Romney heads to swing states as schedule intensifies

  By JIM KUHNHENNLOS ANGELES -- Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney heads to Colorado on Sunday, the first stop in what advisers call an "intense battleground state schedule" aimed at countering GOP criticism that his campaign is mismanaged and misdirected.

The former Massachusetts governor will have the stage to himself in a state that will help decide the presidential contest. President Obama was expected to be in Washington and had no official business or campaign activity scheduled.

For Romney, an evening rally at a Denver-area high school represents his first public event of the weekend. With the election less than seven weeks away, the Republican candidate is facing pressure to spend less time raising money and more time explaining his plans to voters in swing states.

He plans to do that beginning with the Colorado rally. Romney then launches a three-day bus tour in Ohio on Monday followed by a stop in Virginia - all states Obama won in 2008 and held by Republicans four years earlier.

The schedule shift comes in the last full week before the presidential debates move the campaign into a new phase - one which Romney advisers suggest could prove pivotal following several weeks marked by negative attention, missteps and Republican concerns.

Already facing reports of internal finger-pointing and foreign policy questions, Romney suffered another setback last week when a secretly recorded video surfaced showing the Republican standard bearer declaring that almost half of Americans are dependent upon government and see themselves as victims.

On Friday, he released his 2011 tax returns showing income of $13.6 million, largely from investment income.

In an interview set to air Sunday night, Romney told CBS' "60 Minutes" that his campaign is moving in the right direction.

"It doesn't need a turnaround. We've got a campaign which is tied with an incumbent president to the United States," Romney says, according to remarks released in advance by CBS.

While national polls remain tight, polls in several swing states - Colorado among them - suggest that Obama has opened narrow leads in the states that matter most. Obama won Colorado by 9 points four years ago, but the state went to a Republican in the previous three presidential elections.

Romney spent much of his weekend in high-dollar fundraisers in southern California, a state held by Democrats for nearly a quarter century. As the Republican courted wealthy donors at the Beverly Hills Hilton on Saturday, Obama worked to squash GOP hopes for a resurgence in Wisconsin, where the president assailed Romney's economic approach before an energized gathering of 18,000, Obama's biggest crowd of the campaign.

Obama faulted Romney for advancing a top-down economic approach that "never works."

"The country doesn't succeed when only the folks at the very top are doing well," Obama told the massive crowd. "We succeed when the middle class is doing well."

In Beverly Hills, Romney raised $6 million at a Saturday evening fundraiser that attracted celebrities Dennis Miller and Gary Sinise. Before a group of more than 1,000 California Republicans, Romney kept up his criticism of the president for fostering a culture of dependency.

"This is a tough time. These are our brothers and sisters. These are not statistics. These are people," Romney declared. "The president's policies - these big-government, big-tax monolithic policies - are not working."

Obama, too, looked to celebrities to help raise cash to continue bankrolling the deluge of ads already saturating hotly contested states.

Baseball great Hank Aaron supplied the star power at Obama's Milwaukee fundraisers.

"As one who wore the number 44 on his back for decades, I ask you to join me in helping the 44th president of the United States hit a grand slam," said Aaron.

But Obama's schedule has focused more on voters than donors in recent weeks. The president's campaign says Obama attended seven fundraisers and 14 public events since the day after the Democratic National Convention two weeks ago.

Over the last week alone, Romney has attended five public events - including three rallies - and more than a dozen fundraisers.

Romney adviser Kevin Madden defended the fundraising focus, while highlighting a shift toward swing states in the coming days

"We're here raising the resources we're going to need to compete in all those battleground states through Election Day," Madden said. "That's also been matched with a really intense battle ground state schedule that's going to be coming up starting Sunday night. We're keeping very busy."

But conservative worry remains.

"The Romney campaign has to get turned around. This week I called it incompetent, but only because I was being polite. I really meant 'rolling calamity,'" Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter for President Ronald Reagan, wrote late last week.

Speaking at the Beverly Hills Hilton, Romney's California finance committee chairman Thomas Tellefsen sought to reassure supporters.

"I wanted to share some thoughts with you tonight. They can provide you some comfort. Polls are not elections. The voters have not yet spoken," Tellefsen said.

Meanwhile, Obama made the case against Romney in Milwaukee, countering Romney's call to change Washington from the inside with an appeal to voters to help him break through partisan gridlock with pressure on Congress from the outside. He said that despite economic troubles, his administration has made progress and has made "practical and specific" proposals to create jobs.

"We've seen half a million new jobs in manufacturing, the fastest pace since the 1990s," he said. "And so the choice now is, do we reverse that progress or do we move forward?"

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Blind activist leaves China, heads to US

  by DIDI TANGBEIJING -- A blind Chinese legal activist was hurriedly taken from a hospital and put on a plane for the United States on Saturday, closing a nearly monthlong diplomatic tussle that had tested U.S.-China relations.

Chen Guangcheng, sitting in a wheelchair and accompanied by his wife and two children, boarded United Airlines Flight 88 for the 12-hour flight to Newark, outside New York City, a few hours after Chinese authorities suddenly told him to pack and prepare to leave.

"Thousands of thoughts are surging to my mind," Chen said at the airport. His concerns, he said, included whether authorities would retaliate for his negotiated departure by punishing his relatives left behind. It also is unclear whether the government will allow him to return.

A self-taught legal activist, Chen asked his supporters and others in the activist community for their understanding of his desire to leave the front lines of the rights struggle in China.

"I am requesting a leave of absence, and I hope that they will understand," he said.

The Chens' departure to the United States marks the conclusion of nearly a month of uncertainty and years of mistreatment by local authorities for the activist.

After seven years of prison and house arrest, Chen made a daring escape from his rural village in late April and was given sanctuary inside the U.S. Embassy, triggering a diplomatic standoff over his fate. With Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton in Beijing for annual high-level discussions, officials struck a deal that let Chen walk free, only to see him have second thoughts, forcing new negotiations that led to an agreement to send him to the U.S. to study law - a goal of his - at New York University.

Moments after his departure from Beijing, State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland confirmed that Chen was en route to the U.S. and praised the quiet negotiations that freed him.

"We are looking forward to his arrival in the United States later today," Nuland said in a statement. "We also express our appreciation for the manner in which we were able to resolve this matter and to support Mr. Chen's desire to study in the U.S. and pursue his goals."

China's Foreign Ministry said it had no comment. The government's news agency, Xinhua, issued a brief report saying that Chen "has applied for study in the United States via normal channels in line with the law."

Chen's supporters welcomed his departure. "I think this is great progress," said U.S.-based rights activist Bob Fu. "It's a victory for freedom fighters."

The 40-year-old Chen is emblematic of a new breed of activists that the Communist Party finds threatening. Often from rural and working-class families, these "rights defenders," as they are called, are unlike the students and intellectuals from the elite academies and major cities of previous democracy movements and thus could potentially appeal to ordinary Chinese.

Chen gained recognition for crusading for the disabled and for farmers' rights and fighting against forced abortions in his rural community. That angered local officials, who seemed to wage a personal vendetta against him, convicting him in 2006 on what his supporters say were fabricated charges and then holding him for the past 20 months in illegal house arrest.

Even with the backstage negotiations, Chen's departure came hastily. Chen spent the last two and a half weeks in a hospital being given medical treatment for the foot he broke escaping house arrest. Only on Wednesday did Chinese authorities help him complete the paperwork needed for his passport.

Chen said by telephone Saturday that he was informed at the hospital just before noon to pack his bags to leave. Officials did not give him and his family passports or inform them of their flight details until after they got to the airport.

Seeming ambivalent, Chen said that he was "not happy" about leaving and that he had a lot on his mind, including worries about retaliation against his extended family back home. His nephew, Chen Kegui, is accused of attempted murder after he allegedly used a kitchen knife to attack officials who stormed his house after discovering Chen Guangcheng was missing.

"I hope that the government will fulfill the promises it made to me, all of its promises," Chen said. Such promises included launching an investigation into abuses against him and his family in Shandong province, he said before the phone call was cut off.

Chen's expected attendance at New York University comes from his association with Jerome Cohen, a law professor at the university who advised Chen while he was in the U.S. Embassy. The two met when the activist went to the United States on a State Department program in 2003, and Cohen has been staunch advocate for him ever since.

"I'm very happy at the news that he's on his way and I look forward to welcoming him and his family tonight and to working with him on his course of study," Cohen said.

Much as Chen has said he wants return to China, it remains uncertain whether the Chinese government would bar him, as they have done with many exiled activists.

"Chen's departure for the U.S. does not and should not in any way mark a 'mission accomplished' moment for the U.S. government," said Phelim Kine, a senior Asia researcher at Human Rights Watch. "The harder, longer term part is ensuring his right under international law to return to China when he sees fit."

Wu'er Kaixi, an exiled dissident who is on China's list of most wanted student leaders for the 1989 Tiananmen Square demonstrations, made a third unsuccessful attempt Saturday to turn himself in at a Chinese Embassy, this time in Washington, D.C.

However, Chen's friends and supporters cheered Chen's departure. Teng Biao, who had urged Chen after he left the U.S. Embassy to leave China for his personal safety, welcomed the family's departure.

"I feel happy that he and his family can have a normal, free life in the United States with their safety ensured," Teng said.

Nanjing activist blogger He Peirong, who picked Chen up outside his rural village after his escape and spirited him to Beijing, said, "I hope that this will be a good beginning."

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Associated Press videojournalist Annie Ho and reporter Charles Hutzler contributed to this report.

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Republican: heads must roll in Fast and Furious

  By PETE YOSTWASHINGTON -- Republican lawmakers told Attorney General Eric Holder on Thursday to fire some Justice Department subordinates over the flawed arms-trafficking investigation called Operation Fast and Furious.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing, Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin said impeachment is an option if Holder does not "clean up this mess" quickly.

Sensenbrenner and other Republicans hold the attorney general responsible for the operation, in which federal agents failed to track illicitly purchased weapons that were later recovered in Mexico and the U.S., many of them at crime scenes.

"If you don't get to the bottom of this," there is only one alternative, and "it's called impeachment," said Sensenbrenner, without specifying whom he had in mind.

"Why haven't you terminated the people involved?" asked Rep.

Darrell Issa, R-Calif., who chairs the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that is investigating the arms-tracking operation. Issa pressed Holder to appear before the congressman's committee and the attorney general said he would consider the request.

Issa said that the Justice Department has turned over 5,000 emails to the committee about Operation Fast and Furious, but "not one of these emails is yours." Holder said his department's response to the committee's document requests has been "fulsome."

The attorney general, the sole witness at Thursday's hearing, said it was inexcusable for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to use a controversial tactic known as "gun-walking" in its effort to identify and prosecute major arms trafficking networks along the Southwest border. The Justice Department has long prohibited the tactic. The operation's goal was to follow the gun supply chain from small-time gun buyers at a number of Phoenix-area gun shops and make cases against major weapons traffickers. In the process, federal agents lost track of many of the more than 2,000 guns linked to the operation.

House Judiciary Committee chairman Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, said the Justice Department had given inconsistent statements about what Smith called "a reckless and dangerous law enforcement program." Smith said many questions remain about who authorized the operation.

In Operation Fast and Furious, two of the guns purchased at a Phoenix gun store were recovered from the scene of a shooting that killed border agent Brian Terry on the U.S. side of the border.

"We do not know who the particular person was" who decided that "this flawed operation should be conducted," Holder said.

Amid probes by Republicans in Congress and the Justice Department's inspector general, the department already has replaced U.S. Attorney Dennis Burke in Phoenix, acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson and the lead prosecutor in Operation Fast and Furious.

Holder said he is prepared to take other steps, and said additional personnel changes are a possibility. The inspector general's office at the Justice Department is investigating what went wrong in Operation Fast and Furious, but "that does not lessen the responsibility I have as head manager," he said.

Sensenbrenner told Holder that "I don't want to say you have committed a felony," but pointed to the Justice Department's decision last week withdrawing an inaccurate letter to Congress last February. The February letter said the ATF makes every effort to intercept weapons that have been purchased illegally - an assertion that was wrong.

No one at the Justice Department was lying, Holder said. He said department officials based their conclusion in the letter on the best information they had at the time from the Phoenix offices of ATF and the U.S. Attorney.

Operation Fast and Furious was "a regional operation" and not "top to bottom," said Holder. The controversial tactic at issue in the operation was not a decision made in Washington, Holder said.

On Wednesday, the senior Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Chuck Grassley, whose inquiry brought the tactic used in Operation Fast and Furious to light, called for the resignation of one of Holder's top aides, criminal division chief Lanny Breuer.

Breuer has said he made a mistake in not telling Holder and Deputy Attorney General James Cole that the controversial gun-walking tactic had been used in an earlier ATF probe called Operation Wide Receiver, which Breuer had known about since April 2010.

Grassley said that in addition to not informing his superiors, Breuer gave misleading answers when the senator asked whether Breuer had reviewed a Justice Department letter to Congress last February that said ATF makes every effort to intercept weapons that have been purchased illegally - an assertion that was incorrect in both Operation Wide Receiver and Operation Fast and Furious.

Breuer told Congress he cannot say for sure whether he saw a draft of the inaccurate letter and that he has no recollection of having done so. At the time the letter was drafted, Breuer told one of the letter's main drafters, "As usual, great work."

Breuer "needs to go immediately," Grassley said.

In response, Justice Department spokeswoman Tracy Schmaler said Breuer has acknowledged his mistake to Congress and to the attorney general and said Holder "continues to have confidence in assistant attorney general's Breuer ability to lead the criminal division."

Schmaler said Breuer's division has led important prosecutions against high-ranking gang members, secured the extradition of dangerous fugitives and spearheaded efforts with Mexico to enhance that country's law enforcement capacity.

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Giuliani heads to NH to explore presidential bid

  By STEVE PEOPLESCONCORD, N.H. -- Rudy Giuliani isn't convinced that any of the declared Republican presidential contenders can defeat President Barack Obama.

Until he is, Giuliani says he won't rule out a run of his own.

"These are a lot of qualified people," the former New York City mayor told The Associated Press on the eve of his fourth visit to New Hampshire this year. "Do they have a good chance of winning? I don't know the answer to that."

Giuliani, who acknowledges that his failed 2008 campaign was deeply flawed, has five public appearances scheduled during a two-day visit starting Thursday to the first-in-the-nation primary state. The stops include a luncheon with the Seacoast Federation of Republican Women in Portsmouth, a more intimate gathering at a private New Castle home with law enforcement officials and a gun-rights discussion at Manchester Harley Davidson.

It may sound like a candidate's schedule, but Giuliani backed away from an aide's recent comment that he would decide "very soon" whether to join the presidential field. He ruled out any decision before the end of July and said his timeline is late August or early September. He argued that he still has the drive to extend his political career.

"I have a tremendous fire for more public service," Giuliani, 67, said. "That's something that I feel sort of incomplete about."

Still, he doesn't sound eager to be considered even a potential candidate.

"I certainly haven't decided to get in. I don't think I would even describe myself as testing the waters. I'd say that I keep it open as a possibility," he said, adding he was going to New Hampshire at the invitation of local Republicans. "And it will give me a chance to gather more information and get a better feeling for it."

There's a general feeling among New Hampshire Republicans that Giuliani won't run. But if he does, GOP officials here say Giuliani would face tremendous hurdles, partly because many candidates have been building state organizations for months.

"It would be very daunting, particularly when you look at the campaign staffs that several of the candidates have. They've been here a while," state GOP Chairman Jack Kimball said. "But it really comes down to the voters and the passion that they feel for the person."

When it comes to Giuliani, there is evidence of lingering resentment from New Hampshire activists who supported him last time only to watch him employ a national strategy that largely ignored the Granite State, as well as early voting contests in Iowa, Michigan, Nevada and South Carolina. His strategy hinged on Florida, a state he ultimately finished third in before dropping out of the race completely.

He finished a disappointing fourth in New Hampshire last time.

This year virtually every member of Giuliani's 2008 New Hampshire team is backing someone else.

That list is led by Doug Scamman, the former mayor's state chairman in 2008, who now is backing Romney and lent his Stratham farm for Romney's official announcement speech last month.

Giuliani doesn't think the damage is irreparable.

"They have a right to be resentful. I made a big mistake last time," he said. "I think people respond very, very well to somebody just saying they were wrong. I was wrong and will do it differently."

He may not be done apologizing.

"I've done that the last four times I was there," he said, laughing. "I keep apologizing. And I mean it. It's OK. I mean it."

Still, Michael Dennehy, a political consultant who previously led John McCain's presidential campaign here, and others say Giuliani is one of the few remaining potential candidates with the national profile to be a factor, even this late in the game.

"If you look strictly at the numbers, his image is very good" and he's well known, Dennehy said.

Another key Giuliani supporter from 2008, Rep. Frank Guinta, agrees that Giuliani could be a force, although he's not willing to support Giuliani again at this point.

"If Rudy got in the race, and if he ran a different kind of New Hampshire-based campaign, he would be a worthy opponent," Guinta said. "I think his experience and his stature warrants seriousness and brings credibility to the potential group of people running."

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Attempted burglary at ex-IMF head's DC home?

  By ERIC TUCKERGEORGETOWN -- Police responded Thursday morning to the Georgetown home of former IMF head Dominique Strauss-Kahn after an alarm went off inside, but officers said they found no signs of a burglary or a forced entry.

Officers responding to the home with police dogs found the door ajar, but nothing was missing and police ruled out a burglary, said police spokeswoman Gwendolyn Crump. A maid at the home told police she must have inadvertently left the door open, triggering an alarm, Crump said. Police officials said they were contacted by the alarm company.

Officers left less than two hours after arriving.

A message left with Strauss-Kahn's attorney wasn't immediately returned.

Strauss-Kahn quit his post as IMF chief on May 18 after he was accused of sexually attacking a New York hotel maid. He has denied the charges and is living under house arrest in Manhattan pending his case.

Neighbor Michele Camden, 55, said she had seen a moving truck outside the Strauss-Kahn house Wednesday and assumed that someone must have left a door open. She said she had never seen Strauss-Kahn at the house.

"He's not going to hobnob with someone like us," she said.

The house is located across the street from a park and within short walking distance of the bustling shops and restaurants of the upscale neighborhood.

Camden said neighbors might be prone to whispering some "underhanded comments" about each other, but mostly, "We just leave people alone."

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Desmond Butler contributed to this story.

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Palin heads to Ellis Island, Statue of Liberty

  By BETH FOUHYNEW YORK -- Sarah Palin has visited the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island as part of her tour of East Coast historic sites.

The former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee had announced Wednesday's visits on Twitter. She said she looked forward to seeing the "beauty of legal immigrants' work ethic and love of freedom" at the two iconic sites in New York Harbor.

Millions of immigrants passed through Ellis Island between 1892 and 1954. Palin has said she is considering joining the field of GOP candidates hoping to challenge President Barack Obama next year.

Palin toured the sites with her parents, Chuck and Sally Heath, and youngest daughter, Piper.

They shared a pizza Tuesday night with real estate mogul Donald Trump and his wife, Melania.

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