Visual source:
Newseum
Paul Krugman:
The trouble with the budget devised by Paul Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee, isn’t just its almost inconceivably cruel priorities, the way it slashes taxes for corporations and the rich while drastically cutting food and medical aid to the needy. Even aside from all that, the Ryan budget purports to reduce the deficit — but the alleged deficit reduction depends on the completely unsupported assertion that trillions of dollars in revenue can be found by closing tax loopholes. [...]
So the Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.
E. J. Dionne sounds as if he might has written his latest column with a bit of a shudder, wondering just how extreme the extremist right will get:
A small hint of how this push to the right moves moderates away from moderation came in an effort last week to use an amendment on the House floor to force a vote on the deficit-reduction proposals offered by the commission headed by former Sen. Alan Simpson and Erskine Bowles, former chief of staff to Bill Clinton.
You learned only in paragraphs buried deep in the news stories that the House was not even asked to consider the actual commission plan. To cobble together bipartisan support, sponsors of the ersatz Simpson-Bowles amendment kept all of the commission’s spending cuts but slashed the amount it prescribed for tax increases in half. See how relentless pressure from the right turns self-styled moderates into conservatives? If there’s a cave-in, it’s always to starboard.
Alan J. Kuperman couches his bomb-bomb-bomb Iran's nuclear facilties conclusion in a bunch of questions. Not to worry, he says, we have military superiority and any retaliation by Iran would be met with even more bomb-bomb-bombing.
Bill Keller thinks hate-crime legislation is sanctimonious.
Eric Alterman:
Yet again, big money is buying what it wants in Wisconsin and across this country, with the aim of squeezing the poor and middle class even further out of the political process now and into the future. That is the true story of the 2012 election. The fact that money is increasingly able to dominate our politics, culture, and society would not have been possible without the tacit complicity of the so-called liberal media, which has failed and continues to fail to put such stories at the center of their political narrative where it belongs.
Peggy Noonan has another go at the president, calling him devious and dishonest:
If you jumped into a time machine to the day after the election, in November, 2012, and saw a headline saying "Obama Loses," do you imagine that would be followed by widespread sadness, pain and a rending of garments? You do not. Even his own supporters will not be that sad. It's hard to imagine people running around in 2014 saying, "If only Obama were president!" Including Mr. Obama, who is said by all who know him to be deeply competitive, but who doesn't seem to like his job that much. As a former president he'd be quiet, detached, aloof. He'd make speeches and write a memoir laced with a certain high-toned bitterness. It was the Republicans' fault. They didn't want to work with him.
David Limbaugh speaks up for his brother. Those nopologies he made to Sandra Fluke? Completely sincere. And Rush, his brother-defender says, can't figure out why the left won't accept them:
I am watching them operate on Twitter and other social networks, and their viciousness is palpable. They didn't want Rush's apology, which they absolutely refuse to accept. They want his scalp. And they've wanted his scalp for years because he is the most effective and influential spokesman for the conservative cause.