Daily Kos

How much impact will gasoline prices have on voting in the Obama v. Romney contest in November? Hard to know. What's clear is that the desperate Republicans are make them an issue as long they think it will generate a few more votes for them. To do that, however, they've got to convince voters that it's Obama's fault prices are going up. The reality is that it's GOP policies, including the bomb-bomb-bomb Iran talk, the build-build-build Keystone XL pipeline talk, the drill-baby-drill everywhere talk and the no-no-no talk about a higher CAFE standard.

Adam Siegel takes apart that opposition:

Without even considering the impact of truck and other large vehicle standards, the strengthening of the light-vehicle CAFE standards via Obama Administration working with the automobile industry is projected to reduce U.S. oil demand by 2.2 million barrels/day by 2025 (or about 40 percent of current U.S. production and in the range of ten times what might occur from a no-holds barred “Drill, Baby, Drill” regime ignoring environmental consequences).

Very simply, if we believe the [...] “supply/demand curve”, this reduction of U.S. demand (negagallons) is a direct equivalent to increased supply and should reduce overall fuel prices (and thus save money not just for those driving the higher mpg vehicles but for everyone who goes to the pump). This value stream has been, by the way, almost uniformly ignored when discussing the payoff from CAFE standard strengthening — in fact, this ‘indirect’ savings might be three (or even more) times greater than the direct savings that drivers will have due to having to buy fewer gallons of gasoline. (And that calculation, of course, doesn’t even begin to account for the externalities of America’s oil addiction from security costs to health issues to environmental impacts to …)  Simply put, the opposition to strengthening CAFE standards over the years has [led] to greater 2012 US oil demand, higher gasoline prices, and increased US vulnerability to global oil price and supply fluctuations .  Opposing tightened CAFE standards is an argument for extending this problem indefinitely into the future.

In other words, if only dumb opposition hadn't block a steady, gradual increase in the standards over the past 37 years, our automobiles would be more efficient already than they will likely be in 2025. We would already have far less need to burn gasoline and the prices would have less demand pressure boosting them higher.

"We would already if only" is an expression that applies pretty much across the board to energy use in the United States.

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Blast from the Past. At Daily Kos on this date in 2009:

When all else fails with your discredited political party, you might as well try bringing in new blood to shake things up.

It's a logical idea - if something fails, do something else. And Michael Steele is certainly new blood for the Republican Party...except as we've seen, the Republicans don't like him very much.

In his first quarter as the GOP el jefe (well, aside from one rather portly Oxy-Contin addled blowhard on the airwaves), Steele has offered a lot of "off-the-hook" change we really can truly believe in, but so far, he's failed to deliver financially for the GOP.

The Steele Knight brought home the bacon to the tune of $5.1 million in February, his first full month on the job.

Liz Sidoti thinks this might not be all that bad, as it's about what they brought in in January, prior to the Steele Era, with Mike Duncan (putting the "lame" in "lame-duck") as their chair.

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Reposted from Daily Kos Elections by Steve Singiser

On the eve of the Illinois primary, weekend polling (to say nothing of the disastrous Santorum collapse in the Puerto Rico primary) seemed to suck a little bit of the intrigue out of the GOP presidential contest tomorrow night. While Mitt Romney has led in every poll in Illinois of recent vintage, it now looks like his lead has crept into double digits.

I will, having been burned about 25 times to this date, resist the temptation to speculate on whether this is the beginning of the end of the Republican contest.

GOP PRIMARY POLLS:

NATIONAL (Gallup Tracking): Romney 35, Santorum 29, Gingrich 13, Paul 10

ILLINOIS (American Research Group): Romney 44, Santorum 30, Gingrich 13, Paul 8

ILLINOIS (PPP): Romney 45, Santorum 30, Gingrich 12, Paul 10

GENERAL ELECTION TRIAL HEATS:

NATIONAL (Rasmussen Tracking): Obama tied with Romney (46-46); Obama d. Santorum (49-43); Obama d. Paul (48-38); Obama d. Gingrich (50-40)

MISSOURI (Rasmussen): Romney d. Obama (50-41); Santorum d. Obama (51-42)

A few thoughts about tomorrow ... and beyond ... after the jump.

Reposted from Daily Kos Labor by Laura Clawson Ask Mitt Romney a question about education, and it's predictable that he'll come back with two answers: bashing teachers unions and calling for more testing. That's exactly what happened this week when Fox News Sunday's Brett Baier asked Romney if he thinks the federal Department of Education should be abolished. Explaining what role he thinks the federal government should continue to take even if his alleged belief that "education has to be managed at the state level, not at the federal level" was implemented, Romney predictably attacked teachers unions:

But the role I see that ought to remain in the president's agenda with regards to education is to push back against the federal teachers unions. Those federal teachers unions have too much power, in some cases, they overwhelm the states, they overwhelm the local school districts. We have got to put the kids first and put these teachers unions behind.

That's right. Mitt Romney wants you to believe that teachers unions are so powerful that it takes the federal government to counter them—state and local governments are powerless against them. That is, of course, one of those statements that would be totally hilarious if it wasn't a claim that Republican presidential candidates and governors were making, en masse, as the reason to crush teachers unions, and if their reasons for wanting to crush teachers unions didn't have quite so much to do with the desire to make it easier to fire experienced teachers and replace them with cheaper, inexperienced teachers. It might be funny if it wasn't such a terrible insult to people who pour their lives into their classrooms and their students, working long hours for not enormously much pay. In fact, as Romney was saying this, the leaders of the Milwaukee teachers union were "campaigning for members to sacrifice a week’s worth of their pay to help reduce class sizes next year in Milwaukee Public Schools. The MPS Children’s Week Campaign is asking educators to give up 2.6% of their salary next year to allow for class-size relief."

Romney thinks if he always makes sure to include the word "unions," we won't notice that what he's saying is that he wants to put teachers down, to eliminate their ability to bargain over class sizes and how much test results will be used to measure educational quality and to treat teachers as the enemies of their students, rather than as educators and advocates. This is nothing new from Mitt Romney. But it's an insult every time he says it.

America's most infamous sheriff is still at it:

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio believes that a media conspiracy “bigger than Watergate” is purposefully downplaying his volunteer posse’s investigation of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate. [...]

 “The media all came to make fun of me,” the sheriff said of his “birther” press conference. “I'm a little concerned that all of their questions were zeroed in on credibility and that this has been rehashed. They didn't even ask about the proof of the case. They didn't ask about the facts that we had.”

I earlier wondered aloud whether Sheriff Joe really was taken in by his outsourced-to-conspiracy-theorists conspiracy theory or if he was himself in on the scam. The evidence continues to be inconclusive, primarily because he seems dumb enough for either possibility to be true. "The facts that we had" were indeed "rehashed" from silly Jerome Corsi conspiracies, all of which have been debunked to the satisfaction of everyone but unrepentant racists and/or fellow conspiracy theorists and/or people trying to sell books to the first two groups and/or Sheriff Joe the Gullible.

I'm serious when I say I want him to investigate the moon landings. All it takes is some tea party constituent of his to "raise the issue," and Sheriff Joe will be right on that. He'll outsource it to someone who wrote a book on the moon landing conspiracy, he'll collect some donations for the effort, and he'll stand up at a press conference to say that well now, there sure are some interesting things this here book-sellin' crazy-ass twitchy-eyed investigator has come up with.

The main thing Sheriff Joe has proven (and he keeps proving it again and again, for some reason) is that the people of Mariposa County, Arizona are outright morons. That's really the only reason I can possibly think of for why this clown still continues to hold office, despite federal investigations, a crime rate that has gone up, celebrity ride-alongs gone bad and "investigations" whose only apparent purpose is to repeatedly humiliate all involved. He seems to be bad at every single part of his job except the self-promotion part, and yet he still keeps going strong, so at least the rest of us will have an ongoing source of dark comedy.

The increased visibility of the right-wing war on women's reproductive rights is generating significant increases in funding, according to leaders of organizations such as EMILY's List and Planned Parenthood. The 27-year-old EMILY's List is dedicated to electing pro-choice Democratic women to office:

“We are on track to have one of the best first quarters we’ve ever had for candidate fundraising,” said EMILY’s List President Stephanie Schriock.

It’s a very different landscape than the one Democratic women faced in 2010, when 11 of them were ousted from the House and several were replaced by tea party-backed candidates. Democratic women fared better in the Senate, where moderate Sen. Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas was the only female Democratic incumbent to lose her reelection bid, but several others had close calls.

The shift is a surprise.

A spokeswoman said the organization, with eight months to go, has already raised more than twice as much as it did in the whole 2010 election cycle. That cycle EMILY's list brought in $38.5 million, according to Politico, which consistently labels the group as "pro-abortion."

Planned Parenthood has also seen a rise in contributions. A spokesperson wouldn't say how much, but media reports said the organization brought in $650,000 in two days after it became known that the Susan G. Komen Foundation was cutting off funding for it. In addition to the increased flow of money, EMILY's List says it has doubled its mailing list since the 2010 election and has seen a rise in additions in the past three months. Both Planned Parenthood and NARAL Pro-Choice America have seen a rise email recruits as well. It's anybody's guess how much of all that is due to their own efforts as opposed to spin-off from the email and social media campaigns that independent grassroots groups, including Daily Kos, have been running in the wake of the Komen decision and Limbaugh's shoot-from-the-lip misogyny.

Getting more money and translating it into winning candidacies and then into effective policies favoring reproductive rights are, obviously, very different things. But the Republican over-reach seen in the past 15 months—GOP shadow chairman Rush Limbaugh's "slut" diatribe, the dozens of abortion-restricting laws passed in state legislatures and the remarks of ultra-reactionary candidates like Rick Santorum—seem to have struck a nerve that years and years of organizing against the anti-choice, anti-privacy forces had not effectively achieved. All of this adds to the possibility that a reversal could finally be under way.

Why it still takes the traditional media so long to assign reporters to certain subjects remains a mystery. Today's Boston Globe provides an example in coverage of Mitt Romney's proposal to spend 4 percent of gross domestic product on the Pentagon's "core" budget. For the uninitiated, that's the Pentagon budget without the money for nuclear weapons and, ahem, any wars we happen to be fighting, which add several tens of billions to the total.

While such omissions may seem odd, the core budget (when adjusted for inflation) does provide a good comparison over the years. The core Pentagon budget for 2013 is $523 billion. In real (inflation-adjusted) dollars, that's 20 percent more than the average annual core defense budget for the entire Cold War period from 1948-1992. It's the same amount, in real dollars, as the Bush defense budget of 2003.

Romney says that's not enough. He wants to boost Pentagon core spending to 4 percent of the gross domestic product from its current level of about 3.4 percent.

An examination of Romney’s plan, however, shows how difficult it will be for him to achieve his goal. Even some of Romney’s advisers, while saying the Pentagon increases are essential, said in interviews that political and budgetary issues would probably make it impossible for Romney to increase defense spending to 4 percent of GDP in a first year—and tough even in a fourth year—of a presidency.

“No president in the next administration could take the defense budget to 4 percent in the next year,’’ said Mackenzie Eaglen, a scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute who has advised Romney on the issue. “That’s not a hard number and anybody would be crazy to suggest it is. It would have to be a very slow ramp-up and they would be hard-pressed to even achieve a 4 percent base budget by the end of the first term.’’

Why Pentagon increases beyond Cold War spending are "essential" now is a puzzler to anyone not familiar with how the military-industrial-congressional complex operates.

Increasing defense spending isn't a new theme with Romney. He's been making the 4 percent proposal for years. But until his speech at The Citadel last October, he hadn't been very specific. Then he said he would reverse the "hollowing out" of the Navy by increasing ship-building from nine ships a year to 15. In the January GOP debates in Tampa, he claimed the Navy now has fewer ships than at any time since 1917. Which turned out to be untrue. It had fewer ships than now during George W. Bush's whole second term. One could argue that a single aircraft carrier potentially has more firepower than the entire Navy in 1917, since we had no aircraft carriers in those days. But any such comparisons with nearly a century ago fall flat.

Since Romney didn't specify what kind of additional ships should be built, analysts had to guess the budgetary impact based on the Navy's wish-list (mostly destroyers and attack subs). That put it at $35 billion to $40 billion over five years (which is how the Navy figures its ship-building spending), a budget increase in a supposed time of austerity of 43-50 percent.

But back to that 4 percent overall figure for the Pentagon. Core defense spending for 2013 clocks in at about 3.37 percent of gross domestic product. Under Romney, the $523 billion core budget Obama has proposed would be $620 billion. (Plus, of course, the money for nukes and the money for actual shooting wars.)

If you figure it another way, if the Obama administration's current plans were to continue until 2022, the Pentagon core 10-year budget would be $5.7 trillion. Under Romney, based on GDP projections of the Office of Management and Budget, Pentagon spending would be $8.3 trillion for the decade.

There is another way to figure this, too. Under Romney's plans to keep overall spending from increasing the deficit, non-defense discretionary spending, which has averaged just over 3.7 percent of GDP over the past three decades and has never been below 3.2 percent, would have to be cut to 1.7 percent by 2022.

Romney is quite wrong to say his budget proposal can't be "scored." It rates a big fat zero.

Rick Santorum, today:

"We need a candidate who's going to be a fighter for freedom. Who's going to get up and make that the central theme in this race because it is the central theme in this race," Santorum told a crowd of about 200 voters during a rally here on Monday. "I don't care what the unemployment rate's going to be. Doesn't matter to me. My campaign doesn't hinge on unemployment rates and growth rates. It's something more foundational that's going on."

As refreshing as I find it to have a Republican candidate for the presidency say openly he just doesn't honestly give a damn about unemployment, as opposed to merely beating around the bush about it, I think maybe he's lost the plot. Or maybe he hasn't at all: Rick Santorum's entire campaign is based around this new version of "freedom" he speaks of, which he defines as asserting his own narrow morality and turning it into the law of the land.

Compared to that theocratic social mission, worrying about little things like massive unemployment is hardly worth mentioning, right?

The father of Obamacare on Monday, saying how bad things would have been for innovators like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates if they had been a businessmen during President Obama's administration.

Under President Obama’s administration, these pioneers would have found it much more difficult, if not impossible, to innovate, invent, and create.

Somebody really needs to let Mitt Romney know that not only was Steve Jobs CEO of Apple through the first two years of the Obama administration, but he also supported Obama. And for all Romney's bluster about the evils of Obama, Apple somehow managed to release not just one but three different generations of iPads during his tenure in office, completely revolutionizing the tablet market.

(As for Bill Gates, while Windows Vista came out under Bush—okay, cheap shot, I admit it—Obama hasn't stopped Microsoft from coming out with Windows 8.)

But Romney was just getting started on his absurd rant. According to him, under Obama:

The government would have banned Thomas Edison’s light bulb.

Now that's just silly. Obviously, there are more regulations now than there were in Thomas Edison's day, but that thanks in large part to the progress of inventors like Edison. Romney's argument is like saying Henry Ford couldn't have invented the Model T because seat belts are now required in cars.

Amazingly, Romney dug even deeper on the lightbulb issue:

Oh yeah, Obama’s regulators actually did just that.

That's bull. First, the regulation Romney is referring to was signed into law by George W. Bush ... and second, it doesn't ban light bulbs, not even incandescent ones.

What it does is set efficiency standards, just like on cars. As long as incandescent bulbs meet those standards, they can still be manufactured and sold. Over the next two years, the manufacture of older less efficient incandescent bulbs must be sold out, but existing stocks won't be regulated.

Because of the new standards, CFLs and LEDs will grow in popularity, but you can already buy incandescents that meet the new standards—they are just one click away.

What Mitt Romney doesn't seem to understand is that innovation and progress often creates new regulatory challenges. Before cell phones, we didn't need to worry about wireless spectrum. Before airplanes, we didn't need air traffic controllers. Before cars we didn't need a highway system or fuel efficiency standards.

For all of Romney's bluster, if we didn't have any regulation whatsoever, neither Steve Jobs nor Apple would have been able to produce the iPad without them. I know regulations aren't fun and they aren't sexy, but aren't you glad your neighbor's WiFi network can't stop you from running one of your own?

Mitt Romney, now campaigning in Illinois:

These pancakes are something else, I'll tell ya," said Romney, standing in the dining room of Charlie Parker's Diner in Springfield admiring the dish known as a "Charlie's Famous Giant Pancake." "These pancakes are about as large as my win in Puerto Rico last night, I must admit. The margin is just about as good."

"Hello again, fellow earth humans! I am having some pancakes of a quite unusual size. Their circumference reminds me of the time recently when I trounced my human opponent by a similar circumference, and by circumference I mean relative margin, which is technically more similar than radius, and which does not involve pi, except that these pancakes remind me of pi, which is similar to the human treat known colloquially as 'pie,' and those two words are homonyms—but make no mistake, I am not for homosexual pies, or pancakes. Also, these pancakes are clearly the right size. It is all other pancakes that are in error. The circumference of these pancakes, presuming they were exactly circular, which they are not, in fact these pancakes are deviate from true circles by a factor of as much as 1.20, which is not nearly as much as my margin of victory in Puerto Rico, which I learned recently is an island, and part of the United States but simultaneously not an actual state, although, although the united part is still accurate, given that exception: analogy subprocess error #09: analogy too deeply nested, analogy will be aborted so please vote for me, because these larger than average pancakes are quite impressive."

Meanwhile, elsewhere on the campaign trail:

A fancy French restaurant in D.C.? Oh dear. That doesn't sound like proper pandering at all. I'm beginning to question whether Gingrich still has his heart in this campaign. No—no doubt this is just Newt doing more research on the European economic crisis and what effects it may have on France in particular, and soon the lessons of that research will be explained to us all in great detail. Perhaps in the form of a Lincoln-Douglas debate.

Reposted from Comics by Barbara Morrill

In 2008, Democrats were locked in a protracted primary season between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. While Republicans chortled at the time, it proved to have worked to their disadvantage, and Obama won the White House easily.

Naturally, Republicans are trying to spin their 2012 woes as a positive, akin to the Democrats in 2012.

The differences abound—Obama and Clinton kept it much more civil between each other. Remember the Clinton ad that questioned Obama's ability to pick up the phone at 4 AM? Vicious! And given that Clinton and Obama pretty much agreed with each other ideologically, they weren't forced to tug each other out of the mainstream. I mean, Republicans are debating access to birth control!

Furthermore, Republicans nominated a weak senator who wasn't able to rally his base or raise any money. Democrats don't have to worry about that this year.

But here's another reason—both Obama and Clinton built a massive state-by-state infrastructure as they contested states deep into the calendar. That infrastructure is what allowed Obama to shock in states like Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia. And even activated Democrats in hopelessly red states were recruited to partake in the national effort, whether it was by shipping them to swing states, or virtual phonebanking, or whatnot.

Contrast this to Republicans 2012:

Illinois hasn't played a major role in a Republican nominating contest since 1988, when voters here sided with then-Vice President George H.W. Bush over then-Kansas Sen. Bob Dole. Officials here say the presidential campaigns seem almost surprised that they have wound up competing in Illinois this year, and they see little evidence of robust get-out-the-vote operations [...]

Likewise, voters and local political operatives say the candidates have not devoted much time or money to phone calls or mail; instead, a super-PAC supporting Mr. Romney has spent nearly $2.5 million on television ads in the state, while a group supporting Mr. Santorum has spent roughly $300,000.

The Democratic primary in 2008 built up the party. The Republican primary in 2012 is systematically destroying each other as they race to the ideological extremes.

Which one will have left their party in better shape for the November elections? It's no contest.

There's a reason Republicans (and Romney, in particular) have so drastically underperformed in turnout.

Last week, a group of 98 national advertisers put stations on notice that they didn't want their ads associated with Rush Limbaugh and other "controversial" radio hosts.

That list is expanding, according to Radio-Info.com, with a second memo from a network to affiliates, but this time specifically focused on Limbaugh.

From today's TRI Newsletter: Cumulus Media/ESPN Audio affiliates just received a list of 31 advertisers "who requested that their commercials not be scheduled in any Rush Limbaugh programs.” The memo instructs stations to "move any spots that may fall in Rush Limbaugh programs to comparably-rated time periods." Note that this is a different situation from the March 9 TRI story about 98 advertisers who were on a different list. That was about any content "deemed to be offensive or controversial", not just the three-hour daily Limbaugh show.

Radio-Info.com doesn't provide the entire list, just a few examples including Advance Auto, Intuit Turbo Tax, John Deere and Progressive. Turbo Tax is on both lists, as Progressive, and John Deere has announced it would be pulling its advertising. So these 31 advertisers probably aren't new drops, but companies that really, really want to make sure they have absolutely nothing to do with Limbaugh.

Public pressure is obviously still working to keep millions in revenue away from Clear Channel, and away from Limbaugh. So let's keep it up by making sure these advertisers never go back to Limbaugh.

If you haven't yet, sign our petition to all of Limbaugh's advertisers telling them to keep their ads off of his show permanently.