Timothy Egan on the Ryan plan to kill Medicare:
This plan is toast. Newt Gingrich is in deep trouble with the Republican base for stating the obvious on Sunday, when he called the signature Medicare proposal of his party “right-wing social engineering.” But that’s exactly what it is: a blueprint for downward mobility.
Look at the special Congressional election of next Tuesday. What was supposed to be a shoo-in for Republicans in a very safe district of upstate New York, is now a tossup. For that, you can blame the Medicare radicals now running the House. And a raft of recent polls show that seniors, who voted overwhelmingly Republican in the 2010 elections, are retreating in droves. Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin says the Ryan plan is a “watershed event,” putting older voters in play for next year’s presidential election.
Jonathan Bernstein on Newt inciting a GOP civil war:
It’s not his marital record, or multiple ethics investigations. Rather, it’s that Newt Gingrich has a long record of saying outrageous things, worded in every case as if the demise of American civilization was at stake if we didn’t immediately drop everything and do whatever Newt thought was necessary today, and never mind it had nothing to do with whatever he was all worked up about last time. But instead of relegating him to wherever Democrats hid Jim Wright after his aborted Speakership, Republicans set Newt up in a highly visible Washington perch, pretended that his nonsense constituted Serious Ideas and made him an Intellectual, and enjoyed the benefits of his eagerness to use extremist language against the Democrats. Surprise, surprise: he’s still the same old irresponsible Newt, willing to say pretty much anything as long as it’s phrased as strongly as possible.
Politico:
For Republicans, it’s the beginning of the end to silly season. Developer and entertainer Donald Trump’s decision to end his presidential flirtations Monday removed from the equation a candidate who vexed the GOP establishment and served to remind voters of the weakness of the 2012 Republican field. Equally important, it cleared the way for the party to hold a more serious debate over who should carry the GOP nomination in 2012.
NY Times:
Osama bin Laden had been dead only a few days when House Republicans began their efforts to expand, rather than contract, the war on terror. Not content with the president’s wide-ranging powers to pursue the archcriminals of Sept. 11, 2001, Republicans want to authorize the military to pursue virtually anyone suspected of terrorism, anywhere on earth, from now to the end of time.
This wildly expansive authorization would in essence make the war on terror a permanent and limitless aspect of life on earth, along with its huge potential for abuse.
Daily Caller:
As the day has progressed, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich’s comments on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” attacking House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan’s budget plan have come to haunt him. [...
“This is a big deal,” Krauthammer said. “He’s done. He didn’t have a big chance from the beginning but now it’s over. Apart from being contradictory and incoherent as we saw in those two bytes you showed where he contradicted himself in the course of one day on the individual mandate – calling the Republican plan, which all but four Republican members of the House have now endorsed and will be running on, calling it radical and right-wing social engineering is deadly.”
WSJ:
The White House unveiled a far-reaching cybersecurity plan Thursday that largely endorsed the leading proposal on Capitol Hill, boosting the chances Congress will enact a new security regime for companies that run key elements of the nation's infrastructure.
The proposals aim to close security gaps in the networks that run critical infrastructure including the electric grid, the financial sector, and transportation, which have been repeatedly penetrated by hackers. The administration is also working on new policies governing military and foreign-policy aspects of cybersecurity threats, people familiar with those discussions said.
You can read the rollout by Howard Schmidt, White House Cybersecurity Coordinator, at the White House blog.