Alex Sietz-Wald: This week, MSNBC host Joe Scarborough joined the chorus of those decrying the IRS for targeting Tea Party groups for extra scrutiny in applying for nonprofit status. “You can’t allow the government to tread on political speech,” Scarborough said. “The Internal Revenue Service — the taxman — to go after their political beliefs. … I can’t imagine much worse than this,” he added.
Targeting nonprofit groups because of their political beliefs is wrong — pretty much everyone agrees on that. So today’s Scarborough must be outraged by his 2003 self, which gave this monologue on his show “Scarborough Country” on July 13, 2003:
The leader of the NAACP bashes President Bush and the Republican Party. Why is this clearly partisan group still being funded by your tax dollars? [...]
[T]he NAACP continues to get a free ride off of taxpayers because of the tax-exempt status that’s conferred to them by our federal government, now, this despite the fact the NAACP produced and ran the most vicious campaign attack ad in the history of televised presidential campaign. [...]
Rick Ungar: Over the first four years of the Obama presidency, the deficit shrunk by a total of $300 billion dollars. That is not the national debt- it is the amount of money we spend each year relative to the amount we take in. According to the latest CBO report,
“Compared to the size of the economy, the deficit in 2013 is much lower than in 2009, when Obama took office. The deficit will be 5.3 percent of gross domestic product this year, nearly half the 10.1 percent of GDP in 2009.”
The improvement in the deficit as measured against GDP is the direct result of the deficit falling to $845 billion for fiscal year 2013—a $300 billion improvement over the previous year. And the positive trend is projected to continue though the next fiscal year where the the annual budgetary deficit will fall again to $430 billion.
Five Takeaways From The CBO’s Analysis Of Obama’s Budget
Dylan Matthews: For the most part, the description of President Obama’s budget found in the Congressional Budget Office’s analysis of it jibes with the description included in the initial budget release. But the CBO analysis does highlight some interesting features of the proposal. Here are a few.
President Obama talks on the phone with Nicole Hockley and families of the victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shootings in Newtown, Conn., in the Oval Office, April 11 (Photo by Pete Souza)
****
Today:
12:0: Press Briefing by Press Secretary Jay Carney
2:05: The President presents the Commander-in-Chief Trophy to the United States Naval Academy football team
****
****
NBC: For former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, gun violence is personal — so she’s going to begin her own in-person push for a new compromise to expand background checks for gun sales when she returns to Capitol Hill next week, NBC News has learned.
And the gun safety group she founded with husband, Mark Kelly, will begin making robocalls Thursday in Pennsylvania and West Virginia, looking to support the two senators who crafted the deal — an attempt to demonstrate that the organization is committed to challenging the gun lobby’s political infrastructure.
Greg Sargent: What will John Boehner say to Gabrielle Giffords?
This has the potential to create a bit of an awkward moment for Speaker John Boehner, as he weighs whether to allow a House vote on whatever gun legislation clears the Senate.
In a few days, on April 16th, Boehner and Nancy Pelosi will be presiding over a ceremony dedicating the creation of the Gabriel Zimmerman Meeting Room in the U.S. Capitol, according to an invitation to the event that’s making the rounds. Zimmerman was the community outreach director to Giffords when he was killed in the January 2011 shooting in Arizona that almost claimed Giffords’ life.
As families of the victims of the Newtown, Conn., massacre watched from the Senate gallery on Thursday, 68 senators, including 16 Republicans, voted to break a conservative filibuster to allow debate to begin on a bill that would expand background checks for most gun sales.
That a procedural vote was considered a breakthrough demonstrated how hard it has been to get even the most fundamental, common-sense reform of the nation’s inadequate gun laws past the gun lobby.
The People’s View: Surprise! President’s Budget Has Way More New Revenue Than New Cuts
Bet you haven’t heard that one in the national media yet – certainly not on the Left’s media world still in a fit over Chained CPI. I bet here’s what you’ve heard: Obama’s revenue raisers are not enough, his spending cuts are too much, and it’s not ‘balanced’ in terms of revenues and cuts. What you’re hearing is that the president is proposing $1 trillion in cuts! Here’s what they’re not telling you: the president is merely replacing the sequester….
Mark April 11th, 2013, down on your calendars as the day that the GOP’s fiscal ruse was finally unmasked with total clarity: Republicans don’t actually want entitlement cuts. Or, to put it another way, they say they want entitlement cuts, but they want Dems to own them.
A few of us have been pointing this out for some time, but now it’s breaking through to the neutral press, thanks to the ongoing shenanigans between John Boehner and NRCC chair Greg Walden….
ThinkProgress: In the first quarter of 2013, states have proposed 694 provisions related to a woman’s body, how she gets pregnant, or how she chooses to end that pregnancy.
A new report released on Thursday by the Guttmacher Institute takes a comprehensive look at how the War on Women has continued past the election cycle and into 2013. It shows that the new legislatures across the country are still very much dedicated to restricting sex education, availability of medication, and abortion access for women. Indeed, 47 percent of the 694 provisions were directly related to abortion….
President Obama waits for a heavy rain to pass before crossing West Executive Avenue from the Eisenhower Executive Office Building to the West Wing of the White House, March 12 (Photo by Pete Souza)
Puneet Kollipara: President Barack Obama has drawn a line in the sand in his ongoing fight with budget-cutting lawmakers when it comes to future federal funding for research and development. He’s calling for reversing recent spending cuts to most sectors of R&D spending and adding new funds for many areas next year — despite tough fiscal times.
Big winners in the president’s budget include the Department of Energy, whose funding would rise 18 percent. The National Science Foundation, U.S. Geological Survey and National Institute of Standards and Technology would also see healthy increases. The Health and Human Services Department, which houses the National Institutes of Health, would see a slight increase from 2012 — again, all before accounting for inflation.
2:10: President Obama Awards Chaplain Emil Kapaun the Medal of Honor
****
*****
David RothKopf: America is rightly on edge. When a man with the power to make life-or-death decisions affecting thousands of U.S. citizens recklessly shows contempt for decency and international norms of behavior, it is no wonder the American people would be both angry and fearful. When his threats are so clearly contrary to the interests of those he represents and even those who might otherwise support him, it is natural to wonder whether he has somehow become unhinged.
But Kim Jong Un is no Mitch McConnell. Because Kim, even with his nuclear weapons, is hardly likely to launch an attack on Americans anywhere given that the response would produce the instant and certain obliteration of his regime. What that means is that for all his bluster, the chubby little autocrat is very unlikely to cost one American his life. But in vowing to block any vote on even the most modest legislation to rein in America’s out-of-control gun culture, the Senate minority leader all but guarantees that the toll in America’s street-corner war will continue to rise.
Robert Greenstein: The news that President Obama’s new budget will propose adopting the “chained” Consumer Price Index (CPI) for cost-of-living adjustments in Social Security and other retirement programs, and annual inflation adjustments in the tax code, has intensified the debate on this issue. Some commentators portray this proposal as a test of fiscal rectitude, arguing that the chained CPI more accurately measures inflation — period — and that if you’re opposed to it, you aren’t really serious about addressing deficits. Others, including many progressives, strongly reject the proposal, believing it would impose serious hardship on seniors with modest incomes.
I’m not comfortable with either position. There are legitimate reasons not to adopt the chained CPI, and many people who aren’t affluent would indeed be worse off. At the same time, fears that the chained CPI would impose severe hardship are overblown, especially if policymakers accompany it with a robust package of protections and mitigating measures for those who are very old or have low incomes.
CNN: A majority of Americans generally favor stricter gun control laws, and there has been a big jump in the number of Americans who say that gun policy is extremely important, according to a new national poll.
Overall, 40% of Americans say that it is extremely important for government officials to deal with gun policy this year and another 31% say it is very important. That’s substantially higher than the number of thought gun policy was important in previous years – a reflection of the amount of attention gun policy has gotten in the wake of December’s horrific shooting at an elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut, which left 20 young children and six adults dead.
Greg Sargent: This afternoon on CNN, GOP Rep. Greg Walden, the chairman of the NRCC, opened fire on Obama’s budget by claiming it is an assault on seniors. For one thing, it directly contradicts what GOP leaders themselves said earlier today. Remember, John Boehner and Eric Cantor effectively endorsed Chained CPI by claiming we should proceed with those cuts while not raising taxes. Boehner said Obama “deserves some credit” for embracing it. But now the NRCC chair is calling it an assault on seniors?
You could not illustrate the farcical nature of the GOP position on all this more perfectly. Folks should acknowledge and call out how truly farcical and deeply unserious this really is.
Kate Sheppard: It was clear in both the lead up to and the aftermath of the November 2012 election that Republican candidates are not faring well among women voters. From Todd “Legitimate Rape” Akin to Mitt Romney’s 11-point loss among women voters, it became painfully clear that the GOP has a lady problem. A new memo from a pair of liberal groups that pulls together some of the polling figures makes a strong case for paying more attention to this divide.
The memo points to the unprecedented attack on access to abortion underway in states like North Dakota and Arkansas, the 160 Republicans that voted against the Violence Against Women Act at the federal level, and the ongoing fights over both contraception coverage and cuts to the federal family planning budget.
Ed Kilgore: It’s no secret that political scientists as a tribe tend to downplay the importance of ideology and even of “issues” as active factors in American politics. Elections, they say (as an often-welcome corrective to Game Change-style overinterpretation of campaign events), are largely determined by “the fundamentals,” especially economic conditions and the identity of the party in power. Partisan attachments by voters, they often point out, are far more durable than anything you can explain by the day’s, month’s, or year’s controversies and positioning.
So it didn’t totally shock me that in a Salon piece on the “broken” nature of our political system, my esteemed friend the political scientist Jonathan Bernstein issues a disclaimer about the role that conservative ideology plays. I don’t disagree with any of those insights, but when Jonathan comes up with his list of the GOP’s bad habit, I can’t help but notice ideology would explain every single one.
Bloomberg: A rebound in homebuilding after a six-year slump should generate as many as 500,000 jobs in 2013 and 700,000 in 2014 including related services, estimates Russell Price, a senior economist at Ameriprise Financial Inc. in Detroit and the top forecaster of employment for the past two years, according to data compiled by Bloomberg.
The one thing the Professional Left (PL) and their Emoprog cohort don’t seem to realize about Pres Obama is that unlike them he KNOWS the depth of nihilistic destruction that the GOP and their corporate backers are prepared to unleash on this country.
Emos have no clue what the stakes are, being stuck as they are on the eras of FDR & LBJ. The Conservative movement has evolved into a more powerful malignant force since their defeats in the 1930s & 1960s. It is a force that continues to destroy whether their minions hold political power or NOT. Destructive force is easier to deploy than constructive building which liberals-Democrats try to do. Our societal building task is harder, less understood and prone to being demagogued by the conservative retrogressives. The PL is oblivious to the asymmetrical nature of our struggle.
We don’t have the institutional structures to fight the plutocrats mano-a-mano on their turf. We don’t! We can only fight them using guerrilla strategies & tactics. No amount of Bully pulpiting or screaming “progressive chants”, or “twisting arms a la LBJ” is gonna dent the power of the wingnuts’ backers. Those are the facts. They have the power and money and nihilistic bent to destroy us all without batting an eye.
The PL-Emos don’t realize that the $32 Trillion that the plutocrats have stashed in tax havens means that THEY DON’T CARE what happens to this country and the people in it. NADA. Unlike the barons of the gilded age who were at least propelled by some sense of nationalism, today’s plutocrats feel no allegiance to this country. It is only a place to exploit for $$$, and feudalize us against our will.
“Hadiya Pendleton was me, and I was her. But I got to grow up and go to Princeton and Harvard Law School and have a career and family and the most blessed life I could ever imagine. And Hadiya? Oh, we know that story.” First Lady Michelle Obama, April 10
Spending time with the Newtown families, Joshua DuBois realized that the gun control debate isn’t about ideas or policies or politics. It’s about human beings.
*****
*****
*****
*****
