Photograph by Pete Souza/The White House

President Barack Obama shoots clay targets with a shotgun on the range on Aug. 4, 2012 at Camp David, Maryland.

The proof is in the picture.

After President Barack Obama allowed in a recent interview that he and friends shoot skeet “all the time” up at Camp David, cynics started to question why there are no photos of the clay-clobbering president at camp — Presidents from Dwight Eisenhower, who opened the skeet range at the camp named for his grandson, to John F. Kennedy and George H.W. Bush have been pictured plugging away at flying clay at the mountain retreat.

The White House today released a photograph of Obama skeet shooting at Camp David last August after some Republicans expressed doubts that the Democratic president had actually engaged in the activity revealed in that New Republic interview.

“Pull!” — the shotgun is smoking in this presidential photo by White House Photographer Pete Souza.

Obama, who is seeking a ban on assault weapons and other measures to reduce gun violence, told the magazine in its Feb. 11 issue that he shoots skeet “all the time” at Camp David and respects the nation’s hunting tradition. He was responding to a question about whether he had ever fired a gun.

The photo, sent to reporters via Twitter by White House spokesman Jay Carney and Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer, shows Obama shooting clay targets on a range at Camp David Aug. 4.

Asked earlier this week about a photo of the president skeet shooting, Carney replied that when Obama “goes to Camp David, he goes to spend time with his family and friends and relax, not to produce photographs.”

Thereafter, Rep. Marsha Blackburn, Republican of Tennessee, expressed doubt about the president’s skeet shooting.

“You know, if you don’t have the photos, if this is not something that’s a new hobby, then I think he should invite me out to Camp David and I’ll challenge him,” Blackburn said on CNN. Asked for a reaction to Blackburn’s challenge, Carney responded, “I have none.”

The president will continue his pressure on Congress to curb gun violence when he speaks Monday at the Minneapolis Police Department’s Special Operations Center.  Obama has responded to the Dec. 14 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting deaths of 20 children and six educators in Newtown, Connecticut, with proposals to mandate background checks for all gun buyers, a ban on high-capacity ammunition clips and reinstatement of a ban on the sale of assault weapons.

With the photo in, we’re still waiting for the video, like this one of JFK and Jackie Kennedy learning to shoot skeet.

Original post is Obama Skeet-Shooting: Picture-Proof — JFK-Styled Video Next? by Political Capital.

Photograph by Pete Souza/The White House

President Barack Obama hugs his campaign manager, Jim Messina, during an unannounced stop at campaign headquarters in Chicago.

Updated at 9 am EST.

President Barack Obama is converting the machinery of his re-election campaign into a tax-exempt nonprofit group to push his second-term legislative agenda, a Democratic official confirmed.

The new group, Organizing for Action, will be headed by Jim Messina, who served as Obama’s 2012 campaign manager.

That effort was known as Organizing for America.

The group, separate from the Democratic National Committee, will solicit donations from corporations and individuals to augment Obama’s legislative initiatives the next four years on such issues as reducing gun violence and immigration.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss details before an official announcement later today. The formation of the group was reported earlier by the Los Angeles Times.

The transformation marks the first time a president has retrofitted the pieces of a re-election campaign into an outside group formed for the express purpose of prodding Congress to pass the administration’s agenda.

Familiar names will dominate the group’s board of directors, the Democratic official said. They include former White House press secretary Robert Gibbs and top 2012 campaign aides Stephanie Cutter, Jennifer O’Malley-Dillon and Julianna  Smoot.

Jon Carson, White House director of the Office of Public Engagement, is being tapped as executive director of the group, which will have offices in Washington and Obama’s hometown of Chicago.

David Axelrod, senior adviser to the 2012 campaign, will become a consultant. White House senior adviser David Plouffe is expected to join the group after he leaves the administration later this month, the Democratic official said.

First Lady Michelle Obama leads the organization’s video kick-off today.

Hans Nichols contributed.

Original post is Obama’s Campaign Turns to ‘Action’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Time Magazine via AP

President Barack Obama is Time Magazine's Person of the Year.

President Barack Obama, who won re-election last month and is the “author of a new America,” is Time magazine’s Person of the Year for a second time, the publication said today.

The president joins 12 others who have been honored twice.

The announcement was made by managing editor Rick Stengel on NBC’s “Today” show.

“After four of the most challenging years in the nation’s history, his chance to leave office as a great president who was able to face crises and build a new majority coalition remains within reach,” the magazine said.

The weekly news magazine for the past 85 years has selected the person, or sometimes a group or thing, who or that its editors deemed had the single greatest impact during the past year, for better or for worse.

Obama won the same honor in 2008 as president-elect.

See Time’s account.

Original post is Obama Time’s `Person of the Year’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP via Getty Images

Former U.S. national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski speaks during a forum on U.S. and Saudi relations April 27, 2009 in Washington.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, former President Jimmy Carter’s hawkish national security adviser, says that, to the rest of the world, the U.S. looks “leaderless” in the so-called fiscal cliff debate.

“We look a little bit disorderly, indecisive, leaderless and that’s a real problem, and that’s a problem that concerns me, particularly in foreign affairs,” Brzezinski said today in an appearance on MSNBC.

Domestic squabbles have implications for U.S. foreign policy, he said, and “the presidency, not just President Obama, has lost some of the terrain that is used to dominate in the making of foreign policy.”

Obama needs to “make a serious effort to regain it, because he lost some of it himself,” said the former presidential adviser. He is now a counselor at the Washington-based Center for Strategic and international Studies.

He was generous in his advice. He said Obama should move to limit congressional intervention on foreign policy; that he ought to have closer ties to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and should “engage them personally; he has to be willing to crack the whip in some places.”

And what about a replacement for Secretary of State Hillary Clinton?

Obama ought to appoint “someone with real influence up on the Hill” such as Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, and he “might even consider appointing a Republican” such as former Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska or soon-departing Sen. Richard Lugar of Indiana (who lost his seat in a party primary election, and has said he is not interested in State).

Kerry would be suitable, but “there might be reasons why the president doesn’t move that way,” Brzezinski said, without elaborating.

“Any one of those names” would be helpful to Obama “because he needs help” in foreign policy, he said.

A new secretary of state must “neutralize” the interventionist tendencies of some congressional committees and  lobbies. U.S. foreign policy, he said, has become “very fragmented,” whether it involves China or Russia, Syria or the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

“It’s very difficult for America to assert itself,” he said, describing the situation as one of “impotence.” A recent example was the United Nations vote on Palestine, elevated to “observer state” status on a 138-9 vote, with the U.S. in the minority.

“That tells you something.”

Original post is Brzezinski: Time to `Crack the Whip’ — Need Sec’y of State w/ `Influence’ by Political Capital.

Photograph by AP Photo

Cass Sunstein, Director of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs at the Office of Management and Budget.

The government is taking another stab at making the complex more simple.

Cass Sunstein, leaving his office today as the nation’s top regulatory official in President Barack Obama’s White House, issued an order to federal agencies to simplify government forms for permits, licenses, grants, taxes or benefits.

Many times these forms “are too confusing and complicated, especially for individuals and small businesses. Today we are doing something about that problem,” said Sunstein, who last week announced he’s returning to Harvard Law School.

Henceforth, he wrote in a blog yesterday, government agencies must “test complex or lengthy forms in advance by seeing if people can actually understand them.”

How to do that?

Sunstein suggests forms be tested by “focus groups” or through “Web-based experiments” or “in-person observations.”

Uncle Sam’s been in the so-called “plain English” movement for at least 40 years.

President Richard Nixon ordered in 1972 that the Federal Register be written in “layman’s terms.” President Jimmy Carter issued an executive order to “make federal regulations clearer, less burdensome and more cost effective.”

President Ronald Reagan’s Commerce Secretary, Malcolm Baldrige, wrestled against inflated language, inscrutable legalisms and sheer verbosity. He even hired plain-English consultants. Vice President Al Gore in 1998 renewed the pledge as part of his “reinventing government” campaign.

Still, we give credit where credit is due.

We wish Sunstein and his successor well, and the entire Obama administration the best of luck with this.

That much is clear.

Original post is Sunstein’s Solution for Simplified Federal Forms: Focus Group Them by Political Capital.

Photograph by Allison Shelley/The Washington Times/Landov

Volunteers help to wrangle an Uncle Sam balloon at the National Independence Day Parade in Washington.

Get ready for two blasts of fireworks this week: the holiday pyrotechnics tomorrow and another blast Friday — when the government reports the jobs tally for June.

The Labor Department may report that employers increased payrolls by 90,000 workers in June after the paltry 69,000 in May, Bloomberg’s Alex Kowalski reports, citing a survey of analysts.

If that holds, the skyrockets and aerial bombs over the Washington Monument tomorrow might be matched by the political rhetoric from either side of the presidential election contest — or both — on Friday.

It’ll also mark a refocusing of the presidential campaign.

Americans have been consumed for almost a week with news of and reaction to the Supreme Court upholding Obama’s health-care law. By Friday, we’ll return to the economy, the No. 1 campaign issue.

The Labor Department lights the fuse at 8:30 a.m. EDT Friday. We’ll see if the current jobless rate rises, falls or holds steady. Analysts are placing their bets on the unemployment rate holding steady at 8.2 percent.

We’ll be hearing from President Barack Obama and Republican Mitt Romney alike on Friday.

Original post is Fireworks for the Fourth and Friday by Political Capital.

Photograph by Brendan Hoffman/Corbis

Victor Motley, left, and Sharyn Kenchen, volunteers with Organizing for America, President Obama's re-election campaign arm, make phone calls to potential supporters in the group's Richmond headquarters.

Vice President Joe Biden, attack-dog-in-chief, has joined the off-shoring chorus.

And Camp Romney is fighting back.

Biden, campaigning  in Waterloo, Iowa, home of a large Deere & Co. manufacturing facility, accused Republican Mitt Romney today of “making a lot of money facilitating the outsourcing and off-shoring of American jobs.”

“So give Mitt Romney credit,” Biden said in prepared remarks distributed by the Obama campaign. “He is a job creator. In Singapore. And China. And India.”

That’s a ruse, responds Andrea Saul, spokeswoman for the Romney campaign. Biden has “doubled down” on “misleading attacks” designed to distract voters from President Barack Obama’s failed efforts on the $831 billion economic stimulus program — and we still have unemployment at 8.2 percent — Saul says.

“President Obama has failed to meet his own standard for lowering unemployment because he has no idea what it takes to get our economy moving again,” Saul said in an e-mailed statement.

The back-and-forth went on for much of the day.

While Romney campaigned in Virginia, the Obama campaign issued a Virginia campaign ad criticizing Bain Capital LLC’s investments in firms that the Washington Post said shipped jobs overseas, labeling Romney the “outsourcer-in-chief.”

Saul suggested that the Obama administration has done its fair share of enriching foreign manufacturers, too. She cited an ABC News story from 2010 that almost 80 percent of the $2 billion spent on wind power in the stimulus program flowed to foreign manufacturers.

Original post is Off-Shoring, the Attack and Defense by Political Capital.