Visual source: Newseum
The Chicago Tribune on Mitt Romney's decisive win yesterday in Illinois:
Illinois, then, arguably has played a more decisive role in the primary campaign than it will in the general election. President Barack Obama is a prohibitive favorite to win his state's electoral votes. But on Tuesday, Illinois Republicans established that Romney's message -- more attuned to economic rather than social issues -- makes him the party's dominant force in urban and suburban areas. Come Nov. 6, voters in metropolitan communities, rather than in small towns or rural areas, likely will deliver toss-up states such as Ohio, Florida, Virginia, Pennsylvania and Colorado to the Democratic or Republican column.
In earlier primary and caucus states, Republicans consistently have told pollsters that Romney would be their party's strongest candidate against Obama. His Illinois victory now lets Romney characterize that as more than a gut feeling: Building on earlier wins in such states as Michigan and Ohio, Romney can point to his dominance in the vast American suburbia where presidential elections are won and lost.
The
Chicago Sun-Times looks at what it means for the GOP in Illinois:
The party here has long been dominated by moderates, but a persnickety strand of social conservatism has tended to rear its head, throwing fiscally conservative but socially moderate candidates like Romney off their game. For every moderate in the mold of former governors Jim Thompson and Jim Edgar who won statewide, there lurks a shadow conservative candidate who nearly won.[...]
As Chicago Sun-Times political reporter Abdon M. Pallasch put it in a story on Sunday, Illinois is supposed to stand as a “firewall again conservative uprisings” in a presidential contest. Romney’s commanding win here Tuesday solidifies that reputation and helps steady Romney’s ship for the voting ahead.
The Republican contest could go on for months, but Romney’s win in moderate Illinois likely shortens the calendar.
The Los Angeles Times looks at the House Republican budget plan:
For the second time in as many years, the House Republican leadership has put forward a deficit-cutting budget plan that's more of a political statement than a governing blueprint. The proposed budget for fiscal 2013 promotes a long list of conservative policies that are only tangentially related to the federal fisc — for example, repealing new federal restrictions on Wall Street and ending the moratorium on offshore oil drilling. Even the proposals that are purely fiscal in nature rely on changes in law that Senate Democrats won't support, such as repealing the 2010 healthcare reform law. [...]
It's also worth wondering why the House would spend time on a budget for 2013 when Congress enacted a 10-year spending plan last year that, unlike a budget resolution, has the force of law.
More on Ryan's budget from
Matt Yglesias:
His budget in all its PDF'd glory contains a thirteen page discussion of tax reform. Not one sentence. Not one paragraph. Thirteen pages dedicated to explaining his vision for revenue-neutral tax reform. And even so he manages to not name a single tax deduction that he's planning to eliminate. Home mortgage interest deduction? I dunno. Electric vehicle tax credit? I dunno. Deductibility of state and local income taxes? I dunno. I read thirteen pages on tax reform, and didn't learn anything about Paul Ryan's views on tax reform.
And more, from
Jonathan Bernstein:
The real tell in Ryan’s budget is that in the long run, he projects that all discretionary spending (and automatic spending outside of Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security) be reduced to 3.75 percent of GDP by 2050. Why does that matter? Because that category includes military spending, which as CBO reminds us has never dropped below 3 percent* of GDP since World War II. Since Ryan doesn’t want to cut the military, that would leave less than one percent of GDP — to fund the entire rest of the government.
In other words, Ryan’s long term proposal would basically shut down the federal government except for Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and the military. Republicans don’t really want to shut down the FDA, the FBI, and the national parks, not to mention patrolling the border and farm programs and roads. And yet that’s the implication of this document. It’s not even remotely realistic — and neither is Ryan’s claim that his budget would cut the deficit way down.
Susan Brooks Thistlewaite writes about evangelical voters and the budget in The Washington Post:
The support of conservative Christian evangelicals for Santorum, and for GOP fiscal policies in general, rises despite such statements about not caring about unemployment. That’s because, more than any other shift in recent decades, the strong redefinition of the core of the Gospel message away from Jesus’ explicit announcement that his ministry was about “good news for the poor” toward merging biblical values with so-called “family values” defined as anti-gay, anti-abortion, and now, even anti-contraception, is the key to explaining this support. Conservatives have managed to merge conservative fiscal ideas with ‘support for the family.’ Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council says evangelicals are interested in both social and fiscal issues. Jobs and the ability of putting food on the table, he says, are all connected to the well-being of the family.
And one final take on the Republican budget from
Dana Milbank:
Ryan’s justification was straight out of Dickens. He wants to improve the moral fiber of the poor. There is, he told the audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute later Tuesday, an “insidious moral tipping point, and I think the president is accelerating this.” Too many Americans, he said, are receiving more from the government than they pay in taxes.
After recalling his family’s immigration from Ireland generations ago, and his belief in the virtue of people who “pull themselves up by the bootstraps,” Ryan warned that a generous safety net “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It’s demeaning.”
How very kind: To protect poor Americans from being demeaned, Ryan is cutting their anti-poverty programs and using the proceeds to give the wealthiest Americans a six-figure tax cut.