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Washington (CNN) – Sunday evening’s much anticipated deficit-reduction meeting at the White House, involving President Barack Obama and congressional leaders, concluded after negotiations that lasted about 1 1/2 hours.

When asked before the start of Sunday’s talks if a deal could be reached within 10 days, Obama told reporters, “We need to.”

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(CNN) – Whether President Barack Obama’s first ever Twitter town hall is considered a #success or #fail, it’s surely another example of the White House’s embrace of social media and technology.

Here’s a look back at some of the key uses of social media since Obama was elected:

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Washington (CNN) – In what his campaign is billing as a major foreign policy address Tuesday in New York, Republican presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty will accuse the Obama administration of dithering on Iran and failing to pursue American interests during the so-called “Arab Spring.”

President Barack Obama “has failed to formulate and carry out an effective and coherent strategy in response” to popular uprisings across the Middle East, Pawlenty plans to tell an audience at the Council on Foreign Relations, according to excerpts provided to CNN by his campaign.

“He has been timid, slow, and too often without a clear understanding of our interests or a clear commitment to our principles,” Pawlenty will say of the president.

The former Minnesota governor will also question Obama’s handling of the Iranian protests of 2009, when thousands protested in the streets after a disputed election that returned President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power. Dozens were killed during a violent government crackdown.

Pawlenty will say that when the Iranian ayatollahs “stole an election,” the Iranian people rightly protested while Obama “held his tongue.”

“His silence validated the mullahs, despite the blood on their hands and the nuclear centrifuges in their tunnels,” Pawlenty will say.

Pawlenty also plans to take a thinly veiled poke at Republican primary foes like former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former Utah Gov. Jon Huntsman, who have expressed skepticism about the ongoing American military commitment in Afghanistan.

He will warn fellow Republicans not to “shrink from the challenges of American leadership in the world.”

“History repeatedly warns us that in the long run, weakness in foreign policy costs us and our children much more than we’ll save in a budget line item,” the speech reads. “America already has one political party devoted to decline, retrenchment, and withdrawal; it does not need a second one.”

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Washington (CNN) – Rightly or wrongly, here’s one reason why some major Obama big business 2008 campaign supporters now have reservations about supporting him again. It involves a huge Boeing investment in a new assembly plant in Charleston, South Carolina.

Boeing has spent about 0 million so far in building the 787 Dreamliner plant and has already hired 1,000 workers. The plant is supposed to open in the coming days, but the National Labor Relations Board is threatening to shut it down. NLRB officials say Boeing could be in violation of labor relations laws.

CNN Political Ticker

CNN Political Ticker

He has given hundreds of thousands of dollars to Democrats, showered praise on Bill and Hillary Clinton and suggested that Ronald Reagan was a con man with little “beneath that smile”.
A divorcé whose current wife, number three, is a Slovenian former model and jewelry designer, he once favoured Canadian-style single payer healthcare and abortion rights. These [...]
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(CNN) – When President Obama sat down at the White House with a Texas television station Monday, one of the four interviews he did with local TV reporters, he may have also raised speculation that Democrats think solidly red Texas might be in play in 2012.

Democrats think the state’s surging Latino population, 37.6 percent of Texans in the 2010 Census, which voted nearly 2-1 for Obama in 2008, could be the key to victory.

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The latest Gallup Daily tracking three-day average represents a new low for Barack Obama, with just 41 percent of Americans approving his job performance as president. This matches his previous lows in August 2010 and October 2010, just before the mid-term elections, and it is significantly down from his 2011 average of 48 percent. The [...]
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Washington (CNN) – President Barack Obama will lay out his plan for long-term deficit reduction this week, White House senior advisor David Plouffe told CNN on Sunday.

In an interview for broadcast on CNN’s “State of the Union,” Plouffe said Obama will “be clear about the types of deficit reduction we need in terms of dollar amounts over what period of years.”

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And I thought Chris Matthews was fond of Barack Obama.

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