Start your day by reading John Blake’s “Veterans of forgotten voting war count the cost” at CNN.com. Then use it to evaluate the humanity of the Supreme Court majority’s decision on voting rights, expected later today.
If you thought that the GOP had reached rock bottom in dysfunctionality, read Eleanor Clift’s “The GOP’s Kamikazes Are Back” at The Daily Beast. If this keeps up Dems need only ask swing voter friends, “Do the Republicans really look like a party that can run the country? Really?”
Moyers & Co. are doing a great job of “Keeping an Eye on ALEC.”
At The Atlantic, Molly Ball gets on the “Can Democrats Win Back the Deep South?” story, and notes a growing role for new political groups: “…New groups such as South Forward and the Southern Project could make an impact — by providing resources and support to races and states that are often off the radar of the national Democratic Party. A third group, the Southern Progress Fund, also is gearing up to launch in the coming months…”
Micah Cohen’s NYT post “From Campaign War Room to Big-Data Broom” reports on the GOP’s efforts to match the data mining prowess of Team Obama. It does not sound like Dems have much to worry about just yet.
Catherine Hollander’s “Time Is Running Short for Big ‘Obamacare’ Push” At The National Journal outlines the challenge ahead for the Administration: “But Keith Nahigian, who helped design the Medicare Part D prescription-drug enrollment campaign during the Bush administration, thinks the White House and other pro-Obamacare groups are starting this push far too late…”If you don’t build partnerships, and you don’t have third-party validators and local trusted sources, you only have one-way communication of government telling people to take a personal health care decision, and right now there’s not a lot of trust of people [in] government, and also there’s a cost,” Nahigian said, referring to the fact that unlike voting for a candidate, individuals will be paying for insurance under the new law.”
Todd Lindberg argues at TNR that “The NSA Scandal Was Good for Obama.”
If you’re tired of the same ole, same ole social metrics being trotted out year after year, read “Governor O’Malley Leads in the Fast-Rising Movement around Measurement Issues” at Demos. A new indicator, the “Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI)” is being embraced by Maryland, Oregon and Vermont, with other states expected to follow suit. It measures “valuing natural resources and ecosystem services is a staple of GPI, along with other “non-market” goods such as family care-work, volunteerism, and public investments in education, health, infrastructure, and scientific research.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr.’s “Boehner’s House implodes over flawed farm bill” says it plain about the Speaker and his minions: “…Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-Conn.) exposed hypocrisy on the matter of government handouts by excoriating Republican House members who had benefited from farm subsidies but voted to cut food stamps…The collapse of the farm bill will generally be played as a political story about Boehner’s failure to rally his own right wing. That’s true as far as it goes and should remind everyone of the current House leadership’s inability to govern. But this is above all a story about morality: There is something profoundly wrong when a legislative majority is so eager to risk leaving so many Americans hungry. That’s what the bill would have done, and why defeating it was a moral imperative.”
J-school teachers should use this distorted screed as an example of cheesey reporting.
