At The Atlantic Molly Ball asks “Has Obama Turned a Generation of Voters Into Lifelong Democrats?,” — and answers in the affirmative.
CAP’s President/CEO Neera Tanden and CAP senior fellows Ruy Teixeira and John Halpin have a WaPo op-ed “On government spending, GOP faces a reckoning,” which observes that Latinos, African and Asian Americans, as well as yougn voters, have little use for GOP government bashing and they provide the numbers to prove it. They add, “To conservatives’ discomfort, changes in attitudes about government cannot be finessed by softer words on immigration and same-sex marriage. Likewise, new leaders or better outreach and technology will not solve their problems with these rising voters. Perhaps that is why conservatives are being so adamant and extreme about cutting government: Tomorrow’s political terrain is likely to be less congenial to their anti-government fervor, and they want to accomplish what they can before the tide turns.”
It’s early for 2016 horse race heats, but Hillary beats Floridians Jeb and Marco by double digits in FL Quinnipiac University Poll conducted March 13-18.
Same poll shows 56 percent of Floridians, who have more concealed gun permits than any other state, support a nation-wide ban on the sale of assault weapons, with 41 percent opposed, reports the Miami Herald.
As yet another Bush prepares to run for president, The Nation’s Phyliss Bennis does a good job of succinctly relating the costs, human and financial of the Iraq war started by his brother: “…There was the lie that the US could send hundreds of thousands of soldiers and billions of dollars worth of weapons across the world to wage war on the cheap. We didn’t have to raise taxes to pay the almost one trillion dollars the Iraq war has cost so far, we could go shopping instead…But behind these myths the costs were huge–human, economic and more. More than a million US troops were deployed to Iraq; 4,483 were killed; 33,183 were wounded and more than 200,000 came home with PTSD. The number of Iraqi civilians killed is still unknown; at least 121,754 are known to have been killed directly during the US war…More died from crippling sanctions, diseases caused by dirty water when the US destroyed the water treatment system and the inability to get medical help because of exploding violence.”
David Sirota has an interesting read up at Salon.com, “How to turn a state liberal: Colorado’s progressive miracle is a road map to a much brighter America. Here are 9 steps behind the transformation.” Sirota quotes Dean Singleton, “Denver Post publisher and longtime Republican power broker in Colorado”: “I think (the GOP) is dead in Colorado … It really doesn’t matter whom the Republicans put up. Republicans, in my view, won’t win another presidency in our lifetime …They pick candidates that aren’t in the mainstream … I think Colorado is probably a Democratic state from now on. It is a Democratic state today, and I don’t think it’s going back.”
It’s a little late, but support for filibuster reform is apparently growing to the point where Majority Leader Reid is making noises about bringing it back up…somehow. Greg Sargent, however, is unimpressed and says “Empty threats make Dems look weak and do nothing to discourage continued GOP obstructionism.”
TNR’s Nate Cohn explains why the Libertarian Lightweight is not going to mobilize young voters for the GOP.
At the NYT Opinionator Thomas B. Edsall’s take on “The Republican Autopsy Report” sheds light on the dicey future of the GOP. Calling the report “a remarkably hard-headed diagnosis of the party’s many liabilities,” Edsall succinctly enumerates the Republicans internal maladies as “ideological rigidity, its preference for the rich over workers, its alienation of minorities, its reactionary social policies and its institutionalized repression of dissent and innovation.” Edsall concludes that “What has yet to be determined is whether they are fighting over a patient who can be quickly resuscitated or a patient with a chronic but not fatal illness — or a corpse.”
Scalia is apparently campaigning for lead shill in the GOP echo chamber, an oddly undignified role for a self-described ‘textualist.”