Visual source: Newseum
Harold Pollack:
Given Medicaid's low per-person cost and its relatively restrained projected cost growth, there's little room to comfortably cut. Safety-net services are already shoestring operations. Under-funded and stressed, they have many shortcomings. There is no way to meet the above spending reduction targets without shifting costs and risks onto the states, covering markedly fewer people and services, or further underpaying Medicaid providers.
No one can firmly say how states would respond to the reduced federal support. I fear that's precisely the point. Block grants provide both states and the federal government with useful political cover to cut important benefits. If a particular state eliminates Medicaid home care services or by dropping the working poor from coverage, Congressional Republicans can say: "Don't blame us. That's what this state chose to do." Meanwhile governors can say, with equal justification: "Don't blame us. We're doing the best we can, given limited federal resources."
I wish that Rep. Paul Ryan, R-Wis., architect of the House Republican budget plan, could accompany my wife and her brother to waste hours sitting in a gritty welfare office. I wish he had the responsibility of helping an intellectually disabled person with a nasty toothache, when the state Medicaid program no longer covers dental care.
Ryan's proposals won't become law anytime soon. Still, they exemplify this political moment's misguided mood and priorities. During the worst recession in decades, we are cutting needed services precisely when the need for them has grown.
David Leonhardt:
Do the statistical details in the [Friday jobs] report offer reason for optimism?
Yes and no. The Labor Department did revise its estimate of job growth for February and March in a positive way, saying the economy had added 46,000 more jobs than earlier thought. But as these two previous posts discussed, the rise in unemployment rate suggests that the job market may not have been as healthy as some people hoped.
Roger Simon:
It’s the oldest truism in politics: You can’t beat something with nothing. For 2012, the Democrats have something: Barack Obama. The Republicans, so far, have nothing.
This could change. But who is going to change it? And when? It may seem like the Republicans have a lot of time until the 2012 campaign, but they do not. Obama is already running for reelection and already raising money. Lots of money.
Matt Frei:
Even in the eyes of his critics, Barack Obama has made the transition from wimp to warrior president. A New York Times/CBS News opinion poll had support amongst Republicans climb by 15%. Overall his approval ratings stand 11% higher than they did last month. There was the president riffing with the press at the annual White House Correspondents' Dinner last Saturday, while he had already ordered the mission that would end Osama Bin Laden's life and could have haunted his presidency, had it failed.
At one stage Seth Myers, a comedian, was joking that Bin Laden was not only alive but broadcasting in the early hours on C-Span. There were so few viewers that no-one had noticed. The president grinned a full set of teeth. As my friend David, a Republican lawyer, said: "Now that kind of nerve takes a cool cat."
Peggy Noonan:
It was well and brilliantly done. It reminded the world that American might can be wielded with American competence. It highlighted the brilliance of the U.S. military when it is given clear goals and full resources.
And it had to be done, for us and the world.
Osama’s importance is that he was the leader of al Qaeda, but his mystique resided in the fact that he attacked America and got away with it. He killed nearly 3,000 people in a brutal assault and lived to tell the tale. He launched a war and taunted us from the hills. He was invincible, the “strong horse.” This gave him charisma, which he used to rouse and recruit the young, the ignorant and the unstable.
That’s over now. He has been answered. The U.S. action said, “You didn’t get away with it. You are not invincible. You are dead. Followers, please note.”
Is the world safer with bin Laden dead? Who knows. But it is better.
She should have stopped there. However, and with Ms. Noonan there is always a however, she didn't.
Ed Kilgore:
But if Huckabee can chart a credible path to victory, he’s also got more than a few roadblocks he’ll have to contend with along the way. The biggest of such hurdles is the hostility he invariably arouses in elite Republican circles. Huckabee first ran afoul of these groups in 2008, when he refused to defend George W. Bush’s handling of the economy and sounded the occasional populist notes despite his fairly orthodox fiscal positions. His record of budget compromises—including some that involved tax increases—with Democratic legislators in Arkansas was enough to arouse the formidable antipathy of Grover Norquist, who has made enforcing no-tax-increase pledges on state-level Republicans a top priority in the last decade. More generally, a war of words between Huckabee, several major conservative talk-show hosts (including Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck), and the Club for Growth faction (which Huck once termed the “Club for Greed”) has left some very bad blood that refuses to go away. The result is that if Huckabee runs in 2012, there will be a bottomless well of money and air-time available for attacks on his Arkansas record—and not just the tax increases he approved, but his exercise of executive clemency powers and the ethics allegations made against him as governor.
A second, and closely related obstacle, is Huckabee’s less-than stellar ability to raise money.
Nonetheless (as Kilgore notes) if Huck is in, Romney is in trouble.
Michael Hirsh:
Ever so gingerly, even as they praised President Obama’s success against Osama bin Laden, some former senior Bush administration officials have sought to take a little credit for the mission themselves. Former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, interviewed by MSNBC this week, even called the operation “a good story for continuity across two presidencies.”
That assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. Behind Obama’s takedown of the Qaida leader this week lies a profound discontinuity between administrations—a major strategic shift in how to deal with terrorists. From his first great public moment when, as a state senator, he called Iraq a “dumb war,” Obama indicated that he thought that George W. Bush had badly misconceived the challenge of 9/11. And very quickly upon taking office as president, Obama reoriented the war back to where, in the view of many experts, it always belonged. He discarded the idea of a “global war on terror” that conflated all terror threats from al-Qaida to Hamas to Hezbollah. Obama replaced it with a covert, laserlike focus on al-Qaida and its spawn.