At Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Brendan Nyhan has a fascinating analysis of the absence of major scandals in the Obama administration, and of the likelihood that the political environment will soon produce one.
Nyhan defines “major scandal” as “a widespread elite perception of wrongdoing.” By that standard, Obama has done very well:

In the 1977-2008 period, the longest that a president has gone without having a scandal featured in a front-page Washington Post article is 34 months – the period between when President Bush took office in January 2001 and the Valerie Plame scandal in October 2003. Obama has already made it almost as long despite the lack of a comparable event to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Nyan believes the availability of competing news has a big impact on the emergence of scandals, and that Obama (like Bush) has benefitted from big, dominant developments that inhibited the growth of reports, rumors or smears into scandals. But totally aside from any assessments of its integrity, the Obama administration is overdue in the scandal department, particularly since opposition hostility is a big factor in increasing the likelihood of scandals:

Obama already faces low approval among GOP identifiers and a similarly hostile climate in Congress. Back in March, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman noted that Republicans hadn’t yet made a serious effort to back up claims that the Obama White House is “one of the most corrupt administrations.” As more time passes, pressure to find evidence of misconduct is likely to build — my data suggest that the risk of scandal increases dramatically as the period without a scandal stretches beyond two years.

Indeed, notes Nyhan, Republicans are already busily trying to fan the flames beneath a number of “stories” that could theoretically become “scandals:”

Recent examples include allegations of an administration “enemies list” as a result of a National Labor Relations Board complaint against Boeing; claims of favoritism in decisions to grant waivers from regulations imposed under health care reform; and allegations that Department of Justice officials allowed straw purchases of guns that were smuggled to Mexico, prompting a standoff with Congress that House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) recently compared to Iran-Contra.

Since a couple of weeks of concentrated conservative media hyperventilation coordinated with, say, a congressional hearing, are entirely capable of moving just about any negative “story” to the threshold of a scandal, the key variable could actually be which mini-scandal the Right decides to make an obsession. If Nyhan is correct, that should happen pretty soon, absent another competing mega-story.

Into the ragged and treacherous landscape of the 2012 Republican presidential contest now comes a simple and elegant solution: Just nominate Jim DeMint and get it over with.
That’s the thinking of a growing conservative band, according to The Hill‘s Alexander Bolton:
Two GOP factions have begun to draft DeMint for a presidential run.

One is organized by Richard Viguerie, a conservative pioneer in the field of direct-mail political marketing, who helped Reagan win election in 1980.
The other is Conservatives4DeMint, which claims to have about 4,700 members and regional coordinators in 35 states.
Viguerie held a Saturday conference call with allies to plan the initial stages of the draft movement.
“I’ve asked him about the presidential thing twice in the last five or six weeks,” Viguerie said of his recent conversations with DeMint.
“I think he’s giving it serious consideration. Hopefully this will push him over the line and give him the encouragement that there would be a strong base of support,” Viguerie added.
He said DeMint compares to Goldwater in 1964, whom conservatives drafted to challenge President Johnson, and Reagan in 1976 and 1980 respectively.
“He would be the dominant movement conservative leader,” Viguerie said. “He would be the front-runner overnight.”

I think that’s probably true, given DeMint’s national base, cemented by his aggressive (and largely successful) intervention in 2010 Republican primaries.
A DeMint nomination would also be highly appropriate, since he’s the living symbol of the very deliberate turn to the right that the GOP executed after the 2008 elections. Once a lonely crank in the Senate, he’s now clearly more powerful than the alleged Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, who jumps when DeMint says “Frog.”
Democrats would probably be fine with a DeMint nomination, too, since he’s been a bit more frank about the conservative agenda, calling public schools “government schools” and talking about the role of Social Security and Medicare seducing the American middle class into heathen socialist ways.
It would save everybody an enormous amount of time and trouble if we could just make this election a referendum on the philosophies of the two major parties. There are very few Republicans who would publicly deny that DeMint is an exemplar of their own philosophy. So bring him on!

The following article by political strategist Robert Creamer, author of “Stand Up Straight: How Progressives Can Win,” is cross-posted from HuffPo.
In recent American political history, changes in political momentum typically revolve around a seminal political battle.
After the Republican sweep in 1994, that battle was over the GOP plan to cut Medicare to provide tax cuts for the rich. It featured Newt Gingrich’s government shutdown and his subsequent retreat in 1995. From that point forward, Clinton built momentum and ultimately defeated the Republican nominee Bob Dole by 8.5 percentage points.
A similar decisive battle turned the tide ten years later, after the Republican victory in 2004. In the months following their defeat, Democratic prospects looked bleak. Republicans controlled the Senate, House and the Presidency and were poised to seize control of the Supreme Court for a generation.
But then Bush and his Wall Street allies launched a massive effort to privatize Social Security — a move designed both to eviscerate the social insurance program that lay at the foundation of the New Deal and to allow Wall Street to get its hands on the Social Security Trust fund. President Bush toured the country to stump for his plan, the Republican leadership signed on in support.
Democrats stood solidly against the proposal and together — with the labor movement and other progressive organizations — ran a campaign that ultimately forced the Republicans to drop the proposal without even so much as a vote in Congress. It turned out that privatizing Social Security — which would have simultaneously lowered guaranteed benefits, and increased the deficit — had zero traction with ordinary voters who believed that the money they had paid into Social Security entitled them to the promised guaranteed benefits.
The battle to privatize Social Security shifted the political momentum in America. Democrats got back off the floor after being thrashed in 2004, regained their footing and self-confidence and went on the offense — attacking the increasingly unpopular War in Iraq and capitalizing on the unbelievable incompetence surrounding Hurricane Katrina. After Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006, that momentum continued through Barack Obama’s victory in 2008.
After their defeat in 2008, Republicans used the battle over health care reform to turn the political tide themselves. They didn’t win the fight over the health care bill, but they won the political war. They used that momentum to invigorate their base and to capitalize on the slow pace of economic recovery after the financial catastrophe that was actually caused by reckless Republican economic policies coupled with wild excesses on Wall Street.
Politics is like war — or for that matter competitive sport. Momentum is critical to victory and changes in momentum inevitably center on turning-point battles. Just as important, turning-point battles reframe the terms of debate. They become emblematic of whether or not a political leader is “on your side.”
Political momentum shifts have an enormous effect on political psychology. For one thing, there is the band-wagon effect. People don’t like to sign on with losers — or political parties that are despondent and divided. Voters, candidates and donors, want to be with self-confident winners — not losers who are searching for direction. They get on the train when it’s picking up steam — not when it is grinding to a halt.
That’s why the perception that political momentum has changed can often become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Regaining the political momentum will do wonders for Democratic attempts to raise funds and recruit candidates for the elections in 2012. It has already encouraged several of the strongest contenders in the Republican presidential field to take a pass on the race.
And without iconic battles, momentum shifts in politics rarely occur.
After George Bush won the Presidency in 2000, the battle over the Bush tax cuts could have taken on that kind of iconic importance. Unfortunately, even though Democrats could have stopped his tax cuts for the wealthy, much as they stopped his attempts to privatize Social Security after 2004, some Democrats did not hold firm and draw a line in the sand. A few Democrats joined the Republicans to support the Bush tax cuts that have led directly to our current budget deficit. Their success passing tax cuts for the wealthy built momentum for the Republicans.
And, of course, there was another iconic moment that most defined the first years of the Bush Presidency: the attack on 9/11. The Republicans used that attack as a huge political momentum builder, and it served as the rationale for almost all of their policies for the next four years.
By proposing to eliminate Medicare, Republican Budget Committee chair Congressman Paul Ryan set the stage for exactly the kind of iconic battle that signaled fundamental changes in political momentum in the past. Over the last six weeks, that battle has played out in town meetings and talk shows across the country. It culminated last week in the stunning Democratic victory in New York’s blood-red 26th Congressional District, where it became crystal clear to everyone that the Republican plan to eliminate Medicare is a political kiss of death.
The fact that Ryan and the Republicans chose political low ground to engage this battle is not entirely a result of Republican hubris or dumb luck. David Plouffe and the Obama team deliberately laid in wait for the Republicans, holding back at engaging the budget debate until Ryan and company made their incredibly unpopular proposal — and then the President’s budget speech sprung the trap.
They knew that once the Republicans had elaborated their strategy to eliminate Medicare in gory detail they could demonstrate graphically just what America would look like if the Republican ideologues had their way.
Amazingly, this weekend, Republican leaders doubled down on their proposal, pledging to make it part of the terms Republicans will demand to avoid default of America’s debts.
Apparently the Republican leadership’s desperate need to pander to the extremist Tea Party element in their ranks has overwhelmed their good political sense – and that is great news for Democrats.
The battle over Medicare — and the entire Republican budget — puts the question of “who’s on whose side” in clear, unmistakable relief. As in 1995, the issue is simple. In their budget, Republicans proposed to cut – actually eliminate – Medicare in order to give tax breaks to millionaires.
During the 2005 battle over privatizing Social Security, the Republican leaders never even came close to actually forcing their Members to cast a vote to support Bush’s radioactive privatization plan — yet the battle still turned the political tide. This year, the Republicans were so cowed by the Tea Party that they actually corralled all but four Republican House Members — as well as forty Republican Senators — into voting yes on a bill to eliminate Medicare. Astounding.
The decisive battle that has changed the political momentum between the conservative and progressive forces in American society has happened — and once again Progressives have stood up straight and are on the march.
Now we must press our advantage and use this iconic engagement to demonstrate clearly that the radical conservatives are a wholly-owned subsidiary of the CEO/Wall Street class – the wealthiest two percent of Americans — while Democrats and Progressives stand squarely with the middle class.

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
Over the past decade, both Democrats and Republicans have pushed major initiatives to restructure our health and entitlement systems, arguing that significant changes were necessary in order to keep them afloat. So far, their proposals have consistently lurched too far either to the left or to the right of the median voter, and they’ve paid for it dearly each time at the polls. But both parties are right about one thing: The status quo is unsustainable. And until they can persuade average voters of this basic fact, the chances that our country will rise to meet this latest challenge look grim.
In 2004, President George W. Bush interpreted his reelection as a mandate to take on Social Security. Middle-of-the-road voters who had given Republicans their majorities in 2002 and 2004 didn’t agree, and they administered a stinging rebuke in the 2006 midterms. When Democrats regained unified control of the executive and legislative branches in November 2008, they took their success as a license to expand the size and scope of the federal government beyond what coping with the financial crisis required. Again, the voters in the middle didn’t agree, and they handed Democrats their worst midterm drubbing in decades.
Now this cycle of over-reaching is recurring yet again. Incoming House Republicans interpreted their victory as a mandate to dramatically shrink the size and scope of the federal government, and they voted for the Ryan budget with near-unanimity. Then came their defeat in New York’s 26th congressional district, a long-time Republican seat once occupied by Jack Kemp.
In January 2010, most Democrats attributed Scott Brown’s senate victory to the flawed personality and tactics of their party’s nominee–even though Brown had placed a single national issue at the center of his campaign. They learned last November that public discontent ran far deeper than that. In the wake of NY 26, some Republicans have been tempted to repeat the Democrats’ mistake, claiming that the phony Tea Party candidate drained support from their candidate. (If anything, the evidence suggests the reverse: The self-styled Tea Party candidate was a three-time former Democratic nominee for the seat, and as his support collapsed in the final weeks of the campaign, most of it went to the Democrat.)
Wiser Republicans know better: The central issue in the campaign was Ryan’s Medicare proposal, and that’s why they lost. But they still haven’t faced the full truth. In the previous cycle, Democrats made two claims: Republicans were misrepresenting their health care plan, and the people would change their minds when they learned more about it. The first was true, but the second wasn’t, and surveys show that it still isn’t. Now Republicans are offering the same two claims, and again, while the first is true, the second isn’t. The unpopularity of the Ryan Medicare proposal reflects a public judgment about its substance that isn’t likely to change very much. If Ryan himself had been running in NY 26 this year, he might have lost. And I don’t see how Republicans can “reframe” the unpopular facts away by next year. Just how, exactly, do you spin a plan that over the next two decades, according to CBO, will shift more than two-thirds of total costs to future Medicare beneficiaries?

Read more…

One of the most exasperating Democratic failures of the last two years has been the Dems inability to turn high unemployment into a winning political issue. To many progressive Democrats the failure seems literally incomprehensible. After all, millions of Americans are deeply and painfully affected by job losses and opinion polls show with absolute consistency that voters strongly accord “creating jobs” a higher priority than deficit reduction. This holds true across an extraordinarily wide variety of different polls and question wordings.
Given these two facts, many progressives conclude that the only plausible explanation for the Dems failure is their timidity and fear of challenging conservative myths with sufficient boldness. Had Democratic candidates and officeholders displayed sufficient passion and commitment on this issue — and championed genuinely aggressive action to create jobs — many progressives and grass-roots Dems argue that they would surely have been able to mobilize the huge latent well of support that the opinion data shows must exist within the electorate.
It is easy to sympathize with the intense frustration that motivates these views but the reasons why Dems have had less success with the jobs issue than seems warranted are more complex than simply a lack of sufficient passion or commitment. It’s important to understand these deeper causes because they suggest more effective strategies for the future.
Why the opinion poll data is less clear-cut than it appears.
The key problem that must be recognized is that the apparently unambiguous support opinion polls suggest for creating jobs is actually extremely misleading. While creating jobs is indeed consistently given a higher priority than reducing deficits, how this particular fact fits into the larger pattern of public attitudes is far from obvious.
As Democratic pollster guy Mark Melman notes:

It is in the connection [of deficit reduction] to job creation that Democrats misunderstand the tenor of public opinion. Economists, Keynesian and otherwise, along with Democrats, mostly recognize that federal spending creates jobs. Not so voters, at least many of them.
In (a recent) Bloomberg poll, by a nine-point margin, Americans said the better way for the government to create jobs was to cut spending, while smaller numbers opted for “invest[ing] in projects such as high-speed rail, expanding access to broadband Internet,” etc. Indeed, several polls suggest that voters judge cutting federal spending to be the single most effective step government can take to create jobs.
So when Democrats argue that the GOP is focused on spending cuts at the expense of job creation, most Americans shake their heads in disbelief, seeing those cuts as exactly the kind of “stimulus” we need.

For most progressives, who generally have at least a nodding acquaintance with the basic ideas of John Maynard Keynes, it seems almost impossible to believe that substantial numbers of voters can seriously accept this genuinely wacky notion. It appears simply irrational. But when one listens to enough focus groups and other real-world discussions it becomes clear that this view is indeed incredibly pervasive. People will frequently say that “Only private business creates “real” jobs. Government just takes money away from the private sector and transfers it to government bureaucrats and lazy civil servants”. The fact that this view is objectively false does not make it any less common or deeply held.
Another leading Democratic pollster, Guy Molyneaux, seconds Melman’s point:

The public-opinion data on this point, unfortunately, is unambiguous…To be sure, voters do still put jobs and the economy ahead of the deficit in a head-to-head contest of their leading concerns. However, such poll questions assume a choice — reduce the deficit or improve the economy — which voters do not actually perceive. Instead, the public believes deficit reduction is an important step for growing the economy. Indeed, other polling Hart Research conducted in February showed that by a margin of 50 percent to 40 percent, voters believe that reducing the deficit and cutting government spending is a better way to improve the economy than investing in America’s infrastructure, education, renewable energy, and new technology.

Read more…

This item by TDS Co-Editor William Galston is cross-posted from The New Republic.
On a slow Friday afternoon, I settled in to read two lengthy reports–one from the West Virginia Governor’s Independent Investigation Panel on the Upper Big Branch/Massey Energy explosion that killed 29 miners, the other from the Urban Land Institute on the slow-motion crisis in U.S. infrastructure. On the surface, these reports seemed to have nothing in common. But as I plowed through them, I realized that they were addressing two sides of the same question–namely, what government does that nothing else can or will. We need government to prevent private bads, such as corporate greed that gives short shrift to mine safety, and also to provide public goods, such as infrastructure, that the market, left to its own devices, will always undersupply.

The Upper Big Branch report makes for chilling reading. Massey Energy’s management systematically ignored basic safety practices and impeded regulators’ efforts to correct them. The federal Mine Safety and Health Administration failed to use the tough enforcement tools in its arsenal, even after more moderate measures had failed to turn things around. And not only was the West Virginia Office of Miners’ Health Safety and Training understaffed and outgunned, but also it faced what the report bluntly calls the “politics of the state of West Virginia.” Here’s how the report ends:

Many systems created to safeguard miners had to break down in order for an explosion of this magnitude to occur. … Such total and catastrophic systemic failures can only be explained in the context of a culture in which wrongdoing became acceptable, where deviation became the norm. In such a culture it was acceptable to mine coal with insufficient air; with buildups of coal dust; with inadequate rock dust. The same culture allowed Massey Energy to use its resources to create a false public image …. And it became acceptable to cast agencies designed to protect miners as enemies and to make life difficult for miners who tried to address safety.

In an appendix, the report lists 18 individuals who responded to a state subpoena by invoking the Fifth Amendment and refusing to testify. They include Massey Energy’s former Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, as well as its Chief Operating Officer, Vice President of Safety, and President of the Upper Big Branch mine. I don’t know how these people live with themselves. Keep this episode firmly in mind whenever you hear conservatives’ ritual denunciation of “burdensome, job-killing regulations.” Life-saving would be more like it.
Although the temperature of the Urban Land Institute’s infrastructure report is considerably lower, its story is no less compelling. It inventories the vigorous efforts our competitors–established as well as emerging economic powers–are making to upgrade their energy, transportation, information, water, and waste facilities. And it contrasts them with the decades of virtually unbroken decline in the share of our GDP that we devote to these purposes. In 2007, inflation-adjusted federal infrastructure spending was no higher than it had been more than a quarter of a century earlier, in 1981. This investment deficit concerns more than convenience and aesthetics, the report argues; it affects, as well, our long-term commercial productivity and national competitiveness. And there’s no possibility that the private sector alone can take up the slack, because not all potential economic gains from infrastructure investments enter into the calculus of individual private actors.
Not only must the public sector do more; it must act differently. At the federal level, says the report, funding should be allocated in a way that ensures support over extended project time horizons. For their part, states and localities will have to expand and diversify their funding sources. And despite the near-certainly that I’ll be accused yet again of laughable monomania, I’ll quote a key sentence from the report: “At a time when funding is scarce, establishing a U.S. infrastructure bank seems like a no-brainer.” It sure does.
So–to repeat–those of us who reject conservative assaults on government do so for forward-looking, practical reasons, not out of obsolete ideological commitments. We believe that without appropriate government activity, our country will be less efficient and productive as well as less secure and humane. That doesn’t mean that we should resist all proposed reforms, even when they involve long-cherished programs. But we must defend the need for government, staunchly and unapologetically, against the narrow and blinkered attacks that have come to dominate our public discourse.

So you’ve probably heard any number of analysts say that you must take early national polls of presidential nominating contests with a shaker of salt. They mainly measure name ID, and in any event, we don’t have a national primary, so who cares about the early preferences of people in high population states that don’t hold primaries until the field has already been culled or the contest decided?
But the ultimate proof of the limits of such polls is the new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation survey that shows Rudy Giuliani leading the 2012 field. Yes, Rudy Giuliani, who regularly led the early 2008 polls before (predictably) crashing and burning in the early states. Rudy’s done nothing much since 2008 other than make money, so it’s reasonably clear there’s not some news-driven surge of retroactive appreciation for the man, particularly among the totally dominant conservative wing of the GOP that would never in a million years accept a pro-choice presidential nominee.
The fact that Rudy would lead any 2012 poll, though, even for a moment, is indeed a pretty good sign of how wide-open the race is at this point. His fans should not get carried away and deduce he should actually run again, unless they think everyone else will drop out.

I don’t know if you are attending any special Memorial Days events, but just wanted to wish everyone the chance to spend at least a few minutes today thinking about the supreme sacrifices made by so many–usually very young people who haven’t tasted a whole lot of life–in defense of our country. And since they don’t get their own day, it’s not a bad time to express a thought or prayer for non-combatants killed in war, or those losing loved ones.

You may be aware that Public Policy Polling has been occasionally conducting “do-over” polls–surveys to see if voters would confirm or reverse the results of recent elections–of key states this year. At HuffPost Pollster, Margie Omero has a useful summary of PPP’s findings in eight states, at least seven of them considered “battleground” states–where Republicans won governorships in 2010.
Nevada’s Brian Sandoval would do about the same in a “do-over” contest with Rory Reid. But that’s the exception to the rule: in the other seven states (FL, GA, IA, MI, OH, PA, WI), 2010 Republican wins would turn into losses today.
The most dramatic swings have been in Ohio, where John Kasich’s 2-point win over Ted Strickland would be a 25-point deficit today; and in Florida, where Rick Scott’s very narrow victory over Alex Sink would be a gully-washer of a landslide loss today, by nineteen points.
As Romero notes:

Beneath the surface, these Republicans are losing ground with independents. Nationally in 2010, independents gave Republicans a +19 advantage. In the five states above for which we have exit poll data (FL, IA, OH, PA, WI), the Republican won among independents. Yet in six of these eight re-do polls, independents now say they would vote for the Democrat.

In separate news from PPP, Barack Obama leads virtually all comers in polling from 6 of the 9 “swing states” that went for Bush in 2004 and Obama in 2008.

Georgia is often classified with the reddest of states, not without some reason, even though a third of the voters are people of color. But the new Republican Governor Nathan Deal has just signed into law a bill which could push some white rural voters, thoughtful farmers in particular, into the Democratic column.
The reason is nicely encapsulated in the title of Jeremy Redmon’s Atlanta Constitution article “Farmers Tie Labor Shortage to State’s New Immigration Law, Ask for Help,” which explains:

This month, Gov. Nathan Deal signed House Bill 87 into law. Among other things, the law punishes people who transport or harbor illegal immigrants here. It also authorizes police to investigate the immigration status of suspects they believe have committed state or federal crimes and who cannot produce identification, such as a driver’s license, or provide other information that could help police identify them.
Georgia’s agricultural industry — the largest in the state — vigorously opposed HB 87 in the Legislature, arguing it could scare away migrant workers and damage the state’s economy

The consequences thus far, are less than impressive, according to Redmon:

Migrant farmworkers are bypassing Georgia because of the state’s tough new immigration enforcement law, creating a severe labor shortage among fruit and vegetable growers here and potentially putting hundreds of millions of dollars in crops in jeopardy, agricultural industry leaders said this week.
…Charles Hall, executive director of the Georgia Fruit and Vegetable Growers Association, said he has been in close contact with Labor Commissioner Mark Butler and Agricultural Commissioner Gary Black about the shortage, calling it the most severe he has seen. Hall said it’s possible state officials could hold job fairs to steer some of Georgia’s unemployed workers to these farm jobs, which pay $12.50 an hour on average. The state’s unemployment rate is now at 9.9 percent.
Farmers, however, say they often have little luck recruiting Georgia residents to work in their fields because it is temporary, hot and physically demanding. To recruit more workers, some farmers are offering signing bonuses, Hall said.
The law doesn’t take effect until July 1 but is already making migrant Hispanic farmworkers skittish, said Dick Minor, a partner with Minor Brothers Farm in Leslie in southwest Georgia who says he is missing about 50 of his workers now, threatening as much as a third of his crops.
Some farmers who work in Georgia’s $1.1 billion fruit and vegetable industry are now reporting they have only two-thirds or half the workers they need now and for the weeks of harvesting to come, Hall said. Farmers said the full extent of the shortages won’t be known until the coming weeks as they harvest their remaining crops, including watermelons and sweet corn. Hall estimated such shortages could put as much as $300 million in crops at risk this year.

Georgia’s pain may translate into Florida’s gain, reports Redmon:

Manuel De La Rosa, who recruits workers for Minor’s farm, confirmed many migrant workers are skipping Georgia for other states, including Florida. He said these workers became afraid after they heard Hispanic television news programs comparing Georgia’s new law to a stringent one Arizona enacted last year.
“Some of the people who were coming over here to [pick] cucumbers said: ‘No. They are going to catch us. They are going to put us in jail,’ ” said De La Rosa, a U.S. citizen. “Some of them were going to try another state where they have not passed this law yet.”

While white southern voters have often displayed a singular genius for voting against their own economic interests, the sheer idiocy of Republican immigration “reform” in Georgia and other states should give rural Georgians pause the next time some Republican leader prattles on about GOP pro-business creds. Redmon adds:

Meanwhile, the state’s Republican labor and agricultural commissioners are discussing issuing a joint statement in the coming days about what they intend to do about the labor shortage, a Labor Department spokesman confirmed Thursday.

No doubt Georgians await the next edition of GOP business acumen with baited breath, while state consumers may not be too thrilled with expected price hikes at the supermarket, courtesy of the Republican Governor and legislators. Here’s hoping Georgia Dems call them out.