Gregarius

Feeds

18690 items (18636 unread) in 3 feeds

Feeds (18636 unread)

• Daily KosSearch Daily Kos (13450 unread)
• Dork Tower (554 unread)
• CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage (4632 unread)

Unread items (100)

• February 02, 2012
• 11:55

  Komen Foundation official deletes evidence of anti-choice bias from Twitter

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  The Susan G. Komen Foundation, and its senior vice president of public policy, Karen Handel, who is "staunchly and unequivocally pro-life," have been getting beat up pretty bad for the blatantly political decision to stop funding cancer screen and prevention at Planned Parenthood.

  It appears that yesterday, Handel signed on to the "cry me a freaking river" sentiment on Twitter that anti-choicers are gleefully expressing because nothing makes them happier than women dying of cancer if it means sticking it to the nation's biggest provider of health care to women.

  However, since that sentiment didn't really lend credence to the Komen Foundation talking point that its decision wasn't political, the tweet was deleted.

  But, as sharp-eyed Lisa McIntire tweeted, "This is why we take screen shots."

  Karen Handel is apparently a typical Republican and doesn't understand how the internet works. Nice try, Ms. Handel, but too late. The tweet may be gone, but your true feelings about this horrible decision are already out there and have been spread far and wide.

  Send an email to the Susan G. Komen foundation to share your true feelings about this horrible decision.
  

  
  

  
• 11:28

  A quarter of Mitt Romney's campaign funds come from 41 people

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Rich Uncle Pennybags and 40 of his rich friends
  donated a quarter of Mitt Romney's campaign funds. Yessiree, Mitt Romney is just an ordinary man of the people running for president as a voice for the middle class, and if you look at his campaign filings, you'll see that very clearly:

  A quarter of the money amassed by Romney’s campaign and an allied super PAC has come from just 41 people, each of whom has given more than $100,000, according to a Washington Post analysis of disclosure data. Nearly a dozen of the donors have contributed $1 million or more.

  Here's the thing: If a quarter of the money you raise comes from 41 sources, if elected, there is no way you come into office feeling that your main duty is to represent middle-class people. Mitt the candidate is not being supported by middle-class people in the ways that count to him (like the money to run all those ads attacking Newt Gingrich), he's being supported by 41 people who can give more than $100,000 apiece to elect the president they want.

  Mitt Romney wouldn't come into office saying he was there for the 0.1 percent, but whose phone calls do you think he would take?

  
  

  
• 11:05

  Washington state Senate passes marriage equality law

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  It was expected, but it's always a relief when it actually happens: On Wednesday night, by a 28-21 margin, Washington's state Senate passed a bill that would legalize marriage between members of the same sex. The state House is expected to follow suit next week, and Democratic Gov. Christine Gregoire has promised to sign the legislation. So how did the vote break down?

  The bill passed with support from 24 Democrats and four Republicans. Eighteen Republicans and a trio of Democrats—State Sens. Jim Hargrove, Tim Sheldon and Paull Shin—voted no.

  The four Republicans who voted in favor: state Sens. Steve Litzow, Cheryl Pflug, Joe Fain, and Andy Hill. Here's a thought: Democratic state Rep. Marko Liias recently dropped out of a race for Congress in Washington's 1st Congressional District ... but he represents the same district in the legislature as Shin. Liias is a committed progressive and, as it happens, is also gay. How about a challenge to Shin in the (top-two) primary?

  
  

  
• 9:50

  Mark Fiore - Super PAC Mad Libs

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  
  
  

  
  

  
• 9:18

  First-time claims for unemployment benefits fall to 367,000

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  (Calculated Risk)
  One day ahead of the government's monthly jobs report, the Department of Labor said this morning that initial claims for unemployment benefits fell to a seasonally adjusted 367,000 for the week ending Jan. 28,, a decrease of 12,000 from the previous week's revised figure. The four-week moving average, which analysts prefer because it flattens volatility, fell to 375,750. Claims have now been under 400,000 for eight of the past 10 weeks.

  For the week ending Jan. 14, the number of Americans claiming benefits in all unemployment insurance programs was 7,670,452, an increase of 345 from the previous week. That number includes the federally extended program that provides up to 99 weeks of benefits for eligible participants in states with a higher-than-average unemployment rate. Extended benefits are available at some level in 35 states and the District of Columbia.

  Meanwhile, the global outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported this morning that job cuts jumped 28 percent in January. Employers said they planned to cut 53,486 positions, compared with 41,785 job cuts announced in December. The planned cuts were 39 percent higher than in January 2010. Government job cuts fell sharply.

  Retailers and financial firms saw the greatest cuts, losing 12,426 and 7,611 jobs, respectively. Challenger said the retail job losses were not related to seasonal hiring, and instead were the result of restructurings, store closings, and other cost-cutting measures. [...]

  “Of course, it is far too early to say whether we will continue to see low job-cut figures in government. It is highly unlikely, considering that many cities and states continue to struggle with budget deficits,” Challenger said in a statement. “And, then there is the federal level of government, which remains under intense pressure to cut costs. As a result, we expect government layoffs to be heavy again this year.”  

  As part of negotiations of extending the payroll tax cut for the rest for 2012, Republicans seek to "reform" unemployment benefits by 40 weeks and require recipients to have a high school degree or be enrolled in a GED program.

  Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute says this would be a very bad time for such a cut in benefits. The ranks of the unemployed out of work for more than six months is now 42.5 percent. That's 25 points higher than was the case before the recession began.

  
  

  
• 9:00

  Today in Congress: Republican budget plans? 'Pig-Bah!'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Recapping yesterday's action:

  The House made short work of yesterday's suspension schedule, plus the attempt to repeal part of the Affordable Care Act, rejecting all amendments offered, and then passing the bill by a vote of 267-159, with a weird mix of 28 Democrats voting with Republicans, who were unanimously in support.

  The Senate? Well, the Senate was the Senate. They debated the STOCK Act, but held no roll call votes. Hey, maybe today, right?

  Looking ahead to today:

  The House moves on to the "Pro-Growth Budgeting Act"—which we'll call PGBA, or "Pig-Bah"—today. How exciting! It's pro-growth, which is great! What does it do? It requires the Congressional Budget Office to:

  prepare for each major bill or resolution reported by any congressional committee (except the congressional appropriations committees), as a supplement to CBO cost estimates, a macroeconomic impact analysis of the costs of such legislation for: (1) the period for which the cost estimate is prepared, and (2) the 10-fiscal year period beginning with the first fiscal year after the last fiscal year for which such estimate was prepared and each of the 2 next 10-fiscal year periods.

  Sounds easy! And doable, too! Probably with no extra budget necessary for CBO personnel. Or at least I hope so, since there's no chance in hell the Republicans would ever actually pay for this kind of work. Maybe poor kids could do it in between scrubbing toilets, though.

  After Pig-Bah, there are a few more housekeeping items, including a rule for tomorrow's "Baseline Reform Act" (I agree, baselines suck and are in need of reform), plus the delayed vote on a motion to instruct the payroll tax cut extension conferees.

  The Senate goes back to the grind of the STOCK Act today, with still more off-the-floor negotiations seeking an agreement on scheduling amendments and votes, and just maybe wrapping this thing up before the week is out.

  Today's floor and committee schedules appear below the fold.

  
  

  
• 8:43

  Cheers and Jeers: Thursday

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE

  Mitt Sings Again

  3 hours and 12 minutes in, the Romney campaign rally continues...

  I know you've been here awhile, folks, and, golly, I've been singin' my heart out. I know you're anxious to get back to your lives of quiet desperation. But first, let me sing you the 107th verse of America the Beautiful…

  [Groan!!!]

  Now hang on, ladies and gentlemen. Hang on. Don’t forget that you're lookin' at the new mean-as-a-hornet sleaze peddler Mitt Romney. There's enough cash in my SuperPACs to run attack ads against each one of you individually, so zip it. As I was saying, the 107th stanza of America the Beautiful is lovely, just lovely. I bet you don’t know it, do you? Of course you don't. I do, ladies and gentlemen, and it's my personal favorite. So, just as I did the other 106 verses, I'd like to sing it for you now:

  O beautiful for Cayman Isles
  For dividends from Bain
  And Swiss accounts sealed good and tight
  And carried interest gains

  America! America!
  God shed His wealth on me
  And fed my soul with tax loopholes
  For me and my trustee.

  Isn’t that lovely, ladies and gentlemen? How uniquely American! God bless you. God bless you. Now here's the 108th verse…

  [Groan!!!]

  …which you will listen to because I've had all the exits welded shut. So park your buttock regions into your seating devices or I'll give you all something to cry about. Cuz I'm the new mean Mitt Romney and I eat Nasty Flakes for breakfast. They are, by the way, an excellent source of niacin and riboflavin and the full spectrum of B vitamins, my friends. Ahem...a'one and a'two:

  Hey immigrants! Get off my lawn!
  I'm running, for Pete's sake.
  I'll wager you ten thousand bucks
  Then let you all eat cake!

  America! America!
  Where companies are "folks"
  And fire you is what I'll do
  Then feed you to the Kochs.

  And wait'll you hear the 109th verse…

  [Groan!!!]

  I heard that! I heard that!!!

  Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

  
  

  
• 8:13

  Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Romney's common touch

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  Visual source: Newseum

  NY Times:

  The economic and political changes of the past four years have established Nevada as a major battleground this fall, while adding some unpredictability to the Republican caucuses on Saturday. Mr. Romney is widely viewed as being in a strong position to win again this time, partly because he is a Mormon and Mormons are expected to make up slightly more than a quarter of the electorate.

  But the intensity of Tea Party activists in Nevada, fueled by the relentless economic downturn here, suggests the state might offer the Tea Party one of its final chances to block Mr. Romney. Ron Paul is focusing on Nevada at the expense of other states, while Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum are competing intensely for Tea Party backers. On Wednesday, Mr. Santorum released an advertisement here that attacked Mr. Gingrich for supporting the Wall Street bailouts, describing them as “a slap in the face of the Tea Party.”

  Sharron Angle! No bailouts! Smaller government! For thee, not for me.

  Bay Area News Group:

  "The Western Latino electorate is overwhelmingly Mexican-American and overwhelmingly Democratic," said Gary Segura, a Stanford University professor.

  "Their participation in Republican caucuses tends to be low. Those who do participate tend to be moderate."

  That means that although Nevada's population is now 27 percent Latino, and its Latino voting population about 15 percent, the small base of Latino Republicans is unlikely to make a big difference in the Saturday caucus.

  But come November, many experts say the Latino electorate in Nevada and other Western states is critical in deciding the next president. "It's going to matter the most in the general election. We're a battleground state, a swing state," said Ken Fernandez, a professor at the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

  Turned off by Republican congressional candidate Sharron Angle's harsh immigration tone, Latinos helped Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada, keep his job in 2010, Fernandez said.

  Speaking of thee, not me... Greg Sargent:

  You’ve got to take the whole sentence? Interesting. That rule did not apply when Romney personally approved an ad attacking Obama that lifted his words out of context in a hilariously dishonest way, implying that Obama said something about himself he’d actually attributed to a McCain adviser. The Romney campaign subsequently boasted about all the media attention the ad’s dishonesty earned.

  WaPo:

  The connection between the two is an opportunity for Ron Paul to gain a seat at the table if his bid for the presidency fails; for Mitt Romney, it’s a chance to gain support from one of the most vibrant subgroups within the GOP.

  From a comment at the Washington Post: 'Mitt Romney should throw his support to Ron Paul ...' What I love about Paul supporters is their unerring practical sense and close ties to the 11th dimension.

  WaPo:

  Despite Romney’s dominating win in Florida, it was clear Wednesday that obstacles remain. He drew fire from some conservatives for saying in a CNN interview that is not worried about the “very poor” and would instead focus as president on the middle class.

  Romney told reporters afterward that his words were misinterpreted.

  Don't misinterpret his remarks. He doesn't dislike the "very poor," he just doesn't ever notice them, deal with them, or think about them. And you thought caste systems were for India? Romney is simply a "first principles" kinda guy, as in "life, liberty and property."

  EJ Dionne:

  Mitt Romney can argue that winning ugly is still winning, especially in a contest he could not afford to lose. But Romney’s decisive victory in Florida came at a price. He aggravated Newt Gingrich’s hostility to him, with all the trouble that could entail, and left behind a dispirited Republican electorate in a state the GOP needs to win this fall.

  At least until now, this primary process has weakened, rather than strengthened, Romney. It has sowed doubts that he has any understanding of how average people live and opened up a slew of questions about his personal wealth and the taxes he pays.

  Jennifer Rubin:

  Romney derangement syndrome (on the right)

  But it’s hard to ignore the conclusion that for some in the conservative press there is an element of anti-Romney animosity that is not quite grounded in reason or ideological consistency — it is personal. And other than Romney’s being “handsome, rich and successful,” as Kathleen put it, it’s really hard to fathom where it comes from.

  Gee, it couldn't be his religion, his inability to connect with ordinary people, his diminishing chances of actually winning, or his representing the same Republican establishment that stirs up the base but gives them no seat at the table (in their eyes) in return for their support and plays them as chumps every election year, could it?

  In any case, it's fun reading Rubin, who is all in for Romney and can't understand how anyone (like the press for example), can criticize him.

  
  

  
• 8:00

  Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: The long, strange saga of NY-13 just keeps getting stranger

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off:

  • NY-13: Man. I'm not sure there's any seat that's experienced as much craziness in recent years as New York's 13th Congressional District. It would take me pages and pages just to bring you up to speed if you're new to NY-13; all I can recommend is that you head back deep into the SSP archives and work your way forward from May 1, 2008. On that eventful day, we learned that GOP Rep. Vito Fossella had been arrested for drunk driving in Virginia... and from there, the insanity could only explode (and explode and explode) further.

  Fast forward to the present, where—as we once said of Vito—NY-13's newest Republican congressman, Mike Grimm, is on the ropes, due to allegations of extremely shady fundraising on his part (including, reportedly, envelopes filled with cash). Though Grimm's epitaph has not yet been written, the vultures are already swarming... and amazingly enough, one of them is Fossella. While he's careful to say that Grimm "should have the opportunity to explain and defend himself" and that speculation about his future is "premature," Fossella adds: "What the future brings, I cannot say." The Staten Island Advance further notes that Fossella has "not discussed a possible run for his old seat with his family," suggesting that a run is indeed possible—and leading a thousand wags to ask, "Which family?" (If you don't know why that's so funny, click here.) I suspect this race will get a lot crazier before it gets any saner.

  
  

  
• February 01, 2012
• 23:30

  Open thread for Night Owls: AL senator argues raising teacher pay is against 'Biblical principle'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  I keep harping on this, I know. I say it nearly every time. But at a certain point, you just have to come to the conclusion that conservatives are conservative because they are, well, stupid.

  Via Think Progress, here's Alabama State Sen. Shadrack McGill (a Republican, of course) talking about why raising pay for schoolteachers would not just be a bad idea, it would be against the Bible:

  "It's a Biblical principle. If you double a teacher's pay scale, you'll attract people who aren't called to teach.

  "To go in and raise someone's child for eight hours a day, or many people's children for eight hours a day, requires a calling. It better be a calling in your life. I know I wouldn't want to do it, OK?

  "And these teachers that are called to teach, regardless of the pay scale, they would teach. It's just in them to do. It's the ability that God give 'em. And there are also some teachers, it wouldn't matter how much you would pay them, they would still perform to the same capacity.

  "If you don't keep that in balance, you're going to attract people who are not called, who don't need to be teaching our children. So, everything has a balance."

  Now that's an impressive level of Bible-thumping bullshit, right there. Among all professions everywhere, somehow teaching children is the one that always gets singled out as deserving rotten pay because that's how Jesus would have wanted it. Teaching is a calling, you see, and you wouldn't want to taint that with filthy, filthy money so that teachers could pay their rent or buy gas for their cars or something. So why do we pay doctors, then—isn't that a calling? What about lawyers? Heaven knows defending people's freedom ought to be a calling, not a job. And don't even get me started on politicians.

  What's that? You're going to get me started on politicians? Oh, Lord. Here's Bible-citer Shadrack McGill defending his support for raising legislator salaries from about $30k a year to nearly $50k—in the very same damn meeting:

  "That [previous salary] played into the corruption, guys, big time," he said. "You had your higher-ranking legislators that were connected with the lobbyists making up in the millions of dollars. They weren't worried about that $30,000 paid salary they were getting," McGill said, adding that lawmakers have to pay for their expenses out of pocket.

  McGill said that by paying legislators more, they're less susceptible to taking bribes.

  Got that? Teachers should be paid as little as possible so that we can be sure they're doing it for the children. Politicians, on the other hand, should be paid substantially more because otherwise they'll turn corrupt and take bribes and stuff. Hey, you know politicians: They do that sort of thing all the freaking time.

  There's a level of cognitive dissonance here that can't be explained by mere ideology. If teaching children is a calling, then so is serving citizens as one of their leaders. If paying legislators like crap would result in shoddy, corrupt legislators, then it does not follow how paying teachers more would result in them turning shoddy and corrupt. I suppose if you base your premise on politicians being naturally shitty people, sure, but it still doesn't explain why all the other non-shitty people out there should have to suffer.

  Then we've got the whole push among Mitt Romney and the One Percenters (Worst. Band. Ever.) telling us that we can't possibly tax hedge fund managers or other captains of finance at the same percentage rates as the little people, otherwise the hedge fund managers and other captains of finance will Go Galt and not bless us with their vast, sometimes-apocalyptic wisdom. You see, if these people have to pay a few thousand dollars more on each million dollars they make, they won't want to make any more millions of dollars! Think of the chaos! At the same time, the same candidates and pundits tell us that we need to make sure even the poorest of the poor pay some tax, so they have a little skin in the game.

  The common theme is that the rich and powerful need to be rewarded more greatly, less they instead turn to corrupt or apathetic behaviors, and that the poor need to be squeezed more tightly in order to prevent those same moral hazards of corruption or laziness. Apparently, the rich and poor no longer even share the same brain structure, given that the social prescriptions for the two groups are entirely contradictory.

  
  Yes, the only common theme, from powerful conservatives, is that whatever they happen to propose in any given moment will be entirely self-serving. Conservative legislators need to pay themselves more money, because they deserve to be rewarded. Conservative rich people need to pay less taxes, because they goddamn feel like paying less taxes. Conservative corporations (I'm not sure I know of a liberal one—something about dedicating your existence to raw profit seems to fit right in with conservatism) need fewer regulations, because regulations are hard to deal with. Conservatives want everyone else to get paid less, have fewer rights, have fewer legal protections, and so on and so forth because those other people are (1) immoral, (2) benefiting too much from the tax dollars of good conservatives, or (3) because suck it, that's why.

  A lack of empathy explains a lot of it. A nearly sociopathic lack of empathy or concern for others would explain a great deal of it indeed, especially among many conservative leaders. As supposed ideology, however, I have no patience for it anymore. I used to at least respect the notion of conservatism as philosophy, and at least recognize some raw pragmatic value behind the premise, but this version of conservatism is overtly regressive, not conservative. It lacks any coherent point other than the self-centeredness of the practitioner.

  But then I hear people like Alabama State Sen. Shadrack McGill talking about how paying teachers a living wage would be violating a "Biblical principle," while paying legislators a living wage is a damn fine idea, and the far simpler explanation rears its head. Most of these people aren't ideological about anything. They're just profoundly stupid people. They're not conservative, they're just self-indulgent scolds or self-interested collectors of public power. They're only "conservative" because that's the ideology that will best support stringing together random words to accomplish those goals.

  Could we use their own arguments against them, and would those arguments gain leverage? Let's tell Mr. McGill that if we do not raise the pay of our teachers, our teachers will be reduced to selling drugs to our children. Or will be more prone to passing children in exchange for cash bribes from parents. Or, what the hell, will be more likely to sell our children into slavery during the lunch break. If we don't pay teachers the same wages we pay our legislators, our teachers might act as corrupt as legislators do!

  Would it work? Of course not. It would make their little heads explode with outrage, as they contemplated all these new conspiracy theories, but of course they would not embrace the same basic economic principles for schoolteachers as they do for politicians, or hedge fund managers, or the entire oil industry. Again, there is nothing close to consistency in the minds of people like Sen. McGill. Doesn't enter his foggy head. Do what you want, cite the Bible a few times, and call it done, but large swaths of America has attempted to win arguments with conservatism by citing facts or science or logical conclusions, and it never does a damn thing. Climate change can't be happening because (insert Jesus reason here), or last decade's Bush and Republican policies didn't balloon the deficit because (magical timespace distortion putting Obama in charge eight years before he was elected president). There's no winning when your opponents pride themselves on not being consistent from one issue to the next, or on not listening to knowledgeable opinions of people who might have studied the matter more than they have.

  Sometimes I get people scolding me for being mean to conservatives. Frankly, I just don't care anymore. I'm just too tired of it. Many of us were called traitors for not believing that yellowcake uranium meant we had to go to war with Iraq because also al Qaeda and/or freedom fries and/or strategery or whatever the hell the eventual argument was. Not a day seems to go by now where some prominent, high-level Republican isn't accusing Obama of wanting to "destroy America" or "hurt the economy" or whatever else the scary black man is supposedly doing now that was all perfectly reasonable, banal stuff back then. There's no ideological core there. Perhaps there once was, but at present, among the power brokers of policy, of punditry, and of the wider base, it doesn't exist. The calls for smaller government end up with a larger government, the calls for reducing the deficit get replaced with massive deficits, the calls for individual freedoms or states' rights or whatever other crap is being peddled one moment gets just as easily discarded the next.

  The one remaining consistent principle—tax cuts for rich people, and screw everything else—is not an ideology. At least, it's not one that deserves to be taken seriously.
   

  
  Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

  In the wake of this week's House vote on the Obama economic recovery package, we learn that our brave new post-partisan world, as mcjoan wrote this afternoon, sure looks awfully similar to the old bitterly partisan world we've always lived in. And, as ever, we have the Republican Party to thank for this.

  Let’s not pretend that the House bill, which passed 244-188 with precisely zero Republican votes, was exactly a shining moment for the party (although the fact that it has passed at all is certainly something of a victory for the administration). House Republicans see this as their own victory, and for the short term, they may be right.

  They've managed to exact major concessions from the administration and House leadership on the $819 billion stimulus package, including the excision of family planning, of funding for public works projects on the National Mall, and the addition of major tax cuts for businesses...and proceeded to vote unanimously against the package anyway. Furthermore, they managed to turn the stimulus into a political wedge issue, even after winning on the oh-so-sacred tax cuts for big business (apparently the only issue of any consequence to today's Republican Party). It's an impressive, if cynical, example of political gamesmanship. It does not, however, have to be yet another case of the Democratic Charlie Brown trying once again to kick Lucy’s football. In fact, there’s no reason the administration and party leadership can’t use the stimulus vote as an opportunity.
  

  Tweet of the Day:

  

  High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here.

  
  

  
• 20:30

  Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap: Resuming the Mitt Romney inevitability watch (yet again)

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  

  In economics, the proper term would probably be a "lagging indicator". Another way to put it, gramatically awkward though it might be, would be to call it a "pre-bounce".

  Whatever you want to call it, Mitt Romney had a surge in today's Gallup national tracker, despite the fact that virtually all of the respondents in the poll chimed in before the polls closed yesterday in Florida, where Romney swept to a fourteen-point win.

  That was the only primary-level polling of the day, but it was plenty noteworthy:

  GALLUP (National Tracking): Romney 31, Gingrich 26, Santorum 16, Paul 11
  

  On the general election front, Barack Obama's numbers continue a trend we have seen throughout 2012, which (put simply) is that his numbers look a hell of a lot better than they did in 2011:

  NATIONAL (Rasmussen): Obama d. Romney (47-43); Obama d. Gingrich (50-38)

  OHIO (PPP): Obama d. Santorum (48-42); Obama d. Romney (49-42); Obama d. Paul (48-38); Obama d. Gingrich (51-39)
  

  Some thoughts on Romney inevitability, the president, and what that Ohio poll might mean after the jump.

  
  

  
• 20:00

  Sen. Mitch McConnell: Obama got 'everything he wanted' from the Senate

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Sen. Mitch McConnell (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters)
  I swear, Mitch McConnell might spend more time on the Sunday talk shows than he does in the Senate. The latest wisdom being parceled out by Hell's favorite box turtle is that the Senate has given Barack Obama everything he asked for, so the administration has no reason to complain:

  The White House has “been trying to pretend like the President just showed up yesterday, just got sworn in and started fresh,” McConnell declared Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union. “In fact, he’s been in office for three years. He got everything he wanted from a completely compliant Congress for two of those three years… We are living in the Obama economy.”

  So McConnell is saying that Congress, in 2009-2010, was completely compliant? Wow. That's an impressive claim indeed. I remember filibusters galore, and near-blanket holds on presidential appointments, and a fight over health care that had whole segments of America convinced that "death panels" were coming to cart away grandma. I also seem to remember a stimulus that was gutted and replaced in large part with pointless tax cuts, and hostage-taking, always the damn hostage taking, and always centered around making sure the deficit-ballooning Bush tax cuts would never, ever expire.

  It's not surprising that Mitch McConnell is a gigantic liar; that seems to be the job qualification, these days. I suppose it's also not surprising that he's just so darn good at it, for the same reason. But this is the same Mitch McConnell that, along with other key members of his party, went out of their way to explain how blocking Obama at every turn was the Republican strategy, from day one of his presidency. Gridlock was the plan, and the goal.

  So what the hell, let's get PolitiFact on this one. Or better yet, maybe the press corps itself can give Mitch McConnell a ring on the telephone. Or perhaps maybe they can just stop having him on these shows if he's going to spend the entire time dreaming up magical fantasy histories that suggest he's spent the entirety of his recent career on LSD. If he thinks that his Senate, the one he sits his ass down in every day (well, every other day, or perhaps once a week, except during non-recess recesses when nobody comes in at all), has given Obama "everything he wanted," that's probably a sign of some sort of serious medical condition.

  
  

  
• 19:32

  The Republican House reaches new low in wasting time on pointless legislation

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Logo from Blog for Arizona Another productive day in the Republican House of Representatives, in which not a single job was created. They had a full day of debate on utterly meaningless legislation.

  They voted to repeal the CLASS Act from the Affordable Care Act. This was unnecessary, because the administration has already decided to shelve the program because of its costs. The Senate is expected to ignore this bill.

  They also voted to freeze federal workers' pay for one more year, a vote that really was about trying to make Democrats look bad if they chose to stick up for federal employees who haven't had a raise in two years. They got 72 Democrats. They're going to try to get this as a provision in the payroll tax cut extension bill, undercutting President Obama's budget that includes a 0.5 percent increase in pay for federal workers.

  And finally, they proved yet again how much they despise low-income people by advancing the idea that they all waste the taxpayer's dollars byblowing their welfare on booze and lap dances. Yes, they passed the profoundly insulting "strip club" bill, 395-27.

  And no, no Democrat introduced an amendment that would prevent political committees from spending funds at bondage-themed lesbian strip clubs. A sadly lost opportunity.

  
  

  
• 18:08

  Why doesn't the Komen Foundation sever ties with Bank of America?

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Komen & Bank of America: A profitable partnership that
  turns a blind eye to fraud investigations across the country

  The Komen Foundation's public rationale for defunding lifesaving services at Planned Parenthood clinics throughout the country, as summed up by the press, "is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress—a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups."

  According to Komen's spokesperson, the charity's new policy bars grants to organizations that are under such investigations. Specifically, Komen has decided to sever financial ties if a grant applicant or any of its affiliates is "currently under a local, state or federal formal investigation for financial or administrative impropriety or fraud."

  When the money flows out of Komen to clinics to pay for mammograms and other screenings, Komen has decided to rely on the existence of an "investigation"--meritorious or not, politically motivated or not--to justify its defunding.

  With respect to the money flowing in to Komen?

  That's a whole other story.

  Take, for example, Bank of America, a Komen "corporate partner":

  Bank of America and Susan G. Komen™ are proud to have partnered to bring an end to breast cancer. Like the millions of mothers, daughters, families and friends who have been affected by this disease, we want to work together to put an end to this disease. From February 2012 to May 2015, Bank of America is guaranteeing a minimum of $1,000,000 to Susan G. Komen™ in conjunction with its Pink Ribbon Banking products. Since 2009, Bank of America has contributed more than $2.7 million to Susan G. Komen™ in conjunction with this program.

  Yes, that's the same Bank of America that is "currently under a local, state or federal formal investigation for financial or administrative impropriety or fraud." Here's a sampling of what Bank of America is facing:

  • In New York, Bank of America is being investigated for "fraudulently steered homeowners into overpriced insurance policies."
  • In California and Nevada, Bank of America is under investigation for "foreclosure fraud and other wrongdoing in the mortgage markets, including the packaging and selling of mortgage-backed securities by Wall Street players and scams by smaller players offering to help troubled borrower."
  • In Arizona, Bank of America is under investigation for its loan modification practices.
  • And, of course,  the federal government's new mortgage crisis unit will be investigating Bank of America's conduct leading up to the real estate crisis.

  To sum up, Komen is perfectly content with accepting millions from an entity under investigation for fraud across the country but when it comes to dispensing a portion of those and other funds to an entity that saves lives but that's facing a sham of an investigation, Komen draws the line.

  Now it's your turn to draw a line as well.

  Send an email to the Susan G. Komen Foundation and tell them what you think of this decision.
  

  
  

  
• 17:50

  Newt Gingrich's science fiction

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Editor's note: After the success of the recent Daily Kos fundraiser, Markos gave me the go-ahead to add some new cartoonists to our lineup.  Today marks the debut of Brian McFadden, the creator of the alt-weekly comic strip Big Fat Whale, and more recently, a weekly contributor to the New York Times' Sunday Review.  I'm a huge fan of his absurdist humor and offbeat insight, and couldn't be more thrilled that he'll be part of our new "afternoon shift."  Please give him a hearty round of virtual applause -- and check back at this time Friday for our final comics announcement of the week.  --Tom Tomorrow  

  
  Click to enlarge.

  
  

  
• 16:55

  Leon Panetta: U.S. to end Afghanistan combat role by mid-2013

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  U.S. soldiers patrol in the eastern city of Jalalabad, Jan. 19, 2012. (Omar Sobhani/Reuters) I'd love to see the U.S. end ALL roles in Afghanistan by the end of next week, but this at least gives us a light at the end of the tunnel.

  In a major milestone toward ending a decade of war in Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta said on Wednesday that American forces would step back from a combat role there as early as mid-2013, more than a year before all American troops are scheduled to come home.

  There are currently 90,000 troops left in Afghanistan, with a batch of 22,000 due home by the fall. There will be 68,000 left, scheduled to be completely out by the end of 2014.

  Mr. Panetta offered no details of what stepping back from combat would mean, saying only that the troops would move into an “advise-and-assist” role to Afghanistan’s security forces. Such definitions are typically murky, particularly in a country like Afghanistan, where American forces are spread widely among small bases across the desert, farmland and mountains, and where the native security forces have a mixed record of success at best.

  At last count, American forces have suffered 1,889 killed in action in Afghanistan a number that rises to 2,882 when you include other allied forces, and untold hundreds of thousands if you include Afghans themselves (remember them?). We lost 25 soldiers in January of this year alone.

  Dragging this thing out for over another year (and more) is going to get a lot more good people killed. Not that anyone cares much anymore.

  
  

  
• 16:19

  Taco Mayor II: Electric Boogaloo

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Remember this guy?

  Well, after discussing his interesting theory on eating tacos to heal racial rifts, he's back for seconds.

  In an extensive discussion that followed a reporter’s observation that [East Haven, CT, Mayor Joseph] Maturo didn’t appoint any of the Ecuadoreans who appear to make up the bulk of East Haven’s fast-growing Latino community and own most of the Latino businesses along Main Street, Maturo questioned why anyone would need to choose “a certain type of Latino.”

  “If there’s a certain type of Latino that I should have picked, well then let somebody write it down on paper,” Maturo said. “‘I want a 5-foot-2, I want a certain sex.’ You tell me what you guys want. You want me to order it?” [...]

   “I brought in a Latino. Is he not dark enough for you? Light enough for you? I don’t know. ... I wouldn’t have said that.”

  Yeah, all that stuff is terrible. But here's the best part. 

  Remember, Maturo said he would heal the racial divides in his community by "eating tacos." Tacos are obviously Mexican.

  The Latinos in his town are Ecuadorian. There is even an Ecuadorian consulate in next-door New Haven.

  Now I know this is complicated for Republicans like Maturo, but Ecuadorians are not Mexicans! Amazing, huh? So by saying he was going to eat tacos to heal the rift caused by his thuggish police force, he was being an even bigger clueless dick than we ever imagined possible.

  (Via TPM)

  
  

  
• 15:43

  Funny Republican speechifying

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Someone forgot to tell Newt he lost. (Octavian Cantilli/Reuters) If you were lucky enough to miss the post-Florida primary night speeches from Mitt Romneybot and Newt Gingrich, here are some select choice snippets.

  MITT ROMNEY:

  This campaign is about more than replacing a President. It is about saving the soul of America. President Obama and I have two very different visions of America.

  You know who else has a different vision of America than Mitt Romney?

  Mitt Romney.

  
  

  
• 15:36

  House Republicans play politics with federal worker pay freeze

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Speaker John Boehner's House takes time out from protecting millionaires to screw federal employees, Democrats. (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
  It's a stellar day in the House of Representatives. Denigrating poor people, repealing health care reform, and putting the hurt on the middle class, as usual.

  The latter is a particularly pernicious demonstration of trying to score political points. They're attempting to extend the federal workers pay freeze by one more year, and they're doing it in a way to try to make Democrats look bad. Roll Call [sub. required] reports that they included a Congressional pay freeze in the bill, a provision which, as Democrats point out, could be handled as a separate bill.

  “I would favor a stand-alone bill that would cut Congressional salaries as I have consistently done since I’ve been in Congress, but I’m not going to penalize federal employees,” said Rep. Gerry Connolly, a Democrat who represents a district in Northern Virginia that is home to many federal employees. [...]

  At a weekly meeting with reporters Tuesday, House Minority WhipSteny Hoyer (D-Md.) accused Republicans of including the Congressional pay freeze extension in the legislation as an attempt to force Democrats’ hands.
  “To include [in the bill] a freeze of our salary is very clever. ... It will be perceived as, if you’re voting against the bill, you’re voting to raise your own salary,” Hoyer said. “A very good 30-second ad.”

  The federal worker pay freeze, imposed by President Obama two years ago, is still in effect for this year. So this legislation is at best gratuitous.

  So rather than doing anything that might actually help real people, Republicans are working hard to make sure that the only middle class people in America who don't have to struggle quite as much as their private sector counterparts feel some pain, too.

  The vote will occur at the end of the day. Since it's being presented under a suspension of the rules, it will require a two-thirds majority vote, requiring about 50 Democratic votes for passage.

  
  

  
• 15:30

  American Airlines planning 13,000 layoffs, wage and benefit cuts for remaining workers

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  American Airlines is looking to make massive cuts to its workforce as it goes through bankruptcy. Really massive:

  [I]t wanted a 20 percent reduction in salaries and benefits from its employees as well as a termination of their pension plans. It also said it wanted to cut about 13,000 workers, or 16 percent of its current work force.

  The company, which filed for bankruptcy court protection in November, said it aimed to reduce overall costs by $2 billion a year, including $1.25 billion in employee savings. [...]

  As to the job cuts, American said it was seeking the biggest reductions in the number of mechanics and other ground workers, about 4,600.

  One way that American would likely cut mechanics would be to follow the lead of other airlines in taking planes overseas for major maintenance; currently, that work is performed by more than 8,000 union members at two facilities in the United States.

  In light of American recently stiffing its pension fund, paying just $6.5 million of a $100 million obligation, the federal government's pension agency is letting the airline know that any attempts to walk away from the pension will be met with a fight.

  The company isn't relying on its executives' expertise to squeeze its workers for every possible penny, either. Its American Eagle subsidiary is paying Bain & Company $525,000 a month for advice on how it can extract more from its workers.

  
  

  
• 15:04

  American workers kicked in the teeth on wages in 2011

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  The Bureau of Labor Statistics will be out with its latest monthly jobs report Friday. Expert consensus suggests that the economy generated somewhere between 135,000 and 150,000 seasonally adjusted additional jobs in January, which would be a weak showing barely keeping up with growth in the working-age population. That's pretty much what's been happening since the late summer of 2010 when the Census job layoffs ended. Some 6.1 million fewer workers are on the job than was the case in December 2007 when the recession officially began, and at least another 4 million jobs that should have been added to absorb increases in the working-age population have failed to materialize. And then there are the underemployed.

  As if this weren't troubling enough, the BLS released another mostly unnoticed report on Tuesday. It showed that Americans who do have a job increased their wages and salaries on average by a paltry 1.4 percent in 2011. Inflation for the year was 3.2 per cent. Which means real wages fell 1.8 percent. A year ago, the situation was ever-so-slightly better: a 1.8 percent increase in wages and salaries with a 1.5 percent inflation rate. You could call that breaking even, but the trend is certainly not even that good.

  It's not hard to figure out why. Unemployment is still extremely high 49 months after the recession began.

  Even as the jobless rate falls from recession highs—dropping to 8.5 percent in December—the large number of unemployed people willing to work for less has pushed down wages, said Gary Burtless, a labor economist at the Brookings Institution.

  "There's never been a postwar era in which unemployment has been this high for this long," Burtless said. "Workers are in a very weak bargaining position."

  Even employers who would like to give their employees raises are constrained by the weak demand for their products, which is a vicious-circle function of high unemployment. People without jobs buy less. For most employers, however, the unemployment situation gives them a terrific advantage when anybody asks for a raise. And when they have an opening, they can offer less upfront, something many job-seekers have discovered during the economic downturn when they take a new job at far less than they were previously paid.

  There are, after all, 4.2 Americans in the queue for every job opening. If you don't like what you're paid, somebody else will work for your wages. And they'll work harder, doing "more for less," as the managment seminars all advise their participants to tell subordinates. Thus, workers who do have jobs mostly stay put and keep their mouths shut, hoping for better days.

  That could be a long time. According to Mark Vitner, senior economist at Wells Fargo Securities, the relatively soft retail spending at the end of the holiday season came about because most newly created jobs pay close to the minimum wage. In fact, he said 77 percent of jobs created since July 2009 have been in low-paying sectors of retail, leisure and hospitality, home health care and temporary staffing.

  As a consequence, the overall rise in spending that did occur during the holiday season was driven not by higher earnings but by consumers digging into their savings. That, combined with lower real wages, is an unsustainable trajectory.

  
  

  
• 15:00

  Midday open thread

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  • Today's comic by Jen Sorensen is Politics 101: It's the system, stupid:
  • Yikes! If Pfizer is the maker of your birth control pills, read this:

    Pfizer Inc. is recalling 1 million packets of birth control pills after uncovering a packaging error that could leave women with an inadequate dose of the hormone-based drugs and raise the risk that they will get pregnant accidentally.
    

  • Always remember, Mitt Romney wanted to let Detroit go bankrupt:

    Chrysler, propelled by higher sales of Jeeps and other revamped cars and trucks, reported its first annual net income since 1997, capping a pivotal turnaround year that many thought would never come. [...]

    Chrysler expects an even better 2012, despite a sluggish and uncertain economy. The company, which sells most of its vehicles in the U.S., predicts it will make about $1.5 billion this year and increase revenue 18 percent.

  • And speaking of Romney, after yesterday's announcement that he'd be receiving Secret Service protection, the twitterverse had fun coming up with suggestions for his code name. My personal favorite: the-guy-who-lost-to-Obama.
  • And some more Mitt:

    Mitt Romney, his family, staff and supporters donated a combined $66,000 to help Tim Pawlenty retire the debt left over from his presidential campaign.

    ... which may explain Pawlenty's quick endorsement of Romney after he dropped out of the race (which he has to be kicking himself over).
  • Of course they did:

    Officials at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware, the entry point for the nation’s war dead, retaliated against four employees after they raised concerns about the mishandling of service members’ remains, according to an independent agency that investigates whistle-blower complaints in the federal government.

  • Stephen Colbert's Super PAC, "Americans for a Better Tomorrow, Tomorrow," raised more than $1 million according to FEC filings.
  • While I have no desire to see them, it's nice of Judicial Watch to force a very public reminder that President Obama got Osama bin Laden:

    The American public may finally bear witness to some, but probably not all, of the postmortem images of Osama bin Laden taken on the night he was killed in Pakistan. That's the conclusion of Dan Metcalfe, the former director of the Department of Justice's Office of Information and Privacy, after reading the government's response in a lawsuit from activist group Judicial Watch seeking "all photographs and/or video recordings" taken during the raid in Pakistan.

  • Oops:

    The FBI has long refused to confirm or deny whether civil rights era photographer Ernest Withers was a confidential informant.

    The agency, however, accidentally confirmed Withers’ secret work in documents the government publicly released to a newspaper, a federal judge in Washington said today. [...]

    [The judge, Amy] Berman  Jackson said “Withers’ status as an informant has been officially confirmed.”

  • Condolences to family and friends:

    Don Cornelius conducted us on the "hippest trip in America" for more than two decades on Soul Train, and in the process shone a light on R&B stars that mostly performed in the shadows of the mainstream. At the same time, he invited the nation to a multicultural, cross-generational dance party that was broadcast into living rooms every Saturday morning. [...]

    The pioneering media mogul, 75, was found dead in his Sherman Oaks, Calif., home Wednesday morning. He was pronounced dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound at 4:56 a.m. at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, according to the Los Angeles County coroner's office.

  
  

  
• 14:41

  Susan G. Komen Foundation ditches Planned Parenthood, still not good enough for anti-choicers

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Good luck getting money from
  the people who wouldn't even buy the Bible Yesterday, we learned that the Susan G. Komen for the Cure Foundation—the country's biggest breast cancer charity—is pulling its funding from Planned Parenthood, the country's biggest health care provider for women.

  That makes sense, right? If women's health is your reason for existence, why would you possibly want to join forces with another organization whose reason for existence is women's health?

  The excuse, according to the foundation, is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation. Of course, we know that's one hell of a flimsy excuse, since the "investigation" is nothing more than an attempt by House Republicans to put Planned Parenthood out of business.

  Among the 10 billion reasons this is a stupid decision—starting with the fact that 17 percent of Planned Parenthood's services are cancer screening and prevention—is the fact that Komen is alienating the millions of women who support and depend on Planned Parenthood as their primary source of health care, and instead casting its lot with the crazy, fundamentalist anti-choice crowd who, as we all know, are never, ever satisfied.

  Exhibit A, via Right Wing Watch:

  Lou Engle’s Bound4Life, which pushed LifeWay bookstores to stop selling Komen’s “Pink Bible,” commended Komen but like [Family Research Council president Tony] Perkins, asked the group to go even farther to please the far-right by abandoning their support of stem cell research.

  Translation: It's great that the Komen Foundation now supports women dying of cancer, but we'd really like the Komen Foundation to renounce science altogether.

  But apparently, the foundation—particularly Karen Handel, its new "staunchly and unequivocally pro-life" senior vice president of public policy—thinks it's better off siding with the nation's extremists, who would rather see women die than receive health care that the little voices in their heads tell them is evil. Good luck with that.

  Send an email to the Susan G. Komen Foundation and tell them what you think of this decision.

  
  

  
• 14:00

  House Republicans order arrest of 'Gasland' filmmaker Josh Fox

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Josh Fox's film caused GOP meltdowns
    Do House Republicans wake up every morning and each ask themselves "how can I best present myself as an unmitigated asshole today?" or does it just come naturally?

  House Republicans directed Capitol Hill police to detain a highly regarded documentary crew that was attempting to film a Wednesday hearing on a controversial natural gas procurement practice. [...]

  Josh Fox, director of the Academy Award-nominated documentary "Gasland" was taken into custody by Capitol Hill police this morning, along with his crew, after Republicans objected to their presence, according to Democratic sources present at the hearing.

  By "detain" they mean they took Fox away in handcuffs and are currently charging him with "unlawful entry" because they claim he lacked proper Capitol Hill credentials. Curiously, however, an ABC News crew that did have those credentials was also refused entry into the supposedly public hearing.

  There are several ways Republicans could have handled this. If they had really objected on grounds of improper paperwork, they could merely have sent him back to get to the proper paperwork. They didn't: They had him arrested. There's no apparent reason why the ABC News crew was also denied entry other than the Republicans simply not wanting them there. What seems to have happened is that someone on the Republican side said "oh crap, isn't that the guy who made that anti-fracking documentary?" and their whole side of the room had a collective freakout.

  Well, I hope Fox got some good footage of it for his next documentary. Here's a tip, Republicans: If you're so eager to hide something that you have film crews arrested when they try to film your conversations about it, maybe that thing sucks and you should reconsider your life choices.
  

  
  

  
• 13:43

  Where is this 'shared' sacrifice we keep hearing about?

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Wall Street jackasses mock Occupy protesters in Zuccotti Park. Some dumbass writes:

  Talking with top Barack Obama adviser David Axelrod this past Sunday on his show, host David Gregory pushed back against arguments that the wealthy should pay their fair share of taxes.

  “[I]f you really want shared sacrifice, then the middle class should pay taxes, too. I mean, roll back the Bush tax cuts for everybody rather than looking at the, you know, just having the rich pay more,” Gregory argued. “If it’s shared sacrifice, why not say to everybody, everybody’s going to have to do with less in terms of a social safety net, in terms of taxes and all the rest.”

  Who is this “everybody” that Gregory is talking about? It’s not himself, obviously. Or the people he hangs out with at his D.C. cocktail parties.
  

  I love talk of "shared" sacrifice by well-heeled assholes who have forgotten what it's like to sweat their finances. Because nothing says "I'm sharing in your pain" like fighting efforts to repair our nation's debt by having those who can actually afford it carry the load, while pretending that no one else is "sacrificing."

  We see this with the well-compensated media elite, we obviously see it with the selfish-asshole segment of the one percent. And, of course, we see it with dumbass teabaggers who don't know any better.

  Note, all of these groups cheered on tax cuts the nation couldn't afford, and wars the nation couldn't afford, and stealth bombers and nuclear submarines the nation couldn't afford, and an austerity program the nation couldn't afford (the unemployed don't buy stuff or pay taxes).

  And while the teabaggers have actually suffered under recent economic policy (and are simply too stupid to realize why), the elites certainly haven't. And they're going to come talk to the rest of us about "sacrifice"? You know how they can share in the sacrifice everyone else is already feeling? By paying more in fucking taxes. That still won't even things out. The squeezed middle class still has to worry about making mortgage payments and buying groceries and putting off needed car repairs while Mitt Romneybot, David Gregory, and their pals never will. But, at least it'll be something. Because right now, it's nothing but good times for those assholes.

  
  

  
• 13:18

  Who does Mitt Romney care about? Mitt Romney, of course

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  Mitt "Goldilocks" Romney sure is fickle.

  This morning, he told us he's "not concerned with the very poor." Last week, he said he's not worried about the 1 percent because he wants "to help the 99 percent." Apparently, the "very poor" are not part of the 99 percent.

  But we already know that his proposed tax plans wouldn't help the very poor or the 99 percent. As Jed Lewison reported:

  [T]he top 1% would receive on average an $82,188 tax cut and the top 0.1% would receive a $464,005 tax cut. Do a little math and you'll see that 77% of Mitt Romney's tax cut would go to the top 1%—and 44% would go to the top 0.1%.

  So if Mitt admits he doesn't care about the poor, and he says he doesn't care about the rich even though we know his tax policies would hurt low- and middle-income Americans, whom exactly does he want to help? Considering he'll say anything, anything at all, to get elected, seems like there's really just one American he cares about: Mitt Romney.

  
  

  
• 12:30

  Mitt Romney goes from 'I'm concerned about the poor,' to 'I’m not concerned with the very poor'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Mitt Romney only hates the very poor (Jim Young/Reuters)
    Good news ... apparently Mitt Romney only hates the "very poor." Here he was a few weeks ago:

  I’m concerned about the poor in this country. We have to make sure the safety net is strong and able to help those who can’t help themselves.

  ... and today:

  I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there.

  Cayman Island tax dodges, Swiss bank accounts, corporations are people, my friend, $10,000 bets, and now this ... who knew that Mitt Romney's greatest strength as a candidate would be to provide the script for Democratic ads that will be running against him?

  Keep talking, Mitt.

  
  

  
• 12:25

  Sheldon Whitehouse introduces 'Paying a Fair Share' tax bill

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse introduces the Paying a Fair Share Act Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) introduced his "Paying a Fair Share" tax reform bill in the Senate today. From his floor statement:

  The structure of our bill is simple: if your total income—capital gains included—is over $1 million, you calculate your taxes under the regular system. If your effective rate turns out to be greater than 30%, you pay that rate—the same rate you would pay without the bill. If, on the other hand, your effective tax rate is under 30%—like Warren Buffett’s 11%—you would pay the Fair Share Tax. [...]

  This bill would simplify taxes; discourage exotic tax dodges; reduce the deficit; and bring fairness and common sense to our tax system. There are lots of advantages that come with an enormous income, and that’s great because America thrives on capitalism and we all love success; but paying a lower tax rate than regular working families should not be one of those advantages.

  Whitehouse has six Democratic cosponsors: Sens. Daniel Akaka, Mark Begich, Patrick Leahy, Tom Harkin, Richard Blumenthal and Bernie Sanders.

  Whitehouse has made one change from his original proposal, now including a provision that phases the rule in for earners making between $1 and 2 million, who would pay a portion of the extra tax required to get them to a 30 percent effective tax rate. Those over $2 million would pay a minimum 30 percent rate.

  Easy, fair and requiring no fiddling with the current tax structure. The White House supports the bill, though it would still like to see more comprehensive tax reform. The advantage of this bill, though, is that it doesn't require comprehensive tax reform. It's a simple, straightforward fix.

  It's also almost certain to be filibustered by Senate Republicans, which makes it smart politics. Which is why this bill should get votes on the Senate floor early and often, as a stand-alone bill and as part of other packages. Republicans should be forced to vote to protect millionaires and billionaires as frequently as possible.

  
  

  
• 12:20

  Anti-union bill headed to Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels' desk

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Protest against today's anti-union vote (ThinkProgress)

  The Indiana Senate has passed the House version of a so-called "right to work" bill. With both chambers having passed the same version of the bill, it now heads to Gov. Mitch Daniels' desk for his signature. While Daniels once opposed the policy, this year he has been an active part of the campaign to pass it, so there's no doubt he'll sign it into law.

  The vote happened as:

  [...] thousands of protesters packed Statehouse hallways shouting their disapproval, with thousands more lined-up outside waiting to get in.

  After the vote, the protesters poured out of the Statehouse to join them for a rally on the Statehouse lawn and a march to Lucas Oil Stadium, where the Super Bowl will be held on Sunday.

  There are piles of evidence that this will be a disaster for unions and workers in the state. And that's the point. Republican claims that it's about job creation are just a thin mask for the real goal of chipping away at any piece of power workers can currently claim.

  1:00 PM PT: Daniels signed the bill hours after the Senate vote, as protests continued.

  
  

  
• 11:58

  Republican presidential nomination delegate math: Mitt Romney is 5.8% of the way there

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  Dave Weigel gives us the race for the Republican nomination in visual form—but you might need a magnifying glass to make out all the candidates' delegate shares. That's because Mitt Romney's dominant, presumptive-nominee total stands at 5.8 percent of the delegates he'll need to be the actual nominee, with 66 pledged delegates. Newt Gingrich, meanwhile, is 2.2 percent of the way there with 25 pledged delegates.

  Does a 3.6-point delegate lead for Romney really mean game over, time for Newt to step aside graciously? Or are calls for Newt to drop out possibly premature?

  
  

  
• 11:31

  President Obama lays out details of new plans to 'heal' the housing market

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  In a follow-up to remarks made in his State of the Union address last week, President Obama today in Falls Church, Va., elaborated on the administration's plan to extend help to homeowners with refinancing at lower interest rates, establishment of a homeowners bill of rights and coordinating an investigation mortgage origination and servicing abuses.

  “This housing crisis struck right at the heart of what it means to be middle class in America: our homes,” Obama said [in prepared remarks] [...] “We need to do everything in our power to repair the damage and make responsible families whole.”

  Included in the details:

  • The Department of Justice is establishing a working group of at least 55 DOJ attorneys, analysts, agents and investigators from around the country who will join existing state and federal resources investigating similar misconduct under those authorities. The working group will also be co-chaired by New York Attorney General Schneiderman, who will lead the effort from the state level, and by senior DOJ officials.

  • A refinancing plan will help "responsible borrowers" save an average of $3,000 per year. Borrowers who are current on their payments will be able to refinance to take advantage of low interest rates, cutting through the red tape that currently prevents this. The plan will be paid for by a bank financial fee on institutions with $50 billion or more in assets. (Congress has twice rejected such proposals in the past two years.)

  • The Homeowner Bill of Rights will include: access to a simple mortgage disclosure form, so borrowers can better understand the loans they are seeking; full disclosure of fees and penalties; guidelines to prevent conflicts of interest; support to keep responsible families in their homes and out of foreclosure; and protection against inappropriate foreclosure, including right of appeal.

  • Provide a full year of mortgage-payment forbearance for borrowers looking for work.

  • $15 billion in federal funds to put construction workers on the job rehabilitating and refurbishing hundreds of thousands of vacant and foreclosed homes and businesses.
  

  
  

  
• 11:13

  House Republicans will vote to keep people out of strip clubs ... but still no jobs bill

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Logo from Blog for Arizona Here's more laser-like focus on jobs from House Republicans.

  House Republicans don’t want Uncle Sam paying for any more lap dances.

  A bill that GOP leaders are bringing to the House floor Wednesday would require states to prevent welfare recipients from accessing or spending their benefits at strip clubs, casinos and liquor stores.

  Another scourge on society addressed by the Republican House. Because you know the first thing unemployed and low-income people do when they get their public assistance is run to the corner liquor store. No, no stereotyping by Republicans here. Hey, here's an idea: why don't you work on legislation to create some jobs for these people? Yeah, right.

  No word if this ban would extend to paying for visits to bondage-themed lesbian strip clubs by the Republican National Committee.

  
  

  
• 9:50

  Politics 101: It's the system, stupid

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  Click for larger image.

  If I only had a dollar for the number of times someone has accused me of hating the rich or wanting to punish success, I'd be a card-carrying member of the 1%. OK, I exaggerate slightly. But it's simply not true that that's where I'm coming from, nor is that the motivation behind OWS.

  A couple weeks ago, the NYT published an article interviewing several wealthy people who had grumbly things to say about the Occupy movement. The quote that stuck in my mind was one from Adam Katz, the founder and CEO of private jet service Talon Air.

  To many, 99 vs. 1 was an artificial distinction that overlooked hard work and moral character. "It shouldn’t be relevant," said Mr. Katz , who said he both creates jobs and contributes to charitable causes. "I’m not hurting anyone. I’m helping a lot of people."

  It may well be the case that Mr. Katz is a decent person who's done a lot of good. But I find myself wondering: how does he vote? Does he support politicians who make it harder for ordinary people to be successful like him? Who appoint Supreme Court justices who seem hell-bent on creating plutocracy? Does he have any concern at all about our Gilded Age levels of inequality? Does he support the carried interest tax break that allows Mitt Romney to pay only a 13.9% income tax rate? These policies, and the arrogance, rationalizations, and excessive self-congratulation that lead to them are the things I hate. Not the rich. (Props, by the way, to the Patriotic Millionaires.)

  Out of curiosity, I did a little digging about Katz's political contributions. According to this site, things ain't lookin' good.

  Get a signed print of this cartoon from the artist.

  
  

  
• 9:32

  Is Mitt Romney 'concerned' with the 40% of Americans who are less than three months from poverty?

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Such a surprise that MItt Romney isn't concerned with the very poor. As Mitt Romney told us this morning, he's not concerned with the poor:

  “I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there,” Romney told CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it.

  But we learned yesterday that 43.1 percent of American households are less than three months from poverty—they don't have the resources to stay out of poverty for that long if they lose their jobs or face a medical crisis. How about those people? Are they un-poor enough for Romney to be "concerned" with them? And if he's "concerned" with them now, what about two or three months after a job loss or other crisis that throws them into poverty?

  Are more than 40 percent of American families just three months away from being beneath Mitt Romney's concern?

  
  

  
• 9:18

  Nervous Republicans assess the state of their party

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  After South Carolina's strong win for Newt, we began to see what Mitt Romney's wealthy donors empowered him to do: by outspending Gingrich 4:1, Romney was able to launch an air war in Florida that decimated Gingrich. Romney's positive ads constituted a small fraction of the media buy, and by the end, Romney had himself a landslide... and sliding favorables that may come back to haunt him in November.

  It's not just the partisan Democrats saying that, although we are certainly happy to do so. Check out some of today's commentary and headlines:

  The Political Costs of a Nasty Fight (NY Times)

  And the very trait that propelled him in Florida — a willingness to descend into the muck and run a relentlessly negative campaign — distracted from his economic-themed argument against Mr. Obama while deepening his rift with some populist conservatives. Should Mr. Gingrich remain a viable enough candidate to stay in the race through the summer, as he vowed on Tuesday, Mr. Romney could be forced to maintain an angry edge that could undermine his appeal among moderate and independent voters — groups whose views of him, polls suggest, appear to have been harmed by the Florida melee.

  Florida fight rattles GOP leaders (Politico)

  Mitt Romney decisively answered skeptics with a smashing Florida victory Tuesday, but Republican nervousness has already taken a new form: anxiety over the tone of a race that turned ugly here.

  After a week in which a cocky Romney taunted Gingrich about his lackluster debate performances and the furious former House speaker suggested that his chief rival was insensitive to Jews and Catholics, veteran Republicans have become nervous that the primary is damaging the party.

  S.E. Cupp (conservative columnist): The primary has, in fact, divided the Republican base, and it's shown conservative America to be (at best, mind you) an intellectually diverse group of voters. At worst, it appears confused about who it thinks can best lead the country or beat Obama later this year.
  

  Well  that's the best spin possible, but that's all it is. Rather than prepare him, Newt's Bain and tax practices attacks on Mitt, as well as the general nastiness of the campaign is a real risk for Romney, both by making the attack bipartisan and by driving up Romney's unfavorables.

  ° Consider that Newt was anything but contrite in his non-concession speech and vow to fight all the way until the convention.

  ° Consider that Florida turnout was down compared to 2008, whatever that may mean in regard to GOP enthusiasm (as the "out" party, they'll still muster plenty of it in November).

  ° Consider the graphic (top) about how news coverage has been spiking negative for Romney. In fact, Romney's coverage has been so negative, it's approaching what Obama sees every day.

  ° Consider the exit polls, via Rachel Maddow, that suggest 4 in 10 GOP primary voters prefer someone else:

  Florida exit polling, via MSNBC In Romney's Big, Decisive Win, he only hits "51% are satisfied with the current candidates"? That can't be good for him.

  You'll hear tons of happy talk from Republicans about how simply running against Obama will unite all Republicans in the fall. While superficially true, and with questions about enthusiasm, the real downside isn't with Republicans who, and let me bold this for the slow pundits out there, are never numerous enough to win elections.

  Elections are won by moderates and leaners. This is where Romney will take his lumps, and that's where the Republicans are taking their hits as well.

  It isn't the gloves that came off in Florida, it's the mask, and that's what's gotten Republicans really nervous.

  
  

  
• 9:00

  Mitt Romney: 'I'm not concerned with the very poor'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Mitt Romney shows how big the safety net should be (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
    Yes, Mitt Romney really said it:

  “I’m not concerned with the very poor. We have a safety net there,” Romney told CNN. “If it needs repair, I’ll fix it. [...]

  Host Soledad O’Brien pointed out that the very poor are probably struggling too.

  “The challenge right now — we will hear from the Democrat party the plight of the poor,” Romney responded, after repeating that he would fix any holes in the safety net. “It’s not good being poor and we have a safety net to help those that are very poor . . .
  

  That would be the safety net that Romney and the rest of the Republican Party are doing their damnedest to slash and burn to pay for more tax breaks for millionaires and corporations (my friend).

  
  

  
• 8:51

  Today in Congress: Day ending in y? Try to repeal health care.

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Recapping yesterday's action:

  Things have not improved appreciably just yet. The House approved a rule for consideration of the next in the never-ending series of bills attempting to repeal parts of the Affordable Care Act.

  The Senate passed a few bills and resolutions by unanimous consent, but held no roll call votes. The pending business was the STOCK Act, debate of which resumes today. Among the background procedural maneuvers setting up votes later on was the completion of the Rule XIV process on the Republican bill purporting to force approval of the Keystone XL pipeline project.

  Looking ahead to today:

  A little more activity in the House today, not that anything's going to get done. Three suspensions, a Democratic motion to instruct conferees on the payroll tax cut extension, and an attempt to repeal part of the health care bill (hiding behind the title of "The Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act"). I mean, what else would they be doing, right?

  In the Senate, work continues on the STOCK Act, with votes expected to begin on amendments.

  Today's floor and committee schedules appear below the fold.

  
  

  
• 8:49

  Cheers and Jeers: Wednesday

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  From the GREAT STATE OF MAINE

  "Hey, love yer sig..."

  Every now and agin' C&J toodles 'round the comments in diaries and front-page posts looking for signature lines (which you can create in your user profile). Here's some brain candy from you, the unwashed but well-coiffed orange rabble:

  There are two types of Republicans: millionaires and suckers. (Phil T Duck)
  -
  "Because inside every old person is a young person wondering what happened." -Terry Pratchett (revsue)
  -
  "There's a crack in everything; that's how the light gets in." --Leonard Cohen (northsylvania)
  -
  By evening’s end, they had melted into an indistinguishable mass of privatizing, tax-cutting opponents of Shariah law. --NYT on 2nd Republican debate  (wide eyed lib)
  -
  If corporations are people, then I want to see some birth certificates and talk to their parents. (Onomastic)
  -
  Newt's not a conservative. It's just that conservatives assume that someone so mean and hateful has to be one of their true believers and not just an awful person. (Inland)
  -
  Got Social Security? Thank a Democrat! (Fury)
  -
  Dear Congressman West: Check your watch - it's been 15 minutes. (here4tehbeer)
  -
  "Proud to proclaim: I am a Bleeding Heart Liberal" (sara seattle)
  -
  I'm from the Elizabeth Warren and Darcy Burner Wing of the Democratic Party! (TomP)
  -
  America is a COUNTRY, not a CORPORATION. She doesn't need a CEO. Vote Obama. (manneckdesign)

  And my favorite for this round is from stevemb:

  On the Internet, nobody knows if you're a dog... but everybody knows if you're a jackass.

  We now return you to our regularly scheduled mayhem under the watchful eye of our corporate overlords. Serenity now.

  Cheers and Jeers starts below the fold... [Swoosh!!] RIGHTNOW! [Gong!!]

  
  

  
• 8:00

  Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: With new map looming, Florida Republicans start re-shuffling

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off:

  • FL-17, FL-18, FL-22, FL-Sen: It seems like the fix must be in, because even though Florida still doesn't have a final congressional map—there are, in fact, two competing versions circulating—some members of Congress are already announcing their re-election plans. It sounds, though, like incumbents are expecting the proposal put forth by the state House to rule the day. I say that because unlike the state Senate map, the House plan completely renumbers the entire state, from north to south, and the announcements we're hearing so far all appear to rely on those new numbers.

  We start with GOP Rep. Tom Rooney, who says he'll move from what the House map designates as the 18th (his current district number is 16) to the brand-new (and thus open) 17th to seek re-election. This is somewhat surprising, seeing as Rooney is from Tequesta on the Atlantic coast, while the new 17th covers a vast, Everglades-y swath of the middle of the state and actually touches Gulf waters to the west. The old 16th does overlap considerably with this seat, though, which went for John McCain by a 56-43 margin. It's possible Rooney could have some primary company here, but he's the likely favorite for both his party's nomination and the general.

  Rooney's announcement, in turn, led to another, by Tea Party favorite Allen West. West says he, too, will shuffle northward and run in the seat Rooney's vacating, the 18th. Like Rooney, West also doesn't live in his new district, but in point of fact, he doesn't live in his current seat, the 22nd, either. Ironically, West's hometown of Plantation (they could come up with a better name, right?) got moved into the new 22nd (which by chance keeps the same district number), but at 57-43 Obama, there was no way West had any hope here. The great news is that the 18th is very swingish (51-48 Obama), so West should still be eminently beatable with the right candidate. (The question is who?)

  But wait, there's one more domino: Former state House Majority Leader Adam Hasner will reportedly drop out of the GOP Senate primary (where Rep. Connie Mack's entry reduced him to schmendrick status) and run in West's seat, the 22nd. That seems like an extremely uphill climb for any Republican, but particularly so for someone as conservative as Hasner. The two Democrats already running here, Lois Frankel and Patrick Murphy, had different reactions: Frankel promises to stay put in the 22nd, while Murphy doesn't seem quite so certain that we do actually know what the final maps look like (which is how we feel) and says he'll "continue to monitor the redistricting process closely."

  
  

  
• 7:57

  Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: Wealthy backing for Romney's ad blitz

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  Visual source: Newseum

  NY Times:

  Close to 60 corporations and wealthy individuals gave checks of $100,000 or more to a “super PAC” supporting Mitt Romney in the months leading up to the Iowa caucuses, according to documents released on Tuesday, underwriting a $17 million blitz of advertising that has swamped his Republican rivals in the early primary states.

  David Firestone:

  In the end, [Newt] lost every major demographic group and every region of Florida but the conservative and less-populated panhandle. Mr. Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina, where his race-baiting and media-bashing found a more receptive audience, can now be seen as an aberration in comparison to a far more diverse state.

  But Florida cost Mr. Romney some standing as well. He was relentlessly negative in the final days of the campaign, frustrating many voters who wanted to hear an upbeat message. Exit polls showed that he tacked further to the right on issues such as immigration than most Floridians, and his claim that he would get millions of illegal immigrants to “self-deport” may have cost him the endorsement of Jeb Bush, as well as the backing of many other moderate Republicans and independents.

  Let the debate rage: is there something wrong with Romney or is it the Republican base who pushed Romney to be this way? And if he is so weak he can't stand up to his base, what difference does it make? He'd be a terrible president.

  Chris Cillizza:

  Mitt Romney’s across-the-board victory in the Florida Republican presidential primary on Tuesday night serves as a direct rebuttal to the criticism that he simply isn’t conservative enough to be the party’s nominee and leaves his remaining rivals with few obvious next steps as the nomination fight moves to Nevada next month.

  Cillizza isn't wrong, but remember what we said before the primary: don't let Romney's strength in a Republican primary obscure his weakness in a general election.

  EJ Dionne:

  Another sign of dissatisfaction on the right: Roughly four Florida voters in ten said that Romney’s positions on the issues were not conservative enough.

  None of this mattered to the outcome in Florida, but it does suggest there is a base of support for a Romney opponent.

  Yes, indeed. It's called the Republican base.

  Kathleen Parker:

  It isn’t that Romney can’t connect with people, as has been pronounced repeatedly. It is that people can’t connect with him. This also helps explain why the far less perfect Newt Gingrich can attract support against all reason, or at least against all reasonable expectations.

  It's always amusing to see conservatives struggle to explain why no one likes Romney. Parker lists the minor reasons. Having no core beliefs, using your privileges to pay less taxes and buy yourself a nomination, and strapping your dog to the roof of a car while going on vacation seem a lot easier to grasp. But this is a free country. You are welcome to dislike him for whatever reason you feel he's earned.

  Mark Barabak/LA Times:

  Mitt Romney may have won a blowout victory in Florida's presidential primary, but Newt Gingrich is not about to concede defeat.

  
  Did you know Jennifer Rubin really, really, really doesn't like Newt? She didn't like his non-concession speech, either.

  He obnoxiously ended by pledging: “My life, my fortune, my sacred honor.” But he’s not doing any of that. And it’s quite an insult to American patriots who have said that and meant it.

  The WaPo lists opinion columns as "left-leaning" or "right-leaning". The right should be split into "likes Romney, hates Newt"  and "dislikes Romney, hates Newt". You know, for balance.

  
  

  

• 1:00

  Chronicle uses found-footage storytelling

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  In our status-updated, YouTubed, and retweeted age of self-documentation, does the "faux-found-footage" genre—popularized by The Blair Witch Project; vulgarized by the Paranormal Activity franchise and cash-grabbing imitators—add commentary to the zeitgeist or merely mor...

• 1:00

  Craig Finn talks solo album Clear Heart Full Eyes

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  For nearly two decades, Craig Finn has sought comfort amid cranked amps and heavy riffs. First, here in the Twin Cities to cult acclaim as frontman of ahead-of-their-time skewed-punk pranksters Lifter Puller, and then on to global accolades as head poet of classic-rock revivalists the Hold Steady...

• 1:00

  Observer Drift making chill waves with escapist debut

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  Shielded from Bloomington's vulgar tangle of office parks and rundown strip malls, Collin Ward immerses himself in a faint aroma of incense as he enters the basement of a nondescript split-level home. Here, he dreamed up a solo post-chillwave project called Observer Drift. This halcyon, escapist ...

• 1:00

  Critics' Picks: Jeff Magnum, Lenny Kravitz, and more

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage
  Cass McCombs Band

  7th St. Entry, Wednesday 2.1

  Frequently, when a musician decides to release two or more albums within the same year, you find yourself wishing they just combined the best of the lot in order to make one stellar record. In the case of Cass McCombs, who re...

• 1:00

  1968: The Year That Rocked the World

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  The History Theatre certainly doesn't lack ambition with its latest show, which tackles one of the most tumultuous years in recent history through the lens of seven playwrights. However, the show itself is frightfully uneven, with several segments uncovering nothing particularly fresh or interest...

• 1:00

  Park Square's Ragtime tones it down, finds heart

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  When Ragtime first premiered on Broadway in 1998, the producers tried to use spectacle to hide the deficiencies in the adaptation of E.L. Doctorow's novel. Audiences presumably would be so overwhelmed by the fireworks and working Model-T Ford that they wouldn't care that the show tried to ...

• 1:00

  Zamboni's Pizza catering to the Xcel crowd

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  Rubbernecking around groups of guys dressed in head-to-toe weatherproof camouflage, we struggle to find any viable parking spot off West Seventh Street and finally realize we're not in the midst of some sort of hunting convention, but at the post-action epicenter of the Red Bull Crashed Ice event...

• 1:00

  5ingles

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross, and Karen O
  "Immigrant Song"

  Led Zepplin's classic, bathed in Sterno fire, is exactly the kind of napalm-gargling salvo you don't want to serve as your opponents' intro music if you actuall...

• 1:00

  Cooperatives Working Together uses herd retirement to fix milk prices

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  Joe Sonneker is the prototype of a Midwestern dairy farmer. Layered in flannel and a tan Carhartt jacket, his hulking physique bespeaks a man who has spent nearly his entire 64 years performing chores, a student of hard labor since he was old enough to carry feed.

  "I guess I never thought...

• 1:00

  The Super Bowl Prostitution Hoax

   » ‎ CITYPAGES.com - Dan Savage

  Indianapolis is bracing for war. It's Super Bowl week, after all. Time for the Annual Invasion of the Hookers, which promises to be as harrowing as the Ottoman Empire's advance on Crete in 1647, though with considerably more nudity.

  Yes, one of America's great urban legends is again being...

• January 31, 2012
• 23:30

  Open Thread for Night Owls: Campaigning like it's 1952? Nah

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  1952 GOP Convention

  Sixty years ago, on March 11, New Hampshire did what it has since done 15 more times, held the first presidential primary in the nation.

  On the ballot was Robert Taft, who twice before had sought the Republican nomination but been aced out. That was attributed to his vigorous opposition to the New Deal that many liberal Republicans at least half-supported, his prewar anti-interventionism and his postwar opposition to alliances like NATO and the Marshall Plan. One scholarly critic later called his foreign policy views "the psychology of the moat."

  Also on the ballot was the lionized hero of World War II, Dwight D. Eisenhower. It was a bit tricky. Still serving as NATO's supreme commander, he could not be involved in political activities or would run afoul of Army regulations. But the 1949 rewrite of the New Hampshire primary law allowed someone to participate without an overt decision on his part. All he had to do was "allow" his name to be placed on the ballot, a permission he granted. Gov. Sherman Adams filed the paperwork. He would later become Eisenhower's White House Chief of Staff but lost the job in a scandal over a vicuña fur coat.

  The five-star general did not spend a single minute campaigning in the state. Gov. Adams was his proxy in that task. Taft called Ike the "phantom candidate." But when the votes were counted, it was Eisenhower 46,661 and Taft 35,838. He snagged all 14 delegates, every county, and every city but Manchester, which gave Taft a slim lead. A month later, Eisenhower retired from his NATO job and began overtly campaigning. Despite the New Hampshire win and his vast popularity, however, Ike was at a seeming disadvantage.

  With the bloody Korean War grinding on, McCarthyism in full bloom and conservative philosophy having taken stronger hold of the party, Taft had laid out his strongest effort yet. The father of billionaire Warren Buffet, former Nebraska Rep. Howard Buffett, became his campaign manager and his supporters controlled most of the Republican leadership, including the Republican National Committee and the convention's committees. He had the inside track.

  By the time the convention opened in Chicago that July, Taft had amassed 516 delegates and Ike had 414. The governor of California, Earl Warren, had 76. His strategy for getting the nomination was directed at keeping Eisenhower and Taft from a first-ballot win and then, somehow, wrangling enough votes into his camp. It didn't work out that way.

  On the convention's first day, Eisenhower's floor manager, Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge II of Massachusetts, argued that Taft's forces had cheated in the South, particularly Georgia and Texas, by keeping Eisenhower supporters off their delegations. Lodge proposed to replace the Taft delegates from those states with Eisenhower partisans, a proposal they called "Fair Play." But for contested delegations to be seated, the convention would have to vote.

  Taft said the claims of cheating were false and sought to strike a deal in which he and Ike would split the delegations. But Lodge feared this would undermine his efforts, vetoed the deal and made a bargain with a Congressman Senator named Richard M. Nixon for the vast majority of California's 70 delegates. The convention voted 658 to 548 in favor of the proposal. That left the Texans and Georgians free to vote for Eisenhower. Several uncommitted delegations, including those from Michigan and Pennsylvania with their 116 delegates, also supported the general.

  There were rumors after the convention that the chairmen of these uncommitted states, such as Arthur Summerfield of Michigan, were secretly pressured by Dewey and the GOP's Eastern Establishment to support Eisenhower; however, these rumors were never proved. (Summerfield did become Ike's Postmaster General following the election.)

  At their convention also held in Chicago, the Democrats drafted Illinois Gov. Adlai Stevenson who had repeatedly turned down entreaties to run. It took three ballots, but he eventually won the nomination, having been handed a diehard segregationist Senator from Alabama, John Sparkman, as a running mate. With the helpful Nixon as his running mate, Eisenhower went on to win the election over Stevenson, taking 39 states and receiving 55 percent of the popular vote. At the Inaugural in January, he took the oath of office as the first Republican president in 20 years. Taft, just 63 years old, died from complications of cancer less than seven months later.

  

  • • •

  Sources: The Papers of Robert A. Taft: 1949-1953; Principles Without Program: Senator Robert A. Taft and American Foreign Policy, by John Moser; Justice for All: Earl Warren and the Nation He Made, by Jim Newton; Time Magazine, Feb. 11, 1952; 60 Years of the New Hampshire Primary, by David Boeri; Wikipedia.

  Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2010:

  There's a saying in journalism: "If it bleeds, it leads."

  The saying traditionally applies to crime reporting, but can be expanded to describe how the traditional media and many blogs approach any story they perceive as "dramatic", or better yet, "dangerous."

  Last week's national security headlines were a classic example of drama triumphing over careful, in-depth reporting. I'm talking about this particular headline, and all the variations thereof, describing a "report card" issued to the Obama administration:

  US gets 'F' in preparation for threat of biological terrorism, report concludes [...]
  Sounds pretty bad, doesn't it?

  The problem is, that article, and many others, are misleading in a number of ways; their superficial, black-and-white treatment of a very important subject misses some critical points that really need to be highlighted. [...]

  Tweet of the Day:

  

  High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here.

  
  

  
• 23:00

  OR-01 special election liveblog

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Polls have just closed in Oregon's 1st Congressional District, where voters are choosing between Democrat Suzanne Bonamici and Republican Rob Cornilles to replace ex-Rep. David Wu, who resigned last year in disgrace following revelations about erratic behavior and a brewing sex scandal. In this all-mail election, all ballots had to be received by 8pm local time in order to be counted.

  In a break with the past, Oregon election officials are now permitted to count ballots received before election day on election day, rather than having to wait until polls close before beginning the tally. This means that, with any lucky, the vast majority of all votes will have been counted by 8pm, which should also hopefully mean we'll find out most of the results immediately. We'll see!

  Results: AP | Oregonian

  8:05 PM PT (David Jarman): We don't have anything from the AP, but (big h/t to marcvstranivs in comments) local TV station KPTV already has results... and they've already called it! Bonamici 57, Cornilles 37, with around 100K votes tallied already.

  8:07 PM PT (David Jarman): Fastest liveblog ever. (Here's the KPTV link, and now we're hearing that the SoS office has confirming numbers up at their site.

  8:09 PM PT (David Jarman): Well, the SoS office is calling it 100% reporting. They say:
  Suzanne Bonamici 79,386 (56%)
  Rob Cornilles 53,215 (38%)
  Steven Reynolds 4,473 (3%)
  James Foster 4,413 (3%)
  Thanks for coming everyone! You've been a great audience!

  8:12 PM PT (David Jarman): If you're following the individual counties, it's Bonamici at 53% in Washington (the big enchilada), 75% in Multnomah, 56% in Clatsop, and 50% in Columbia. We haven't gotten any numbers from Yamhil, yet though, which ought to move things a percent or two closer overall once they report (they're the only GOP-leaning county in the district).

  8:14 PM PT (David Jarman): The AP says 54% is reporting, so we aren't actually that close to being done; they say 57-37, though they have lower totals than the Sec. of State's office.

  8:18 PM PT (David Jarman): AP has it at a slightly closer 54-39 now. But they've also called the race. So too has Portland's local paper, the Oregonian. Congratulations to Suzanne Bonamici, the House's newest member!

  8:42 PM PT (David Jarman): The SoS office is saying 54-39 now too (with 3 each for the minor players), with rural Yamhill County finally having reported (where Cornilles won narrowly, not that that helps him much). 89,055 for Bonamici, 64,121 for Cornilles.

  10:20 PM PT (David Jarman): Well, it's much later, and very little more has happened. The AP has moved the needle up to 71% reporting; the SoS office has bumped the total up to 93.5K for Bonamici and 67.6K for Cornilles, still good for a 54-39 Bonamici lead.

  PPP and SurveyUSA acquitted themselves well; both picked an 11-point margin for Bonamici, not far from the actual 15. On the other hand, local Republican pollster Moore Information gets the gong, portraying it as a 4-point race; still, that may have head-faked the NRCC into spending five figures on a last-minute coordinated expenditure, so, really, kudos to Moore Information too.

  Then there's the case of the DCCC, who along with Dem allies pumped more than a million dollars into this race to pump up the margins. On the one hand, while Bonamici might have won without any outside expenditures at all, a dominant win here avoids any Beltway media "Dems in disarray!!1!!" narrative setting that might hurt future fundraising or recruitment in the coming months; on the other hand, they might find themselves in late October wishing they had that extra million dollars sitting around ready to deploy. We'll have to accept that the jury is still out on their decision to go big on this race.

  
  

  
• 22:10

  Daily Kos Elections Polling Wrap: The Florida postgame show

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  

  So ... that was kind of decisive for Mitt Romney, wasn't it?

  The bad news for Mittens, though, is that polling released today hints at the fact that he might not have it quite so easy in the near future. Three polls were released today, the Gallup national tracker, plus new polls in Ohio and Missouri (where PPP wisely polled both the caucuses and the primary because ... well ... Newt, y'know).

  As it happens, Mitt leads in none of them. Though, in fairness to Mr. Florida, he is right on the cusp of the lead in virtually all of them (Missouri being the notable exception):

  NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Gingrich 28, Romney 27, Santorum 17, Paul 13

  MISSOURI CAUCUS (PPP): Gingrich 30, Santorum 28, Romney 24, Paul 11

  MISSOURI PRIMARY (PPP): Santorum 45, Romney 34, Paul 13

  OHIO (PPP): Gingrich 26, Romney 25, Santorum 22, Paul 11
  

  On the general election front, President Obama is still in the driver's seat, as the primary beneficiary of the fisticuffs on the Republican side:

  NATIONAL (Daily Kos/SEIU/PPP): Obama d. Romney (46-42); Obama d. Gingrich (49-40)

  NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Obama d. Romney (47-42); Obama d. Gingrich (50-37)
  

  (Cue wingnut heads exploding that the "librully biased" team of PPP, SEIU, and Daily Kos give Mitt and Newt more of a shot than their beloved Rasmussen!)

  No big analysis tonight, folks, because Oregon is about to give us round #2 of the election fun. Democrats, and their candidate (Suzanne Bonamici) are hoping for a night that is about as suspenseful as Florida was for the GOP tonight.

  More numbers, and more analysis, will be on deck tomorrow night.

  
  

  
• 21:17

  Daily Kos Elections Florida Republican primary liveblog thread #6

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Polls are closed in Florida, and we're liveblogging the results of the Republican presidential primary.

  Results: AP (By county) | CNN | Google | Politico

  6:18 PM PT: Gingrich says he'll abolish White House czars, because as a dictator, he won't need them.

  6:19 PM PT: You will always know where you where when Newt gave his "I have a dream" speech.

  6:20 PM PT: Newt is also using a teleprompter, making the Freepers weep.

  6:21 PM PT: Washington outsider Newt Gingrich cites David Broder column on something he did in Congress in the 1990s.
  — @blakehounshell via Twitter for iPad

  6:22 PM PT: Professor Newt is in da house! He's been studying shit for 60 years! So trust him. Even though you're not supposed to trust any other professor.

  6:23 PM PT: Someone needs to slip Newt a "Dude, you lost" note.
  — @pourmecoffee via TweetDeck 6:25 PM PT: Obama also uses a toaster. Can't toast bread with fire, elitist Barack Hussein?!
  — @BigFatWhale via web

  6:26 PM PT: Alright, I'm skipping Ron Paul. My kids are far more interesting.

  Thanks for hanging with us tonight!

  7:16 PM PT (David Jarman): One last tally from the bean counting crew, seeing as how the count in Florida is almost done. With slightly over 98% reporting, the Romney total edged down a bit more; Mitt's at 46, to 32 for Gingrich, 13 for Santorum, and 7 for Paul. Romney's strongest county was also the state's most populous: Miami-Dade, with 61%, along with 57 in Collier and 54 Palm Beach... all distinguished by having lots of transplanted northeasterners. The largest county that Gingrich won was Escambia (Pensacola, in the Panhandle); Clay and Alachua are his only other big prizes, along with a handful of rural counties in the Panhandle and the empty area around Lake Okeechobee. Gingrich also kept Duval (Jacksonville) close.

  7:39 PM PT (David Jarman): One more observation: tonight's turnout was approximately 1,656,000 (with a few precincts left to be counted). That's a respectable-seeming 40% of the state's 4.1 million registered Republicans... but let's flash back to 2008, when the GOP presidential primary drew 1,949,498 voters instead. Anybody sensing a little less enthusiasm for the GOP field this time?

  
  

  
• 20:46

  Daily Kos Elections Florida Republican primary liveblog thread #5

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Polls are closed in Florida, and we're liveblogging the results of the Republican presidential primary.

  Results: AP (By county) | CNN | Google | Politico

  5:47 PM PT (Jed Lewison): Father of Obamacare on the TelePrompter!

  

  5:49 PM PT (David Jarman): Here's a quick update on the actual counting: we're up to 70% reporting, with the statewide tally Romney 47, Gingrich 32, Santorum 13, Paul 7. (And Rick Perry in 5th place with 6,000 votes.) Still a lot of precincts left in Romney-friendly Miami-Dade (62-25) and Broward (50-30) Counties. Early reports from the more urbanized parts of the Panhandle (39 Romney, 37 Gingrich in Escambia (Pensacola) and 37 Romney, 36 Gingrich in Bay (Panama City) haven't done anything to help Gingrich.

  5:53 PM PT: Do you think Mitt knows he's "elite"? I wonder if he's had self-awareness software installed.
  — @HunterDK via TweetDeck

  5:53 PM PT: Interviewed on CNN, Rick Santorum is bragging that he raised $200,000 today. Um Ricky? That's not a lot of money.

  5:58 PM PT: Do Androids Dream of Electronic Funds Transfers to the Cayman Islands?
  — @HunterDK via TweetDeck

  6:01 PM PT: Santorum pretending he's in this for the long haul, and why not? He has 200 Gs burning a hole in his pocket! That'll, like, buy him six ads.

  6:06 PM PT: Mitt's new math: he promised to balance budget without raising taxes or cutting defense, & he attacked Obama for cutting Medicare.
  — @SimonWDC via TweetDeck

  6:08 PM PT: Newt is up! Thanks his staff who did so awesome that he came in distant second.

  6:10 PM PT: Newt will now tell us how he will defeat Saul Alinsky. #p2 #FLPrimary
  — @Marnus3 via HootSuite

  6:12 PM PT: Gingrich blabbing on and on about people power. I wonder if that means his sugar daddy casino mogul is done writing checks.

  With lucks, he might raise a cool 200 Gs like Santorum!

  6:12 PM PT: Gingrich slogan: 46 states to go. And I'm on the ballot in many of them!
  — @davidfrum via TweetDeck

  6:16 PM PT: If we were playing a drinking game, and chugging every time Newt said "establishment", we'd all be in a coma.

  6:18 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The liveblogging continues in the next thread.

  
  

  
• 20:22

  Daily Kos Elections Florida Republican primary liveblog thread #4

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Polls are closed in Florida, and we're liveblogging the results of the Republican presidential primary.

  Results: AP (By county) | CNN | Google | Politico

  5:24 PM PT: Team Romney spent 1.5 as much as the entire GOP field spent in FL in 08 on TV. $10m in 08 versus $15m just for Romney in 12. Â
  — @billburton716 via Twitter for BlackBerry®

  5:27 PM PT (David Jarman): We're finally seeing a lot of votes from Duval County (Jacksonville), which had been previously silent, and it's pretty close there: Romney 41, Gingrich 39. (Again, Gingrich does better the closer you get to Georgia.) That batch of votes seems to sink Romney a little further away from the outright 50% mark; he's leading Newt 47-31 statewide now, with 58% reporting according to the AP.

  5:28 PM PT: 46 States to Go!  Donate today and help us defeat Obamneycare. 1 million dollar money bomb. https://t.co/ZDth0s3X
  — @newtgingrich via web I thought he had Sheldon Adelson on speed dial.

  5:29 PM PT: Romney up. So no Gingrich concession?

  5:31 PM PT (David Jarman): Mitt may yet hit the 50% mark overall: nearly one-quarter of all the outstanding votes left are in Miami-Dade County, where only 154 of 798 precincts have reported yet (assuming that it isn't riddled with empty precincts). That's Romney's best county at this point, where he's pulling in 63% to Newt's 25%.

  5:32 PM PT: A teleprompter was set up earlier tonight for Mitt Romney's acceptance speech. #FLPrimary
  — @ProducerMatthew via web

  5:34 PM PT: Romney: We're united as a party while we beat the shit out of each other with $17 million in negative ads.

  5:38 PM PT: Mitt has that disease where he can't remember anything that happened before 2009. What's that called? Ah, Bushitis.
  — @HunterDK via TweetDeck

  5:38 PM PT: Romney: Obama wants to send your money to his friends. Instead of me.

  5:39 PM PT: Father of Obamacare promising to repeal Obamacare.
  — @jedlewison via Twitter for Mac 5:40 PM PT: Father of Obamacare promising to repeal Obamacare.
  — @jedlewison via Twitter for Mac To be fair, Mitt Romney and Mitt Romney have very different visions of America.
  — @pandagon via web

  5:41 PM PT: Mitt's speech is a case study in building straw men. "Obama wants to eat kittens, ALIVE! I'd rather see them play with yarn."
  

  5:44 PM PT: Obama is making America "the worst of what Europe has become" says the guy who had his money in Swiss banks. And he really didn't have a problem with Europe when he hid there during the Vietnam War.

  5:47 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The liveblogging continues in the next thread.

  
  

  
• 19:56

  Daily Kos Elections Florida Republican primary liveblog thread #3

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Polls are closed in Florida, and we're liveblogging the results of the Republican presidential primary.

  Results: AP (By county) | CNN | Google | Politico

  4:58 PM PT (Jed Lewison): This is pretty funny...

  Can we now stop pretending that winning a majority of Republican voters in SC means anything except that you can out-cracker someone?
  — @ESQPolitics via web ...but I actually disagree. Mitt didn't go negative on Newt until it was too late in SC, and overall he didn't blow Newt out of the water as much as he did in Florida. Newt also had a stronger line of attack on Mitt—the Bain stuff—which he has mostly abandoned. The Juan Williams stuff was definitely important, but so too was the John King moment.

  5:01 PM PT: It's no coincidence that Newt raised his stature when attacking Romney on Bain Capital, and collapsed when he abandoned that line of attack. Even Republican voters liked populist Newt better than they like ... whatever the hell he is these days.

  5:01 PM PT (David Nir): The full Florida exit polls are now available here.

  5:02 PM PT: Oh, Romney wins Florida. In case anyone was wondering.

  5:03 PM PT (David Nir): Exit polls project out to 46 Romney, 33 Gingrich, 12 Santorum, 8 Paul. So that's awfully close to a tie between R vs. G + S.

  5:05 PM PT: And so after a few weeks of fake drama, the guy who was always going to get the nomination edges closer toward getting the nomination.
  — @tomtomorrow via web

  5:07 PM PT: The best part of these primaries is that it's all fun! There's no pins and needles and personal stake in who wins or loses. They all suck, and the more contested primaries they have, the more we win!

  5:14 PM PT (David Jarman): So Newt is ahead in only two counties of any consequence, population-wise. One is Clay County, the ultra-conservative suburbs of Jacksonville, where he leads 43-37. The other, interestingly, is Alachua County, home of Univ. of Florida, where the ex-prof is up 37-36. (As we've pointed out, the closer you get to the Georgia border, the better Newt does.) Romney's topping at least 40% in just about every other major county, even some of the fiercely red ones, like Lake Co. north of Orlando, home to notoriously right-wing retirement destination The Villages... Romney's up 45-35 there. But hey! At least Newt's winning a bunch of former-Dixiecrat rural counties in the Panhandle, never mind that most of them have populations of 10 or 20,000.

  5:15 PM PT: In the past, I'd say, "Okay, that does it. Mitt's the nominee!" But I've learned my lesson. In this primary, who the hell knows what's next? Sure, Romney is still likely to be the nominee, but we don't know how bumpy that ride will be.

  5:17 PM PT: Remember how Jewish voters were flocking to the GOP because of Obama? Only 1% of voters were Jewish, compared to 3% in 2008

  5:23 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The liveblogging continues in the next thread.

  
  

  
• 19:28

  Daily Kos Elections Florida Republican primary liveblog thread #2

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Polls are closed in Florida, and we're liveblogging the results of the Republican presidential primary.

  Results: AP (By county) | CNN | Google | Politico

  4:31 PM PT: Remember, the story of the night isn't so much that Rommey is going to win big, but it's HOW he won big:

  Here’s all you need to know about the Florida campaign: amidst the blizzard of campaign ads there was only one positive pro-Romney ad — a single Spanish language TV ad.

  That’s right. Mitt Romney and his allies spent more than $15 million on TV ads — only one was positive and it was in a foreign language.  It ran a total of 15 times statewide.

  Negative campaigning works, and blowing your opponent out of the water works. It also helps that your opponents is a troll that no one likes, And if no one likes you? Who cares! Just make sure everyone likes your opponent even less.

  THAT's how Romney won Florida.

  4:33 PM PT: Ideal outcome tonight: Newt gets enough votes to stay in, but loses badly enough to become FURIOUS NEGATIVE AD HULK NEWT! #popcorn
  — @drgrist via TweetDeck

  4:35 PM PT (David Nir): And the flipside of Markos's post above—about how Romney won by going negative—is that Mitt hasn't been hit with nearly the barrage of negative ads he's dished out. Assuming he's the GOP's nominee, he'll face hundreds of millions of dollars worth of negative ads—and his favorables already suck.

  4:35 PM PT: 46 more states to go, minus the ones in which Newt Adelson didn't qualify for the ballot.
  — @KagroX via TweetDeck

  4:36 PM PT: CNN wonders, "we'll see if we can call this at 8 o'clock". Will they? The suspense is killing me!

  4:40 PM PT (Steve Singiser): There is one place where Newt is doing rather well, but it is a small consolation to him. He is either leading or right in the hunt in the group of counties huddled against the southern border of Georgia. The good news? Perhaps some predictive value for how the South will vote down the line. The bad news? These counties are small, and his leads are rather weak. In the only county with all the precincts in (Liberty County), Newt's win was a 43-25 victory over Romney.

  4:40 PM PT (David Nir): Politico: 28% in, Romney 439K votes; CNN: 36% in, Romney 446K votes. No, I can't explain that either.

  4:41 PM PT (David Nir): Scratch that. CNN had 46% in, not 36%, when I wrote that, so their "reporting" gulf with Politico is huge, but the vote spread is small.

  4:42 PM PT: Total 4Q $ raised: Romney: $24,278,503.06. Gingrich: $9,822,375.66.
  — @SarahH_CBSNJ via HootSuite

  4:46 PM PT: So Mitt will win easily tonight. If he could hit 50%, it would be the first time he's come anywhere near showing majority support. If he can beat the next two not-Romneys, that would be a solid showing as well.

  Currently, it's Mitt 48, Gingrich-Santorum 44

  4:46 PM PT (Steve Singiser): Gingrich's strength is mostly contained in the "deep South" part of Florida, up near the Georgia border. But he does have one county down South where he has a shot: in smallish Hendry County (in south-central Florida), Romney and Gingrich are practically dead even, with 96 percent of precincts reporting.

  4:47 PM PT (David Nir): I think the key question now is whether Romney's total exceeds that of Gingrich and Santorum combined. Right now, it's 48% R, 44% G + S. Still, neither Santorum nor Newt seem likely to drop out and endorse the other one.

  4:47 PM PT: Both Newt and Mitt's unfavorables get any lower they'll be able to pick Cheney as their running mate for a little likeability.
  — @LOLGOP via TweetDeck

  4:49 PM PT (David Jarman): Mitt's best county: Collier County (he's at 64% there). Home to Naples, and a lot of wealthy, elderly, WASPy former northeasterners. On the other hand, Alachua County is surprisingly close (and it's almost done reporting): Newt and Mitt are both at 37. That's where Gainesville (and Univ. of Florida) are.

  4:54 PM PT (David Nir): CNN's live map shows very clearly where each candidate's strengths lie (dark red is Romney, light red is Gingrich): Mitt in the central and southern parts of the state, Gingrich in the northern areas that are actually traditionally more "Southern":

  4:56 PM PT: Newt will drop out tonight if he's given command of Deep Space Nine.
  — @pandagon via web

  4:57 PM PT (David Jarman): Romney is overperforming his 2008 numbers almost everywhere, but especially in the Miami area. Most of all in Miami-Dade County, where he got 16% in 2008 and now has 64%! (McCain cleaned up in Miami-Dade last time, but looks like Romney grabbed most of those McCain voters this time... and that's despite Gingrich trying to stake out a softer immigration position than Romney this time.) Likewise, Romney had 24% in Broward (now 53%) and had 30% in Palm Beach (58%).

  4:57 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The liveblogging continues in the next thread.

  
  

  
• 18:59

  Daily Kos Elections Florida Republican primary liveblog thread #1

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Polls are closed in Florida, and we're liveblogging the results of the Republican presidential primary.

  Results: AP (By county) | CNN | Google | Politico

  
  As we wait for votes to be counted in Florida tonight, what could possibly go wrong?
  — @politicalwire via Twitter for Mac
  FLORIDA TV AD BREAKDOWN: 68% of ads were anti-Gingrich, 23% anti-Romney, 9% pro-Gingrich, 0.1% pro-Romney (via @jonkarl)
  — @thinkprogress via TweetDeck

  4:03 PM PT (David Nir): Via email, CBS news says:

  The raw vote totals will come in shortly after 7 pm ET and then the exit polls will be released at 8 pm ET (when the last polls close in the state).

  4:05 PM PT: Can we just get past tonight and make the new narrative that Romney needs to spend 6:1 to get any momentum? kthxbai
  — @pandagon via web

  4:06 PM PT: The Pandagon tweet above makes an excellent point -- fact is, Gingrich has gotten blown out of the water in terms of money in Florida, an expensive state to compete in. His casino mogul sugar daddy wrote that $5 million check, and his campaign claims he raised $5 million since South Carolina, but that's chump change compared to the cash Romney and his establishment allies had, and it showed.

  4:09 PM PT (David Nir): The first votes are coming in, probably early votes. Romney's up big, with 52% in this initial batch.

  4:10 PM PT: Early vote numbers show Romney with a 30,000-vote lead. Some media reports suggested that number would be closer to 50-60,000. We don't know if this is ALL early votes, or some.

  4:11 PM PT: The early vote lead is now 45,000, so yeah, they're clearly still counting them.

  4:15 PM PT: This is the hour that tests cable news anchors' bantering skills
  — @mikememoli via web 4:20 PM PT: #CNNelections Exit poll: 39% of FL GOP unhappy with field; 53% of Gingrich voters unhappy if Romney nominee.  Bile, bitterness & bad blood.
  — @PaulBegala via Twitter for iPad

  4:25 PM PT (David Nir): Right now, CNN's website appears to be the fastest - they have Romney with 291K votes (51%), but their percentage of precincts reporting looks to be way too high, compared to sites like AP and Politico.

  4:25 PM PT: ABC:

  Here’s all you need to know about the Florida campaign: amidst the blizzard of campaign ads there was only one positive pro-Romney ad — a single Spanish language TV ad.

  That’s right. Mitt Romney and his allies spent more than $15 million on TV ads — only one was positive and it was in a foreign language.  It ran a total of 15 times statewide.

  4:27 PM PT (David Nir): Yeah, so basically, CNN thinks 30% of precincts have reported, but Politico has it at about 10% - but they offer similar vote totals. Not sure what's going on here, but CNN may be counting early votes differently.

  4:29 PM PT (Kaili Joy Gray): The liveblogging continues in the next thread.

  
  

  
• 18:30

  Newt Gingrich robocall accuses Mitt Romney of having no 'compassion' for elderly Holocaust survivors

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  
  Keepin' it positive. (Phelan Ebenhack/Reuters and Chris Keane/Reuters)
  In today's episode of Relentlessly Positive Theater, Florida primary edition, we learn from a Gingrich campaign robocall that Mitt Romney wanted to take kosher food away from Holocaust survivors. This is a double whammy against Romney; he didn't just want to hurt old people, or Jewish people, he wanted to hurt old Jewish people. Via the Huffington Post, the text of the robocall:

  "As governor of Massachusetts, Mitt Romney vetoed a bill paying for kosher food for our seniors in nursing homes. Holocaust survivors, who for the first time, were forced to eat non-kosher, because Romney thought $5 was too much to pay for our grandparents to eat kosher. Where is Mitt Romney's compassion for our seniors? Tuesday you can end Mitt Romney's hypocrisy on religious freedom, with a vote for Newt Gingrich. Paid for by Newt 2012."

  The issue in question was a 2003 Romney veto over additional $600,000 in funding for kosher kitchens in Massachusetts nursing homes (a veto that was overturned), which in turn was an attempted patch of previous funding cuts to those homes. Is it a fair hit? Well, Gingrich's campaign is blatantly lying about the "were forced to eat non-kosher" part, because it never happened. Even if Romney's veto had been upheld, the most probable net effect would have been not to end kosher meals, but for the nursing homes in question to possibly have them delivered from elsewhere. But yes, he did veto that funding.

  The only part of this that confuses me is that I thought Republicans liked cutting government spending in ways that hurt old people, so that wouldn't seem too effective a slam, and the party's relationship with Jewish Americans in general is, um, a bit conflicted.

  Newt Gingrich would seem to be a rather poor candidate for defending Jewish citizens from harm, given that he spent yesterday in a batshit-crazy Florida church listening to a prominent batshit-crazy religious conservative talk about how to best convert Jews away from their shameful, shameful Jewishness:

  Gingrich was an hour late, and he and his wife quietly slipped into a pew near the back. This church was similar to the one they visited that morning, also with a giant robed choir, full orchestra and space for thousands.

  As he arrived, Gingrich updated his FourSquare account to announce the occasion, saying, "Tip: Don't be just a pew sitter." [...]

  Inside, the topic of the evening discussion, led by Joel Rosenberg, a novelist who writes about Islamic terrorism, focused partially on how to convert Jews to the faith.

  "As a Jewish person," Rosenberg, who was raised by a Jewish father and a Gentile mother, "our people really didn't get it the first time Jesus came."

  He urged the audience not to be bashful, and to act quickly in case the End Times were nigh. "I know you know Jewish people," he told them. "You have an accountant, you have a lawyer..."

  Good gawd. Well, here's another tip: Don't freaking text in church. And if you have time to text in church, maybe you should spend more time commenting on how you don't actually believe the convert-the-Jews-before-the-End-Times crap the batshit-crazy preacher is going on about, and less time updating your goddamn FourSquare status.

  Fine, whatever. It's campaign season, so of course Newt can listen to how shameful those Jewish accountants and lawyers are, not properly converting themselves so that we can have a good ol' fashioned Armageddon showdown with rockets and lasers and Jesus flying a jet fighter or whatever it's going to be, while at the very same time Newt can release a robocall pointing out that the other guy is so mean that he wants nursing-home-bound Holocaust survivors to have to eat non-kosher food. Yeah, great.

  Given that the entirety of primary season seems to be a contest to see which well-funded monkeys can throw their poo the farthest, it's really hard to get outraged. I'm gonna just despise all of these candidates equally and be done with it.

  
  

  
• 18:00

  Open thread: Mitt Romney's 99 percent problems

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  
  

  
• 17:57

  Susan G. Komen for the Cure caves to anti-choicers, stops funding Planned Parenthood

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Source: Planned Parenthood 2008-9 annual report

  The Washington Post reports:

  The nation’s leading breast-cancer charity, Susan G. Komen for the Cure, is halting its partnerships with Planned Parenthood affiliates — creating a bitter rift, linked to the abortion debate, between two iconic organizations that have assisted millions of women.

  The change will mean a cutoff of hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants, mainly for breast exams.

  As you can see from the chart to the right, cancer screening and prevention comprises 17 percent of Planned Parenthood's services. For many low-income women, Planned Parenthood is their only source of health care. By caving to the anti-choice extremists who are determined to put Planned Parenthood out of business, Susan G. Komen for the Cure is essentially telling low-income women they're better off dying of cancer than having access to the screening and prevention that saves lives.

  Of course, that's not what they're saying:

  Komen says the key reason is that Planned Parenthood is under investigation in Congress — a probe launched by a conservative Republican who was urged to act by anti-abortion groups.

  Right. Because of extremists in the House, like Rep. Cliff Stearns (R-FL) and Michele Bachmann (R-MN), who tried last year to investigate and defund Planned Parenthood—and even threatened to shut down the government if they didn't get their way—low-income women will have a much harder time getting the necessary care they need to screen for and prevent cancer. And the Komen Foundation is now doing their dirty work for them.

  And the fact that Karen Handel, the foundation's senior vice president of public policy, is "staunchly and unequivocally pro-life" is just a coincidence, right?

  Send an email to the Susan G. Komen foundation and tell them what you think of this decision.

  Planned Parenthood's statement is below the fold.

  
  

  
• 17:30

  Predicting Florida: What say you?

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  (Caricature by DonkeyHotey)

  Changed into your tee-shirt and sweats? Checked the cupboards to make sure you're stocked up on tequila and popcorn? Got your calculator and digital pencil ready? Got the Plexiglas shield in place to keep your cat off the keyboard? Told the eye-rollers in your household that they can take a hike for the duration of the evening while you plot the course of the Republican presidential field?

  Okay, then. Time for predictions. But first, a prediction from the guy who won the last primary, Newton Leroy Gingrich:

  “If you watch tonight, my prediction is the conservative vote will be dramatically bigger than Governor Romney’s,” he said. “So we’ve got to find a way to consolidate conservatives, and I’m clearly the front-runner among conservatives.”

  But Mr. Gingrich also predicted early returns would suggest a Romney cakewalk because of voters who cast their ballots before Mr. Gingrich’s victory in South Carolina 10 days ago.

  “I can tell you now the early vote will all look very good for Romney because it’s the absentees, where he spent millions of dollars before we got here,” Mr. Gingrich said at a campaign stop later Tuesday morning.

  That's a good bet considering that the Romney team concentrated a sophisticated campaign on early voters. Just over half a million Floridians requested absentee ballots for the primary; only 200,000 did so in 2008.

  So, with the polls ready to close, here's your chance. No points for picking Romney, Gingrich, Santorum and Paul in that order. Margins, it's all about margins.

  We'll be liveblogging results here starting at 4 PM PT.

  
  

  
• 14:12

  GOP campaign against Keystone decision far more than a fight over a pipeline

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Tar sands extraction in Alberta (Environment Canada) Over the past year, Republicans, TransCanada and a compliant megamedia have persuaded a majority of Americans, including many union members, that the Keystone XL pipeline will produce a significant number of jobs despite a study by both the State Department and an independent study showing otherwise.

  With the 1,700-mile, Alberta-to-Texas pipeline now at least temporarily rejected by the Obama administration, the GOP can be expected to use the decision as a cudgel in the election campaign. As House Speaker John Boehner said at the Republicans' lobbyist-packed annual retreat in Baltimore two weeks ago:

  The Keystone pipeline—which is part of our jobs plan—has put us back on offense. This is an opportunity to get back to what we know works. […] You’ll see me holding up my jobs card, talking about our plan, asking ‘Where are the jobs?’ Have you heard me say all that before? Hell, yes. I’ll be doing it again because it works. And it only works if we do it over and over and over again.”

  It works in part because, as Media Matters has shown, the megamedia have served as a conduit for the propaganda of the pipeline proponents and given short shrift to its opponents.

  Even that barrage of disinformation has not done quite as persuasive a job as Boehner suggests. A GOP poll taken in December two weeks before Obama's decision was announced did find that 78 percent of respondents said they believe the pipeline would create "a significant amount of jobs." But the same contentiously worded poll showed 48 percent saying time should be taken to fully understand the environmental implications of the pipeline versus 45 percent who said delay is costing jobs and is politically motivated. Increasing the percentage of those who believe the delay is harmful will depend on just how aggressive a campaign the pipeline's advocates will mount. Very aggressive would be an excellent guess.

  As David Wilkins, the U.S. ambassador to Canada in the George W. Bush administration, told an Edmonton, Alberta, reporter Monday, we'll be seeing a lot more about the pipeline "as the campaign for president unfolds." Wilkins conceded that if Obama is reelected, the pipeline may be approved in 2013. If he isn't, however, "the pipeline will absolutely get approved because all of the Republican candidates have indicated they are very much in favor of it.”

  Wilkins, who was in Canada for energy-related discussions, works for a U.S.-based law firm that represents the Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers in Washington.

  As conventional oil becomes harder to find, the move to sources like shale oil and tar-sands oil will increase. Already more than 50 U.S. refineries in 16 states process nearly 2 million barrels of Canadian tar-sands oil a day, 15 percent of U.S. crude-oil imports. This source is vastly more environmentally destructive than other sources of oil. Among other things, hundreds of thousands of acres of boreal forest must be cut down to get at the sulfurous, molasses-like, heavy metal-filled bitumen that the oil is derived from.

  What the ultimate decision on the pipeline is really about is not jobs, but the agenda of the multinational oil and gas corporations with their hooks planted deep in the political system of both parties and represented by Wilkins's firms and scores just like his. The fight is not merely about the pipeline, but rather the whole energy regime of the planet. Do we stick with what we already have, maintaining the gargantuan profits of corporations that for decades have controlled our energy direction to our detriment?

  Or do we break with the past so we can have a prosperous and environmentally sound future?

  
  

  
• 13:05

  National Journal poll: 'Overwhelming support' for populist tax reform

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Buffett with Pres. Obama in 2010 (White House)
  A new United Technologies/National Journal Congressional Connection Poll shows huge support for President Obama's "Buffett Rule" tax reform proposal.

  By a whopping 76-percent-to-19-percent margin, Americans agreed with Obama’s proposal to “impose a minimum tax on money American companies earn from their operations abroad to discourage them from creating jobs overseas and encourage them to create jobs in the U.S.”

  They also support the basic idea behind Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse's "Paying a Fair Share" legislation. By a margin of 65 to 31 percent, poll respondents said Congress should act to ensure that people making more than $1 million should pay at least 30 percent of their income in taxes.

  Unfortunately, the public is also depressingly realistic: "[A]n eye-popping 70 percent of respondents said it was not too likely or not at all likely that the president and Congress would agree on the major ideas Obama presented."

  There's a silver lining to that cynicism with Democrats newly committed to a populist message. It should be very clear to all these would-be voters who is obstructing the tax policy they support.

  
  

  
• 11:50

  Democrats hone in on populist 2012 election narrative with 'Buffett Rule' as centerpiece

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  President Obama (White House photo)
  The new narrative for the 2012 election has emerged, and it's about time. They're not going to be talking about austerity. They're not going to be talking about deficits (we hope), but about fairness. And they're starting with taxes.

  Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada is planning votes all spring and summer in an attempt to end the tax breaks that corporations and wealthy individuals like Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney enjoy. [...]

  [T]he Democrats are etching a sharp contrast with GOP initiatives on Capitol Hill, as Republicans continue to emphasize last year's proposals to change Medicare, cut regulations and develop the controversial Keystone XL oil pipeline.

  "We're going to have a robust debate about whose vision is more promising for moving this country forward," Obama told House Democrats at their annual retreat Friday in Cambridge, Md. [...]

  "The question is how do we pay for that?" Obama said about the costs of keeping those tax breaks in place. "Because when you give me a tax break that I don't need and the country can't afford, two things happen: Either the deficit increases or, alternatively, somebody else has to pay the tab—that senior, or that student, or that family who's struggling to make ends meet."

  Every election is about defining the other guy, but in this one the contrast couldn't be sharper—who's looking out for the hedge fund manager, versus who's looking out for the rest of us. The argument held true in December of 2010 when Democrats had the chance to make the fight over ending the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy really damage Republicans, but deferred. It's even more true now that the damage from the debt ceiling deal and the cuts it demands.

  There couldn't be a stronger narrative to galvanize people against the Republicans, particularly with Millionaire Mitt as their presumptive standard bearer.

  
  

  
• 11:40

  World Net Daily notices our petition calling for an investigation of James O'Keefe for voter fraud

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  James O'Keefe (@Steffikeith/twitpic)
  At Daily Kos, we are currently running a petition asking the New Hampshire attorney general and the relevant U.S. attorney to investigate James O'Keefe for committing voter fraud in the New Hampshire primary. We are doing this because James O'Keefe, and several of his associates, may have committed voter fraud in the New Hampshire primary.

  The petition currently has over 40,000 signatures, and you can sign it here. Along with allied organizations who have also collected tens of thousands of signatures, we are delivering it on Thursday.

  World Net Daily noticed the petition, and is none too happy about it:

  Daily Kos, a disgusting left-wing website connected with George Soros, is now circulating a petition calling for an official law enforcement investigation of O’Keefe for practicing voter fraud as part of his whistleblower investigation.

  It is easy to forget that absolutely everything progressive do is connected to George Soros. Fortunately, publications like World Net Daily are here to remind us.

  Here is another taste of World Net Daily's editorial:

  O’Keefe is a hero.

  The pukes at Daily Kos are villains.

  If we are making them angry, then we must be doing something right. Please, add your name to the petition calling for an investigation of James O'Keefe for voter fraud.

  7:45 PM PT: We're over 50,000 signatures on the petition. Keep piling on.

  
  

  
• 10:22

  Federal workers out-earn private sector ones ... at the low end. At the high end, they earn less.

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  The right is going to push the new CBO study (PDF) comparing compensation for federal and private sector workers as showing that federal workers earn more than private sector workers and are therefore, by definition, overpaid. But while the CBO does find that federal workers, on average, earn more in wages and benefits than similar private sector workers, that's not the important story it tells.

  Look at the graph at the right. It compares federal and private sector wages and benefits for workers at different levels of education. Federal workers with a high school diploma or some college earn more in wages and benefits than private sector workers. For workers with bachelor's degrees, wages are just about tied, but federal workers have better benefits. By the time you get to a master's degree, private sector workers are earning slightly more in wages, though their benefits still fall short. Workers with a professional degree or doctorate get just about the same amount of benefits in the private sector and the federal government—but those in the private sector make substantially more in wages. So while, overall, the government pays 16 percent more in total compensation than the private sector would for comparable workers, that's stratified. The government pays 36 percent more to workers with a high school diploma or less, and 18 percent less to workers with a professional degree or doctorate.

  Aside from the general desire to target any and all evidence of competent governance, in other words, Republican outrage about overpaid federal workers is about the fact that the floor isn't as low as they want it to be. The ceiling on what federal workers make is a lot lower than it is for private sector workers. But the floor—what a federal custodian or groundskeeper with a high school diploma makes—still includes good health care and a pension, and to the right, that's a waste.

  This comparison between private and federal compensation isn't just a reflection of reality right now. It's a map of where Republicans want us to go—to them, the greater inequality of the private sector is a model, and the fact that all federal government employees are making enough to live on even if they get sick or old is an abomination.

  
  

  
• January 30, 2012
• 20:30

  Newt Gingrich, student of privilege

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Those kids need to get off my lawn.
  If you've spent any amount of time listening to Newt Gingrich, you no doubt know that one of his big ideas is that kids these days are too damn lazy, and need to work for a living. He has proposed that we have elementary school kids work as janitors, and that from that age on up through college students ought to have a job. Mostly poor kids, but hey, everyone else too. His latest was directed at lazy college students who really ought to be working part time, rather than just lazing away their days trying to get an education and stuff.

  See where this is going yet? No? Well, via Wonkette:

  And now the key excerpt from the 1995 Vanity Fair profile that proves Newt’s generalizations about college kids are, no surprise here, derived solely from his own experience trying to wheedle money from his parents and spouse:

  “Newt, who avoided Vietnam with student and marriage deferments, resisted taking a job. During his college years, Newt called up his father and stepmother to ask for financial help. His stepmother, Marcella McPherson, can still hear his exact words: ‘I do not want to go to work. I want all my time for my studies. . . . Bob Gingrich told me he will not help me one bit. So I wondered, would you people help me?’ Big Newt began sending him monthly checks.

  “Dolores Adamson, Gingrich’s district administrator from 1978 to 1983, remembers, ‘Jackie put him all the way through school. All the way through the PhD. . . . He didn’t work.’ ”

  That lazy freaking bastard.

  
  

  
• 20:00

  Republican primary ad spending shifts from campaigns to Super PACs

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney love their Citizens United cash
    This doesn't come as a shock, but it's still nice to see numbers validate what was obvious to anyone who paid attention to the Citizens United ruling: a new study shows that while the amount of advertising so far in the Republican presidential primary is on the same level as 2008, a much larger portion of it is now being funded by outside groups.

  According to the study, featuring data from Kantar Media/CMAG and analysis from the Wesleyan Media Project, 69,871 television ads have aired on national cable and local broadcast on behalf of Republican primary candidates thus far in the 2012 cycle. Total cost: $28.9 million. Through the same point in 2008, roughly the same number of ads had run—68,839, although the cost was much higher: $49.8 million. (Note that these numbers do not include local cable.)

  Aside from the lower ad rates, the big change between 2008 and 2012 is that in 2008, 97.4 percent of the money was spent by campaigns themselves—just 2.6 percent by outside groups. In 2012, 56.4 percent of the money was spent by campaigns—43.6 percent by outside groups, a nearly 17-fold increase for outside groups as a share of total ad spending. Even though total spending decreased by 42 percent, spending by outside groups increased 1,281.8 percent.

  Although these numbers don't capture all ad spending, they do provide an apples to apples comparison for local broadcast and national cable, and they show that rather than giving more citizens a voice in the political process, Citizens United has merely allowed campaigns to rely on a smaller group of elite funders to pay for their campaigns. Instead of raising $100 from 10,000 individuals, now all Mitt Romney needs to do is ask one of his old Bain buddies to drop a $1 million check into a Super PAC. (He's allowed to help them fundraise.) The same amount of advertising is going on the air, but a dramatically smaller number of people are funding it, and because much of the advertising is going through Super PACs, candidates can avoid taking full responsibility for some of the least defensible stuff said on their behalf.

  Despite evidence like this, most Republican politicians defend Citizens United in the name of promoting liberty and freedom. I do not think they know what liberty and freedom truly mean.

  
  

  
• 19:30

  Caption contest: 'Mitt Romney serves meal at Jewish nursing home'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  (Brian Snyder/Reuters) Alternately: "So that's what happened to Seamus." Can you top ours?

  
  

  
• 18:07

  Senate approves cloture on STOCK Act

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama highlighted one particular piece of legislation to restore the public's faith in their government:

  “Send me a bill that bans insider trading by members of Congress, and I will sign it tomorrow,” Obama said during his address to a joint session of Congress.

  Today, the Senate voted to move forward with the STOCK Act, which will do precisely that. Today's vote was on cloture, the Senate agreeing to move the bill forward, and it passed 93-2 (Sens. Tom Coburn [R-OK] and Richard Burr [R-NC] voted against). The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act, which would prevent members of Congress and federal employees from using insider knowledge from trading stocks based on that knowledge. The bill was introduced by Sens. Scott Brown (R-MA) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY). Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid promised an amendment process when the bill comes to the floor for final passage.

  You might remember that this bill was somewhat controversial last year, when House Financial Services Chairman Spencer Bachus was all set to move forward, but found an unsurmountable obstacle: House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

  In a Wednesday meeting described by one source as “extremely direct” and by another as “very blunt,” Cantor (R-Va.) ripped into Bachus, explaining in no uncertain terms that it was unacceptable for Bachus to mark up the bill without having run it by GOP leaders and other chairmen with jurisdiction over its provisions. [...]

  Cantor delivered the cease-and-desist order on behalf of GOP leaders, other chairmen and rank-and-file lawmakers on both sides of the aisle who were concerned that Bachus could help give the bill life by having the committee approve it. In particular, it put members of the committee in a tough spot: Even if they think the bill’s a bad idea, it’s hard to go home and explain why they voted against it.

  Cantor soon backed down, saying in mid-December that the bill would come to the floor in the House in 2012 in a new and improved version. See, he only rejected it initially because it didn't go far enough. And it only took him a week to come up with that explanation. At any rate, it looks like he's going to get his chance to follow through on that promise.

  (And in case you're really curious, no, members of Congress, their families and staff aren't explicitly covered by insider trading regulations. Go figure.)

  
  

  
• 18:00

  Weeks after Citigroup cuts 4,500 jobs, CEO says 'jobs should be our number one priority'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Vikram Pandit (World Economic Forum)

  Which of these items, highlighted by Felix Salmon, do you think more accurately represents Citigroup's priorities? This, from Dec. 7, 2011?

  Citigroup to Cut 4,500 Jobs on Slumping Revenue

  Or this, from Jan. 29 at the World Economic Forum at Davos?

  “Jobs should be our number one priority,” declared Annual Meeting Co-Chair Vikram Pandit, Chief Executive Officer of Citi, in a session on the global agenda for 2012.

  Unless that's really "cutting jobs should be our number one priority," there's a wee contradiction here. But really, Pandit's words are just prime grade bullshit; as Salmon writes, "everybody knows, in any case, that profits are Pandit’s number one priority; to be honest I’d be surprised if jobs are on his priority list at all."

  
  

  
• 17:50

  One black kid

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Editor's note: This week, I'm excited to say, we're adding some new contributors to the Comics page at Daily Kos.  Today it is my great pleasure to introduce one of my former comrades at Salon, Keith Knight.  Every Monday at this time, Keith will be posting selections from either his semi-autobiographical K-Chronicles, or his socio-political single panel strip, (Th)ink.  He's won the Harvey Award, the Comic-Con Inkpot Award, the Glyph Award, has authored ten books, and was the lead vocalist for the San Francisco rap group the Marginal Prophets.  Please join me in welcoming this multi-faceted, multi-talented artist to the Daily Kos Comics lineup.  (And be sure to check back Wednesday at this time for our next announcement.)  --Tom Tomorrow

  

  
  

  
• 17:09

  Republican terriers try to turn bark into bite by taking Keystone decision away from President Obama

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Sen. Joe Manchin crosses the aisle, again. House Republicans are gearing up for another round over the Keystone XL pipeline. This time they hope to force the White House to approve it by tying it to an energy and highway construction bill. But Senate Republicans have another plan: Take the decision about the pipeline completely out of the hands of the president altogether and give it to Congress.

  House Speaker John Boehner said on ABC's "This Week" Sunday that he may attach approval of the Keystone pipeline to the GOP-initiated American Energy and Infrastructure Jobs Act. Republicans tied a requirement for a quick White House decision on the pipeline to the two-month payroll tax-cut extension in December. That gambit ran aground when President Obama rejected the pipeline, which would carry tar-sands oil along a 1700-mile Alberta-to-Texas route. The 60 days allowed for coming to a decision was unreasonably short, the administration said.

  Unlike previous speculation, Boehner apparently won't be trying to attach pipeline approval to the full-year extension of the payroll tax cut now being worked out in a Senate-House conference committee.

  But three senators instrumental in getting the quick-decision stricture into the payroll tax deal last year have a fresh plan that could make Boehner's moot.

  Sens. John Hoeven (R-ND), Richard Lugar (R-IN) and David Vitter (R-LA) introduced legislation on the floor Monday afternoon that would yank authority for any pipeline decision away from the administration and give it to Congress instead. They cite constitutional grounds for this under the Commerce Clause. That's an approach bolstered by an analysis by the Congressional Research Service:

  "[I]f Congress chose to assert its authority in the area of border crossing facilities, this would likely be considered within its Constitutionally enumerated authority to regulate foreign commerce," the analysis states. [...]

  The four CRS attorneys write that their review “suggests that legislation related to cross-border facility permitting is unlikely to raise significant constitutional questions, despite the fact that such permits have traditionally been handled by the executive branch alone pursuant to its constitutional ‘foreign affairs’ authority.”

  The three sponsors of the proposed legislation claim their approach is bipartisan because the 44 senators who have signed on include one Democrat, Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Just two big problems: getting many other Democrats on board; and, should they gain passage in the Senate and the House, getting the president's signature on legislation designed to go around him on the pipeline.

  Now, at least we know what Hoeven and Manchin were talking about when they sat together for the State of the Union address. Said Manchin of the proposed legislation:

  As our country continues to need oil, common sense tells me I’d rather buy it from our friends in Canada, not countries around the world that seek to do us harm. I’d rather buy from our closest ally and create jobs in America than push Canada to build a pipeline out to the West Coast of North America that benefits countries like China. This pipeline is a job creator with support of both labor and business. It needs to be built not for the benefit of one political party or one state, but for the benefit of America.

  Republicans, who promised creation of jobs would be their No. 1 priority in the run-up to the 2010 congressional elections but have yet to produce any, have made the pipeline all about jobs. Because now it's another election year. Like the megamedia, they've touted pipeline builder TransCanada's claims in this regard, arguing that at least 20,000 direct jobs would be generated by construction and more than 100,000 indirect jobs. A study by the Cornell Global Labor Institute says the project will create far fewer jobs than TransCanada and the company's consultants claim.

  The entire list of sponsors of the legislation can be seen below the DKos croissant.

  
  

  
• 16:46

  Rick Warren is an ass, but he's right

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Rick Warren, mega-church grifter, uses some of his tax-exempt time to promote the asinine Republican attack on President Obama's use of the teleprompter:

  Leaders speak from conviction. Actors speak from telepromters.
  — @RickWarren

  Of course Warren is right. Actors do use teleprompters:

  ... as does almost every politician, Republican or Democrat, since late in the twentieth century.  

  Warren needs to stick with something he's good at ... praying fleecing suckers out of more of their hard-earned money instead of peddling tired GOP talking points. Oh, wait, that would make it too hard to scam his herd. Carry on, Rick. Dumbass.

  
  

  
• 16:31

  President Obama shows how loving owners transport their dogs. Are you watching, Mitt Romney?

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  David Axelrod shows us how President Obama transported Bo late last year when he went out for a little Christmas shopping at PetSmart and Best Buy:

  How loving owners transport their dogs.http://t.co/...
  — @davidaxelrod

  Say what? President Obama didn't follow Mitt Romney's lead and load Bo into a dog carrier strapped to the roof?

  Yikes. I knew he hated free enterprise. But I didn't know he hated it that much.

  
  

  
• 16:02

  Unions call on Democrats to reject poison pills buried in Republican 'compromise' on FAA

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  When Republicans suggested that they would agree to a compromise on Federal Aviation Administration reauthorization, dropping their demand to count workers who did not vote in union representation elections as having voted against the union in exchange for raising the threshold of workers asking to get a union representation election from 35 percent to 50 percent, there were two possibilities: Either Republicans were dropping a huge demand in exchange for something relatively minor and it was a bit of a win, or there was something sneaky buried in what Republicans now wanted.

  Today, Greg Sargent reports that more than a dozen unions have come out against the compromise—in essence, they concluded it was option B and the seemingly innocuous requirement of 50 percent interest in a union (seemingly innocuous because it would be malpractice to ask for an election that would require 50 percent support if you didn't already have 50 percent support) hides a fistful of poison pills.

  The issues involved are somewhat technical, but the unions contend that the actual "compromise" being proposed would have a number of negative effects. Under current procedures, employers don't know which workers have signed cards saying they want a union. The "compromise" could enable airlines to find out exactly which workers had signed cards, allowing managers to precisely target union supporters for intimidation. Once upon a time (2006 to 2010, roughly), Republicans and corporations were deeply and sincerely worried about what would happen to workers if a law was passed saying that if more than 50 percent of workers signed cards asking for union representation got them a union; this meant the destruction of workers' right to a "secret ballot," Republicans argued. Now, they want to make the workers sign the cards and then show the cards to their bosses before the election, while giving the bosses ways to delay the election to buy time to intimidate as many workers as needed to prevent a union win.

  But that's not all. In cases where a larger non-union and a smaller union airline merge, the "compromise" would make it easy to decertify the union at the smaller airline right off the bat, without allowing a vote. It would also diminish the independence of the National Mediation Board, the federal agency that oversees air and rail unions, making it easier for Congress to tie up the board's time and resources and, more, to intimidate it into making decisions tilted toward airlines.

  The unions, which Sargent reports include the Communications Workers of America, the International Association of Machinists, and many more, are calling for the Senate to reject the so-called compromise and pass a clean FAA reauthorization.

  
  

  
• 15:44

  Pew: Majority of Republicans dissatisfied with their candidates

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  According to Pew's latest survey, a majority of Republicans are dissatisfied with their candidates ... ... which perhaps is not a surprise given that a majority of Americans think neither Newt Gingrich nor Mitt Romney understand the problems facing average Americans: Meanwhile, most Americans think President Obama understands their problems. That's a real problem for Republicans—so it's no surprise they've got the Bad Candidate Blues.

  Republicans would probably love to press the reset button and start this whole thing over, but even if they did have a decent candidate waiting in the wings, as Meteor Blades pointed out, it's too late.

  
  

  
• 15:00

  Midday open thread

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  • Today's comic from Tom Tomorrow is State of the primary:
  • What you missed on Sunday Kos ...

    • Super Rocket PACs, by Matt Wuerker.
    • Meet George Jetson, by Mark Sumner.
    • Mitt Romney's in between a rock and hard place on taxes, by brooklynbadboy.
    • Fox News psychiatrist: Newt Gingrich's affairs 'mean he might make a strong president,' by Hunter.

    • From the streets to the Congress: Has Occupied changed the political narrative, by Armando.
    • They 'went for broke' in WWII while their families were broken, by Denise Oliver Velez.
    • Outrage fatigue: Or, accepting that the Republicans just are that bad, by Dante Atkins.
    • The problem with the Republican Party is not Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney, by Laurence Lewis.

  • Netroots Nation needs your help in developing and organizing the sessions (panels, trainings and screening series sessions) you want to see at Netroots Nation this June 7-10 in Providence. The deadline for submissions is Jan. 31. Guidelines and the submission form are here.
  • If you happen to be in Knoxville, Tennessee, be sure to visit The Bistro at the Bijou:

    Knoxville, Tennessee restaurant Bistro at the Bijou is receiving boatloads of support on Facebook after reports began surfacing that it refused service to state Senator Stacey Campfield out and asked him to leave. [...]

    Campfield, who has been in the news again recently because he's still trying to push his heinous homophobic "don't say gay" bill in Tennessee, gave an interview last week to Michelangelo Signorile in which he asserted that bullying of gay kids "is a lark", compared homosexuality to sex with animals, asserted that homosexuality is "glorified" in the media, and that it's "virtually impossible" for heterosexuals to contract AIDS.
    

    The restaurant's facebook page has a short and sweet message about the incident:

    I hope that Stacy Campfield now knows what if feels like to be unfairly discrimanted against.

  • Not breaking news: Whether it's claims about her father's death at the hands of the Nazis, the landscape being littered with headless bodies, or accounts of her encounters with President Obama, Arizona Governor Jan Brewer "often has trouble with the truth."
  • Another day, another hypocritical Republican—Indiana edition:

    Secretary of State Charlie White, a Republican, is in the unusual position of being the person entrusted to protect the integrity of the ballot box, while at the same time fighting seven felony charges involving allegations he registered to vote at his ex-wife's house and served as a local councilman when he actually lived outside the district.
    

  • Students at Florida State University aren't happy about the Koch brother's involvement—read that, buying influence—at their school:

    The FSU Student Senate is now introducing a resolution against the Kochs’ “undue influence on academics as established by the current agreement between the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation and the FSU Economics department.”

    In their words, “no public institution should accept funding that is conditional upon a willingness to fulfill  or conform to a private entity’s ideological goals.”

  • A North Carolina Republican representative sent a rather amazing email to the entire General Assembly:

    "We need to make the death penalty a real deterrent again by actually carrying it out. Every appeal that can be made should have to be made at one time, not in a serial manner," [Rep. Larry] Pittman wrote in the email. "If murderers (and I would include abortionists, rapists, and kidnappers, as well) are actually executed, it will at least have the deterrent effect upon them. For my money, we should go back to public hangings, which would be more of a deterrent to others, as well."

    Pittman defended himself for the mailing, saying that it was only supposed to go to one fellow-assembly member, but "he was tired and accidentally hit 'Reply All.'" Other than that, apparently he meant every word.

  • This is sure to annoy Republican lawmakers because ... uh ... because it's energy efficient:

    Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and Energy Secretary Steven Chu plan to flip the switch Monday night on newly installed LED lights that will illuminate most of the Mall — and reduce the National Park Service’s energy bill.

    The energy-efficient lights, donated by bulb maker Osram Sylvania and installed for free by Pepco, should cut the Mall’s utility bill by 60 percent to 65 percent, Interior Department officials said. With a long stretch of walking and bike paths and dozens of structures accessible to the public at all hours of the day, the Mall consumes the most electricity of the 397 national parks.

  • Best wishes for a speedy recovery:

    Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson suffered a broken clavicle and another fracture to his rear shoulder area when he fell six to eight feet off a stage Friday night, according to the Palm Beach Post.

    Robinson, 74, was sitting on an elevated stage at the Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Fla., during a dinner for the Joe DiMaggio Legends Game, according to the Post. Robinson leaned back against a curtain toward the back of the stage, but there was nothing behind the curtain to hold him up.

  • Dude, seriously?

    A man is in custody after allegedly texting a naked photo of his girlfriend's daughter to nearly 40 contacts in the girl's cellphone. [...]

    According to what 3TV's Mike Watkiss learned, Foster found a photo the girl, who is a student at Poston Butte High School in San Tan Valley, had taken of herself, and decided to teach her a lesson by sending the photo to contacts in her phone. Investigators do not believe Foster was intentionally trying to exploit the child.

    Investigators and the reporter are idiots ... from later in the article:

    Even if Foster's intentions were well-meant, what he allegedly did is against the law.

    Yes, well-meant. My eyes are rolling.

  
  

  
• 14:53

  NC-Gov: Democratic chances may have improved, post-Bev Perdue

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Erskine Bowles Public Policy Polling (PDF). 1/27-29. North Carolina voters. MoE ±4.2% (12/1-4 in parentheses, 9/30-10/3 in brackets):

  Erskine Bowles (D): 42 [42]
  Pat McCrory (R): 44 [42]
  Undecided: 14 [16]

  Walter Dalton (D): 35 [32]
  Pat McCrory (R): 50 [46]
  Undecided: 15 [23]

  Bill Faison (D): 31 (26) [30]
  Pat McCrory (R): 50 (47) [45]
  Undecided: 19 (26) [25]

  Anthony Foxx (D): 32
  Pat McCrory (R): 50
  Undecided: 18

  Brad Miller (D): 35
  Pat McCrory (R): 49
  Undecided: 16

  Richard Moore (D): 36
  Pat McCrory (R): 47
  Undecided: 17

  Mike McIntyre (D): 30
  Pat McCrory (R): 50
  Undecided: 20

  Allen Joines (D): 30
  Pat McCrory (R): 50
  Undecided: 21

  Bob Etheridge (D): 35
  Pat McCrory (R): 50
  Undecided: 16

  Dan Blue (D): 31
  Pat McCrory (R): 49
  Undecided: 19

  Heath Shuler (D): 31
  Pat McCrory (R): 48
  Undecided: 21

  Kay Hagan (D): 41
  Pat McCrory (R): 48
  Undecided: 11

  Charles Meeker (D): 29
  Pat McCrory (R): 49
  Undecided: 22

  Sorry to be unusually waffly in the lede to a big story, but I don't have any other way of saying it: Democrats may be better off with unpopular incumbent Gov. Bev Perdue's stop-the-presses decision late last week not to run for a second term ... or they may not be better off. It depends on who the actual candidate is, and whether he can get his name rec up to the point where he's running at a rate comparable to Generic Democrat.

  "Generic Democrat," for now, is the Democrats' best bet here, actually leading Republican challenger and former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory, 46-45. (By comparison, a Bev Perdue loss was probably already baked in: She was routinely polling at a high-single-digits or low-double-digits deficit against McCrory.) Unfortunately, Democrats are experiencing some of what Republicans are currently experiencing at the national level: Nobody in reality measures up to Generic D's potential. [UPDATE: It's worth noting that Generic D is actually matched up against Generic R, rather than McCrory. The non-controversial, business-conservative McCrory may actually overperform Generic R.]

  Democrats who've run statewide near the top of the ticket (former Senate candidate Erskine Bowles, Sen. Kay Hagan) have the name rec to make it an interesting race from the get-go; downballot statewide Democrats, U.S. Reps., and big-city mayors don't have the name rec, and trail by double digits for now. (We have trendlines on some of them, because PPP has been aggressive about testing out other options, especially Bill Faison, who'd already been planning a primary run against Perdue.)

  Given Generic D's strength and the fact that McCrory starts out already very well-known (45/31 favorables, thanks to his 2008 Gov. run), a little-known Democrat could cut that down into single digits pretty quickly with a successful campaign rollout. But that means it'll take a while before we know whether our lot, post-Perdue, has really improved at all or not. And with McCrory already polling at or near 50, significant improvement over Perdue may still not be enough to get the job done in November.

  Since you may not be familiar with all of these Democrats who comprise the field's very long short-list, here's some background (plus their favorables, according to PPP's sample):

  Erskine Bowles: Former Clinton WH official, former UNC president, lost 2004 and 2002 Senate races, debt-reduction commissioner (38/31)
  Walter Dalton: Lieutenant Governor (17/25)
  Bill Faison: State Representative (8/24)
  Anthony Foxx: Charlotte mayor (21/25)
  Brad Miller: U.S. Representative, NC-13 (22/24)
  Richard Moore: Former state Treasurer, lost 2008 Democratic Gov. primary (23/20)
  Mike McIntyre: U.S. Representative, NC-07 (14/21)
  Allen Joines: Winston-Salem mayor (11/20)
  Bob Etheridge: Former U.S. Representative, NC-02, former state Superintendent of Public Instruction (25/27)
  Dan Blue: State Senator (19/25)
  Heath Shuler: U.S. Representative, NC-11 (21/23)
  Kay Hagan: U.S. Senator, elected in 2008 (37/39)
  Charles Meeker: Former Raleigh mayor (17/22)

  A few of these names are already moot, though, with some clarification on who's interested and who's not, from over the weekend:
  

  Kay Hagan: "not running"
  Bill Faison: "I say yes"
  Brad Miller: cheekily sounds interested, via Facebook
  Allen Joines: "will not run"
  and further down the ballot: Cal Cunningham (ex-state Rep., loser of 2010 Senate primary): "won't run for Lt. Gov." (open because Walter Dalton's already in the Gov race)

  
  

  
• 13:50

  Allen West on Obama, Pelosi and Reid: 'Get the hell out of the United States'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Allen West (Official portrait) Speaking to a gathering of Florida Republicans, Rep. Allen West added a layer of cement to his already solid reputation for right-wing lunacy:

  "We need to let President Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, (audience boos) and my dear friend the chairman of the Democrat National Committee, we need to let them know that Florida ain't on the table," West said. "Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America."

  Ludicrous macho posturing aside (he followed up with "Yeah I said 'hell'"—ooooh, naughty!), insane characterizations of ideas like tax fairness and promoting American manufacturing aside, the North Pole? Wait, did Allen West just say that Santa Claus is a Democrat?

  "America: love it or leave it" as traditionally applied is a noxious enough idea, a defense of the status quo that says the only way to love your country is to defend its every action and that wishing the nation would do better or trying to make that happen is an offense against it. But this is a radical step beyond that, to "love Florida Republican Rep. Allen West's ideas or leave America."

  This from a man who in 2010 got not quite 119,000 votes while Nancy Pelosi got just shy of 168,000 and Harry Reid got nearly 363,000. In 2008, of course, Barack Obama got more than 69 million votes. No one is suggesting West should leave, of course, but it does suggest that even if the American system of democracy provided for one individual to say "these ideas and no others define America; leave if you disagree," Allen West would not be that individual.

  
  

  
• 13:43

  Impeachment redux, just for the hell of it

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Grover Norquist (Jonathan Ernst/Reuters) The crazy will be strong when Obama gets reelected.

  [Grover] Norquist: If the Republicans have the House, Senate, and the presidency, I’m told that they could do an early budget vote—a reconciliation vote where you extend the Bush tax cuts out for a decade or five years. You take all of those issues off the table, and then say, “What do you want to do for tax reform?”

  Then, the question is: “OK, what do we do about repatriation and all of the interesting stuff?” And, if you have a Republican president to go with a Republican House and Senate, then they pass the [Paul] Ryan plan [on Medicare].

  NJ: What if the Democrats still have control? What’s your scenario then?

  NORQUIST: Obama can sit there and let all the tax [cuts] lapse, and then the Republicans will have enough votes in the Senate in 2014 to impeach. The last year, he’s gone into this huddle where he does everything by executive order. He’s made no effort to work with Congress.

  Ignore the nonsense about Obama not trying to work with Congress. I doubt even Norquist, the GOP's top anti-tax crusader, believes that idiocy.

  Instead, note that Norquist doesn't pretend that there's any "high crimes or misdemeanors" in question. It's simply—if Obama doesn't extend tax cuts for the one percent, then he'll be impeached.

  For some bizarre reason, the reporter interviewing Norquist didn't follow up on that point. But lest we forget, this is Norquist's GOP. He says "jump!" and Republicans across the land shout back, in unison, "HOW HIGH?"

  If you don't care for Obama, then whatever. Do something constructive and focus on getting Nancy Pelosi her gavel back. And if you do care for Obama, then also work to get Pelosi her gavel back.

  Because if Republicans remain in charge of the House, impeachment of Obama—despite running what is clearly the most scandal-free administration in decades—is virtually guaranteed.

  
  

  
• 13:03

  Sheldon Whitehouse to introduce 'Buffett Rule' bill Wednesday

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (Larry Downing/Reuters) Warren Buffett has been talking for months about the unfairness in our tax system, pointing out that his secretary pays more in taxes than he, a billionaire, does. Buffett could be getting his day on the Senate floor, courtesy of Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI).

  Last week, Whitehouse announced his intention to introduce a bill that would rectify some of the tax inequality our current system allows. In a conference call with reporters today, he explained his legislation and confirmed that he will introduce it in the Senate this Wednesday.

  Using Rhode Island wages as his example, he argued that the top 400 taxpayers in America are paying about the same percentage of income as a truck driver. "In theory," Whitehouse said, "we have a progressive tax code in which the greater income you have, the more you pay in percentage of income. Unfortunately, there are these huge exceptions to the rule of a progressive tax system,” he added. “I hope that many of my colleagues believe that these are loopholes that we can and should close.”

  His bill would do that quite simply, without actually rewriting any tax code. Taxpayers making more than $1 million would pay either their regular amount, if it's 30 percent or over of their income, or if it's less, 30 percent. They would be able to take charitable deductions in determining income, as in the current system.

  The bill is currently being scored by the Joint Committee on Taxation, and he has two early cosponsors, whom he chose not to name today. Whitehouse hasn't determined with leadership when his bill might be considered, but with the Bush tax cuts expiring in January 2013, he sees plenty of opportunity for the legislation to set an agenda for the White House and Democrats on basic tax fairness. There's probably not enough time to have it included in the ongoing conference on the payroll tax cut extension, but Whitehouse says he "wants to put it in wherever we can."
  

  
  

  
• 12:30

  Newt Gingrich vows to press on regardless of Florida outcome

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  If you have to explain why you can still win, you're losing (Chris Keane/Reuters) If Newt Gingrich pulls off a miracle in Florida—or even if he beats expectations and comes close to victory, as a new poll indicates might be possible—it's easy to see why he'd continue on. But even if he takes the anticipated shellacking, Gingrich is vowing to continue forward.

  Gingrich's basic argument: that even after Florida, less than 10 percent of delegates will have been selected, and that going forward, the prevalence of proportional allocation methods in the remaining states will make it impossible for Romney to secure the nomination anytime soon. As he said yesterday on ABC's This Week:

  But the fact is, this race is going to go on. The conservatives clearly are rejecting Romney. He is nowhere near getting a majority. And the fact is, once you get beyond Florida, these are all proportional representation states, and he's not going to be anywhere near a majority by April.

  And so this is going to go on all the way to the convention.

  Who knows whether or not Newt is telling the truth when he vows to continue his campaign at least until April, but his claim about delegate math is accurate, though it might not mean much. Based on the primary calendar and delegate allocation guide from thegreenpapers.com, as of March 31, only 50.2% of Republican delegates will have been selected. Thanks to new Republican Party rules, except for the first four states, all of those contests must have some sort of proportional allocation. That means Romney's best case scenario is probably being three-fifths to two-thirds of the way towards the delegates he needs.

  That being said, if Romney has three-fifths to two-thirds of what he needs by the end of March, he'll have a nearly absolute lock on the nomination. Although proportional allocation rules won't be required after April 1, nearly two-thirds of the delegates available after that point will be awarded using proportional allocation. That means if Romney builds a big lead early, he'd have to utterly crater (probably to something below 20% in most of the remaining states) to fail to get the delegates he needs.

  The bottom-line—and there's not really going to be a way for Newt to spin this otherwise—is that in order to beat Romney, he's going to need to beat him. It might feel good for him to blame Rick Santorum for having divided conservatives, but Mitt Romney's strategy has always been to divide and conquer. And if Newt can't stop that strategy ... it's known as losing. In other words, the only real way to win ... is to win. But if Newt wants to keep bashing Mitt Romney even after he's effectively lost the nomination, more power to him.

  
  

  
• 12:29

  Sarah Palin: Vote for Newt Gingrich to 'annoy liberals' and 'rage against the machine'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  Yeah how can he say he is not part of the establishment? Well look at the players in the establishment, who are fighting so hard against him. They want to crucify him because he has tapped into that average everyday American Tea Party grassroots movement that has said "enough is enough of the establishment."

  That tries to run the show that tries to tweak rules and law and regulations for their own good and not for our nation’s own good. Well when both party machines and many in the media are trying to crucify Newt Gingrich for bucking the tide and bucking the establishment that tells ya something.

  I saw ya know you gotta rage against the machine, at this point in order to defend our Republic and save what is good and secure and prosperous about our nation, we need somebody who is engaged in sudden and relentless reform and isn’t afraid to shake it up. Shake up that establishment.

  So, if for no other reason to rage against the machine vote for Newt, annoy a liberal. Vote Newt. Keep this vetting process going, keep the debate going.

  How dumb is Sarah Palin? So dumb that she thinks Newt Gingrich—former speaker of the House, regular guest on the Sunday talk shows, and, according to Nancy Reagan, the leader of the conservative movement to whom St. Ronnie himself handed off the torch—is an "outsider" who scares "the establishment."

  Sarah Palin is so dumb she thinks the reason the "establishment" is afraid of Newt is because of how well he's tapped into the "average everyday American Tea Party grassroots," which is neither "average" nor "everyday American" nor "grassroots." Yeah, it has nothing to do with the reality, as Bob Dole took a break last week from shilling for hard-on pills to point out, that a Gingrich nomination would "have an adverse impact on Republican candidates running for county, state, and federal offices," just like Newt's myriad ethical problems were a disaster for his own party in the '90s, including damaging Dole's run for the White House. (Apparently, that's one pill that's still too bitter for Dole to swallow.)

  Sarah Palin is so dumb she thinks Democrats are afraid to run against Newt Gingrich, even though polling shows President Obama would chew him up and spit him out in the general election because he doesn't just have baggage—he's got a full set of Tiffany-monogrammed luggage (from his ethical violations to his chronic philandering to his crazy Big Ideas like moon bases to his blatant dog whistle racism) that Democrats would love the opportunity to talk about.

  But you keep talking, Sarah. Keep encouraging your ever-dwindling following to really stick it to The Man by voting for the walking disaster that is Newt, all but ensuring that Obama enjoys the greatest landslide since, well, since Reagan.

  'Cause that will really annoy us liberals.

  (Via Joe My God)

  
  

  
• 12:22

  Clock runs out on white knight who could save GOP from Mitt, Newt, Rick and Ron

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Magical solution to GOP predicament seems
  to have missed his train. For months, some disenchanted Republicans have sought an alternative to the GOP presidential field. Actually, there are lots of disenchanted Republicans. At the beginning of this month, 58 percent said they weren't happy with their choices.

  Some prominent members of this cohort gave up on getting Sarah Palin in the race, as if another candidate with a record of wackiness, missteps and being unqualified for the office she's already held could possibly have improved matters. Then they turned their sights on New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels and, of course, former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush. None stepped up to the plate, even though some hopefuls keep grasping at straws.

  In truth, it's been too late for the knight in shining armor to come to the rescue for some time. Winning the nomination requires more than magic. It takes organization in the primary and caucus states and none of the purported saviors have that. No offices, no phone lines, no team of phone-bankers. Zilch.

  There's one more problem: Filing deadlines. Josh Putnam lays it out in stark terms at FrontloadingHQ. If the GOP rescuer got it together right now, today, and filed all the paperwork necessary to get on the ballot in the states whose deadlines have not yet passed, he or she could possibly arrive in Tampa in August with the 1144 delegates necessary to get the nomination at the GOP Convention. Assuming he or she won every available delegate in every state. Possible, no doubt, in a video game. After Tuesday, even that won't be possible, however, as the filing deadlines for Kentucky and Indiana pass into history.

  Yes, there's another straw-grasping scenario: getting the uncommitted delegates. Counting the possibility that enough such delegates would swing toward a still-unannounced candidate ups the chances a bit. And even if a candidate couldn't get the needed votes to win the nomination, there might be enough to block another candidate from being the nominee. But that suggests throwing in with one of the not-good-enough candidates that nearly three-fifths of Republican voters aren't happy about.

  Still, as Putnam says, there is that one remaining problem for such a scenario:

  Who is that candidate? Let me rephrase that. Who is the candidate who can not only successfully enter the race late, but who can also marshal the organization necessary to cobble together enough delegates to take the nomination or throw enough of a monkeywrench into the process and still maintain support in the party to win the nomination at the convention? Let's think about this for a moment. There are people in this race now actively seeking the nomination (and who have been running for president for quite some time) who cannot get on the ballots in some states. And we are expecting someone to come in and immediately be able to beat these deadlines, organize write-in efforts and uncommitted slates of delegates to get within shouting distance of 1144 or a lower total held by the frontrunner.

  Hahahahahahahaha. Ahem.

  The Republicans came to the dance with the wrong partners. And now they're going to have to go home with one of them.

  
  

  
• 11:39

  Mitch McConnell may be caving on the tax to make millionaires pay their fair share

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Sen. Mitch McConnell (Jim Young/Reuters)
  Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell hinted this weekend that he, at least, isn't willing to go back to war with Democrats over how to pay for the payroll tax cut extension bill. That issue has been nearly as problematic for Congress to work out as the House Republicans' insistence on making dumb political points with totally unrelated riders. Keystone XL pipeline, anyone?

  Democrats have pushed a surtax on millionaires to pay for the extension, while Republicans have wanted to slash spending elsewhere. The Senate Republicans tried to just to get on with the negotiations and keep the House from making all Republicans look bad by refusing to allow tax breaks for the middle class.

  Now there is just a hint of softening in that position. On CNN's State of the Union this weekend, host Candy Crowley asked McConnell whether it would be possible to pay, at least partially, for the tax holiday extension with tax increases on the wealthy. He didn't rule it out, but instead tried to change the subject to the deficit.

  “Would you pay for it partially with any kind of tax increase? Would you agree to that?” McConnell was asked by CNN’s “State of the Union” host Candy Crowley.

  “We have this problem, at the risk of being repetitious, because we spend way too much. We now have a debt the size of our economy. [...]

  Crowley pressed, “But you're not saying no, which is interesting to me. ... Usually you all flatly rule out any kind of tax increase and you're not.”

  “I'm not going to negotiate this agreement with you this morning, but I want the American people to understand that we now have a debt the size of our economy,” McConnell said.

  It's not a done deal by any means, but McConnell's refusal to rule out the tax hike on millionaires is movement. The payroll tax cut extension isn't the only issue here, as the bill also includes an extension of unemployment benefits and funding to prevent a 27 percent cut to physicians and providers for Medicare patients.

  Back in November, McConnell was absolutely refusing to consider it. McConnell wants to get this negotiating done and out of the way, understanding just how much damage was done by House Republicans and their shenanigans. This is an advantage Democrats need to press, and they need to press it by keeping the hugely popular millionaires' surtax alive.

  
  

  
• 11:35

  Final round of Florida polls still shows Romney lead, but Gingrich-linked pollster dissents (a bit)

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  After a small post-South Carolina surge, Newt Gingrich's standing in the polls has steadily eroded, as this chart from FiveThirtyEight shows:

  The newest batch of polling all agrees on one broad point: Mitt Romney still leads. But by how much—and whether Newt still has any mojo left—there is no consensus. Quinnipiac:

  Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has a 43 - 29 percent lead over former House Speaker Newt Gingrich among Republican likely voters in Florida, the nation's first big-state presidential primary, according to Quinnipiac University poll released today. Only 7 percent are undecided, but 24 percent say they might change their mind by tomorrow's election

  Public Policy Polling:

  PPP's second day of tracking in Florida finds little change in the state of the race. Mitt Romney leads with 39% to 32% for Newt Gingrich with Rick Santorum at 14% and Ron Paul at 11%. Romney and Santorum are both down a single point from Saturday's polling while Paul has gained 2 points and Gingrich has stayed in place.

  And lastly, InsiderAdvantage:

  A new InsiderAdvantage poll conducted Sunday night of likely Republican voters in the state of Florida shows a significant surge for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.

  The poll has former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney leading with 36 percent of voters, followed by Gingrich at 31 percent.

  If you're holding out hope that the InsiderAdvantage survey shows Gingrich could somehow, improbably, pull this thing off, just remember that the firm's CEO, Matt Towery, is a former Gingrich campaign chairman. And also note the site I regrettably had to link in order to show you this poll: NewsMax (shudder).

  And even if you think Newt could still catch fire in the last 24 hours or so, there's also this to consider: Romney has now locked in a sizable lead among those who say they've already voted. Indeed, PPP's Tom Jensen points out that Gingrich would have to lead by about 6-7 points among those who vote on election day itself in order to pull out a win.

  Newt, at least, is vowing to fight on no matter what happens. So we can only hope that for once, he's actually telling the truth. We'll see.

  
  

  
• 11:18

  Nonexistent out-of-control government spending dragging down the economy and hurting Obama

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  (New York Times)

  Over the last two years, David Leonhardt notes, "The government shrank at an annual rate of 1.4 percent." That meant that though the private sector grew at an average annual rate of 3.2 percent, the economy as a whole grew only 2.3 percent. Jared Bernstein looks at state and local government spending, which throughout the 1990s contributed to the GDP, and shows that today, massive cuts in local and state governments are creating a drag on the entire economy.

  Yet we keep hearing about "out-of-control government spending," often from the same commentators acting mystified about why President Obama can't or won't do more to help the economy and create jobs.

  Joe Weisenthal at Business Insider points to an exchange epitomizing this problem. On Meet the Press, David Gregory insistently questioned Obama adviser David Axelrod about what "hard choices" Obama would make, about "dealing with entitlements," and of course about debt, debt, debt. And Axelrod accepted the terms Gregory was laying out, just arguing about the details of how it would be done and how much would be done. As Weisenthal writes, "The premise of the question is accepted by everyone. That premise is that Obama has been a wild spender, and that now there's an urgent need to make cuts."

  But it's not true. It couldn't be true first because, as Leonhardt and Bernstein show, government spending has been shrinking, and its shrinkage has been dragging down the economy. So the premise is wrong on two points: First, that government spending would be a bad thing and that cuts need to be made for the health of the economy, and second, that Obama has been spending a great deal—not remotely true. So Obama's taking it from both sides, getting blame for doing a thing he's not doing and for the negative economic effects of not having done it. And, at least on Sunday's Meet the Press, David Axelrod wasn't pushing back very hard against either side of that.

  
  

  
• 9:54

  Mitt Romney spending five times as much as Newt Gingrich in Florida

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Mitt Romney is outspending Newt Gingrich by a 5:1 ratio (Phelan Ebenhack/Reuters and Chris Keane/Reuters)
    Cause:

  Newt Gingrich has been outspent on the Florida airwaves by a nearly $12 million margin, according to a source monitoring the Sunshine State ad war.

  Through Friday, the Romney campaign and the super PAC Restore Our Future had spent a combined $15,340,000, the source said. Gingrich’s campaign and the super PAC Winning Our Future spent a comparatively paltry $3,390,000.

  And effect:

  Nate Silver's FiveThirtyEight projection as of 12:28 ET on 1/30/12 Mitt Romney has pretty high expectations for tomorrow ... and with numbers like these, you can see why.

  
  

  
• 9:50

  State of the primary

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos

  

  Click to embiggen

  Order a signed print of this cartoon from the artist

  Note to comics fans: we're making a few additions to the DK Comics section this week.  Check back around 6 PM Eastern for today's announcement.

  
  

  
• 9:07

  Mitt Romney aide on Florida primary: 'It's about destroying Gingrich'

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  When nobody likes you, you destroy your opponents (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
    Mitt Romney's strategy:

  "It not about winning here anymore," one Romney staffer told BuzzFeed. "It's about destroying Gingrich — and it's working."

  In other words, the one thing Mitt Romney's campaign is worried about ... is a viable alternative to Mitt Romney. It's either that ... or Mitt Romney is just a dick.

  
  

  
• 9:00

  This Week in Congress: the battle for economic reframing begins anew

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Recapping Last Week in Congress

  There just wasn't much to speak of in terms of legislative accomplishments in Congress last week. A handful of suspensions bills in the House, and the rejection of the motion to proceed to the resolution of disapproval of the debt ceiling hike in the Senate. Man, the Senate even makes it a mouthful to tell you how they didn't do anything!

  Outside of the strictly legislative stuff, there was the Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) resignation, and the State of the Union address. Remember that? That was awesome.

  This Week in Congress

  A little heavier lifting this week, starting with the schedule full of Orwellianism in the House. Can you tell what's on their minds? "The Fiscal Responsibility and Retirement Security Act." The "Pro-Growth Budgeting Act." The "Baseline Reform Act." Yes, it's time again to pretend the country is buying what Republicans are selling in the budget department. The ground has shifted a little since the last time around on that subject (thanks, OWS), but Republicans will be looking to push back with their pro-austerity, pro-locust program, convincing The Village that it's Very Serious (and "bold," and "courageous," yadda, yadda) to keep squeezing the 99%, and the game starts this week.

  In the Senate, by contrast, the week kicks off with the motion to proceed to the "Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge (STOCK) Act." Well, at least the acronym isn't completely awful. We'll give it a BANANAS (Bad Acronym Naming and Nomenclature Assessment Scale) score of just 1. Anyway, it's pretty much the opposite direction from the one in which the House is setting out. Which naturally means that there's no agreement on voting on the motion to proceed, and we'll instead have a vote on the 49th cloture motion filed in the 112th Congress. For those keeping score at home, we're running at about 70% the rate of cloture filings from the last Congress. So that's what the Gentlemen's Agreement has bought us. Less is good, and a 30% reduction is nothing to sneeze at. But there's clearly more work to be done. If it's important that the Occupy movement got a nod in the State of the Union, then it's important that filibuster reform got one, too.

  Let the games begin.

  Full floor schedules are below the fold.

  
  

  
• 8:00

  Daily Kos Elections Morning Digest: Deal may be at hand in Texas redistricting litigation

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Want the scoop on hot races around the country? Get the digest emailed to you each weekday morning. Sign up here. Leading Off:

  • TX Redistricting: Could Redistmas come twice in the Lone Star State? Perhaps the Grinch has reformed: Cameron Joseph at The Hill reports that defendants (i.e., Republicans) in Texas's redistricting litigation are in serious settlement talks with plaintiffs (Democrats and minority groups) and may be ready to give up store rather than suffer a legal rout. Obviously any discussions about what a settlement might possibly look like are extremely hazy, tentative, and subject to change, but the unnamed plaintiffs who spoke to Joseph sounded very positive, and he says that the outcome "would likely mean at least four more Texas Democrats in Congress as of next year." And what's remarkable is how little Republicans are apparently hoping for in exchange:

  In exchange for a map that would give minorities and Democrats what they want, the agreement would allow Republicans to keep the state’s primary on April 3, saving the state money and making it more likely its presidential primary will be early enough to matter. Texas has already had to move its primary back once because of the ongoing court cases. They would also avoid having two federal courts label their plans intentionally discriminatory.

  An assistant attorney general stresses, though, that any deal would only apply to interim maps for use in this year's elections, so we're not talking a permanent settlement. Anyhow, fingers crossed, but don't get your hopes up just yet.

  
  

  
• 7:30

  Abbreviated Pundit Round-up: 'Antic, manic, lunatic' Newt Gingrich may really stick it out

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  

  Visual source: Newseum

  John Heilemann unsheathes his sickle and goes to town on Mr. Gingrich:

  Pledges to continue the fight unabated in the face of harsh and/or humiliating outcomes are staples of presidential campaigns. And they are also patently meaningless. (Please recall Jon Huntsman's feigned brio on the night of the New Hampshire primary — and his departure from the race a few days later.) But in Gingrich's case, he might be serious, so much has he come to despise Romney and the Republican Establishment that has brought down on him a twenty-ton shithammer in Florida, and so convinced is he of his own Churchillian greatness and world-historical destiny. The same antic, manic, lunatic bloody-mindedness that has made him such a rotten candidate in the Sunshine State may be enough to keep him the race a good long time.

  Mike Rosen, striving for a new world's record (or at least a personal worst), gets only nine words into his latest hackeyed diatribe before invoking the "liberal media" in yet another of his kettle-pot whines about what a cliché Occupy is.

  James Surowiecki:
  

  The most interesting line in the G.O.P.’s official response to the State of the Union address was Mitch Daniels’s assertion that the United States is in big trouble because “no entity, large or small, public or private, can thrive, or survive intact, with debts as huge as ours.” Unsurprising as the attack was, its phrasing inadvertently underscored the curious reality of this year’s election; namely, that the same party that loves to inveigh against the dangers of excessive borrowing is now likely to nominate for President a man whose entire career, and entire fortune, was built on debt. Leveraged-buyout firms like Bain Capital, which Mitt Romney ran between 1984 and 1999, routinely borrow massive sums in order to make their acquisitions, leaving companies with debt loads equal to twice their annual sales or more.

  
  John Nichols whips out his calculator and concludes that the recall drive against Wisconsion Gov. Scott Walker is a lot more popular with voters than all three contests for the GOP presidential nomination have been.

  Paul Krugman notes that Britain is doing worse in some measures at pulling out of recession now than it did during the Great Depression of the 1930s. Why?
  

  [S]urpassing the track record of the 1930s shouldn’t be a tough challenge. Haven’t we learned a lot about economic management over the last 80 years? Yes, we have — but in Britain and elsewhere, the policy elite decided to throw that hard-won knowledge out the window, and rely on ideologically convenient wishful thinking instead.

  Robert Scheer:
  

  I’ll admit it: Listening to Barack Obama, I am ready to enlist in his campaign against the feed-the-rich Republicans ... until I recall that I once responded in the same way to Bill Clinton’s faux populism. And then I get angry because betrayal by the “good guys” for whom I have ended up voting has become the norm.

  Yes, betrayal, because if Obama meant what he said in Tuesday’s State of the Union address about holding the financial industry responsible for its scams, why did he appoint the old Clinton crowd that had legalized those scams to the top economic posts in his administration? Why did he hire Timothy Geithner, who has turned the Treasury Department into a concierge service for Wall Street tycoons?  

  The New York Times Editorial Board says what we have been saying:
  

  After a decade of unrestrained Pentagon spending increases, President Obama deserves credit for putting on the brakes. The cuts are a credible down payment on his pledge to reduce projected defense spending by $487 billion in the next decade. They are not going to be enough. In the likely absence of a bipartisan budget pact, a further automatic across-the-board 10-year cut of nearly $500 billion is to take effect starting next January.

  Even if a last-minute deal heads that off, the country needs to find more savings. And there is still plenty of room to cut deeper without jeopardizing national security.

  
  E.J. Dionne Jr. says President Obama twice botched his decision on how contraception services should be handled under health care.

  Sarah Chayes:
  

  Underlying the current dispute over the intelligence estimate is another, deeper divide. The assessment reportedly acknowledges the hard work by Afghan and foreign troops in driving the Taliban out of many of its strongholds. That success is clearly visible in Kandahar, where I have lived for most of the last decade. But its significance is less clear.

  "Yes, we've made gains against the Taliban around Kandahar," a minister and former Kandahar governor told me recently. "But it takes 18,000 men for a single district. We can't sustain that."

  And there have been other costs. As troops moved into rural districts the Taliban had held, they built dirt roads right through farmers' vineyards and orchards. I saw the results when I went to visit a friend's family land. Debris had been shoved into an irrigation channel that once watered the whole village, razor wire had been looped across a road, and buildings where families dry their grapes to make prized raisins had been destroyed.

  
  Jonah Goldberg, once again, epitomizes upsidedownism at its finest.

  
  

  
• January 29, 2012
• 23:30

  Open Thread for Night Owls: Sacrificing the future

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Jared Bernstein, now at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, writes:

  Here’s one reason we’re stuck in slow growth mode: the budget crunch among state and local governments.

  The figure shows the yearly percentage point contribution to or subtraction from real GDP growth from the state and local sectors since the late 1980s.  The trend bounces around but the recent cliff dive is evident.  It’s also why we keep losing jobs in these sectors month after month.

  

  Paul Krugman weighs in:

  But it’s even worse than he says. Why? Because if you look at what’s being cut, it’s heavily focused on investment: That is, we’re sacrificing the future as well as the present. Oh, and the cuts that aren’t falling on investment in physical capital are largely falling on human capital, that is, education.

  It’s hard to overstate just how wrong all this is. We have a situation in which resources are sitting idle looking for uses — massive unemployment of workers, especially construction workers, capital so bereft of good investment opportunities that it’s available to the federal government at negative real interest rates. Never mind multipliers and all that (although they exist too); this is a time when government investment should be pushed very hard. Instead, it’s being slashed.

  What an utter disaster.

  As JBC in the Krugman comment thread says: "Some men just want to watch the world burn."

  Indeed. And as any arson investigator will tell you, the most avid watchers are the guys who started the fire.

  Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2008:

  If John McCain doesn't win Florida, he almost certainly won't be the Republican nominee.  And if he does win Florida, his only chance of avoiding a crushing defeat in November will be to embrace the same moneyed interests he's declared are among the biggest problems facing America.  

  Some months back McCain's campaign applied for federal matching campaign funds.  (The money comes from individual taxpayers who voluntarily check off a $3 contribution on their income tax return.)  In December seven campaigns were officially notified that they qualified for matching funds.  However, because of a funding shortfall, none of the federal matching funds have been released.  Apparently the fund reserves the money needed for the general election before it starts to pay out matching funds for the primary, and until monies arrive from this year's tax returns, the fund doesn't have enough money to deliver money for the primary.  John Edwards secured a bank loan against the federal funds, so he is officially locked in to abiding by the spending limits in the event he gets the nomination.

  McCain qualified for $5.8 million in matching funds.  He could do as Edwards has done, and get the money now by securing a bank loan against the eventual payment from the US Treasury.  But McCain has been anything but "straight talking" regarding his money; until he receives the money from the Treasury or borrows against it, he's not locked in to the system.  Thus, he's currently trying to evade the federal spending limits if he can raise enough money to stay viable, but holding out the option of taking the federal funds if he can't survive through tonight.  

  Tweet of the Day

  

  High Impact Posts are here. Top Comments are here.

  
  

  
• 22:00

  The problem with the Republican Party is not Newt Gingrich or Mitt Romney

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  The Republicans chose Mitch Daniels to rebut President Obama's State of the Union speech. They chose Bush's budget director to talk about the economy. The guy who inherited the Clinton budget surplus and transformed it into the largest budget deficit in American history. If you want to understand how clueless and out of touch the Republican Party has become, all you have to do is start with their having chosen Mitch Daniels to rebut President Obama's State of the Union speech.

  Republican insiders are freaked out over the possibility of Newt Gingrich becoming their presidential standard bearer. That's the technical term: freaked out. And that they are so freaked out over that possibility at least speaks to their not having completely lost touch with reality. They have completely lost touch with the American people, but they haven't completely lost touch with reality. Not completely. At least not yet. But in light of their support for the personification of so much that is so wrong and so unpopular in this country as alternative to Gingrich, their prospects for retaining at least a partial grip on reality are not good. And they did choose Mitch Daniels to rebut President Obama's State of the Union speech. Which speaks for itself.

  The Occupy movement is not overtly political, at least not in the traditional sense of that word. It does not adhere to any political party or any individual political movement, but it is symbiotic with many political movements, and its goals align very well with traditional Democratic Party populism. The Democratic Party has been adrift from its populist traditions, and in many ways that made the Occupy movement necessary, but many Democrats seem to be recognizing what is happening. They seem to be rediscovering the Democratic Party's populist tradition. The Republican Party has no link at all to populism. The Republican Party, since at least the Reagan era, has been the party of the economic elite, waging neoliberal class warfare and then feigning outrage at what Republicans consider to be the class warfare of merely calling the Republican Party on its actually waging class warfare.

  
  

  
• 20:00

  Outrage fatigue: Or, accepting that the Republicans just are that bad

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  
  Mitt Romney explains his vision for America's middle class. (Brian Snyder/Reuters)
  
    I am despondent. As an avid follower of political news and a self-identified solid progressive, I am experiencing strange feelings—or, more accurately, I am experiencing a strange lack of feelings. In prior election cycles, I would watch the Republican debates with energy, excitement and attention. I would be prepared to be aggrieved by their attacks on Democrats and their ever-increasing trend toward the extremes of the right wing. I would become fired up, knowing that whether it was Bush or McCain in 2000, or whether it was McCain, Romney or Huckabee in 2008, the Democratic candidate had to prevail, no matter what. Every debate would serve as a reminder and a motivator of that certain fact.

  This cycle should be no different, especially now that the Republican pretenders to the throne are even more renegade than they ever have been in recent memory. In this current primary contest, the first three states have been won, respectively, by three distinct yet equally odious candidates: a former senator with a Google problem who believes that rape victims should make the best of a bad situation should they be unfortunate enough to conceive as a result of the crime; a vulture capitalist who likes to fire people and never met a policy position he didn't like if he felt it could get him a better shot at an even higher office; and ... Newt Gingrich. Yet even in spite of that, I cannot muster up the energy and enthusiasm to watch the continuing Republican immolation of just about everything that is fair and right in this country. While Gingrich's proposal about lunar statehood provided a sliver of respite, it has not been enough to turn the tide or lighten the gravity of this situation.

  To make matters worse, my interest was rising again after Gingrich won the South Carolina primary and appeared to be gaining a crescendo of support. But his newfound lunacy has now caused his base in Florida to crater. And as Gingrich's support wanes, Mitt Romney's now appears to be waxing at exactly the right time to win Florida, eliminating his final rival for the nomination that was long assumed to be his, and leaving the Republican Party in a relative sea of tranquility.

  Lunar guffaws aside, the battle that will unforld once Mitt Romney wins the nomination will be a battle for the soul of America, but not in the way usually intended by Republican candidates. In his recent State of the Union Speech, President Obama laid out his vision for what America could and should be. Even if the speech was not a progressive's dream from every policy standpoint, it focused very strongly on a few central themes with which we can all agree: reforming the tax code to end the rewarding of outsourcing, reinvesting in American manufacturing and the middle-class jobs that come with it, and investing in the education that will allow American workers to have the skills required to do the jobs of both the present and the future.

  Mitt Romney has consistently presented a different vision. It's an ideology that professes that if only plutocrats like him were less restrained by consumer protections, labor, and regulations, that they could produce all the jobs America needs through trickle-down economics, even as the stepladders to the middle class that government has already provided continue to be gutted in the name of personal responsibility. It is a vision born of a decades-long effort to rehabilitate the principles of Ayn Rand and transform them into a socially acceptable philosophy on governance while interweaving a theocratic social agenda thought unthinkable only a few years ago.

  I was technically a teenager when 9/11 occurred, and just beginning to become interested in politics in a serious way. At that time, I was outraged by every single Republican attempt to erode our civil liberties while continuing to gut environmental protections and government services while enriching those who needed it the least. I was outraged precisely because I viewed it as an excess brought about by the temporary insanity that resulted from our national trauma, combined with the radicalism of the Bush administration. I expected that the election of Barack Obama would end the radical and imperial interregnum that was the Bush administration, marginalize the so called "dead-enders" and unify the country in a new era of sanity and political civility.

  The truth was not as joyous, as history has shown. But I am no longer outraged, because it is far more difficult to be outraged at what is expected. Instead, as we prepare to face Mitt Romney in November, I am simply resolute: there's a job that needs doing. Neither Romney nor the future nominees of his party can be given four years to unleash their plutocratic fancies against America's middle class. Outrage won't guarantee that outcome, but hard work will.

  
  

  
• 18:00

  They 'went for broke' in WWII while their families were broken

   » ‎ Daily KosSearch Daily Kos
  Japanese-American farm mother awaiting relocation
  (Dorothea Lange, NARA)

  As the daughter of a Tuskegee Airman, I didn’t need Hollywood to teach me its history. My dad and his friends—former airmen—taught me not only the history of their service, but the harsh truths of how they were maligned by racists here at home.

  No disrespect to George Lucas, whom I applaud for his latest film production, Red Tails, but the tales of the ugliness faced by not only the Airmen, but other non-white members of our military and their families, still aren't grist for the big silver screen.  

  Reading some of the commentary and criticism about his film was beyond aggravating—particularly those whining, "But ... but ... but ... it's been done already!" Sure, there have been other films, like HBO's Tuskegee Airmen, but until every history book documents them, and every child in America knows the stories of the 332nd Fighter Group and the 477th Bombardment Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps (Tuskegee Airmen) and the Navajo Code Talkers, I don't care how many versions are made. I still have students who don't have a clue when I bring these subjects up in class.

  I am pleased that Lucas had the courage to present the Airmen through a black lens, with an all-black cast. There is no white hero or heroine to make our history palatable and salable for "general" (read: white) viewing audiences. We have enough of that already, whether it is in The Help or Blindside.

  I find myself wondering if any major producer will step up and tell the tales of the Nisei and Japanese Americans during WWII.
  

  442 Insignia

  The history of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team is one that we should all be proud of:

  The unit became the most highly–decorated regiment in the history of the United States Armed Forces, including 21 Medal of Honor recipients. The motto of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team was “Go for Broke.”

  Yet it wasn't until seven decades later that they received the Congressional Gold Medal.

  It is not just important to honor the service of veterans; it is equally important that we are aware of the ugly reality of the round-up and internment of Japanese Americans, authorized by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in Executive Order 9066, on Feb. 19, 1942. While the motto of the 442nd was "Go for Broke", their community was broken up, dragged off and demeaned, and many internees died, broken-hearted and shamed.