Obama to face huge challenges in 2012

Obama to face huge challenges in 2012

WASHINGTON

Addressing reporters before heading to Hawaii on Friday, President Barack Obama looked like a president in command of the stage again, for now. He left the capital after presiding over a two-month extension of a payroll-tax cut — about $40 per paycheck for someone making $50,000 a year — that came when House Republicans caved on demands for a longer deal.

Yet on this issue, like many, enormous work remains for Obama after the new year, just when voters begin choosing a Republican nominee to try to oust him from his job.

Obama initially had pushed for a year-long extension of both the Social Security payroll tax cut and unemployment benefits. He got only two months on both because Congress could not agree on how to pay the bill for more without gutting their own political priorities — the same problem that awaits all sides in the weeks to come.

Queen Elizabeth II’s husband hospitalized

LONDON

Queen Elizabeth II’s husband was hospitalized Friday evening after experiencing chest pains, British royal officials said.

Prince Philip, 90, was taken from Sandringham, the queen’s sprawling estate in rural Norfolk, to the cardiac unit at Papworth Hospital in Cambridge for “precautionary tests,” a spokeswoman for Buckingham Palace said.

She would not say if other members of the royal family were with the Duke of Edinburgh or if he would stay the night at the hospital. The spokeswoman declined to comment further and spoke on customary condition of anonymity. A hospital spokeswoman referred all calls back to the palace.

Justice Department rejects SC voter law

COLUMBIA, S.C.

South Carolina’s attorney general says he will fight the Justice Department in federal court over South Carolina’s voter ID law.

The federal agency on Friday rejected the law, saying it makes it harder for minorities to vote. It was the first voter ID law to be refused by the Obama administration.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez says South Carolina’s law didn’t meet the burden under the Voting Rights Act and may have prevented thousands of minorities from voting because they don’t have the right identification.

The Justice Department must approve changes to South Carolina’s election laws because of the state’s failure in the past to protect the voting rights of blacks.

Biden, Romney offer full-contact preview

TILTON, N.H.

It’s an opening salvo of the presidential campaign, minus actual presidential nominees.

Vice President Joe Biden unleashed a biting critique of Mitt Romney’s policies Friday and the Republican came swiftly back at him — a full-contact preview of what the general election might look like should Romney win the GOP nomination to challenge President Barack Obama.

All this, before a vote is cast in the Republican race, The Iowa caucuses, looming Jan. 3, are the first step in the voting to pick a Republican nominee.

In an opinion piece published in The Des Moines Register, Biden portrayed the Republican frontrunner as the purveyor of failed, retreaded economic ideas. Romney shot back that Biden and Obama live an economic “fantasyland” out of touch with the real world.

Biden’s jabs mark a major escalation in Obama’s re-election campaign and refocus his political team on Romney, the former Massachusetts governor whom Obama advisers have long considered his most likely opponent. And it switches Obama away from his just-concluded tax cut victory over House Republicans to the GOP presidential field just 12 days before the Iowa caucuses.

Associated Press