At Think Progress.org, Scott Keyes provides an in-depth look at the Elizabeth Colbert Busch’s carefully-calibrated strategy for winning the special election for South Carolina’s 1st congressional district tomorrow — a seat Republicans have held for 30 years.
Even if Colbert Busch loses, argues The Fix’s Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan, the outcome might benefit Democrats in part because Sanford would be a high-profile exemplar of “The narrative that Republicans have a woman problem will have new life — with little the GOP leadership can do about it.”
Carrie Budoff Brown of Politico reports on the latest immigration reform strategy: “Senate immigration negotiators are targeting as many as two dozen Republicans for a show-of-force majority — which they believe may be the only way a reform bill will have the momentum to force the House to act…Reform proponents are looking for votes far beyond the usual moderate suspects to senators in conservative bastions such as Utah, Georgia and Wyoming. The senators landed on the list because they’re retiring, representing agricultural states, anxious to get the issue behind the party, important to persuading skittish House Republicans or all of the above.”
The white house has announced that the president will begin “middle class jobs and opportunity tours” on Thursday to raise awareness of the Administration’s proposals for a minimum wage hike to $9 per hour, $50 billion in infrastructure upgrades and new investments in manufacturing. The white house said that “the tours are designed to engage Americans and push Congress to act.” Hopefully they will also spotlight Democratic candidates.
WaPo columnist E. J. Dionne, Jr. makes the case that the president’s tours “should be shaped by a consistent, driving theme: that the stakes in this debate are larger than the day-to-day drone of partisan invective suggests…Remember the Mark Twain line that Wagner’s music was better than it sounded? Obama’s program has more to do with growth and opportunity than he usually lets on. If he wants to rally us, he might want to change that.”
Despite a new Republican effort to suppress student voters in Ohio, President Obama urged Ohio State University graduates to reject government-bashing and become fully engaged citizens.
Matea Gold of the L.A. Times Washington, D.C. Bureau spotlights ‘Democracy Alliance,’ a group of wealthy donors to progressive causes, including OFA.
Paul Krugman makes an often overlooked point in his Sunday NYT column: “Keynesian economics says not just that you should run deficits in bad times, but that you should pay down debt in good times…Hard-line conservatives declare that we must not run deficits in times of economic crisis. Why? Because, they say, politicians won’t do the right thing and pay down the debt in good times. And who are these irresponsible politicians they’re talking about? Why, themselves…Here we have conservatives telling us that we must tighten our belts despite mass unemployment, because otherwise future conservatives will keep running deficits once times improve.”
The political comeback of Ohio Gov. John Kasich, attributable to some extent to his support for Medicaid expansion, provides a cautionary tale for Democrats, as reported by Andy Kroll of Mother Jones.
So here’s an interesting chart depicting the geography of “political clout” — and a surge in clout along the Gulf Coast.

At The Daily Beast Michael Tomasky notes “You’ve seen the poll results showing at least five senators who voted against the Manchin-Toomey bill losing significant support. Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire is the only one of the five from a blue state, so it’s probably not surprising that she lost the most, 15 points. But Lisa Murkowski in Alaska lost about as much in net terms. Alaska’s other senator, Democrat Mark Begich, lost about half that. Republicans Rob Portman of Ohio and Jeff Flake of Arizona also tumbled.” As for the next vote on background checks, Tomasky sees “eight potential switches, where six are needed” if it comes up again in the not to distant future.
Further, “…59 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with the results of the Senate gun votes: 19 percent said they were angry about the votes, and 40 percent said they were disappointed by the results,” according to a new poll from CBS News and the New York Times, conducted April 24-29.
Jobless claims are down, although killjoy economists attribute it to ‘Spring swoon” pattern of recent years. The trade deficit is narrowing impressively as well. And the Monitor “What’s behind best April for Detroit’s Big 3 since 2007?” is also encouraging.
At Wonkblog, Brad Plumer’s “Is U.S. manufacturing making a comeback — or is it just hype?” provides a more informative and cautiously optimistic look at the economic recovery in the U.S.
Democracy is running a forum on “Winning the Voting Wars” featuring a number of articles of interest, including: “Playing Offense: An Aggressive Voting Rights Agenda” by Michael Waldman; “Make It Easy: The Case for Automatic Registration” by Heather K. Gerken; “The Missing Right: A Constitutional Right to Vote” by Jonathan Soros & Mark Schmitt; “Expanding Citizenship: Immigrants and the Vote” by Tova Andrea Wang; and “A Temporary Victory: Looking Ahead to 2014” and Beyond by Jeff Hauser.
Anthony Salvato of CBS News asks “Do the Democrats have a lock on the Hispanic vote?,” and notes: “Hispanic households earning under $50,000 were the most pro-Obama at 82 percent, but Obama support drops as income rises, to 64 percent for Hispanic voters in households of $50,000 to $100,000 and households earning more than $100,000 split almost evenly 51 percent Obama to 48 percent Romney.”
At Politics365, Dr. Jason Johnson has an update on Republican efforts to suppress the college vote in Ohio.
However, there are indications that voter suppression has a downside for its perpetrators, arguably costing the GOP more votes than it gains from suppression, at least in certain localities. The Nation’s John Nichols explains “How Voter Backlash Against Voter Suppression Is Changing Our Politics.”
In his Wall St. Journal column, “The GOP Sets Its Sights on the Senate in 2014,” Karl Rove says the Republicans have only “an outside chance of a Senate majority,” and adds: “Last year, Democratic Senate candidates outraised Republicans by $60 million (not including the Connecticut and Pennsylvania races with GOP self-funders). The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee outraised its GOP counterpart by an additional $20 million. Republicans won’t make big pickups if there’s a disparity like this in 2014.”
It’s never over until the last ballot is counted, but do not bet the ranch on this happening.

Tom Raum’s AP article “Economic gains may not help Democrats much in 2014” really deserves a subtitle like, say, “Unless of Course They’re Really Good.” The nut of Raum’s argument:

–Presidential claims of responsibility for economic gains rarely win plaudits from voters, yet presidents nearly always get blamed when things get worse.
–The historical odds for midterm gains in Congress by the in-power party are slim at best. Since World War II, the president’s party has lost an average of 26 seats in midterm elections and gained seats only twice — Democrats in 1998 under President Bill Clinton and Republicans in 2002 with George W. Bush in the Oval Office.
–Presidential elections are often referendums on the economy. That applies less often to midterms.

Raum adds that “there has been a feeling of incremental improvement after Obama’s first term in office. That’s the key word, incremental. Presidents have to make the people believe that things are getting better every month.”
Raum concedes the good news Dems are trumpeting: “Right now, surveys and reports show that the recovery is continuing, although more slowly than most, despite continued high unemployment and an environment of modest economic growth and inflation. Home prices are on the rise, manufacturing is slowly improving.” He cites an uptick in consumer spending and economic growth statistics. He says economists credit Obama’s policies with creating about 3 million jobs, while the Administration claims 6 million jobs added.
But Raum believes sitting presidents have to be very cautious about how much they brag about their economic accomplishments:

Democratic strategists James Carville, Stan Greenberg and Erica Seifert concluded from focus-group sessions with both Democratic and Republican audiences that Obama fares far better in speeches when he highlights economic progress without taking credit.
People “are very much on edge financially … because they live it every day. Every speech needs to start from a place that understands this is not theoretical or ideological,” they wrote in a policy memo. Obama must “thread a very careful needle,” they concluded.

Raum also quotes Rutgers political science professor: “Americans would say, ‘Well, that’s our judgment to make, whether you’re doing a good job or not….Facts speak for themselves,” Baker said. “If things are good, you don’t really need to make any extraordinary claims.”
President Obama is certainly smart enough to avoid crossing the line between skilfully defending his record with facts and bragging immodestly. He’s got articulate surrogates who can amplify his accomplishments in a way that allows him to preserve his dignity. he also has a good sense of just how much he can get away with in terms of explaining his challenges without sounding like a whiner. We will never hear him echoing his predecessor’s mantra in the 2004 debate with Sen Kerry “It’s tough…It’s hard work”
Most voters are smart enough to know that presidents can have undeserved good luck or bad luck. The 2012 vote suggests that a healthy majority apparently gets it that President Obama inherited an unholy mess from his predecessor, and increasingly, that he has done fairly well, especially considering that the Republican party has zero interest in doing anything that might help the country if it also means helping Obama.
Historical patterns suggest that the Republicans will take control of the Senate and hold their majority of the House. For that to happen, however, a majority of the voters who show up at the polls in 2014 will have to think continued gridlock is a good thing or believe, against all evidence, that their Republican incumbent is capable of bipartisan cooperation for economic recovery.
What Democrats have going for them in 2014 is the growing realization among most informed voters that President Obama needs a substantial congressional majority to get anything done. Most swing voters will figure out that electing more Republicans means even more gridlock. Getting rid of a few Republicans on the other hand, just might enable the President to kick-start the economy. If Democrats do indeed have a qualitative edge in ground game mechanics and candidate recruitment for 2014, an upset just may be in the making.

At Politico Ben White and Tarini Parti have an interesting post, “Democrats ask: What debt crisis?” which notes the growing confidence with which Democrats like Sen. Tim Kaine and Chris van Hollen are attacking austerity as an economic policy: “…aided by a pile of recent data suggesting the deficit is already shrinking significantly and current spending cuts are slowing the economy, more Democrats such as Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine and Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen are coming around to the point of view that fiscal austerity, in all its forms, is more the problem than the solution…This group got a huge boost this month with the very public demolition of a sacred text of the austerity movement, the 2010 paper by a pair of Harvard professors arguing that once debt exceeds 90 percent of a country’s gross domestic product, it crushes economic growth.”
In “Germany Should End Austerity, Not Ireland,” at Bloomberg Megan Green reports from a centrist perspective on the politics and economcs of relaxing austerity in Europe.
But Ezra Klein’s Wonkblog post, “Reinhart and Rogoff aren’t the problem. The Republican Party is” cuts straight to the chase: “The real debate right now is with a Republican Party that won’t permit any more stimulus, won’t permit any more deficit reduction if it includes tax revenues, and won’t even permit the federal government to make it easier for people to refinance their homes. That’s a position that often gets called “austerity,” and so cloaks itself in the work of more serious deficit hawks, but it’s actually something very different, and much less coherent…”
Hope Yen’s post “Black Voter Turnout Passed White Turnout For The First Time In 2012” at Talking Points Memo notes that “Unlike other minority groups, the rise in voting for the slow-growing black population is due to higher turnout. While blacks make up 12 percent of the share of eligible voters, they represented 13 percent of total 2012 votes cast, according to exit polling. That was a repeat of 2008, when blacks “outperformed” their eligible voter share for the first time on record.” Imagine what the turnout might have been if there was no voter suppression.
The online sales tax issue is driving yet another wedge into the GOP, reports Jonathan Weisman at The New York Times.
At Larry J. Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Geoffrey Skelley takes a look at state-by-state unemployment rates in the context of the 2012 elections and concludes that “Demographics Overtakes Economy as Prime Presidential Election Indicator.”
Also at The Crystal Ball Kyle Kondik’s “Senate Update: Baucus Leaving Could Be Blessing in Plain Sight” has the latest inside skinny on some key upcoming Senate races.
Historical patterns notwithstanding, Dems are in pretty good shape to wage battle for majority control of the House of Reps, according to DCCC Chairman Steve Israel, quoted by Abby Livingston in Roll Call: “”We are ahead-of-schedule on recruitment, ahead-of-expectations on fundraising, and ahead-of-the-curve on defining the Republican Congress,” Israel wrote of his second cycle leading the DCCC…To retake the majority, Democrats need 17 seats, which is the exact number of Republicans currently sitting in seats that President Obama won in 2012.”
Harold Meyerson’s Washington Post column, “It’s not the left that’s changed, it’s the economy” provides several perceptive insights, including “…Gallup released a poll showing that 72 percent of Americans, including a majority of Republicans, would support a major federally financed infrastructure repair program and a federal program creating 1 million jobs. Nearly 80 years after Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration, it seems the American people would like the government to re-create it.”
As if any amount of “personal charm” would make Republicans negotiate in good faith.

Walter C. Jones of Morris News Service takes a look at Democratic prospects for picking up the U.S. Senate seat currently occupied by Saxby Chambliss in “Georgia Democrats differ on strategy to win back state.” Jones says state Democratic party chairman Mike Berlon is trying “to broker an agreement between U.S. Rep. John Barrow of Augusta and Michelle Nunn, the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn and the head of a nonprofit organization.” A unified Democratic Senate campaign should have a decent chance against the divided GA GOP, considering that President Obama received 46.9 percent of the Georgia vote in 2012.
At PoliticusUSA Amy Morton’s “A Progressive Storm Brews in the South: Democrats Eye Georgia’s Open Senate Seat” mines the same vein: “No Democrats hold statewide office in Georgia, and the Georgia House and Senate are both controlled by Republicans. But, a perfect progressive storm may be brewing in the deep South.”
Nate Silver considers: “The Gun Vote and 2014: Will There Be an Electoral Price?.” Silver works the numbers and charts, and concludes that the GOP’s inflexible opposition to gun safety will hurt them mostly by adding to their image as an extremist party. Silver adds, “For Democrats to have much of a chance to win back the House — bucking the historical trend of the president’s party faring poorly in midterm years — the Republican Party will first and foremost have to be perceived as out-of-touch on the economy.”
At The Atlantic David Catanese’s “Why These 2016 Democratic Hopefuls Aren’t Shying Away From Gun Control” discusses the ramifications of strong support for gun safety reforms embraced by three potential Democratic candidates, Governors Cuomo, Hickenlooper and O’Malley.
This poll strikes me as weakened by a question that asks about feeling, instead of political intentions. The limited answer choices diminish the value further. Respondents were asked, “What word best describes how you feel about the Senate voting down new gun control legislation that included new background checks on gun purchases?” and they could chose 1 of 4 answers: ‘very happy/relieved’; ‘disappointed/angry’; ‘none/other’; and ‘no opinion.’ But no amount of polling distractions can erase the fact that about 90 percent of the public wants background checks.
Thomas B. Edsall reports at the NYT Opinionator on “The Shadow Lobbyist,” noting a disturbing trend: “Many of the activities most people would call lobbying now fall outside of its legal definition. They have become a large but almost invisible part of special interest influence on public policy.”
The politics of the sequester-driven FAA furlough are getting a little tricky.
NYT columnist Charles M. Blow probes evidence of paranoia on the right, culminating in Glen Beck’s recent unhinged tirade. Blow sees a “constant stream of desperate drivel that has fostered a climate of fear on the far right that makes common-sense consensus nearly impossible.”
“Republican effort to rebrand the party takes a hit” by Lisa Mascaro of the L.A. Times Washington Bureau, reports about Republicans rejecting a bill to help Americans with preexisting health conditions. So much for House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s hopes for reviving the ‘compassionate conservatism’ meme.
Not easy to find a credible complement for a president who left the world economy in a mess, but this one will serve the purpose — to affirm the bipartisan custom of presidents supporting each others’ libraries.

Right-wing media bias could soon get even worse. As Amy Chozick reports at The New York Times, “Now, Koch Industries, the sprawling private company of which Charles G. Koch serves as chairman and chief executive, is exploring a bid to buy the Tribune Company’s eight regional newspapers, including The Los Angeles Times, The Chicago Tribune, The Baltimore Sun, The Orlando Sentinel and The Hartford Courant.” Read Chozick’s article for more on an even broader takeover of media outlets by conservatives.
Also at the Times, Charlie Savage reports that Republican politicians are pushing “to declare the surviving Boston bombing suspect an enemy combatant in order to question him without a lawyer and other protections of the criminal justice system.” The point being to make Republicans look more concerned about national security than Democrats, most of whom want to keep the case in the criminal justice system.
At FiveThirtyEight, however, Micah Cohen’s “Small Majority Approved of Miranda Rights for Terror Suspects” indicates that the public may have more sympathy for the Democratic position.
Ilyana Kuziemko, associate professor of finance and economics at Columbia Business School and Stefanie Stantcheva, M.I.T. doctoral candidate in economics, explore American attitudes towards inequality at the NYT Opinionator. They provided survey subjects with a “tutorial” on inequality before polling them, and found an interesting paradox: “Respondents reacted to our inequality tutorial by reporting lower trust in government, raising the possibility that Americans may have reacted to 30 years of rising income inequality by reducing their trust in government…On one hand, liberals can take heart in the news that Americans are deeply troubled about the current level of income inequality. On the other hand, conservatives may be glad to hear that despite this concern, Americans have a healthy skepticism that government can be trusted to do much about it.”
Post Politics’ Aaron Blake names 11 House Republicans who have been placed on the NRCC’s “Patriot’s Program,” a.k.a. the “incumbent protection program,” including: Rep. Mike Coffman (Colo.); Rep. Rodney Davis (Ill.); Rep. Jeff Denham (Calif.); Rep. Mike Fitzpatrick (Pa.); Rep. Bob Gibbs (Ohio); Rep. Chris Gibson (N.Y.); Rep. Joe Heck (Nev.); Rep. David Joyce (Ohio); Rep. Steve Southerland (Fla.); Rep. David Valadao (Calif.); and Rep. Jackie Walorski (Ind.).
Paul Krugman has a a well-stated observation obstructionist politicians ought to think about : “…When future historians look back at our monstrously failed response to economic depression, they probably won’t blame fear, per se. Instead, they’ll castigate our leaders for fearing the wrong things…The key question is whether workers who have been unemployed for a long time eventually come to be seen as unemployable, tainted goods that nobody will buy. This could happen because their work skills atrophy, but a more likely reason is that potential employers assume that something must be wrong with people who can’t find a job, even if the real reason is simply the terrible economy. And there is, unfortunately, growing evidence that the tainting of the long-term unemployed is happening as we speak.”
Michael Tomasky’s ‘The Conservative Paranoid Mind” at The Daily Beast describes the “common thread linking conservatives’ positions on gun control, immigration, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev: the constant need to stoke fear…They need to make gun owners fear that Dianne Feinstein and her SWAT team are going to come knocking on their doors, or, less amusingly, that they have to be armed to the teeth for that inevitable day when the government declares a police state. They need to whip up fear of immigrants because unless we do it’s going to be nothing but terrorists coming through those portals…”
If Chris Cillizza is right that the failure of the gun background checks bill makes it a little easier to pass immigration reform, we’ll take it, sad commentary that it is on the political morality of members of congress who make major decisions this way.
E.J. Dionne, Jr. shares a salient observation on “The way forward on guns“: “… The next steps are up to the supporters of gun sanity. They can keep organizing to build on the unprecedented effort that went into this fight — or they can give up. They can challenge the senators who voted “no,” or they can leave them believing that the “safe” vote is always with the NRA. They can bolster senators who cast particularly courageous “yes” votes — among them, Mary Landrieu and Kay Hagan — or they can leave them hanging.”
Have you ever read an article that so convincingly refutes it’s own premise as this one?

For those who want to do something about the shameful vote in the U.S. Senate yesterday, Kos’s “In 2014, it will be the NRA against the American people,” notes two organizations you can contribute to who are committed to fight the NRA, with contributor page links added: “Mayors Against Illegal Guns and Gabby Gifford’s Americans for Responsible Solutions have already restored some balance in the public gun debate, pushing back against what was once a one-sided NRA attack. Bloomberg’s Independence USA SuperPAC has already shown a willingness to counter the NRA’s millions with millions of its own.”
The seats of thirteen Republican U.S. Senators in “Class 2” are up for re-election in 2014, including: Sessions; Chambliss (retiring); Risch; Roberts; McConnell; Collins; Cochran; Johanns (retiring); Imhoffe; Graham; Alexander; Cornyn; and Enzi. Only Collins voted with the Democrats on the background checks filibuster. Not all of them have announced opponents yet, but Sabato’s Crystal Ball names a few of their emerging opponents. Best bets for Dem pick-ups among this group are senate races in GA, KY and NE. But all would require upsets.
Every public appearance of the senators who voted wrong should be met with protesters bearing posters showing photos of the betrayed kids, and these senators should get photos of the kids in their office email and faxes — until we get some legislation.
if you had to pick one sentence in all the news coverage of the background check vote, this one from the Washington Post editorial board would do: “A COWARDLY minority of senators blocked a gun background-check proposal on Wednesday, in one vote betraying both the will of the American people and the charge voters gave them to work in their interest.” Rarely does the Post editorial board use all caps for emphasis in a sentence.
At The Washington Monthly Ed Kilgore flags Ezra Klein’s and Evan Soltas’s well-titled post, “The gun bill failed because the Senate is wildly undemocratic,” and adds “…For this to change, the first step is for political actors and political media to recognize and draw attention to the problem. I noted late yesterday that in a long report on the Manchin-Toomey vote in The Hill, the words “filibuster” and “cloture” do not appear, even though the vote in question was actually on a motion for cloture to end a filibuster. The defeat of the measure by a Senate minority was treated as just the way things are done. That is what has to change first, before real change can come to the Senate. And frankly, any post-mortem on the failure of gun legislation, however well-meaning, that doesn’t prominently mention the horrifically anti-democratic set-up of the current Senate is missing a crucial point.”
For Mitch McConnell, defeating yesterday’s background check initiative is not enough. he has to gloat.
It’s hard to see a ray of hope for a sane firearms policy in our future in yesterday’s senate vote on gun safety. But Jonathan Bernstein gives it a try at the Plum Line: “…While today is clearly a crushing setback for proponents of tougher gun legislation, overall the effort has been a very solid step towards eventual passage. If, that is, the people who strongly supported today’s amendment keep working to reward Senators who supported them, to make life difficult for those who opposed them; and, most of all, to make it a must-support for future candidates.”
There was a real hero in the U.S. Senate — up in the gallery. Maybe she should run.
I’m with those who would like to see some party discipline, perhaps in terms of funding or committee assignments, invoked on the four Democratic Senators who supported the filibuster. That would be Max Baucus of Montana, Mark Pryor of Arkansas, Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota and Mark Begich of Alaska. I understand their perceived predicaments. But party should mean something. At least “Never filibuster against fellow Dems” ought to be a principle that comes with a price for breaking it.
At least Sen. Chuck Schumer put Ted Cruz in the clown car.

Happy Tax Day! Well, maybe not for you. As Nobel Prize laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz explains at At the New York Times Opinionator blog, in his “A Tax System Stacked Against the 99 Percent,”: “About 6 in 10 of us believe that the tax system is unfair — and they’re right: put simply, the very rich don’t pay their fair share. The richest 400 individual taxpayers, with an average income of more than $200 million, pay less than 20 percent of their income in taxes…consider Germany, for instance, which has managed to maintain its status as a center of advanced manufacturing, even though its top income-tax rate exceeds America’s by a considerable margin. And in general, our top tax rate kicks in at much higher incomes…The top rate in the United States, 39.6 percent, doesn’t kick in until individual income reaches $400,000 (or $450,000 for a couple). Only three O.E.C.D. countries — South Korea, Canada and Spain — have higher thresholds.”
Jeffrey M. Jones reports at Gallup.com that only 55 percent of Americans believe their taxes are fair, according to a Gallup Poll conducted April 4-7 — the lowest figure since 2001. Interestingly, “…Democrats and political liberals much more likely than Republicans and conservatives to believe their taxes are fair.”
For an instructive history of a problematic word Democrats shouldn’t even be using, check out Hedrik Hertzberg’s “Senses of Entitlement” at the New Yorker. “The word, that is, not the thing. “Entitlements”–alternatively, “entitlement programs”–is now the standard descriptor for what ought to be called, more accurately and less tendentiously, social insurance. In the early days of Social Security, politicians and bureaucrats occasionally talked of it as an “earned entitlement.”
E. J. Dionne, Jr. clarifies the role of the Newtown families in forcing progress towards enacting background checks. Dionne makes a convincing counter-intuitive argument — that the Newtown families have restored reason to the debate — while the NRA political minions have pitched emotional arguments devoid of reason.
Joan McCarter’s Daily Kos post “Remembering the Medicare Catastrophic Coverage debacle: What happens when you piss off seniors” is an instructive read, which notes “…See this week’s AARP survey. Seventy percent of voters age 50 or older are opposed to the chained CPI for Social Security. That increases to 78 percent opposed to having it applied to retired and disabled veterans’ benefits. But the number politicians really need to consider: 66 percent. That’s the group that will be more inclined to vote against a senator or representative who voted for any kind of deal including chained CPI.”
Also at Kos, John Perr explains why “Raising payroll tax cap is the best fix for Social Security“: Compared to President Obama’s chained C.P.I. proposal, “…Raising the payroll tax cap from its current $113,000 to $200,000 will generate far more revenue and deficit reduction for Uncle Sam without trimming benefits for millions of seniors already so close to the edge of financial distress.”
At The Daily Beast Bob Shrum’s “Democrats Need to Stop Attacking Obama’s Budget and Wake Up to Reality” notes in a nut graph: “The Obama budget does raise taxes on the wealthy by capping their deductions–which is one reason Democrats should rally to it. And there’s another: it increases spending now, while back-loading steeper deficit reduction, to support and speed the pace of the recovery. Do Democrats really think it’s smart to go into the midterms weighed down by the vulnerability of a sluggish economy? That didn’t work out so well for them in 2010.”
At The Nation, however, John Nichols warns that “Obama’s Chained-CPI Social Security Cut is Smart Politics… For the GOP.” Nichols explains that NRCC head Rep. Greg Walden is taking a new tack: “…ripping the president’s decision to go with “Chained-CPI.” And it explains why austerity opponents are ripping Walden – they fear any rips in the fabric of fantasy that suggests only a cuts agenda (as opposed to a growth agenda) will balance budgets.” But Nichols adds that Walden is one of the GOP’s smartest and most experienced strategists. “…He knows that a Democratic president talking about Social Security cuts is a winning issue for Republicans.”
In Jonathan Martin and John F. Harris’s Politico post “President Obama, Republicans fight the class war“, they quote GOP pollster Whit Ayres: “”We had Obama beating Romney by 11 percentage points on the question of who would do more to help the middle class,” said Ayres. “And that was absolutely critical. Demographics don’t explain our losses in Ohio, Wisconsin and Iowa. What explains those losses is that Republicans were not deemed to be the party of the middle class…”Whichever party is the voice of the middle class ends up winning presidential elections,” said Ayres. “When Republicans were winning five of six presidential elections we were the voice of the middle class and Democrats were the voice of special interests and minorities. And just as Reagan pinned the tag of special interests and minorities on Democrats, Obama pinned on us the party of the rich this time. And then we did what Democrats did in the 1980s — we played into the caricature.” Say the authors: “Class warfare works.”
Mother Jones notes that Mitch McConnell’s “I’m the victim here” act has not impressed Kentucky’s flagship Louisville Courier-Journal, which ran an editorial yesterday saying: “Mr. McConnell has masterfully diverted public attention from the offensive content of the tape–which is the real story here–to his outrage over how it was obtained….He has long ceased to serve the state, instead serving the corporate interests he counts on for contributions and leading obstruction that continues to plague Congress. He needs a credible opponent and a serious effort by people ready to advance the interests of Kentucky and its citizens.”

At Roll Call, Meredith Shiner’s “Obama Budget Strategy Irks Democrats” quotes a senior administration official” saying that the President’s much criticized budget proposals are “intended as more of an olive branch to Republicans than an outline of Obama’s view of the budget and economy…The president has made clear that he is willing to compromise and do tough things to reduce the deficit, but only in the context of a package like this one that has balance and includes revenues from the wealthiest Americans and that is designed to promote economic growth.”
NYT’s Jackie Calmes clarifies President Obama’s proposed chained c.p.i. reform: “Under the president’s budget, the government would shift in 2015 from the standard Consumer Price Index — used to compute cost-of-living increases for Social Security and other benefits and to set income-tax brackets — to what is called a “chained C.P.I.” The new formulation would slow the increase in benefits and raise income tax revenues by putting some taxpayers into higher brackets sooner, for total savings of $230 billion over 10 years…Even so, he emphasized that his support is contingent on Republicans agreeing to higher taxes from the wealthy and new spending, in areas like infrastructure, to create jobs.”
Greg Sargent notes in his Plum Line post “Obama makes Republicans an offer they will refuse” that “The response from liberals to Obama’s latest offer has been threefold: They have denounced Chained CPI as terrible policy. They argue offering concessions to Republicans up front can only lead to giving up more concessions. And they note that positioning to win over the Very Serious People either won’t work — since the deficit scolds will never acknowledge that one side is more to blame than the other — or won’t politically matter over time.”
Tim Dickenson has “The Five Most Outrageous Facts About Our Broken Voting System” in Rolling Stone. They include: 1. African-American voters wait in line nearly twice as long as white voters; 2. Hispanic voters wait in line one-and-a-half times as long as white voters; 3. True-blue Democrats wait in line 45 percent longer than red-bleeding Republicans; 4. Voting in Florida remains a shitshow – even compared to other big states; and 5. The federal Election Assistance Commission is on its last legs. It is supposed to have four commissioners. It currently has four vacancies. All five of these facts were created by Republicans.
So how popular is same-day voter registration, which the Republicans have been trying to repeal in various states and localities across the country? An editorial at The Cap Times says that “In Maine, after Gov. Paul LePage and his Republican allies in the legislature ended the 38-year-old practice of allowing voters to register on election day, citizens petitioned in 2011 to overturn the governor’s assault on voting rights…Maine voted 60-40 percent to restore same-day registration…In Milwaukee, voters were asked if they wanted to retain election day registration. By a 73-27 percent margin they said “yes.”…In Dane County [WI], they faced the same question. The vote was even more lopsided, with 82 percent voting “yes.”…The Maine referendum was binding. The Wisconsin votes were advisory. But the message is the same.”
Micah Cohen takes stock of “Which Governors Are Most Vulnerable in 2014?” at FiveThirtyEight, and finds that “The two most unpopular governors up for re-election in 2014 are Gov. Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island, an independent, and Gov. Pat Quinn of Illinois, a Democrat. But the remaining eight governors with net negative job approval ratings are Republicans, including four who rode the Tea Party wave to power in blue and purple states in 2010 and now appear to be in some danger: Gov. Rick Scott of Florida, Gov. Tom Corbett of Pennsylvania, Gov. Paul LePage of Maine and Gov. Rick Snyder of Michigan.”
Lois Beckett’s ProPublica report “Voter Information Wars: Will the GOP Team Up With Wal-Mart’s Data Specialist?” provides an interesting update on the Dem-GOP data mining race. Beckett notes, for example, “…The [Obama] campaign used the television-watching data it acquired to figure out exactly what shows the voters they wanted to reach were watching, all of which made for more cost-effective ad placements…The result? The Obama campaign bought more targeted ads, while spending less per television spot than the Romney campaign, according to data collected by Kantar Media’s Campaign Media Analysis Group.”
Cass R. Sunstein, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, has an interesting review article “Moneyball for Judges: The statistics of judicial behavior” at The New Republic. There are no huge surprises in the data Sunstein presents from ” The Behavior of Federal Judges: A Theoretical and Empirical Study of Rational Choice” by Lee Epstein, William M. Landes and Richard A. Posner. As one passage notes “Justice Scalia is significantly more conservative than Chief Justice Roberts, and Justice Ginsburg is significantly more liberal than Justice Sotomayor…The authors find that a large number of justices change over time. Of the twenty-three justices who served for a minimum of fifteen terms, four drifted to the right, and no fewer than eight drifted to the left. In general, those shifts were not massive–not a wholesale conversion experience, but an unmistakable movement toward a greater degree of moderation.” Yet, as Sunstein concludes, “The good news is that statistical analysis and quantitative measures are enabling us to go far beyond the intuitions and anecdotes that have long dominated academic and public discussions of government’s third branch.”
John Avlon’s CNN.com headline says it well — “GOP’s cowardly gun filibuster threat.” As Avlon says, “Republicans are doubling down on irrational appeals and trying to block debate…That’s another reason this position is infuriatingly stupid — it compounds the number one negative perception about the Republican Party. Namely, that it is “inflexible and unwilling to compromise.”
Yet more evidence that the AFL-CIO needs it’s own television network: At Truthout MIke Ludwig’s “Labor Report: Four Major TV News Networks Ignore Unions” reports “During the years of 2008, 2009 and 2011, less than 0.3 percent of news stories aired on four major news broadcasting networks involved labor unions or labor issues, according to analysis recently released by Federico Subervi, a professor of media markets at Texas State University.”

If it seems to you that the death of Margaret Thatcher evokes a sense of deja vu, it is because we went through the same MSM myth-mongering routine when President Reagan died. Their supporters pulled out all stops in glorifying these twin reactionaries, who were said to greatly admire each other’s uncanny ability to screw everyone but the wealthy and get away with it.
You have to look around a little bit to set the record straight about Thatcher’s record, because her beatification as a saint of the super-rich is still commanding lots of coverage. But it’s out there for the willing. As Michael Hudson and Jeffrey Sommers write at Counterpunch:

When Mrs. Thatcher took power, 1 in 7 of the England’s children lived in poverty. By the end of her reforms that number had risen to 1 in 3. She polarized the country in a ‘divide & conquer’ strategy that foreshadowed that of Ronald Reagan and more recent American politicians such as Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. The effect of her policy was to foreclose on the economic mobility into the middle class that ironically she believed her policies were promoting.
Pundits the world over are chirping about her role in “saving” Britain, not as indebting it – destroyed an economy in order to save it. Her rule was historic mainly by posing the conundrum that has shaped neoliberal politics since 1980: How can governments nurture and endow financial kleptocrats in the context of rule by popular consent?
…Nowhere in the world is banking more short-term than in Britain. Nobody better exemplified this narrow-minded perspective than Lady Thatcher. Her simplistic rhetoric helped inspire an inordinate share of simpletons conflating supposed common sense with wisdom.

Thatcher’s real socio-economic legacy (said to have inspired the term “sado-monetarism”) needs to be outed more honestly, as it undoubtedly will be in the days ahead, at least in the progressive press. But weep not for the Iron Lady — it’s not like she doesn’t have plenty of defenders to whitewash her record. The critics will surely be drowned out in a tsunami of glorification.
Meanwhile, enjoy this performance of “Stand Down Margaret” by the English Beat, flagged by Ed Kilgore at Washington Monthly.