “CPAC, to me, has totally diminished its credibility as an organization,” Dowd said. “And you invite Sarah Palin, who wasn’t competent enough to keep a...

Yesterday, I wrote about the silliness of requiring a file clerk to have a college degree. This morning, a friend sent me the following note about the narrowing of opportunity in modern America: Random thought inspired by the NYT article re: requiring BAs for everything and your post, especially the note about your IT team and their varied backgrounds, which is far less likely to be true today. It seems to me that a similar version of that narrowing-entry option is occurring in many fields You've written in the past about how the top banks have steadily narrowed the pool...

According to Politico, “a political colonoscopy is going on before our eyes.” Yuck. Karl Rove has set up a Super PAC to keep controversial conservatives from winning Republican primaries and the Senate leadership has established a “buddy system” to keep Tea Party congressmen in line (“buddy” as in “you should probably vote the way we tell you to, buddy…”). But the most important changes are taking place at Fox where heavyweights Sarah Palin and Dick Morris are out as contributors. A lot of this is post-election house clearing (CNN has moved staff around, too) but it also suggests that the...

What is the difference between Barack Obama and Ignatius Loyola? Not a hell of a lot. I’m thumbing through a copy of The Ten Commandments of Propaganda, a book by my academic buddy Brian Patrick. Aside from being a well-rounded review of the dark art, Brain illustrates historical cornerstones of propaganda, which includes Ignatius. The Roman church originated modern techniques for thought control with their Congregation for the Propagation of the Faith, known in Latin as “Congregatio de Propaganda Fide” and hence the modern perversion of the word ‘propaganda’.  In its purest form, ‘propaganda’ means to propagate information. It took...

When President Obama takes the oath of office for the second time, he will also usher in a new era in American power politics. Whereas the old left-wing definition of “who rules” focused on large corporations, banks, energy companies and agribusinesses, the Obama-era power structure represents a major transformation. This shift stems, in large part, from the movement from a predominately resource and tangible goods-based economy to an information-based one. In the past, political struggles were largely fought over how to divide up the spoils generated by the basic productive economy; labor, investors and management all shared a belief in...

One lone trustee objected to the institution’s betrayal of Andrew Carnegie. As Lagemann reports, a Cornell professor presented to the board a proposal that it focus, not on building libraries, but on spreading library science, which would lead to “advancing popular intellectual progress” (read: “smartening up the slack-jawed yokels”). The lonely dissenter, trustee James Bertram, argued that if the board consented to this recommendation, it "would contravene Carnegie’s clear and known wish 'to give libraries to communities and [to] leave the communities absolutely free to manage them any way they might see fit.'” Because Bertram spoke the truth, the trustees...

Some interesting news has broken in the wake of the latest push for gun control by President Obama and Senate Democrats: Obama sends his kids to a school where armed guards are used as a matter of fact. The school, Sidwell Friends School in Washington, DC, has 11 security officers and is seeking to hire a new police officer as we speak. If you dismiss this by saying, "Of course they have armed guards -- they get Secret Service protection," then you've missed the larger point. The larger point is that this is standard operating procedure for the school, period....

There is a bizarre, sophomoric "rah-rah yay team" dynamic in our culture whereby if the guy presented as being on "Team D" with the donkey mascot holds a position the "Team R" fans boo, while if the guy presented as being on "Team R" with the elephant mascot does exactly the same thing, the "Team R" people cheer. My theory is that this is all a byproduct of the sports culture. People are trained to root for "their team", no matter who the men are that are playing on the team. So, saying "I'm a Cowboys fan" or "I'm a...

Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service. Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance.

Dinners were served in the basement. Ambassadors, generals with many stars, senior White House officials and closely read columnists — all would walk past the yellowing kitchen, which looked as if it hadn’t been updated since the Ford administration, and down a narrow flight of stairs into the dimly lighted dining room. Guests were arrayed around the table according to rank, with the most important ones squeezed in the center. Although the Old World meals could be quite elaborate — venison paté, duck in bitter orange — they were prepared and served entirely by the host, a stickler for protocol...

For Washington, this is definitely not the best of times. The town is suffering from a power outage. The evidence is hard to miss, from Washington’s weeklong struggle to cope with storm damage that knocked out electricity across the region to President Obama’s inability to awaken the economy, as reflected once again in June’s pathetic jobs report. To make matters worse, Washington is out of sync with the country, at least with the noncoastal parts. The usual response is to unleash the president so he can rally America to Washington’s purposes. But the bully pulpit hasn’t been effective since Ronald...