ContributorNetwork - COMMENTARY | President Barack Obama has a simple answer to the accusations being levied against him that his foreign policy is one of appeasement. "Ask Bin Laden," he suggested, according to the Associated Press. Obama has a point.

AP - President Barack Obama and his national security team are appealing to lawmakers for last-minute changes to a sweeping defense bill that mandates military custody for terrorism suspects linked to al-Qaida, including those captured within the U.S.

In 2007, then-senator Barack Obama insisted that the coming presidential primary- and general-election campaigns “shouldn’t be about making each other look bad, they should be about figuring out how we can all do some good for this precious country of ours. That’s our mission.”

“And in this mission,” he continued, “our rivals won’t be one another, and I would assert it won’t even be the other party. It’s going to be cynicism that we’re fighting against.”

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In the first month of his presidency, Barack Obama averred that if in three years he hadn’t alleviated the nation’s economic pain, he’d be a “one-term proposition.”

When three-quarters of Americans think the country is on the “wrong track” and even Bill Clinton calls the economy “lousy,” how then to run for a second term? Traveling Tuesday to Osawatomie, Kan., site of a famous 1910 Teddy Roosevelt speech, Obama laid out the case.

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The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Barack Obama says that “some billionaires have a tax rate as low as 1 percent”

On Dec. 6, 2011, President Barack Obama gave a speech at Osawatomie High School in Osawatomie, Kan., the site of an address by Theodore Roosevelt just over a century earlier. In it, Obama sought to warn Americans about the perils of economic inequality. Here’s what he said: "Today, the wealthiest Americans are paying the lowest taxes in over half a century. This isn’t like in the early ‘50s, when the top tax rate was over 90 percent. This isn’t even like the early ‘80s, when the top tax rate was about 70 percent. Under ...

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Reuters - Republicans in the House of Representatives began to fall into line on Thursday behind a bill to extend an expiring payroll tax break after their leaders sweetened the measure with a provision that President Barack Obama has threatened to veto.

AP - President Barack Obama vowed to delay Congress' year-end vacation as well as his own Thursday for "as long as it takes" to extend Social Security payroll tax cuts and long-term jobless benefits, his second challenge in as many days to conservative Republicans.

Reuters - President Barack Obama's choice to run criminal tax prosecutions will not get a quick confirmation vote due to an unrelated dispute involving the Justice Department, a senior senator said on Thursday.

AP - President Barack Obama on Thursday forcefully rejected Republican accusations that his foreign policy is timid and amounts to a policy of "appeasement."

Daily Caller - On Thursday President Barack Obama defended his administration’s 11th-hour decision to keep in place an age restriction on the sale of the “morning after” birth control pill.

Daily Caller - President Barack Obama promised on Thursday to fight through Christmas to win Senate approval for his Wall Street regulatory proposals and his pitch to extend the payroll tax. He tried to use his personal popularity to discredit GOP policy arguments, and he again opposed approval of the job-producing Keystone XL pipeline.

Reuters - Though demographic trends lean in his favor, President Barack Obama has work to do in Colorado to woo Hispanics, the voting bloc that holds the key to victory in this battleground state and, potentially, nationwide.

Reuters - President Barack Obama said on Wednesday he wanted answers to the environmental questions about the Keystone XL pipeline, whose delay overshadowed a new U.S.-Canadian border agreement announced on Wednesday.

AP - House Republicans have dotted nine remaining spending bills with well more than 100 "riders" that would redirect government policy or maintain it in some cases despite objections from President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress. Most are unlikely to survive in final negotiations on a massive bill for funding government operations through next September.

Reuters - The gay half-sister of Republican presidential candidate Newt Gingrich slammed his position on gay rights on Wednesday and said she will support President Barack Obama, a Democrat, in the 2012 election.

Has Barack Obama’s Democratic party given up on winning the votes of the white working class? Thomas Edsall, the longtime Washington Post reporter now with the Huffington Post, thinks so.

Surveying the plans of Democratic strategists, Edsall wrote in the New York Times on November 28 that “all pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned.”

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Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast
Remember the days when a Barack Obama speech was an event? Can’t blame you if you don’t. It sure has been a while. He hasn’t uttered a particularly inspiring or unexpected sentence in public in ages. But Tuesday’s “Teddy Roosevelt” speech in Osawatomie, Kans., broke the losing streak and then some. This was Obama’s best speech in a very, very long time, and it showed that he and his political people have finally figured out how to express the new, quasi-populist mood in this country in a way that sounds utterly majoritarian...

Joel Kotkin, Forbes
Most critics of Barack Obama’s desultory performance the past three years trace it to his supposedly leftist ideology, lack of experience and even his personality quirks. But it would perhaps be more useful to look at the geography — of Chicago and the state of Illinois — that nurtured his career and shaped his approach to politics. Like with George W. Bush and Texas, this is a case where you can’t separate the man from the place.The Chicago imprint on Obama is unmistakable. His closest advisors are almost all products of the Windy City’s...

AP - President Barack Obama has met with a small number of donors at a Washington fundraiser to benefit his re-election bid.

AP - Two Virginia governors clashed in their first debate of the 2012 U.S. Senate race over showing respect for President Barack Obama.

AP - Republican presidential hopefuls took turns lambasting President Barack Obama's policy toward Israel on Wednesday, accusing him of being timid in the face of Iran's attempt to build nuclear weapons and allowing a dangerous distance to develop between the U.S. and its long-time ally in the Middle East.

AP - President Barack Obama is meeting with a small number of donors at a fundraiser to benefit his re-election bid.

AP - President Barack Obama warned congressional Republicans that he would reject any effort to tie extraneous issues to an extension of the payroll tax cut, including the approval of a controversial oil pipeline between the U.S. and Canada.

ContributorNetwork - Of all the Republican players, recent polls point to Newt Gingrich as the best bet to be elected captain of the team. With Herman Cain now sidelined, Gingrich should pick up the majority of Cain backers that chose him as their second choice. For President Barack Obama to win re-election, he will need to study Gingrich game tapes to come up with a good game plan. Here is a solid 3-point shot that Obama could utilize against Gingrich vulnerabilities if he should become the Republican nominee.