Julian Zelizer at CNN:
Donald Trump has suggested, in an interview with The Hill, that if the Republican Party doesn't treat him right, he might run as a third-party candidate. Republicans should be worried.
If Trump takes this step, he would add a serious element of uncertainty into an already unwieldy process. Trump can bring his demagoguery and willingness to say anything approach to the general election, when the outcome in a handful of states will determine the next president. [...] Trump can cause some pretty big problems for the Republicans. In his most recent incarnation, Trump, as an article in Talking Points Memo points out, is even more conservative than Perot was in 1992. If the real estate mogul continues along the current path, he could rally hard-line elements of the GOP, such as the warriors who are fighting against immigration, siphoning off right wing voters and activists.
For a number of Republicans, such as Jeb Bush, who are already struggling to prove to their conservative base that they are strong and ideologically pure candidates, this will be a problem.
Robert Schlesinger:
My first reaction to the report in The Hill that former reality TV star Donald Trump is threatening to run for president as an independent if the GOP is too mean to him was a derisive chuckle – of course he's not going to run as an independent, I thought. But hey, I also doubted that he'd ever actually declare for the presidency in the first place and even after he did that I wouldn't have guessed that he'd file a real financial disclosure but he has. [...] The fundamental question one must ask when pondering Trump's "candidacy" is how seriously to take him as a politician seeking office. Does he really believe that he can be elected president and does he actually want to be? Does he, in other words, believe the nonsense that pours forth from his perpetual-motion-machine mouth? Or is this just a publicity stunt, a more elaborate version of his near-quadrennial attention grab?
If you're not sure of the answer, consider this from The Hill's story: "Real estate mogul Donald Trump said ... he could run for president as an independent if he's unable to win the Republican nomination in 2012." Oops, sorry – that was The Hill's story from April, 2011. So yeah, we've seen this show before.
More on the day's top stories below the fold.
Jeff Spross examines Kasich's economic record:
Kasich has said he'd be down for similar income and corporate tax cuts on the national stage, and he wants to focus on increasing business investment — "the single biggest thing," in his judgment, "that would help us to overcome wage stagnation." To that same end, he wants to balance the federal budget to increase investor confidence, as well as alter expensing and depreciation rules — which he believes will make workers more productive and thus push up wages.
But America's corporate income tax, capital gains taxes, and the income tax are all at historic lows. And that nadir in tax rates has happened while business investment and research and development budgets in the economy have also been on a downslope.
Ryan Cooper gives his take on racial justice and income inequality:
Being poor is a known factor in about every social ill. Blacks do commit more crime than whites on a per capita basis, but this is largely explained by a poverty rate that is nearly three times greater. Thus, poor neighborhoods suffer both a lot of crime and crushingly heavy policing. When they are arrested, poor people often can't afford bail, or to hire a decent attorney, leaving them defenseless before the incarceration machine.
Poverty means constant stress and exhaustion as people struggle to balance critical needs on a tight budget — and its disadvantage is transmitted through time. Family income is tightly correlated with children's test scores, chance of college attendance, and future class position. Money, quite simply, is power.
Hence, an economic agenda aimed at the bottom of the income ladder is simply an indispensable part of any racial justice policy portfolio.
Over at CNN,
John Cook outlines five "telltale techniques of climate change denial":
Ninety-seven percent of climate scientists agree that humans are causing global warming. This has been found independently in a number of studies, including surveys of Earth scientists, analysis of public statements about climate change and analysis of peer-reviewed scientific papers. How might one cast doubt on the overwhelming scientific consensus? One technique is the use of fake experts.
We see this in online petitions such as the Global Warming Petition Project, which features more than 31,000 scientists claiming humans aren't disrupting our climate. How can there be 97% consensus when 31,000 scientists disagree? It turns out 99.9% of the petition's signatories aren't climate scientists. They include computer scientists, mechanical engineers and medical scientists but few climate scientists. The Global Warming Petition Project is fake experts in bulk.
AJC's
Jay Bookman looks at the jobless applications numbers:
if you judge by Republican rhetoric, none of this can be happening. Between ObamaCare, slightly higher taxes on the richest of Americans and an EPA that actually attempts to protect the environment and address issues such as climate change, the national economy ought to be a smoldering pile of rubble about now.
Yet it is not. Once again, everything they predicted has proved wrong. Funny how often that happens.
Catherine Rampell on youth voters:
[O]ver time young people have withdrawn from traditional social and political institutions, including everything from political parties to churches. In polls, millennials say they trust almost no authority figure to do the right thing most or all of the time: not Congress, not the president, not the Supreme Court, not the media, not Wall Street and definitely not federal, state or local government. Mired in debt, with scant job prospects, young people feel abandoned by the organizations that once claimed to represent their interests. Perhaps as a result, millennials have elected not to participate in the elections that grant such figures their authority. Only a third of young people say their vote will “make a difference” anyway, according to the latest Harvard Institute of Politics youth poll.
