“Is the president going to have the authority to decide if the Supreme Court has deliberated too little on a case?” CitizenLink quotes Yoo writing on the matter. “Does Congress have the right to decide whether the president has really thought hard enough about granting a pardon? Under Obama’s approach, he could make a recess appointment anytime he is watching C-SPAN and feels that the senators are not working as hard as he did in the Senate (a fairly low bar).”

CitizenLink identifies Yoo only as “a law professor at the University of California at Berkley, who is well known in legal circles for advocating executive power.”

Yoo is perhaps one of the most controversial figures in U.S. legal history. His torture memos were eventually disavowed by the Bush justice department. The Office of Legal Counsel where Yoo worked repudiated them as unsound and dangerous. After a five year inquiry, the department’s Office of Professional Responsibility reported that Yoo had “committed intentional professional misconduct when he advised the CIA it could proceed with waterboarding and other aggressive interrogation techniques…” During the inquiry, Yoo told investigators the “president… had the constitutional power to order a village to be ‘massacred.’” Three years ago, Spanish Judge Baltasar Garzón Real launched an investigation of Yoo for war crimes.

By contrast, the Obama appointments this week can be seen in context less as any kind of historic overstep and more as just another strategic move in a Capitol Hill chess game.

The appointments come after three years of deep congressional dysfunction and after the president in recent months vowed to act where he can to use executive orders to bypass congressional obstructionism.

“We’re not going to wait for Congress… Where they won’t act, I will, through a series of executive orders… We’re going to look every day to see what we can do without Congress,” he told a crowd in October gathered on the downtown Denver Auraria Campus.

The argument against the appointments is that the Senate was not in fact in recess when Obama made them. The White House says the Senate was “in session” in name only, opening up for do-nothing 30 second meetings in order mainly to keep the president from appointing Cordray to head the two-year-old leaderless Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CPFB), which was created by Congress over the objection of bank lobbyists to protect credit card holders, for example, from gouging interest rates and fees.

Republican senators have for months blocked confirmation of Cordray, who is a Republican and a former attorney general of Ohio. The senators say they do not object to Cordray but only to how the CPFB is organized. Its financing, for example, comes from the Federal Reserve, which means Congress can’t influence the agency by controlling its budget. Yet, in two years, none of the senators have introduced legislation to rework the CPFB, leading most observers to conclude that, on one hand, the Republicans, acting on behalf of the banks, don’t want the bureau to ever functionally exert its regulatory mission and, on the other, don’t want to go on record with that stand in an election year where the commitment of lawmakers to represent the interests of their constituents instead of the interests of corporations is being seriously called into question.

Jon Stewart on Thursday laid out the controversy in typical succinct and damning fashion:

The Supreme Court announced today that its hearings in the lawsuit challenging the new federal health care reform law will begin on March 26 and will last three days.

Florida is leading the legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act, a suit that includes 25 other states. State officials have argued that the alleged unconstitutionality of the individual mandate is grounds for striking the bill in its entirety. That argument has not been upheld in lower court decisions.

Both parties have worked actively to make sure that the Supreme Court is able to reach its decision before the 2012 presidential election.

The Wall Street Journal reports that the “main part” of the hearing “will take place on Tuesday, March 27, with a two-hour argument over the minimum-coverage provision, which starting in 2014 will require most Americans to carry health insurance.”

President Barack Obama (Photo: Flickr/The White House)

Women’s health advocates all over the country were stunned yesterday when Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius reversed an FDA request to expand access to over-the-counter emergency contraception for teenagers under the age of 17. In press releases denouncing the decision, a common theme has emerged: President Obama has followed in the footsteps of his predecessor, George W. Bush, on the heated issue of emergency contraception.

The political fight during the Bush administration over Plan B, also known as the morning after pill or emergency contraception, was a volatile one. Conservatives were dead-set against the FDA’s approval of the drug and did all they could to stall access to it once it was approved.

As feminist writer Jessica Valenti has written on the subject:

As you may remember, the concerns the FDA cited over emergency contraception were not about women’s health or the safety of efficacy of the drug. Instead, they were worried about young women getting all slutty. Dr. W. David Hager, one of the FDA committee members who voted against EC’s over-the-counter approval and a key player in making sure Plan B got held up, told The New York Times: “What we heard today was frequently about individuals who did not want to take responsibility for their actions and wanted a medication to relieve those consequences.” Some things to keep in mind about Hager: in suggested in a book he wrote that women could cure PMS with prayer, and his wife accused him of rape. So yeah, a bit scary that he was in charge of women’s health.

It later came to light that FDA medical official Janet Woodcock wrote in an internal memo that over-the-counter status for Plan B could cause “extreme promiscuous behaviors such as the medication taking on an ‘urban legend’ status that would lead adolescents to form sex-based cults centered around the use of Plan B.” It has Lifetime Original Movie written all over it. Of course this but-it-will-make-girls-slutty argument is hardly new. It’s the same excuse legislators have given when attempting to limit women’s access to birth control, and more recently, to the HPV vaccine.

Because the argument against emergency contraception wasn’t rooted in any medical or scientific argument, advocates were sure the Obama administration would uphold the recommendation. Furthermore, it was unlikely that a health secretary would publicly overrule the FDA.

According to The New York Times:

Although Ms. Sebelius had the legal authority to overrule the F.D.A., no health secretary had ever publicly done so, an F.D.A. spokeswoman said. Nor had such a disagreement been the subject of such extraordinary dueling press statements. Dr. Margaret Hamburg, the F.D.A.’s commissioner, issued a lengthy statement saying it was safe to sell Plan B over the counter, while Ms. Sebelius countered that the drug’s manufacturer had failed to study whether girls as young as 11 years old could safely use Plan B.

However, the conversation about whether to remove the barrier of a required prescription for girls under the age of 17 was about making sure emergency contraception was available to all sexually active women in an emergency. Requiring a prescription for a young girl could remove Plan B as an option altogether.

Women’s advocates also expected Sebelius and the Obama administration to protect women’s health issues, no matter the political fallout. The administration took a hit from politically powerful Catholic groups when it upheld a recommendation from the Institute of Medicine to include contraception in a list of preventive medicines to be covered without co-payments.

But in the months since the decision to include contraception in the list was made, reproductive justice advocates have been less sure that the administration will stand its ground, and they now consider yesterday’s decision a sign of things to come. Worse, advocates now see the Obama administration as continuing the politics of the Bush administration.

Nancy Keenan, the president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, wrote in a press release yesterday that the group “expected this kind of action from the Bush administration, so it’s doubly disheartening and unacceptable that this administration chose to follow this path.”

“We had a major opportunity to improve young women’s access to contraception,” Keenan said in a statement, “which is the best way to reduce the need for abortion, and the Obama administration missed the mark.”

The Center for Reproductive Rights released a statement saying, “Six years ago, we sued the Bush administration for rejecting science and playing politics with women’s health by denying emergency contraception for over-the-counter sale.”

“We are stunned to see the same behavior from the Obama administration,” said Nancy Northup, president of the Center for Reproductive Rights. ”It is unacceptable that the approval for drugs supporting women’s reproductive health is held to a completely different standard.”

One of the country’s oldest feminist groups, the National Organization for Women, aslo said in a statement that:

It is an unusual and infuriating move for the Obama administration to overrule that decision, especially at a time when rumors are flying that the president is on the brink of caving in to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops by expanding religiously affiliated employers’ ability to deny contraceptive coverage to women under the Affordable Care Act.

NOW calls on the president to stop playing politics with the lives of women and girls. During the Bush years, women’s reproductive health was under constant attack. We don’t need more of the same from the Obama administration.

The Center for Reproductive Rights will be in federal court on Tuesday, according to their stament, continuing to fight for over-the-counter emergency contraception. The group filed a petition years ago, “along with attorneys Andrea Costello of Florida Institutional Legal Services and Natalie Maxwell of Southern Legal Counsel on behalf of the Association of Reproductive Health Professionals (ARHP), National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health, grassroots activists, and parents who seek over-the-counter access for their daughters.”

A federal court ordered the FDA to reconsider and rule on the petition filed by the Center in 2001. However, the FDA has yet to follow the order, the Center says.

Groups expect to hear whether Sebelius will uphold her decision to include contraception in a list of preventive services some time this week.

Gingrich, however, is the latest in a revolving list of candidates who have floated to the top of the party’s primary contest as an alternative to effective frontrunner Mitt Romney. PPP recently reported Gingrich leading Romney among Colorado Republicans 37-18, partly due to the fact that Gingrich is drawing the lion’s share of Herman Cain supporters left in the lurch when their man dropped out of the race in the wake of horrifically managed spiraling sex scandals.

That Newt is leading here is an obvious problem for the state GOP. Unaffiliated voters make up roughly a third of the Colorado electorate and Obama is polling way out in front of Gingrich in that demographic. PPP surveyed roughly 800 voters this week in Colorado and found Obama leading among independents by a 56 to 32 point spread.

PPP reported a plus/minus 3.5 percent margin of error in the week’s survey. Director Tom Jensen seemed to be having fun writing up the polling results.

Our new Colorado poll is more evidence that the Newt surge could be disastrous for GOP hopes of beating Barack Obama next year….

As weak as Obama is in Colorado, if the Republicans nominate Newt Gingrich it doesn’t look like it matters. Obama leads Gingrich 50-42 in the state, including a whooping 56-32 advantage with independents. Gingrich is a reviled figure with only 32 percent of voters seeing him favorably to 55 percent with a negative opinion, including a 25/59 spread with independents…

The GOP’s move toward supporting Gingrich is seriously endangering its chances of winning in the fall.

Jensen writes that Romney is running roughly neck and neck with Obama and that, if Republican primary voters can hold their noses and vote to nominate him as their general election candidate, Colorado could “go back into the swing state category.”

“Or it could be another easy Obama win as it was in 2008.”

Got a tip? Story pitch? Send us an e-mail. Follow The Colorado Independent on Twitter.

Michigan is one state that has been host to repeated violations of HIV-positive persons’ rights, as has been frequently documented by The American Independent’s former sister site The Michigan Messenger. And a recent study into the application of Michigan’s HIV disclosure laws has uncovered policies in some local health jurisdictions that experts say are troubling in their implications to reproductive freedom and personal privacy.

Trevor Hoppe, a Ph.D. candidate in women’s studies and sociology at University of Michigan, has been conducting extensive interviews with local health department officials about how they have been applying state laws related to HIV. In the course of that study, Hoppe identified several health departments that are using pregnancy, partner-notification services, and sexually transmitted infection (STI) reports to initiate what’s known as “health threat to others” actions (HTTO). To ensure the anonymity of the respondents, Hoppe’s study did not identify specific health departments or counties where these policies were uncovered.

HTTO is a state law that allows health officials to intervene in the private lives of people who have serious infectious diseases. The initiation of an HTTO starts with a formal cease and desist letter with a demand for the person in question to appear at the local health department on a specific date. From there, health officials can do anything from prescribing counseling to seeking a court order to civilly confine a person for as long as six months.

Issuance of an HTTO order is also documented in a statewide database. That database is coded, but it is names-based and accessible to any health official in the state. A person remains in that database indefinitely – until the HTTO order is lifted by local and state health officials. And sometimes it’s never lifted.

Hoppe presented the results of his (currently unpublished) study in August at the 2011 National HIV Prevention Conference (PDF), held in Atlanta. Among the results, he found that two health departments were starting HTTO actions against HIV-positive women after knowing only two things about these women: They were pregnant; they were HIV-positive. The assumption underlying the HTTO actions against them was that the women engaged in behavior that would lead to a significant risk of HIV transmission in others.

What makes a human a ‘health threat’?

Joshua Moore, who runs Detroit Legal Services, a law firm focused on HIV issues and the law, told The American Independent that the policy of labeling people as ‘health threats’ with insufficient evidence is problematic for many reasons.

“The obvious concern is that the pregnant HIV-positive woman is not a ‘health threat to others’ based on the fact that she is simply HIV-positive,” Moore said. “This concept is just outrageous. Many HIV-positive women are choosing to have children safely and are not putting anyone at risk for contracting HIV. The fathers of these children are either HIV-positive themselves or are aware of their partners’ HIV status.”

These health departments have taken up this HTTO policy against pregnant HIV-positive women in spite of recent studies that have shown that in serodiscordant couples (where one partner is HIV-positive and the other is HIV-negative), the use of successful antiretroviral treatment reduces the risk of infection by 96 percent. In addition, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta reports the risk of HIV transmission to newborn babies is reduced to less than 2 percent for pregnant women who are on successful treatment during pregnancy, labor, and delivery and if babies are immediately treated with the medications. Even starting treatment only at labor and delivery reduces the risk of transmission to under 10 percent.

Nicole Seguin, of the Positive Women’s Network, told TAI that the kind of policy highlighted in Hoppe’s study is troubling. As an HIV-positive woman who chose to have a child while positive, Seguin said she worked very closely with her doctor and staff to ensure a safe pregnancy.

“The circumstance of a woman’s HIV status should not allow for an initiation of a ‘health threat to others’ action and diminish the responsibility doctors have to adequately explain medical choices to his patient so that she is comfortable and can consent to all procedures and interventions during pregnancy and birth,” Seguin said. “It erodes women’s reproductive rights by taking away the medical choices that every person is entitled to simply because the woman is living with HIV, and pregnant.”

Similar actions occurred in Mississippi until the U.S. Department of Justice intervened and ordered the state to stop directing people with HIV not to have children.

“Pregnancy in and of itself is not a sufficient reason to define an individual as a ‘health threat,’” said Angela Minicuci, spokesperson for the Michigan Department of Community Health (MDCH). “Local health departments carefully evaluate individual cases in order to determine whether they should be considered ‘health threats,’ as defined by statute, and if they are, appropriate action to be undertaken. We are not aware of action being taken against HIV-positive women for getting pregnant.”

Violation of privacy

In addition to the pregnant women being targeted, a more dangerous activity from public health officials was uncovered by Hoppe. Under Michigan law, the names of all people who test positive for HIV are reported to the MDCH. They are kept in a centralized, coded database. While the move to the names-based reporting was mandated by the CDC and fought by those living with HIV, the state assured the database would be used only as a list of those living with the virus.

What Hoppe discovered was that health officials were comparing the names of individuals named in partner services counseling with the state database. Partner-notification services are voluntary, and the state mandates only that the assistance to contact partners at risk be offered. The counseling session often happens at the same time a person is diagnosed with HIV or another STI. That period can be one of deep trauma, and many advocates have argued the counseling programs can turn coercive.

Hoppe found that when a person tests positive for HIV, health officials in at least three jurisdictions will solicit names as part of partner-notification services. With a list of names in hand, health officials will compare that list to the state database, and if any name on the partner-notification list pops up on the statewide list, health officials will initiate an HTTO action against that person.

“Anytime a government agency uses names inappropriately, it is a threat to the civil liberties of those with HIV, as well as those who are not infected with HIV,” said attorney Moore. “Often, partner notification laws are abused by individuals. Issuing an HTTO to a person simply because they were mentioned in a partner notification and are in the state database would not mean that individual is an automatic HTTO. To suggest that anyone would automatically be a HTTO under these circumstances is an extreme scenario.”

Perpetuating the criminalization of HIV-positives

The final stunning discovery from Hoppe’s study is that some local health departments have begun initiating HTTO actions against HIV-positive persons who test positive for other sexually transmitted infections.

Hoppe quoted “Fern,” an anonymous disease investigator from a local health department, in his PowerPoint presentation at the HIV conference earlier this year.

“Well, usually it’s all the sudden their name appears with another STD… So… if the [syphilis coordinator] has any syphilis cases where they’re also showing that they’re HIV-positive, then her and I work together and we – you know, if I’ve got a case report – then it goes to a ‘health threat to others,’ more or less. Because if they come up with syphilis, they’re having unprotected sex.”

But that’s false logic. What distinguishes syphilis from other STDs is that it can be spread by skin-to skin contact. Thus, contrary to Fern’s conclusions, a syphilis infection does not necessarily indicate unprotected sex.

Minicuci, of the state health department, said Hoppe’s findings in relation to STIs and partner-notification services are accurate.

“Under the Michigan Public Health Code and Administrative Rules, public health is permitted to use available disease reporting records to aid in disease investigation and to support prevention,” she told TAI. “Michigan’s Public Health Code grants public health the ability to prevent and control disease, including collecting information, case investigation, and action to prevent the spread of disease. Confidentiality of all reports, records and data pertaining to testing, care, treatment, reporting, research, and information pertaining to partner notification activities is, however, protected by law (MCL 333.5131 (7)).”

This news comes as some states are seeking permission to use results of viral load tests and immune function tests to track down people with HIV who may not be on medications or who have developed resistance to their HIV medications. Such a proposal in New York state has activists there rattled. The Obama administration’s National HIV/AIDS Strategy called for the monitoring and collection of these test results with the theory that reduction in community viral load will lead to reduced new infections.

Though Michigan has collected these results for years, Minicuci said the results are not used to track down individuals.

“Currently MDCH collects HIV viral load, western blot, and CD4 results for epidemiological surveillance of HIV disease in Michigan,” she said. “Physicians will follow up with their patients on any positive HIV test results (such as a detectable viral load and reactive western blot) and will then report that case to the MDCH for the epidemiological surveillance. Additionally, viral load (detectable and undetectable) and CD4 results are aggregated and used to identify areas of the state where there may be gaps in service for persons living with HIV. This helps us to make well-informed funding decisions.”

Mark Peterson, a director of the Michigan Positive Action Coalition (MI-POZ), said the study’s discoveries are “disturbing” in how they malign people with HIV but not people who regularly contract other STDs.

“How often does public health in Michigan apply health threat measures against someone who has repeated STIs that don’t include HIV?” Peterson said. “Conversely, how often are the same measures applied when HIV in present?

“Our public health messages have stated that people with HIV can live long and happy lives, that HIV is no more of a health consequence than diabetes, yet continued stigma related policies show that this is not actually the real case,” he continued. “If presence of HIV is the main reason that health threat cases are begun, then what we’re doing is criminalizing HIV and those living with it. We can’t say something is ‘chronic and manageable’ and then go to the extremes in health threat cases. People with HIV need comprehensive and compassionate care that includes individualized education, counseling and skills building on how to keep themselves from getting another STD because it is bad for their health. They don’t deserve to be labeled as imminent public threats simply because they have a virus, while the individuals who continually get other STIs are held harmless.”

Peterson was not alone in raising concerns about the local health departments’ actions.

Catherine Hanssens, executive director of the Center for HIV Law & Policy in New York, told TAI that the discoveries highlighted in Hoppe’s study have troubling implications.

“All women retain the constitutionally protected right to reproductive choice, including the right to bear a child, and this right is not affected by an HIV diagnosis,” she said. “Similarly, a policy that treats evidence that a person with HIV is sexually active as tantamount to positing a HTTO, without more [evidence], likely is a violation to the related right to sexual expression and intimacy. The fact that cooperation with partner-notification services can lead to intrusive government actions against a partner raises serious public health and privacy issues.”

Sean Strub, founding publisher of POZ Magazine and a board member of the Global Network of People with HIV North America, echoed Hanssens’ concerns.

“This is about punishing people with HIV for being sexual – that’s the real agenda here,” Strub said. “These are horrible, but increasingly typical, examples of how people with HIV are increasingly treated as a problem population to be tagged, regulated, controlled and criminalized. … Using the excuse of public health to oppress people is not new. The Nazis were pioneers in this regard. It is unfortunate to see Michigan officials following their lead.”

Photo: Flickr/Monifoto.net

“By resoundingly rejecting the Republican-backed push to rewrite labor rules for public employees, Buckeye State voters helped set the table for the 2012 presidential election,” wrote Henry Gomez, politics writer for the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “Without question the results will be viewed as a momentum-builder for Democrats nationwide and should encourage President Barack Obama.”

In the same column, he quoted John Green, director of the Ray C. Bliss Institute of Applied Politics at the University of Akron. “Unions and their allies have done a lot of things transferable to next year,” said Green.  “In some respects, the campaign was a trial run for the presidential.”

Both parties are making dangerous long guesses on Ohio’s political will, however.

After Ohio’s independent voters, reacting to high unemployment and limited recovery from the recession, helped Republican candidates sweep most Democrats from the statewide positions in 2010, freshly elected Governor John Kasich introduced some sweeping changes for the state, from so-called reforms in the biennial budget, to the establishment of an opaque non-profit — JobsOhio — to take the helm for the state’s economic development and keep behind the scenes machinations away from pesky media scrutiny. Finally, Kasich and the state GOP attempted to end public unions’ rights to bargain, eliminating third-party arbitration and public employees’ right to strike.

But the Governor was elected in 2010, when Democrats were purged nationwide, the result of a massive effort by the Republican Party to place blame on the Obama administration and cast every Democrat as guilty by association.  Even so, Kasich was only elected by a 2-percent margin, or roughly 77,000 votes, over incumbent Ted Strickland, who was elected by nearly 50 percent more votes than his Republican challenger J. Kenneth Blackwell in 2006.

Kasich, however, seemed to think he was bestowed with a popular mandate to fulfill a conservative agenda, and sought extremely aggressive reforms that proved to be far from what Ohioans actually wanted. The referendum on SB5, Issue 2, was one of three laws of which the public took umbrage. The other two are on the ballot for 2012: Republicans’ redistricting plan for Congress, passed in an emergency appropriations bill to insulate it against a referendum effort. Ohio’s Supreme Court disagreed, ruling the reapportionment part of the bill was indeed subject to citizen’s veto referendum.

The other law, H.B. 194, is an election-reform law that liberal opponents freely refer to as the “Voter Suppression Bill,” a law the would make permanent Secretary of State Jon Husted’s decision this year to prohibit county boards of elections from mailing out unsolicited absentee ballot applications to voters. Ohio residents will decide its fate next November, as well.

Even the union-sympathetic message sent by voters last Tuesday hasn’t stalled Ohio conservatives from announcing a petition to amend the state’s constitution to prohibit unions from forcing employees to join against their will. If passed, Ohio would join 22 other “Right to Work” states, cutting in on labor’s ability to raise funds. SB5 was voted down by 792,676 votes -– more than ten times the number of votes by which Kasich beat Strickland.

Does this mean Ohioans will now embrace Democratic initiatives? Not necessarily. While SB5 was widely perceived as unfair and over-broad, many elements within the bill were consistently embraced by voters.

And on Tuesday, Ohio voters easily approved Issue 3, a tea party-led effort to “block” the individual mandate in the Patient Protection and Affordable Healthcare Act.

In fact, it passed at almost the exact same margin as Issue 2 failed, according to unofficial election results. While Issue 3 was campaigned much less aggressively, both for and against, the tea party’s referendum on “Obamacare” and, in effect, President Obama himself, shows that Ohioans don’t completely align with him or his party.

In fact, they don’t seem to have any allegiances to anyone.

“President Obama joined with the Occupy Wall Street protestors who believe that the problem we face is capitalism, the free markets and job creators,” Bachmann said in a statement Friday. “It’s not.”

Instead, Bachmann says the problem is “crony capitalism,” which she defined in a speech at Iowa State University earlier this week as “forcefully taking your money for the purpose of paying off a politician’s political friends.”

“The problem is one set of standards for individual Americans and another set of standards for those who make political donations to candidates,” she said. “If we are ever to get out of this ditch, President Obama, the Democrats and Occupy Wall Street need to wake up and stop blaming job creators for the failures created by selfish politicians.”

While Bachmann briefly touches on the issue of campaign finance reform, saying that American and “Occupy Wall Street in particular, needs to wake up and stop blaming job creators for the failures created by selfish politicians who wink at their political donors,” she eventually settles blame for the faltering economy on the corporate tax rate and regulatory burdens.

The tax code “contains loopholes that are exploited by companies large enough to hire an army of lawyers,” she said in Iowa. “The United States remains stuck since 1986 in an out of date high corporate tax rate that sent companies fleeing America for a more competitive tax climate.”

Bachmann’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on Bachmann’s stance on the Citizens United Supreme Court decision or campaign finance reform (this post will be updated if we do hear back).

“President Obama joined with the Occupy Wall Street protestors who believe that the problem we face is capitalism, the free markets and job creators,” Bachmann said in a statement Friday. “It’s not.”

Instead, Bachmann says the problem is “crony capitalism,” which she defined in a speech at Iowa State University earlier this week as “forcefully taking your money for the purpose of paying off a politician’s political friends.”

“The problem is one set of standards for individual Americans and another set of standards for those who make political donations to candidates,” she said. “If we are ever to get out of this ditch, President Obama, the Democrats and Occupy Wall Street need to wake up and stop blaming job creators for the failures created by selfish politicians.”

While Bachmann briefly touches on the issue of campaign finance reform, saying that American and “Occupy Wall Street in particular, needs to wake up and stop blaming job creators for the failures created by selfish politicians who wink at their political donors,” she eventually settles blame for the faltering economy on the corporate tax rate and regulatory burdens.

The tax code “contains loopholes that are exploited by companies large enough to hire an army of lawyers,” she said in Iowa. “The United States remains stuck since 1986 in an out of date high corporate tax rate that sent companies fleeing America for a more competitive tax climate.”

Bachmann’s campaign didn’t immediately respond to the Minnesota Independent’s request for comment on Bachmann’s stance on the Citizens United Supreme Court decision or campaign finance reform (this post will be updated if we do hear back).

The office will be located at 2722 University Avenue S.E., in Minneapolis. An invitation sent to supporters invites them to meet fellow activists and learn about the campaign’s “grassroots strategy for re-electing the president.”

“One year isn’t so far away, and we have to build for the long term and strengthen this movement today. Come on Monday to see how you can be involved and how together we will re-elect the President and reclaim the basic values that make our country great.”

Obama’s Republican rivals are currently focusing their resources on early primary states like Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina.

In an earlier poll on Oct. 5, Obama was given a negative 41-55 percent split, but falls within the margin of error in today’s offering at 47-49 percent. When asked if Obama deserved reelection, 52 percent of survey respondents previously said “no,” but are now willing to give the Democrat a second look.

Obama has made gains against his potential GOP rivals:

• 47 – 42 percent over Mitt Romney, compared to a 46 – 42 percent Romney lead October 5;
• 52 – 36 percent over Rick Perry, up from a 45 – 44 percent tie last month;
• 50 – 40 percent over Herman Cain, who was not included in a matchup last month;
• 52 – 37 percent over Newt Gingrich, who was not matched last month.

“Obama seems to be improving in voters’ eyes almost across-the-board,” Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, said in a statement. “He scores big gains among the groups with whom he has had the most problems – whites and men. Women also shift from a five-point negative to a four-point positive.

“Whether this is a blip, perhaps because of the death of Moammar Gadhafi and the slight improvement in some of the economic numbers, or the beginning of a sustained upward move in his popularity isn’t clear and won’t be for some time. Nevertheless, the movement allows the White House a sigh of relief, for the president’s approval had been stuck in the low 40s for some time and even a temporary upward move is good news for the folks at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave.”

Over the past month the president’s approval among men improved from 60 – 36 percent disapproval to 53 – 43 percent disapproval today; white voters shift from 62 – 34 percent disapproval to 56 – 40 percent disapproval. Women shift from a 51 – 46 percent disapproval last month to a 50 – 46 percent approval today.

Much the same is true when voters are asked about whether the president deserves a second term. Results among men shift from a 58 – 37 percent ‘no’ to 52 – 43 percent ‘no’ and among whites he goes from 62 – 34 percent ‘no’ to 57 – 39 percent ‘no.’

The news is also good for Cain, who leads the GOP presidential field with 30 percent, followed by Romney with 23 percent, Gingrich with 10 per cent and Perry with 8 percent. No other member of the field tops 7 percent, the pollsters reported.

The poll was conducted between Oct. 25 and 31 on both land lines and cell phones and surveyed 2,294 registered voters.

Looking beyond the presidential contest, respondents were asked if they would vote for the Republican or Democratic candidate for U.S. House in their district if the contest were held that day. Overall, respondents picked the Democrat, 42 to 34 percent. When those responses were broken down by annual income levels, however, respondents who reported making $100,000 per year or less were strongly in the Democratic camp, while those making above those levels trended more Republican.

Overall, however, the latest results continue to show a slip in popularity by House Republicans. In March, for instance, 40 percent of respondents said they would vote for the GOP and only 37 percent said they would vote for the Democrat. The numbers have not only flipped since that survey, but Democrats have built momentum.