Brookings senior fellows William A. Galston and Elaine C. Kamarck have a good read at The Washington Post, (adapted from their article in Democracy: A Journal of Ideas “How to save the Republican Party, courtesy of two Democrats.” the authors explain why even good Democrats should care about making the Republican party better: “…Our democracy is better off with two healthy political parties willing to debate fiercely — and then reach honorable compromises. A Republican Party dominated by a new generation of reform-minded conservatives who care more about solving problems than scoring points would be a huge step toward restoring a federal government that can govern….”
Steven Greenhouse has a NYT update on organized labor’s two-pronged approach toward enhancing unions growth and influence: experimenting with different levels of membership and a more energetic effort to build coalitions for political change.
Also in the Post, George Will predictably snarls, along with the higher-brow Hillary-haters, at another Clinton candidacy. But he gets in a potent dig at the prospect of a Christie presidency, riffing of an incident in which the NJ governor got down and dirty with a NY Daily News sportswriter. “But who wants to call the person “Mr. President” who calls a sportswriter an “idiot”?,” asks Will. Put another way, do voters really want to be reped by a bellowing gasbag at future G-20 summits? “So’s yer muddah, Putin.”
At the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein’s “Bad Bet: Why Republicans Can’t Win With Whites Alone” notes an often overlooked point: “Greenberg, who polled for Bill Clinton, says Obama faces unique problems among whites both because of his race and the gruelingly slow economic recovery. “Those things together make me think these white numbers [for Democrats] are not the new baseline–that they are much more likely to go up than down,” he says…Veteran Republican pollster Whit Ayres is no less dismissive. “Any strategy that is predicated on [consistently] getting a higher percentage of the white vote than Ronald Reagan got in 1980 is a losing strategy,” he says.”
Yes, every effort toward bipartisanship by House GOP leaders should be encouraged. But, as Keith Brekhus points out at PoliticusUSA that the failure of House Republicans to support Speaker Boehner and Majoritry Leader Cantor on the Syria resolution provides yet another example of their limp leadership. Says Brekhus: “…They have demonstrated that they have lost control of their own caucus, because the number of GOP representatives who have chosen to join them in support of the policy can almost be counted on one hand. Of the 232 House Republicans not named Cantor or Boehner, a grand total of six of them, have joined in expressing support for the authorization of force in Syria…as the mutiny spreads within the GOP ranks, Boehner and Cantor are spiraling deeper and deeper into political irrelevancy.”
At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky spotlights the “brazen hypocrisy” of Republicans on U.S. military intervention in Syria, noting “The Gold Weasel Medal goes to Marco Rubio, as others such as Tim Noah have noted. Back in April, Rubio thundered that “the time for passive engagement in this conflict must come to an end. It is in the vital national security interest of our nation to see Assad’s removal.” Removal! Obama’s not talking about anything close to removal. So that was Rubio’s hard line back when Obama was on the other side. And now that Obama wants action? Rubio voted against the military resolution in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee last week.”
Nobel prize for Economics laureate Joseph E. Stglitz makes a strong case for Janet Yellen to head the Fed, including his belief that she does not suffer from “cognitive capture” by Wall St. and he adds, “Ms. Yellen has a superb record in forecasting where the economy is going — the best, according to The Wall Street Journal, of anyone at the Fed. As I noted earlier, Mr. Summers’s leaves something to be desired.”
Credit President Obama with overseeing significant progress toward energy independence for the U.S. As Bill Scher writes at Campaign for America’s Future: “In many ways President Obama’s energy policies have been a huge success. Carbon emissions are down. Oil consumption is down. Renewable energy consumption is up. North America is projected to be effectively energy independent by 2020, and the United States by 2030.” On the other hand, adds Scher, “renewables still amount to a paltry portion of our overall energy usage, with wind and solar power producing only three percent of the nation’s electricity. In other words, this is the area that has the most room to grow, the most potential for creating green jobs and further slashing our carbon pollution.”
Yikes, now they want to privatize the money.

Former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has made a fairly strong argument against U.S. military intervention in Syria. From his blog, via Reader Supported News:

Even if the President musters enough votes to strike Syria, at what political cost? Any president has a limited amount of political capital to mobilize support for his agenda, in Congress and, more fundamentally, with the American people. This is especially true of a president in his second term of office. Which makes President Obama’s campaign to strike Syria all the more mystifying.
President Obama’s domestic agenda is already precarious: implementing the Affordable Care Act, ensuring the Dodd-Frank Act adequately constrains Wall Street, raising the minimum wage, saving Social Security and Medicare from the Republican right as well as deficit hawks in the Democratic Party, ending the sequester and reviving programs critical to America’s poor, rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure, and, above all, crafting a strong recovery.
Time and again we have seen domestic agendas succumb to military adventures abroad – both because the military-industrial-congressional complex drains money that might otherwise be used for domestic goals, and because the public’s attention is diverted from urgent problems at home to exigencies elsewhere around the globe.

Reich goes on to add, quite rightly that “a strike on Syria may well cause more havoc in that tinder-box region of the world by unleashing still more hatred for America, the West, and for Israel, and more recruits to terrorism. Strikes are never surgical; civilians are inevitably killed. Moreover, the anti-Assad forces have shown themselves to be every bit as ruthless as Assad, with closer ties to terrorist networks.”
Reich deplores Assad’s use of chemical weapons, but warns against the U.S. getting bogged down in a “slippery slope,” which almost always accompanies military action that purports to be limited.
Reich is a good writer, and his points are well-stated. Regarding his concern about squandering Obama’s “limited amount of political capital,” needed to advance his domestic agenda, however, Ed Kilgore has an instructive post on “Obama’s ‘Political Capital‘” up at Washington Monthly, in which he observes:

…Seriously, what sort of “political capital” does the president have with congressional Republicans? They committed to a policy of total obstruction from the day he became president and picked up right where they had left off the day he was re-elected. Obama’s only options in dealing with the GOP are to offer them cover for compromise when he must and hand them an anvil to speed their self-destruction when he can. But he has no “political capital” to spend.

A good point. Another problem with Reich’s argument is that he offers no suggestions for alternative action. Is doing nothing about atrocities with chemical weapons really our best option? Nothing?
Part of the argument against military intervention is well-stated by Reich and other writers. But, the anti-interventionist argument could use a little more heft. There may indeed be nonviolent alternatives, and perhaps some input by leading nonviolent strategists like Dr. Gene Sharp could open up the dialogue. Certainly the Syrian resistance to Assad could benefit by applying some of Sharp’s ideas, as did the ‘Arab Spring’ uprising in 2010-11. In the future, at least, the U.S. could invest in training pro-democracy movements in nonviolent strategy and action.

From HuffPo Pollster Mark Blumenthal and Ariel Edwards-Levy report on “The Surprising Takeaway From A Poll About Polls“: “Three out of four (75 percent) said they perceive polling to be biased. Only 4 percent reported “a lot of trust” in polling companies — and nearly half (46 percent) expressed distrust — in the midst of a conversation with an employee of a polling company…As such, the perceptions of bias may not signal further doom and gloom for pollsters. If anything, they suggest that the few who do participate in surveys will share their true beliefs, even when it might offend the pollster. And that, in a perverse way, may amount to a bit of good news.”
At USA Today Martha T. Moore and Catalina Camia explore how the “Syria vote will ripple through 2014 campaigns,” particularly the senate seats now held by Mitch McConnell and Mark Pryor.
Meanwhile, “Obama Faces Barrier in His Own Party on Syria” by NYT’s Jeremy W. Peters reviews the challenges the president is facing in getting Dems to support a strike against the Assad regime: “Those who are deeply conflicted about how to proceed include liberals who are ordinarily suspicious of using military force but feel compelled to punish President Bashar al-Assad of Syria over accusations that his forces staged a chemical attack against civilians. There are also members who represent primarily minority and urban districts where the president’s word carries a lot of weight but voters are preoccupied with how spending cuts are hurting public assistance and threatening Social Security and Medicare.”
The Plum Line’s Greg Sargent has some sound advice for the president with respect to winning public support for a strike against the Assad regime: “…It would seem that if the administration wants to rally the public, the focus should be on less on persuading people that Assad is guilty of gassing his own people and more on persuading them that the response to it would have an impact and entails minimal risk.”
Ezra Klein’s interview with Rep. Brad Sherman sheds light on the same topic. Says Sherman “I would say it will require two things. One, he needs to quickly propose a different resolution that is extremely narrow. It needs to authorize only what he says he wants to do. If instead the lawyers and planners in the administration say they want a resolution that authorizes anything they might want to do, they’ll fail. Second, I think he’ll need to go on TV, in primetime. The active public is against this. I don’t know a member of Congress whose e-mails and phone calls are in favor of this.”
Bill Barrow of the Associated press reports on Democratic strategy in upcoming elections in the south: “As Democrats try to curtail GOP dominance in the South, the party’s top recruits for 2014 elections are trying to sell themselves as problem solvers above Washington’s partisan gridlock…They’re casting the Republicans’ anti-government mantra and emphasis on social issues like abortion and gay marriage as ideological obstacles to progress on “bread-and-butter” issues like public education, infrastructure and health care…That goes beyond their usual effort to distance themselves from President Barack Obama and national Democrats, and it’s the closest thing the Democratic Party has to a unified strategy in the region beyond simply waiting for demographics to shift in the long term to ensure they can compete with Republicans.”
At The Fix Sean Sullivan explains why “Why Lincoln Chafee’s decision not to run for reelection is more good news for Democrats”
Also at The Fix, Chris Cillizza reports on “The era of the recall,” noting “The recall election, once reserved for forcing out elected officials accused of a crime, ethics violations or gross misconduct, has become an overtly political tool. Since 2011, voters in four states have successfully mounted petition drives to recall state legislators over new laws curbing the influence of public unions, or expanding the reach of background checks on gun purchasers…The number of recalls has spiked dramatically in recent years. Of the 32 successful recalls in the United States since 1911, one third — 11 — have taken place since 2011. Of the 21 recall efforts that succeeded in forcing a sitting elected official back onto the ballot, but failed at the polls, 13 have taken place in just the last two years.”
Here’s a headline for Dems to savor: “Ohio Republican Party Goes to War With Itself, Leaving 2016 in Doubt” by The Daily Beast’s Dennis Freedlander.

Run, Wendy, Run, say national Dems. Win or lose, she could energize the Texas Democratic Party. Even apart from her much-celebrated filibuster against an anti-abortion bill, Sen. Davis has a really good story, as Trip Gabriel reports in the New York Times: “Raised by a mother with a sixth-grade education after her father left, she became a single mother herself, living in a mobile home. She worked her way through community college, won a scholarship to Texas Christian University and eventually graduated from Harvard Law School…She served nine years on the Fort Worth City Council before defeating a Republican incumbent for the State Senate in 2008…Ms. Davis’s number crunchers are telling her, in essence, that if she can win her Senate district — much of Fort Worth and its suburbs — she can win statewide. It is the only district out of 31 in the state that is a true battleground, not drawn to protect one of the parties…In winning re-election in November, Ms. Davis outpolled Mr. Obama in her district by 15,000 votes. She appealed to ticket-splitters, who preferred Mitt Romney on the presidential ballot by 8 points. Many were white suburban women, independents who were not driven by wedge social issues like abortion, Ms. Davis’s advisers determined.”
For what ought to be the last word on the absence of Republicans at the 50th anniversary commemoration of Dr. King’s dream, check out James Wimberly’s link-rich post, “How Today’s GOP Celebrated MLK’s Speech” at the Washington Monthly.
Jonathan Weisman has a New York Times update on the candidacy of Michelle Nunn for the U.S. Senate seat now held by the retiring Saxby Chambliss, which many believe could be the Democrats’ best hope for a pick up. The relatively young Nunn has already done more good for her potential constituents than all of her rivals in the GOP clown car put together. As Weisman writes, “She co-founded Hands on Atlanta, a volunteer organization, and led the Points of Light Foundation, the volunteer group started by former President George H. W. Bush. Organizing is in her blood, she says. Her first effort after declaring her candidacy was to mobilize thousands of volunteers — even before she develops a policy platform beyond a promise of bipartisan cooperation and fiscal rectitude.”
In the Virginia Governor’s race, it’s all about turning out the base, as Ben Pershing and Fredrick Kunkle report in the Washington post. Here’s why: “Only Virginia and New Jersey elect their governors the year after presidential contests, and turnout typically seesaws as a result. In Virginia, the proportion of registered voters who voted careened from 75 percent in 2008 to 40 percent in 2009 — a record low for a gubernatorial contest — back to 72 percent last year…”You have to do much more work to figure out who to target in a 45 percent turnout election” than in a presidential year, said Jeremy Bird, Obama’s 2012 national field director.”
Alabama Dems have a plausible strategy for ending Republican domination in the state legislature, according to Tim Lockette’s Anniston Star report, “Rural east Alabama race key to Democrats’ 2014 strategy; Wounded party hoping to blunt GOP supermajority“: “The district [S-13], now represented by Sen. Gerald Dial, is one of five Senate seats targeted by a prominent Democratic group in its strategy to bring Alabama Democrats back from near oblivion. And it’s the only Senate district where a Democrat – Heflin resident and union representative Darrell Turner – has so far emerged to challenge a sitting Republican…”This is doable,” said Mark Kennedy, leader of the group Alabama Democratic Majority. “It’s not a mountain too steep to climb.” No ActBlue link yet.
How public opinion shakes out on U.S. military intervention in Syria: “According to the Pew Research Centre, 56% of Republicans support military action compared with 46% of Democrats; 24% of Republicans and 34% of Democrats are opposed…While these are not majorities in opposition to intervention, they are sizable portions of the American public.” Ben Adler explores the conflict over intervention among progressives in his post, “Why liberal America is in two minds over military action” at The Guardian.
In his Labor Day column, E. J. Dionne, Jr. notes that a new grand strategy may be emerging for organized labor, with an intensified effort to increase the minimum wage in the fast foods industry to complement a more fair distribution of taxes. “There’s a new idea that brings these approaches together: “Pre-distribution.” The term was coined by Yale political scientist Jacob Hacker as an alternative to “redistribution” that involves “government taxes and transfers that take from some and give to others.” …Redistribution is necessary, but Hacker thinks that a more promising long-term solution is to begin changing “the way in which the market distributes its rewards in the first place.” We need a fairer distribution “even before government collects taxes or pays out benefits.”
Also recommended, for an even broader vision for organized labor and progressives, “Back to Basics on the Question of Labor” by Wake Forest proff David Coates at HuffPo.
This New York Times editorial rolls out a pretty good Labor Day agenda for Dems: “…What’s missing are policies to ensure that a large and growing share of rising labor productivity flows to workers in the form of wages and salaries, rather than to executives and shareholders. Start with an adequate minimum wage. Provide increased protections for workers to unionize, in order to strengthen their bargaining power. Provide protections for undocumented workers that would limit exploitation. Add to the mix regulations to prevent financial bubbles, thereby protecting jobs and wages from ruinous busts. Adopt expansionary fiscal and monetary policies in troubled times to sustain jobs and wages.”
But The Wall St. Journal wins the award for the most ridiculous headline of the month (August) with this slam dunk: “A Wish for Labor Day: Visionary Union Leaders: Unions have won key battles, but they are losing the war by insisting on inflated wages.”

Dem campaign workers and candidates, don’t miss Nathan L. Gonzales’s “6 Things Losing Candidates Say” at Roll Call’s ‘Rothenblog’
From Stephanie Condon’s CBS News post, “Majority oppose GOP plan to defund Obamacare, poll finds“: “A clear majority of Americans are opposed to the Republican-led effort to defund Obamacare, a new poll shows….Fifty-seven percent of Americans say they disapprove of the proposal to cut off funding as a way to stop the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, according to a new survey from the nonpartisan Kaiser Family Foundation.” More disturbing, “As many as 51 percent say they don’t have enough information about it to understand how it will impact them and their family, while as many as 44 percent either think the law has been repealed (8 percent), overturned by the Supreme Court (5 percent) or are unsure whether it remains the law (31 percent).”
Peter Mackin’s PBS News Hour report, “The Alternative American Dream: Inclusive Capitalism” provides an interesting update on worker ownership’s promise and pitfalls.
In a rare display of humility, Bill O’Reilly admitted that he was, gasp, wrong. According to Jack Mirkinson’s report at HuffPo: O’Reilly had complained that no Republicans had been invited to the event. In fact, many, including both living Republican presidents, John McCain, Jeb Bush and John Boehner had been asked to attend. All declined for various reasons….O’Reilly admitted that he had been wrong….”The mistake? Entirely on me,” he said. “I simply assumed … Republicans were excluded.”
Elsewhere in Republican punditland, “Fox News contributor Laura Ingraham chose to follow up a recording of Lewis’ call to Congress to both fix the Voting Rights Act and pass immigration reform with a gunshot sound effect. As Joan Walsh of Salon observed, even “[a]fter the assassinations of Medgar Evers, John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy and Dr. King, after the gunning down of so many civil rights workers over the years, Ingraham thought it was funny, or clever, or provocative, to ‘symbolically’ cut off Lewis’ speech with the sound of a gun,” reports Sergio Munoz at Media Matters.
At Scholars Strategy Network, Theda Skocpol’s “Why Now is the Time to Build a Broad Citizen Movement for Green Energy Dividends” explores an interesting alternative to cap and trade.
Timothy Noah’s MSNBC post “Why business needs a stronger labor movement” ought to be of interest to thoughtful business leaders. As Noah notes, “The trouble with a capital-focused economy isn’t only that it’s bad for workers. It’s also, more broadly, bad for the economy. Capital’s current hogging of corporate income is doing very little to create actual prosperity, except for stockholders–and eventually it won’t create prosperity even for them…U.S. corporations are currently recording, on average, a profit margin of about 9%, which-except for the fourth quarter of 2011, when it reached 10% percent–is the highest that corporate profits have been in six decades…You would think the surge in profits would mean that Gross Domestic Product–the standard measure of prosperity-was expanding like gangbusters. But it isn’t. Second-quarter GDP growth is estimated at a paltry 1.7%–an improvement over the first quarter’s 1.1% but about half what it would be in a healthy economy.”
In “LGBT Advocates Move Immigration Reform Forward During August Recess” at Center for American Progress, Sharita Gruberg reports on an interesting example of different progressive movements agreeing “to work together to build support for two separate ballot questions last November–one allowing same-sex marriage in Maryland and the other allowing undocumented immigrants to pay in-state tuition at colleges and universities under certain circumstances.”
Re Tim Alberta’s National Journal post “Republican Lawmakers Retaliate Against Heritage Foundation,” keep up the great work guys.

From MSNBC’s Politics Nation with Rev. Al Sharpton:

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Today, the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s dream. should be a great day for America, with President Obama and former Presidents Carter and Clinton joining many thousands of King’s followers on the National Mall for a joyful celebration.
You would think congressional Republican leaders would join in celebrating Dr. King’s bipartisan dream of a nation united in justice, equality and opportunity as transcendent values shared by Americans across the political spectrum. You would think that. But you would be wrong.
It would have been a big surprise if congressional Republican leaders joined the commemorative march on Saturday, since the tone was more political. But today will be more a day of tributes and affirmations of the ‘brotherhood’ part of Dr.King’s speech. Speaker John Boehner and Senate Minority leader Mitch McConnell are not on the program, having reportedly turned down invitations as a result of prior commitments, as did former President Bush. It’s not like they didn’t know this milestone anniversary was coming up.
Today, even yellow dog Democrats should hope they will change their minds and do at least a drive-by. MLK’s dream included Republicans. Indeed many were present for the ’63 March….but that was then.
Fortunately, some Republican governors, even conservative ones in Utah and Kansas, will be taking part in nation-wide bell-ringing ceremonies commemorating Dr. King’s dream and his call to “Let Freedom Ring,” according to commemoration organizers. The A.P. reports that more than a 100 locations have scheduled bell-ringing programs in synch with 3 p.m. Eastern Time. March organizers say they have registered more than 300 bell-ringing events across the U.S., and they think there will be hundreds more that didn’t bother to register. There will likely be a healthy turnout of Republican rank and file and local leaders at these events.
Sad that their leaders in congress have other commitments.

In “Rasmussen Reports Loses Scott Rasmussen, But the Inaccurate Polls Will Remain” TNR’s Nate Cohn provides a sendoff many poll watchers will appreciate: “…His polls were biased toward Republican candidates in two consecutive cycles, outrageously so in 2012. He refused to interview voters with a cell phone, even though mounting research confirms they tilt toward Democratic leaning groups. He weighted his samples to a fantasy electorate where there are millions more white, Republican voters. And unlike Gallup, which is in the middle of an extensive post-election effort to improve its polling, Rasmussen’s post-election rethinking involved reweighting their tracking poll to the 2012 exit polls, even though you really, really can’t do that. Really embarassing stuff.”
Dem policy-makers should give Amy Sullivan’s Atlantic post “Why Jobs Go Unfilled Even in Times of High Unemployment” a thoughtful read, and come up with a credible job-training program. Among Sullivan’s points, “There are some observers who say that the idea of a skills gap is overstated, that vacancies persist because employers can’t find people with the skills they need at the rate they’re willing to pay. But it is true that employers complain they have a hard time finding workers with the skills they need. About 40 years ago, only one in four jobs required more than a high school education, but now about two in three jobs require more training. And workers now really need to think of learning as a lifelong task. That’s a huge shift from the days when you did one job that never changed for one employer and then you retired.”
The Koch Brothers may be unhinged wingnuts, but they can add, is one conclusion that might be drawn from this HuffPo report, which notes of their interest in purchasing Tribune syndicate newspapers: “…The prospect of their ownership had led to protests from people who were concerned they would use the papers to push their highly controversial political views…But sources told the Daily Caller that, after looking at Tribune’s finances, the Kochs had determined that the purchase wouldn’t be “economically viable.” They are not done yet, however, as one of their spokespersons stated, “”Koch continues to have an interest in the media business and we’re exploring a broad range of opportunities where we think we can add value. In terms of the Tribune, the Daily Caller story is accurate.”
Along with NC right-wing extremist Art Pope, the Koch brothers have a big influence on the tide of reaction in NC through the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). For an update on ALEC’s influence in NC politics, read Jim Morril’s Charlotte Observer post, “Where the N.C. GOP got its agenda.”
But the Republican strategy of all-out voter suppression may not do so well in neighboring VA, as John Harwood reports in his New York Times post, “Demographic Shifts May Help Virginia Democrats.”
So what are the prospects for Dems pulling off a repeat of the 2012 strategy of supporting tea party candidates in the GOP senate primaries, which Claire McCaskill so adroitly deployed? Pretty good, apparently, as Noah Bierman explains in his post,”Democratic strategy promotes Tea Party rivals” at the Boston Globe.
Ditto for Democratic strategy in congressional races, as Cameron Joseph reports at The Hill in “Democrats hope GOP chaos in fall will help them win back House.”
The AFL-CIO is targeting six Republican governors for defeat, as Tom Guarino’s Monitor post “Top labor union aims to topple six GOP governors: payback or big risk?” explains: “The six governors are primarily from the Midwest: John Kasich in Ohio, Rick Scott in Florida, Rick Snyder in Michigan, and Scott Walker in Wisconsin, plus Tom Corbett in Pennsylvania and Paul LePage in Maine. Mr. Hauser [AFL-CIO spokesman Jeff Hauser] says the AFL-CIO will not neglect important state and congressional races in the rest of the country, but its “focus” will be those six battlegrounds where the majority of its 12 million members are located.”
E.J,. Dionne, Jr. has coined an apt term for the GOP’s shut-down-government freaks —“The Armageddon Caucus.” Dionne points out “The GOP has gone from endorsing market-based government solutions to problems the private sector can’t solve — i.e, Obamacare — to believing that no solution involving expanded government can possibly be good for the country…Ask yourself: If conservatives still believed in what both left and right once saw as a normal approach to government, would they speak so cavalierly about shutting it down or risking its credit?”
Only Five?

Democrat McAuliffe is up 6 over Cucinelli in race for VA Governor, according to Quinnipiac University poll, report Laura Vozzella and Scott Clement at WaPo. “Among likely voters surveyed by Quinnipiac, Democrats outnumber Republicans 39 percent to 32 percent — the identical split found in Virginia exit polls in the 2012 presidential election.”
At Wonkblog Sarah Kliff has an ironic revelation: “A new poll finds that young Republicans are more likely to have health coverage through their parents’ policy than young Democrats, an option widely expanded under the Affordable Care Act…The poll comes from the Commonwealth Foundation, which has spent two years tracking how adults between the ages of 19 and 25 are reacting to the Affordable Care Act. Beginning in 2010, the health care law allowed young adults up to age 26 to stay covered under their parents’ health plans…The Commonwealth Foundation estimates that of the 15 million young adults that have insurance coverage through a parent, 7.8 million would not have qualified without this policy.”
GOP lunacy hits overdrive, as Michael Tomasky reports in his Daily Beast post, “Republicans Move to the Center? Nope, They’re Crazier Than Ever.”
Republicans have launched a total war on student voting in North Carolina, Ari Berman reports at The Nation. Here’s a good video clip on the topic, via berman, from The Rachel Maddow Show, which also spotlights an 80-year-old progressive warrior, who is fighting Republican disenfranchisement of strudents and minorities in NC:

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Republicans have done eveything they can to rig elections in NC, but they still may not be able to take away Kay Hagan’s Senate Seat, as Sean Sullivan explains at The Fix. Imnagine what shape they would be in without the gerrymandering and voter suppression.
WaPo columnist E.J. Dionne, Jr. has a moving meditation on the 50th anniversary of MLK’s dream, which will be commemorated world-wide next week. As Dionne concludes, “We honor him best by sharing not only his hope but also his impatience and his resolve.”
At The Guardian, Vad Badham has an interesting and amusing post on Australia’s experience with compulsory voting, and why it might be a good thing for the U.S.
From Casey A. Klofstad’s “Talking About Politics Boosts Civic Participation“, via the Scholars Strategy Network and Demos: “My basic research finding is quite striking: students who were assigned to dorms in 2003 where they were exposed to political discussion by their randomly assigned roommate became more likely to join civic-minded student organizations such as student government, partisan political organizations, and community volunteer organizations. This effect lasted throughout their four years of college. More recently, I surveyed these same individuals during the 2012 election, and my newly collected data reveal that study participants who were exposed to political discussion as first-year college students are still more likely to be active civically nearly ten years later.”
Kevin Mahnken’s New Republic post, “Two GOP Operatives Reveal How to Turn Texas Blue” notes : “Local exigencies–finding those 250 county chairs and grooming the next Democratic railroad commissioner–are key in any state, but national trends (the Hispanic or Latino population grew by 43 percent over the last decade) and the sputtering of immigration reform are seen as potentially game-changing phenomena in Texas. Weaver [John Weaver of the McCain campaigns] advised Democrats to focus not merely to focus on Latinos, but also the newly minted Texans who relocate to the state for jobs and low cost of living. “People who are moving here from the West Coast, or the upper Midwest, or the East Coast, for economic reasons, they aren’t typical Southern Republicans either,” he said. “Those people are more moderate on social issues, and they see a [Republican] party that’s out of step with their values. Whether it’s a tsunami or not–for Republicans, you can still drown in it if you don’t fix it.”
New GOP scam: highlight diversity, even though they don’t have the numbers to back it up. Or as Nicole Greenstein puts it in her Time Swampland post “The Party of Old White Guys Changes Its Look.”

From Thomas B. Edsall’s NYT Opinionator post, “Marco Rubio’s Un-American Dream“:

The dilemma of the Republican Party as it struggles to pick its way through the immigration minefield and build Hispanic support is further complicated by the fact that polling data suggests that the most fruitful source of new voters for the party’s candidates is not Hispanics, but the white working class. It is already a Republican constituency, but the discontent of these voters with the Obama administration has been growing sharply.
…Ruy Teixeira, who specializes in analyzing political-demographic trends, has written perhaps the best description of the weaknesses of the white Republican strategy: the core target, the white working class, is “declining precipitously as a share of voters, down from 54 to 36 percent between 1988 and 2012.” At the same time, young white voters make up “the most liberal generation in the overall electorate by a considerable margin.”

Edsall adds that “For many Republican politicians, shifts in Hispanic voting have little relevance to their individual re-election prospects, and the importance of Latinos in presidential contests is a secondary concern.” Further,

The real issue facing the Republican Party in presidential elections is that it needs new blood. Mitt Romney lost to Obama by a 3.85 percentage point margin, 51.06 to 47.21 — that’s 5 million votes. The party can try to boost its backing among whites, a steadily declining share of the electorate, or it can try to boost margins among Hispanics. The truth is that a winning Republican candidate will probably have to do both.
Projections of the impact of immigration reform range from Jeb Bush — “immigrants are particularly important to help create more taxpayers to fund the safety net for the large, retiring baby boomer generation” — to the Heritage Foundation’s argument that immigration reform “would cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion in new spending on entitlements and social programs.”
…A pro-immigration-reform candidate along the lines of Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio will have to figure out how to balance the conflicting interests and values of a white and Hispanic coalition, just as the Democrats from 1968 onward have struggled to maintain — and win with — a biracial coalition, white and black….

All of which underscores the importance of Democrats reiterating their identity, loudly and clearly, as the party of both fair immigration reform and economic justice and opportunity for all working families. In doing so they will continue to make inroads with younger white working-class voters, solidify support among Latinos and highlight the Republicans’ inability to build consensus, even in their own party.