The following article, by Erica Seifert, is cross-posted from the Carville-Greenberg Memo:
Several months ago, the GOP announced that it would begin a concerted outreach program to groups of voters, including women, who consistently vote for Democrats by large margins. So last week, just in time for Mother’s Day, House Republicans offered American mothers the “Working Families Flexibility Act.” The more appropriately titled “More Work, Less Pay Act” would essentially eliminate overtime pay, putting working families on a collision course with rising prices at the grocery store and mounting costs of childcare, rent, and education.
That is not an agenda that works for working women. It is little wonder that 60 percent of women say Washington is not addressing the issues that are important to them. As one women in Denver told us a few months ago, “Oftentimes I worked 5 jobs, never saw the kids. They raised themselves. A majority of politicians don’t understand.”
While Washington politicians focus on solving crises of their own invention and dreaming up new ways to squeeze working people, our research has found that working women are intensely concerned about their own pocketbook economies–concerns that somehow eluded supporters of the “More Work, Less Pay Act.”
Our most recent Democracy Corps survey found clear evidence that women want Washington to advance a serious working women’s economic agenda. This agenda must address the cost of childcare, invest in education and job training, expand paid maternity and sick leave, and finally put resources toward enforcing pay equity.
If Republicans want to put forward policies that will actually work for working women, it should look more like this:
Jobs. Any working women’s agenda must include a plan for good jobs that provide good incomes, employment security, family leave, and health and retirement benefits. Pay equity and raising the minimum wage are necessarily part of this agenda; the Economic Policy Institute estimates that women comprise 56 percent of those who would be directly affected by an increase in the minimum wage. The “good jobs” agenda must also include job training and education to afford women the opportunity to get and keep those good jobs.
Cost of living. The working women’s agenda must address the cost of childcare. For middle-class families, the average cost of childcare is high–about 10 percent of monthly income. But for low-income families (a majority of which are headed by women), the average cost of childcare was 50 percent of monthly income in 2010. Addressing the cost of living also means expanding access to affordable healthcare, including preventive care for women.
Retirement security. Retirement security is critical for women because they live longer and because they are less likely to have jobs that provide pension and retirement benefits. Well over half (56 percent) of Medicare recipients are women. Older women are more likely than older men to pay for health care out of pocket and more likely to be low-income. For many of these women, Medicare is a necessity.

Alex Seitz-Wald’s “When the IRS targeted liberals” at Salon.com makes a couple of points that help to put the latest dust-up about the IRS targeting political groups in clearer perspective:

While few are defending the Internal Revenue Service for targeting some 300 conservative groups, there are two critical pieces of context missing from the conventional wisdom on the “scandal.” First, at least from what we know so far, the groups were not targeted in a political vendetta — but rather were executing a makeshift enforcement test (an ugly one, mind you) for IRS employees tasked with separating political groups not allowed to claim tax-exempt status, from bona fide social welfare organizations. Employees are given almost zero official guidance on how to do that, so they went after Tea Party groups because those seemed like they might be political. Keep in mind, the commissioner of the IRS at the time was a Bush appointee.
The second is that while this is the first time this kind of thing has become a national scandal, it’s not the first time such activity has occurred….”I wish there was more GOP interest when I raised the same issue during the Bush administration, where they audited a progressive church in my district in what look liked a very selective way,” California Democratic Rep. Adam Schiff said on MSNBC Monday. “I found only one Republican, [North Carolina Rep. Walter Jones], that would join me in calling for an investigation during the Bush administration. I’m glad now that the GOP has found interest in this issue and it ought to be a bipartisan concern.”
The well-known church, All Saints Episcopal in Pasadena, became a bit of a cause célèbre on the left after the IRS threatened to revoke the church’s tax-exempt status over an anti-Iraq War sermon the Sunday before the 2004 election. “Jesus [would say], ‘Mr. President, your doctrine of preemptive war is a failed doctrine,'” rector George Regas said from the dais.

Shouldn’t Democrats insist, make that demand, loud, clear and relentlessly, that any probe of I.R.S. political activity also include an investigation of abuses against progressive organizations?
Seitz-Wald adds “And while All Saints came under the gun, conservative churches across the country were helping to mobilize voters for Bush with little oversight.” A couple of conservative churches in Ohio were said to have “essentially campaigned for a Republican gubernatorial candidate…and even flew him on one of their planes.” And then there is the harassment of the NAACP during he Bush administration:

And it wasn’t just churches. In 2004, the IRS went after the NAACP, auditing the nation’s oldest civil rights group after its chairman criticized President Bush for being the first sitting president since Herbert Hoover not to address the organization. “They are saying if you criticize the president we are going to take your tax exemption away from you,” then-chairman Julian Bond said. “It’s pretty obvious that the complainant was someone who doesn’t believe George Bush should be criticized, and it’s obvious of their response that the IRS believes this, too.”
In a letter to the IRS, Democratic Reps. Charles Rangel, Pete Stark and John Conyers wrote: “It is obvious that the timing of this IRS examination is nothing more than an effort to intimidate the members of the NAACP, and the communities the organization represents, in their get-out-the-vote effort nationwide.”

Greenpeace was also targeted by he I.R.S. under Bush, reports Seitz-Wald, at the behest of an organization heavily subsidized by Exxon Mobil Oil Co., which Greenpeace had labeled the “No. 1 climate criminal.”
None of this is to argue that there should be no accountability for the latest I.R.S. abuses — only that any probe and punishments should be scrupulously nonpartisan. Otherwise it’s a partisan farce masquerading as concern about ethics.

Ed Kilgore has a blast with inside-the-beltway media’s self-importance in his Washington Monthly post, “D.C. to Obama: Don’t Mess with this Town.” Responding to a VandeHei/Allen almost gleeful Politico post claiming that ‘the town’ is turning against President Obama, Kilgore explains, “What amazes me the most about this column is the forthright announcement that the MSM are going to make explicit common cause with the GOP.”
Kilgore quotes the Politico tag team:

….Buy-in from all three D.C. stakeholders is an essential ingredient for a good old-fashioned Washington pile-on — so get ready for bad stories and public scolding to pile up…Obama’s aloof mien and holier-than-thou rhetoric have left him with little reservoir of good will, even among Democrats. And the press, after years of being accused of being soft on Obama while being berated by West Wing aides on matters big and small, now has every incentive to be as ruthless as can be.

They add that NYT columnist Maureen Down has joined the bash-Obama fest, as if she is the emblematic Democratic progressive, to which Kilgore dryly responds, “Yes, MoDo is your representative Democrat. When you’ve lost her, you’ve clearly lost the Blue States altogether.”
The Politico tag team also trots out the “Anonymous Insider Democrat” to whine about Obama’s lack of political courtship skills — “He has never taken the Democratic chairs up to Camp David to have a drink or to have a discussion,” no “flowers and candy” blah blah.
Kilgore observes that “…The new “narrative” of Obama being on the ropes is bringing back all sorts of stupid and discredited criticisms. “This town” has turned on him! That’s all that matters.” Allen/VandeHei also attribute Bush’s miserable record to his failure to observe D.C.’s political etiquette, rather than his failed policies on a broad range of national issues.
The Politicos “come so close to self-parody that every sentence is like a pinata you could hit from any direction,” notes Kilgore. “…Make no mistake: this is a declaration of war by elements of the Beltway Media who are determined to show us all they still have the power to “bring down a president,” as they arrogantly used to say about Watergate, and that not only the GOP but the Breitbartian wingnuts have a new ally in the “Vetting” of Barack Obama.”
Meanwhile, far, far from the beltway, out in the real world, the actual electorate’s response to all the village hyper-ventillating can most accurately be described as a collective yawn, as Charlie Cook explains, quoted in the post below.

Charlie Cook’s National Journal post “While Republicans Rant About Benghazi and IRS, Public Mostly Yawns” puts GOP meme-mongering about the two ‘scandals’ in adult perspective:

… At this point, the significance of each is more in the eye of the beholder. Liberals and Democrats tend to de-emphasize both affairs, while many conservatives and Republicans think that each rises to the level of impeachment. It will take time to know which end of this ridiculously broad spectrum of assessments proves to be more accurate.
…One wonders whether the same Republicans who are frothing over Benghazi would have been quite as vigilant had they been in Congress after the bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut in October 1983, which killed 220 U.S. Marines, 18 sailors, and three Army soldiers in the largest single-day loss of American military since Vietnam and the largest number of Marine Corps fatalities since the Battle of Iwo Jima. By the end of December 1983, hearings and investigations were complete, reports had been issued, and the tragic episode soon became history (other than to the families and friends of those lost). In today’s political culture, such sad events have considerably longer shelf lives.
…Perhaps the best way to determine whether either (or both) of these stories is starting to resonate with the American people is to simply watch Obama’s daily and weekly Gallup job-approval ratings. After all, this is the first presidency that will be covered from start to finish with daily public-opinion samplings. Since the beginning of March, the president’s approval ratings each week have been between 47 and 51 percent, and between 48 and 50 percent for all but two weeks. For the week of May 6-12, with the last interviewing being conducted Sunday night, Obama’s approval rating was at 49 percent, down a point from the previous week, and his disapproval was at 44 percent, the same as the week before.
According to the Gallup Organization, the average job-approval rating for presidents in their 18th quarter in office, covering the post-World War II period, was 51.3 percent. That’s a little over a point higher than where Obama is right now. Bill Clinton had the highest job-approval rating at this point in his presidency over the past 50 years, with 57 percent. Ronald Reagan was at 55 percent, George W. Bush at 46 percent, and Richard Nixon at 45 percent. Nixon had been above 50 percent until early April, and then he began his gradual decline, never to recover.
If Obama were a stock, you could say he has a very narrow trading range; indeed, one can argue that he has had a higher floor and lower ceiling in terms of job approval than any other modern president. His bedrock support–particularly among minorities, youth, and liberals–keeps him from dropping below a certain level in all but the worst weeks. But the equally vehement opposition among conservatives and older white men puts a ceiling on how high Obama can go in even a great week.

Going forward, Cook suggests,

The most objective way to ascertain whether either or both of these stories have “legs” and are beginning to get traction with the public is to watch every Monday afternoon for the release of the Gallup approval rating for the previous week, ending the night before. Although you can look at the Gallup three-day moving average, those have a smaller sample size than the full week of interviewing and tend to be somewhat volatile. As long as Obama’s job approval remains in that 47-to-51-percent range, particularly between 48 and 50 percent, it’s safe to say that neither story is hurting him significantly, at least with the public. If you are going to look at other polls, take a gander at that poll’s “trading range” for Obama over March and April, and see whether it drops below that range. Each pollster’s methodology is a bit different, and each has its own idiosyncrasies, making comparisons between polls a little more iffy. It’s always better to compare each poll with previous numbers from that specific pollster.

Cook adds that such distractions tend to burden second-term presidencies by taking away time and attention from more urgent problems. He could have also added that these distractions also help Republicans avoid acknowledging that the budget deficit they have been whining about for years as the mother-of-all-issues is now rapidly declining.

Americans do love their scandals, as the Republicans well understand in their amping up their bogus outrage over Benghazi and the alleged I.R.S. investigation targeting right-wing organizations. But sometimes we get distracted by the bright and shiny thing and overlook the real scandal, the one that does much more damage and justifies more legitimate outrage. As Jonathan Bernstein writes at The Plum Line:

Want a real Washington scandal — one worse than the (phony) Benghazi scandal and the (apparently real, but apparently limited) IRS scandals combined? Try the continuing, and possibly accelerating, obstruction of executive branch nominees by Senate Republicans.
…Republicans, by abusing their Constitutional powers, are — deliberately, in several cases — preventing the government from carrying out duly passed laws.
…Republicans have manipulated loopholes in Senate rules to delay confirmation of Secretary of Labor nominee Thomas Perez and Environmental Protection Agency nominee Gina McCarthy…Republicans are delaying these nominations beyond their eventual insistence that almost all nominees must get 60 votes. In other words, they’re filibustering on top of their own filibusters.
That’s just two examples. There are numerous others; again, with virtually all nominees required to have 60 votes…Republicans are filibustering every nomination. But perhaps the worst are the “nullification” filibusters, in which Republicans simply refuse to approve any nominee at all for some positions — the National Labor Relations Board, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — because they don’t want those agencies to carry out their statutory obligations.
In doing so, Republicans are not breaking the rules of the Senate. They are, however, breaking the Senate itself, and harming the government…Republicans, by refusing to accept those norms, make it impossible for the normal machinery of government to function.
…This is entirely unprecedented. Until very recently, simple majority confirmation was the norm on executive branch nominations with only a handful of exceptions. Not only that, but both Democrats and Republicans agreed that in almost all cases presidents were entitled to their choices when it came to these posts.
…The only recourse for the majority — and recall that Democrats enjoy a 55-seat duly elected majority in the Senate — is to threaten to change the rules if Republicans continue, and then carry out that threat with majority-imposed reform to end filibusters on executive branch nominations altogether…If filibusters become routine instead of used only for those things the minority objects to the strongest, then the majority will have little choice.
Yes, I know that in the way Washington works, this kind of routine disruption of normal government procedures doesn’t qualify as a Scandal! But it should. And while it’s quite proper for those concerned about good government to be outraged by the IRS story, this one is a much bigger deal, and the facts of it are plain for all to see — in fact, the people responsible are openly bragging about what they’re doing…Now that’s a scandal.

Bernstein is right. The only question is how long the MSM will continue to be suckered by GOP theatrics and when, if ever, they will find the courage to address the real scandal with the coverage it deserves.

In his May 12th Daily Beast column, Mike Tomasky says that “the idea of impeaching Obama is industrial-strength insane. Republicans will probably try anyway”
Here’s his analysis:

When the histories of this administration are written, I hope fervently that last Friday, May 10, does not figure prominently in them. But I fear that it might: the double-barrel revelations that the White House hasn’t quite been telling the whole story on Benghazi and that some mid-level IRS people targeted some Tea Party groups for scrutiny are guaranteed to ramp up the crazy. But to what extent? I fear it could be considerable, and the people in the White House damn well better fear the same, or we’re going to be contemplating an extremely ugly situation come 2015, especially if the Republicans have held the House and captured the Senate in the by-elections.
…I can assure you that already in the Pavlovian swamps of the nutso right, the glands are swelling. Theirs is a different planet from the one you and I inhabit. Most Republican members of the House live in districts where it is a given (among the white constituents, anyway) that Obama is a socialist; that’s he bent on bringing the United States of America down, or at least that he definitely doesn’t love the country and the Constitution (nudge nudge) the way they do; that he’s not a legitimate occupant of the Oval Office to start with. …
… there is no end to Republican figures–and to a distressing extent, the mainstream media–feeding the crazy. [Republicasns] do their base’s bidding, not America’s. How many times do you need to see them do this before you accept that it is the reality? And now there’s an added element. They want to gin up turnout among their base for next year’s elections. And if they gin it up enough, and the Democratic base stays home, they could end up holding the House and taking the Senate. And if they have both houses, meaning that the vote in the House would not be certain to hit a Senate dead-end, well, look out.
I hope the White House knows this. I hope they understand, I hope the President himself understands, that the fever has not broken and will not break. It might crescendo right up to his very last day in office. ….If my worst fears are never realized–well, good, obviously. But it will only be because they couldn’t identify even a flimsy pretext on which to proceed. Never put the most extreme behavior past them. It is who they are, and it is what they do

Tomasky’s right and before any Democrat dares to disagree with him and say “Oh, they’ll never really go That far” they should just stop and think about how many times they’ve said the same thing before in the last five years and been utterly and totally wrong.

For a richly-deserved takedown of the phony Republican outrage about Benghazi, don’t miss Bob Cesca’s Huffpo post on the topic, which lists 13 incidents during President Bush’s watch, in which American diplomats were attacked and/or killed by terrorists with little or no criticism by Fox News or Republican politicians. The incidents include:

January 22, 2002. Calcutta, India. Gunmen associated with Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami attack the U.S. Consulate. Five people are killed.
June 14, 2002. Karachi, Pakistan. Suicide bomber connected with al Qaeda attacks the U.S. Consulate, killing 12 and injuring 51.
October 12, 2002. Denpasar, Indonesia. U.S. diplomatic offices bombed as part of a string of “Bali Bombings.” No fatalities.
February 28, 2003. Islamabad, Pakistan. Several gunmen fire upon the U.S. Embassy. Two people are killed.
May 12, 2003. Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. Armed al Qaeda terrorists storm the diplomatic compound, killing 36 people including nine Americans. The assailants committed suicide by detonating a truck bomb.
July 30, 2004. Tashkent, Uzbekistan. A suicide bomber from the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan attacks the U.S. Embassy, killing two people.
December 6, 2004. Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Al Qaeda terrorists storm the U.S. Consulate and occupy the perimeter wall. Nine people are killed.
March 2, 2006. Karachi, Pakistan again. Suicide bomber attacks the U.S. Consulate killing four people, including U.S. diplomat David Foy who was directly targeted by the attackers. (I wonder if Lindsey Graham or Fox News would even recognize the name “David Foy.” This is the third Karachi terrorist attack in four years on what’s considered American soil.)
September 12, 2006. Damascus, Syria. Four armed gunmen shouting “Allahu akbar” storm the U.S. Embassy using grenades, automatic weapons, a car bomb and a truck bomb. Four people are killed, 13 are wounded.
January 12, 2007. Athens, Greece. Members of a Greek terrorist group called the Revolutionary Struggle fire a rocket-propelled grenade at the U.S. Embassy. No fatalities.
March 18, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Members of the al-Qaeda-linked Islamic Jihad of Yemen fire a mortar at the U.S. Embassy. The shot misses the embassy, but hits nearby school killing two.
July 9, 2008. Istanbul, Turkey. Four armed terrorists attack the U.S. Consulate. Six people are killed.
September 17, 2008. Sana’a, Yemen. Terrorists dressed as military officials attack the U.S. Embassy with an arsenal of weapons including RPGs and detonate two car bombs. Sixteen people are killed, including an American student and her husband (they had been married for three weeks when the attack occurred). This is the second attack on this embassy in seven months.

As Cesca notes, “Nearly every accusation being issued about Benghazi could’ve been raised about the Bush-era attacks, and yet these self-proclaimed truth-seekers refused to, in their words, undermine the commander-in-chief while troops were in harm’s way (a line they repeated over and over again during those years).”

In his WaPo column, “Labor wrestles with its future,’ Harold Meyerson provides an update on what the trade union movement is planning, not only to increase union membership from the current low figure of 6.6 percent of private sector workers, but also to provide new forms of worker participation in politics, as well as economic uplift. Meyerson explains:

…Unions have begun to experiment with answers, even if, as the unions readily admit, they’re a poor substitute for collective bargaining. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has detailed dozens of organizers to fast-food joints in a number of cities: There have been one-day strikes of fast-food workers in New York and Chicago, and such actions are likely to spread. The goal isn’t a national contract with companies such as McDonald’s but the eventual mobilization of enough such workers in sympathetic cities and states that city councils and legislatures will feel compelled to raise the local minimum wage or set a living wage in particular sectors. This means, however, that the SEIU is helping to build an organization that won’t produce anywhere near the level of dues-derived income that unions normally accrue from collective-bargaining agreements. This new approach may not pencil out, but neither does the slow decline in membership that labor will continue experiencing unless it changes course.
The AFL-CIO has embarked on a similar — and perhaps even more radical — roll of the dice. “We’re not going to let the employer decide who our members are any longer,” federation president Richard Trumka told me in a recent interview. “We’ll decide.”
Instead of claiming as its members only the diminishing number of workers in unions whose employers have agreed to bargain, the AFL-CIO plans to open its membership rolls to Americans not covered by any such agreements. The first part of this plan is to expand its Working America program, a door-to-door canvass that has mobilized nonunion members in swing-state working-class neighborhoods to back labor-endorsed candidates in elections in the past decade. In New Mexico in recent months, Working America enrolled 112,000 residents on their doorsteps in a campaign that raised the minimum wage in Albuquerque and then in an adjacent county. But the goal of such campaigns, says Karen Nussbaum, the organization’s director, isn’t just to win a raise; it’s also “to get as many workers as we can involved in winning the raise and hope this carries over to specific workplace activism.” They aim to build a workers’ movement — even though, as with the SEIU campaign of fast-food workers, securing workplace contracts (and the kind of membership dues that sustain unions) isn’t on the horizon.
The AFL-CIO’s plans don’t end there. “We’re asking academics, we’re asking our friends in other movements, ‘What do we need to become?’ ” says Trumka. “We’ll try a whole bunch of new forms of representation. Some will work; some won’t, but we’ll be opening up the labor movement.” Forming a larger organization of unions and other progressive groups isn’t out of the question, though it would take time to pull off.

Organized labor is rightly concerned with increasing its membership. But the new emphasis on searching for other forms of worker participation is a healthy development. A stronger union movement would be a tremendous asset for the Democratic Party (and vice-versa), and broadening the pathways of participation for workers in social and political change would be a very good thing for America.