At the height of the Iraq war in 2004, veterans gave President George W. Bush a 16-percentage-point edge over his Democratic rival. Four years later, Barack Obama trailed among the former military members by 10 percentage points.

But Mr. Obama’s campaign said it thinks his three and a half years as commander in chief have turned the tables on the issue, giving him a good chance at winning the veteran vote this year.

One of Mr. Obama’s first campaign ads — released just this week — was aimed directly at war-weary service members and their families.

“It’s because of what they’ve done that we’ve been able to go after al-Qaeda and kill Bin Laden,” Mr. Obama says in the ad. “And when they come home we have a sacred trust to make sure that we are doing everything we can to heal all of their wounds, giving them the opportunities that they deserve to find a job and get the education that they need.”

The ad is part of Mr. Obama’s efforts to capitalize on a very different profile than is typical for a Democratic president.

Having come into the White House on an antiwar platform, Mr. Obama nonetheless increased American involvement in Afghanistan even as he began drawing down troops in Iraq. Now, both wars are winding down — a
relief to many military members and their families.

In addition, Mr. Obama has embraced the use of drones to assassinate terrorist leaders. And he authorized the raid that led to the killing of Osama bin Laden.

“President Obama is committed to ensuring that all of our men and women who’ve served in uniform can find work when they return home, receive the health care and benefits they’ve earned and have the chance to get a college education through the post-9/11 G.I. Bill,” said Clo Ewing, a campaign spokeswoman.

Working in Mr. Obama’s favor may be the changing face of the American military, which is becoming younger and more diverse. Advisers to the president note that he actually won in 2008 among veterans who were under 60 years old.

The military is also changing in its attitudes toward social issues, the Obama campaign believes. Mr. Obama’s decision to end the “don’t ask, don’t tell” ban on gays serving openly will be a benefit, they say.

There is little recent polling to suggest how the two candidates are faring among veterans. But advisers to Mr. Romney scoff at the idea that Mr. Obama will steal away a traditional Republican advantage come Election Day. They argue that the president’s economic policies have been especially detrimental to veterans and their families.

every paragraph leads me to think: "what a tool." so glad he thinks that there's no correlation between class size and student performance. do not vote for Romney, for the sake of your children!

via maggie eighteen (of west philly):
Madaline G. Dunn, 78, who said she has lived here for 50 years and volunteers at the school, said she is “personally offended” that Romney would visit her neighborhood.
“It’s not appreciated here,” she said. “It is absolutely denigrating for him to come in here and speak his garbage.”
Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter (D) addressed protesters and the media, quipping that Romney “suddenly somehow found West Philadelphia.”
“It’s nice that he decided this late in his [campaign] to see what a city like Philadelphia is about,” Nutter said. But, he added, “I don’t know that a one-day experience in the heart of West Philadelphia is enough to get you ready to run the United States of America.”
“You want to have an urban experience?” Nutter added. “You want to have a West Philly experience? Then come out here and talk to somebody in West Philly.”

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

For the alleged productivity surge never actually happened. In fact, overall business productivity in America grew faster in the postwar generation, an era in which banks were tightly regulated and private equity barely existed, than it has since our political system decided that greed was good.

What about international competition? We now think of America as a nation doomed to perpetual trade deficits, but it was not always thus. From the 1950s through the 1970s, we generally had more or less balanced trade, exporting about as much as we imported. The big trade deficits only started in the Reagan years, that is, during the era of runaway finance.

And what about that trickle-down? It never took place. There have been significant productivity gains these past three decades, although not on the scale that Wall Street’s self-serving legend would have you believe. However, only a small part of those gains got passed on to American workers.

So, no, financial wheeling and dealing did not do wonders for the American economy, and there are real questions about why, exactly, the wheeler-dealers have made so much money while generating such dubious results.

But he doesn’t seem that enamored with Mitt Romney either.

In an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” program Wednesday morning, Mr. Powell, a Republican who did endorse Mr. Obama in 2008, despite having worked under President George W. Bush, chided Mr. Romney for listening to conservative foreign policy advisers.

Mr. Powell noted that Mr. Romney recently said that Russia was the “No. 1 geopolitical foe” of the United States.

“Well, c’mon Mitt, think. It isn’t the case,” Mr. Powell said. “I don’t know whether Mitt really feels that.”

Asked whether he thought Mr. Romney’s advisers told him to say that, Mr. Powell said: “I don’t know. You ask him.”

Mr. Powell said Mr. Romney’s comment had been “catching a lot of heck from the regular G.O.P. foreign affairs community.”

“We’re kind of taken aback by it,” he said. “Look at the world. There is no pure competitor to the United States of America.”

Earlier in the interview, Mr. Powell described Mr. Romney’s foreign policy advisers as “quite far to the right.’

“Sometimes, they, I think, might be in a position to make judgments or recommendations to the candidate that should get a second thought,” Mr. Powell said.

House Minority Leader, responding to an expected acceleration of John Boehner’s timeline on the Bush tax cuts, fired off a letter to the Speaker asking for immediate consideration of an extension of just the “low end” tax cuts – which include the Bush-era marginal rates for households making up to $1 million. This represents a shift in the dividing line for the Bush tax cuts, which has traditionally been at $250,000.

The Bush tax cuts at every level up to $1 million in annual income, in other words, are now framed as “middle-income tax cuts.” She says it right here in the letter:

Without further delay, the Majority Leadership should schedule a vote on extension of the middle-income tax cuts, as early as next week, to increase certainty for millions of American taxpayers and for the economy. We should not delay passing this legislation that will help afford all Americans the opportunity to reach their goals and realize the promise of the American Dream.

We must ask the very wealthiest Americans to pay their fair share. Democrats believe that tax cuts for those earning over a million dollars a year should expire and that we should use the resulting revenues to pay down the deficit.

First of all, if you make the dividing line at $1 million a year in annual income, there simply won’t be all that many revenues generated to pay down that deficit. When the dividing line was $250,000 a year, the revenue was around $800 billion over a ten-year period. I don’t have a strong grasp of what the numbers would be at $1 million, but my guess would be half that, if not more. So from a deficit reduction standpoint, this makes pretty much no sense.

Second of all, because of our marginal tax rate system, high-income earners at the $1 million
level would still benefit from all the tax cuts on the first $1 million of their income, which are substantial. In fact, you’d be giving hundreds of billions of dollars – whatever the difference is between letting the tax cuts expire at the $250,000 level and the $1 million level – entirely to well-off people.

Mr. Powell, a retired four-star general and Republican former secretary of state, praises Mr. Obama for having “stabilized the financial system.”

And Mr. Powell is supportive of the president’s Afghanistan policy.

Nearly four years after lending his military stature and his political prowess to Mr. Obama with a critical endorsement, Mr. Powell sounds happy with the result. And yet, he is not quite ready to endorse the president again.

“I don’t want to throw my weight behind somebody,” Mr. Powell said on NBC‘s “Today Show” on Tuesday morning. “I feel as I private citizen I ought to listen to what the president says and what the president’s been doing. But I also have to listen to what the other fellow says. I’ve known Mitt Romney for many years, good man.”

The decision by Mr. Powell could just be a gracious delay from a man who served President George W. Bush during wartime. He said on NBC that he does “owe the Republican Party some consideration.”

And if Mr. Powell decides to endorse Mr. Obama again, he might want to time the announcement to have more impact that it might in late May.

May 22 (Reuters) - ATLANTA - When he entered the race for the Republican presidential nomination in May 2011, Newt Gingrich was the prosperous head of a small empire commonly known as Newt Inc, which included both for-profit consultancies and nonprofit foundations. Altogether, these entwined ventures pulled in more than $110 million over the past decade. Now the vestiges of this empire are mired in debt, as is Gingrich’s campaign fund. A bankruptcy proceeding under way in Atlanta will determine whether the one company still owned by Callista Gingrich, Gingrich Productions, will lose an expected payout that now constitutes the bulk of the Gingriches’ net worth.

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Republicans seem immune to criticism. In an angry speech last month, John Boehner, the House speaker, said claims that his party was damaging the welfare of women were “entirely created” by Democrats. Earlier, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, sneered that any suggestion of a G.O.P. “war on women” was as big a fiction as a “war on caterpillars.”

But just last Wednesday, Mr. Boehner refuted his own argument by ramming through the House a bill that seriously weakens the Violence Against Women Act. That followed the Republican push in Virginia and elsewhere to require medically unnecessary and physically invasive sonograms before an abortion, and Senate Republicans’ persistent blocking of a measure to better address the entrenched problem of sex-based wage discrimination.

On Capitol Hill and in state legislatures, Republicans are attacking women’s rights in four broad areas.

The chart above is from the invaluable people at Voteview, who use data on Congressional voting to measure political positions and polarizations. What it shows is what should be obvious, but much of the Beltway chattering class still refuses to acknowledge: there has been a huge increase in polarization, and it’s because Republicans have moved right, not because Democrats have moved left. (You want to look at the Northern Democrat line; the southern Democrats disappeared or became Republicans).

As I said, this is obvious; yet people who try to say this get frozen out of the discourse, even when — like Mann and Ornstein — they have heretofore been pundits in good standing. Instead, you’re supposed to wring your hands over partisanship in the abstract.

And when the attempt to turn this hand-wringing into actual political effort flops, you blame it on the false equivalency police!

The facts have a well-known anti-centrist bias.