David Weidner, MarketWatch

Bob Shrum, The Week

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Charlie Bass says expiration of Bush tax cuts would be highest tax increase in history

U.S. Rep. Charles Bass sees a perfect financial storm looming. Meeting last month with The Telegraph editorial board, Bass, a New Hampshire Republican, ran through the list of upcoming votes that could divide Congress and American taxpayers over the coming months. "We now have a sequester of about $1 trillion hanging over our heads at the end of the year," Bass said in the April 3 meeting, referring to mandatory cuts that will take effect if Congress doesn't act. He added, "We have the payroll tax issue to address. We ...

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At the end of the 1980 campaign, Republican Jacob Javits of New York, a four-term Senator, came to my law school to deliver a foreign-policy speech to the students and faculty.

Javits was a moving force in New York politics and a powerful player in the Senate, but he was suffering the onset of Lou Gehrig's Disease. So in his campaign for a fifth term, he was challenged -- and defeated -- in the GOP primary by Town of Hempstead Supervisor Alfonse D'Amato.

Javits should have bowed out gracefully after the primary, but instead chose to fight on as a third-party candidate.

When he appeared in the lecture hall, he had to be helped to the podium. When he began to speak, you could see the ailment had impaired the great man's ability to speak and think. It was a sad and painful spectacle to watch.

Javits, the last great liberal Republican, captured only 11 percent of the vote in that election and his defeat marked the end of an era in which the Republican Party could win statewide in liberal New York.

I'm reminded of Javits by Indiana's six-term Sen. Dick Lugar, who just lost his primary challenge to Richard Mourdock, an event Tea Party activists say show the movement remains alive and well.

The truth is that Lugar, 80, should have announced his retirement this year, but made the same mistake as Javits in not bowing out in a dignified manner.

Politics is like gambling: you have to know when to walk away from the table, particularly if you want to go out a winner.

This is particularly true these days, when career politicians are perceived so poorly by frustrated voters. Some are starting their re-election bids as underdogs, so overwhelming is the anti-incumbent attitude in our national politics.

Lugar lost not because of a great outpouring of support for Mourdock and his intransigent Tea Party beliefs, but because he had lost touch with the Republican base in his state. Neither did it help that he had become old, arrogant and ran a poor campaign.

Too often, moderate incumbents like Lugar lose perspective of why they were elected, how to do their jobs and the plight of their constituents.

Others, like Maine Sen. Olympia Snowe, know when it's time to quit and retire.

Some, like Arizona's Sen. John McCain, recast themselves as super conservative to win re-election.

And those like Javits and Lugar, who feel entitled to die in their seats, suffer humiliating defeats.

Lugar's loss shows the electorate is looking for solutions to the country's ills. Come November, voters will be ousting more incumbents -- no matter their party -- who have contributed to the stalemate in Washington and don't know when it's time to quit.

The lesson of Lugar's defeat shouldn't be lost on only Republicans.

Incumbents who have lost touch will be term-limited by the electorate, the way the system is supposed to work.

Published on May 11, 2012 in Florida Voices.

Steven Kurlander blogs at Kurly's Kommentary, writes a weekly column for Fort Lauderdale's Sun-Sentinel and Florida Voices and is a South Florida communications strategist.

Scott Conroy, RealClearPolitics
People have always told Bobby Jindal to slow down.The Louisiana governor has a tendency to speak faster than his audience is able to think, so when it came time to deliver the Republican response to President Obama's first address to a joint session of Congress in 2009, the most important speech of Jindal's political life, he made sure to take it slow.What resulted was an oratorical disaster.On live national television, Jindal spoke in a jarring, singsong pitch that replaced his natural rapid-fire monotone. Even longtime friends found it difficult to concentrate on what he was...

Pat Buchanan, Pitt Tribune-Review
It took Joe Biden's public embrace of same-sex marriage to smoke him out.But after Joe told David Gregory of "Meet the Press" he was "absolutely comfortable" with homosexuals marrying, Barack Obama could not maintain his credibility with the cultural elite if he stuck with the biblical view that God ordained marriage as solely between a man and woman. The biblical view had to go.Obama had to move, or look like a malingerer in secularism's next great moral advance into post-Christian America.Consider. Obama had an appearance coming up on "The View,"...

Global investors increasingly prefer President Barack Obama to Republican challenger Mitt Romney and most say they believe the incumbent will remain in the White House for another four years.

Simendinger & McPike, RCP
President Obama's personal embrace of same-sex marriage could cost him votes in key swing states in November, he conceded during an interview with ABC News on Wednesday.Political analysts said it is impossible to gauge in a vacuum whether the first-ever presidential endorsement of gay marriage will prove a net loss for Obama on Election Day, compared with the support his change of heart might mobilize, including among younger voters, who overwhelmingly back marriage equality, according to recent polling."There are obvious risks in this, but I dispute the conventional wisdom that...

Charles Krauthammer, Investor's Business Daily
In May 1967, in brazen violation of previous truce agreements, Egypt ordered U.N. peacekeepers out of the Sinai, marched 120,000 troops to the Israeli border, blockaded Eilat (Israel's southern outlet to the world's oceans), abruptly signed a military pact with Jordan and, together with Syria, pledged war for the final destruction of Israel.May '67 was Israel's most fearful, desperate month. The country was surrounded and alone. Previous great-power guarantees proved worthless.

Ron Brownstein, National Journal
In the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988, Democrats effectively competed for so few states that their own strategists lamented that the party needed to draw an “inside straight” to reach the 270 Electoral College votes required for victory. But since then, the parties have played very different hands.In that earlier period, Gerald Ford in 1976 was the sole Republican presidential nominee to win fewer than 301 Electoral College votes. Jimmy Carter, who beat Ford, was the only Democratic nominee during those years to win more than 191. 

Kim Strassel, Wall Street Journal
Here's what happens when the president of the United States publicly targets a private citizen for the crime of supporting his opponent.Frank VanderSloot is the CEO of Melaleuca Inc. The 63-year-old has run that wellness-products company for 26 years out of tiny Idaho Falls, Idaho. Last August, Mr. VanderSloot gave $1 million to Restore Our Future, the Super PAC that supports Mitt Romney.

LOS ANGELES -- President Barack Obama is telling major Hollywood donors that his decision to support same-sex marriage is a logical extension of where he believes America ought to be.

Obama also says that the issue illustrates the difference in visions for the country between himself and Republicans.

Obama addressed about 150 top-dollar supporters Thursday night at actor George Clooney's Tudor-style canyon home in the Studio City area of Los Angeles

The president's remarks about his gay marriage stance were brief and oblique, without ever mentioned the word marriage.

Obama began his remarks by simply saying: "Obviously, yesterday we made some news." That drew the most enthusiastic applause of the evening.

An anonymous former high-school classmate of Mitt Romney's told ABC News on Thursday that many fellow students have "really negative memories" of the Republican presidential candidate, and that his behavior during those years was "like
'Lord of the Flies.'"

The interview came on the heels of a Washington Post report that detailed Romney's behavior as a student at the Cranbrook School, a prestigious institution in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. In the article's most explosive revelation, multiple classmates of Romney's recall how he led a group of students that forcibly cut the hair of John Lauber, a student who was thought to be gay.

Romney countered the allegations quickly, making a surprise appearance on Fox host Brian Kilmeade's radio show Thursday morning.

"They talk about the fact that I played a lot of pranks in high school," he said. "And they describe some that you just say to yourself, back in high school I just did some dumb things, and if anybody was hurt by that or offended by it, obviously I apologize."

“I participated in a lot of hijinks and pranks during high school, and some might have gone too far, and for that, I apologize," he added.

Earlier in the interview, Romney said that during his high-school days -- the mid 1960s -- a student's sexual orientation "was the furthest thing from my mind."

Romney's advisers are hoping for backup on those words. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2012/05/romney-friend-stu-white-says-campaign-wants-him-to-counter-prank-accusations/" target="_hplink">ABC News reports that his campaign has approached some of the candidate's Cranbrook friends to counter the sometimes harsh image put forth in the Washington Post article.

WASHINGTON -- Shortly before President Barack Obama voiced his support for gay marriage, Vice President Joe Biden apologized to the president for comments that led him to speed up his public pronouncement.

Biden and Obama spoke in the Oval Office on Wednesday, a person familiar with the exchange said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talk. Obama accepted his vice president's apology, saying he knew Biden was speaking from his heart when he declared in a television interview that he was "absolutely comfortable" with gay couples marrying.

Biden's comments pushed gay marriage to the forefront of the presidential race and focused a fresh spotlight on Obama's vague position on the matter. The president, who once opposed gay marriage, had been saying for more than a year that his personal views were "evolving."

The vice president spoke out on gay marriage without White House consent, leaving Obama aides deeply frustrated.

In an interview with ABC News, Obama said he wasn't angry at Biden, though he thought the vice president had gotten "a little bit over his skis" by voicing his support for gay marriage ahead of his boss.

"Would I have preferred to have done this in my own way, in my own terms, without I think, there being a lot of notice to everybody? Sure," Obama said. "But all's well that ends well."

By the time Biden's interview on NBC's "Meet The Press" aired on Sunday morning, a handful of close Obama aides knew that the president had already finished that evolution. He had decided to speak publicly about his personal support for gay marriage sometime before the Democratic convention in early September.

The White House and Obama's presidential campaign at first tried to play down Biden's remarks, insisting that the vice president had gone no further in support of equal rights for same-sex couples. But gay rights advocates latched onto Biden's remarks, declaring him the highest-ranking U.S. official to support gay marriage.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan, a longtime friend of the president, stirred the political pot further on Monday, declaring unequivocally that he also supported gay marriage.

By Tuesday morning, the president came to the conclusion that he couldn't stay silent on the issue any further. The White House hastily arranged a television interview with ABC News for Wednesday, during which Obama explained to the public that he had decided it was important for him to "affirm that same-sex couples should be able to get married."

If your client has a complaint about the bank managing his or her home loan, Joseph Smith, the former North Carolina banking commissioner charged with enforcing the national mortgage settlement, would like to know about it.

On Thursday, Smith announced the launch of an online tool for attorneys and other advocates to report their clients' mortgage servicing complaints. (There is also a tool for homeowners to lodge a complaint directly.)

“This allows me, as monitor, to hear complaints and learn more about advocates’ impressions of how the settlement is working," he said. "Although I’ll extensively review reports and monitoring from the banks and my own team of auditors, it is still critical for me to receive information from the heart of each community this settlement serves.”

While filing a grievance may help the settlement's top enforcer keep an eye on the banks -- Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase and Ally Financial -- Smith does not have the power to investigate individual complaints or help homeowners. This speaks to the limitations of the mortgage settlement, which expires in three years and was never intended to give individual homeowners an opportunity to have their appeals for help directly heard.

Under the settlement, banks pledged to overhaul how they manage troubled loans. That includes eliminating "dual-tracking," the practice of banks pursuing foreclosure proceedings against homeowners who are at the same time seeking a trial loan modification. Financial institutions must also establish a single point of contact for troubled borrowers -- a response to widespread complaints from homeowners that when they called for help, they never could speak to the same person twice.

Homeowners' biggest complaint over the past few years is the lack of response from banks and the government to their claims about wrongful fees, misapplied payments and botched foreclosures.

In an interview late last year, one elderly borrower near Baltimore told of sleepless nights and a worsening of medical problems due to stress caused by dealing with his bank, which he claimed was foreclosing based on faulty loan calculations. No one at the institution or in the government would hear his pleas, this borrower said.

Another homeowner in distress recently emailed The Huffington Post, desperate to save her home. "CAN ANYONE HELP US?" this California homeowner wrote. "Or are we going to be like other seniors we have seen lose their home who now live in vans, or push grocery carts on the street with what they can save to live on, sleeping on the street?"

But while the mortgage settlement monitor can't help, the federal government has created two other avenues for borrowers to appeal for direct assistance.

The simplest is to lodge a complaint with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. That agency promises to forward a grievance to the financial institution, assign it a tracking number and keep borrowers updated on the status. What's not clear is how often the agency intervenes on a borrower's behalf.

For borrowers whose homes were in some stage of foreclosure during 2009 or 2010 there is the Independent Foreclosure Review. The program, agreed to by 14 loan servicers as part of consent decrees signed with regulators last year, is designed to give borrowers a chance to have a loan file reviewed by an impartial third party if the mortgage was involved in any stage of foreclosure from 2009 to 2010 -- and they believe that they suffered financial harm. (So far, just 3 percent of eligible borrowers have applied).

Smith will use the information gathered from these recorded complaints to investigate any notable trends, he said.

“Lawyers, caseworkers and other consumer advocates are the eyes and ears on the ground who will know first, and know intimately, what kind of difference these payments, adjustments and programs are making," Smith said. "That’s why we’ve created this dedicated tool -– to see what they’re seeing."

Richard Socarides, New Yorker
Even though the waiting was frustrating, President Barack Obama’s announcement today that he fully supports marriage equality for gay and lesbian Americans is historic. It will certainly go down in record books with events like Stonewall as an important milestone in the equal-rights movement. Having a President, especially this President, take a strong moral stand in favor of rights for gays will help the country complete its own evolution on the issue and lead to a day where, once again, our understanding of American freedom will have been expanded.

Brian Wesbury & Robert Stein, First Trust
The Social Welfare State is dying. Like the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain, the cradle-to-grave social welfare experiment must eventually collapse. A system of taxing work and profits, while subsidizing leisure, sloth, and retirement, must eventually fail.The end of the Social Welfare State is painful for many, and it will not end quickly or quietly as the elections of this past weekend prove. Francois Hollande, a Socialist, was elected president of France, while Greece saw a surge in votes for “anti-bailout” political parties in parliament.

Kevin Drum, Mother Jones
Could Europe cut Greece loose with only a moderate amount of pain and chaos? That's steadily becoming the mainstream view, but Ryan Avent begs to differ:

John Kass, Chicago Tribune
A few weeks after the recent synod of the bishops of journalism — known to us taxpaying chumbolones as the White House Correspondents' Association dinner — the secular clergy pronounced sentence on Indiana Republican Richard Mourdock. Mourdock had the audacity to whomp the heck out of six-term U.S. Sen. Richard Lugar in Tuesday's Indiana Republican primary.

George Will, Washington Post
Bill Hewlett and David Packard, tinkering in a California garage, began what became Hewlett-Packard. Steve Jobs and a friend built a computer in the California garage that became Apple’s birthplace. Bill Cook had no garage, so he launched Cook Medical in a spare bedroom in an apartment in this university town. Half a century ago, in flight from Chicago’s winters, he settled here and began making cardiovascular catheters and other medical instruments. One thing led to another, as things have a way of doing when the government stays out of the way, and although Cook died...

Why are Republicans fixated on holding middle class Americans hostage to their campaign to prevent government spending on preventive health services? Senate Republicans have just blocked legislation to keep college loans affordable by adhering to House Speaker John Boehner's promise to condition Republican support for keeping interest rates from doubling by cutting $6 billion from the Prevention and Public Health Fund. Earlier this year, Republicans actually bragged that they cut these funds by $5 billion when they grudgingly agreed to extend the middle class tax cuts without also cutting taxes on the wealthy. The Republican spin is that they are scaling back "Obamacare." Politics trumps health. Never mind that the Republicans' latest move will effectively zero out monies for reducing America's rising health care costs.

In designating public health funds as ransom for affordable college loans, Boehner called them "slush funds." Accusing his opponents of engaging in "campaign-style theatrics," he implied that investment in initiatives to prevent human suffering wastes taxpayers' dollars. Presumably, in the Republican playbook, the Democrats' proposals for financing low-interest rates on college loans by ending tax subsidies for oil and gas companies or increasing the Social Security and Medicare payroll taxes on high earning stockholders are mere "theatrics" aimed at preserving profligate public health spending.

This curious characterization of preventive health expenditures as "slush" raises the question of why Republicans are unable or unwilling to appreciate the benefits of investing in public health. In particular, why do they oppose efforts to reduce our enormous expenditures on medical care for sick people by cost-effective investments in programs and services to keep people from getting sick?

As its name implies public health protection refers to a government responsibility. This includes protecting communities from contaminated food and water, disease-carrying mosquitoes and tainted blood products and promoting smoking cessation, healthy diets and exercise. This is to be done while ensuring access to vaccinations and reducing children's injuries and responding to emergencies to prevent the spread of disease and assist people in distress. These are services that promote the well-being of individuals and society.

The Republicans recent assault on public health is particularly troubling for several reasons. First, they have politicized an issue that should be a shared enterprise. A physically healthy population is essential for our country's economic growth and national security. Last month The Institute of Medicine issued another report bemoaning the woeful state of America's public health infrastructure. It called our lack of public health funds "dysfunctional" and documented the negative impact that insufficient spending has on life expectancy and health outcomes compared with other developed countries.

Republicans have also confused the issue of preventive health funding with their obsession to impose their moral values on society. Grandstanding their intention to defund Planned Parenthood in reality means denying women access to the preventive services that detect breast, cervical and uterine cancers and that enable them to choose whether or when to get pregnant. Moreover, cutting these funds reduces the government's ability to address the health challenges plaguing marginalized populations. The Department of Health and Human Services just released a report documenting the negative health outcomes experienced by racial and ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender communities who face barriers to health services.

Finally, failing to support public health weakens our nation's security. It is ironic that given limited funds and competing needs, Republican budget proposals cut human services and increase defense spending. Do politicians believe that disease pathogens or virus-carrying insects distinguish between humans wearing military uniforms and civilians? Public health departments monitor disease outbreaks and mobilize appropriate responses. With up to 10 million people annually crossing international borders, the potential for human transmission of the deadly H5N1 pandemic virus, the threat of bioterrorism using lethal germs or weaponized bacterium (think anthrax), how can they brag about cutting already woefully inadequate public health funds?

To be sure, Republicans can claim that they want only to cut the "slush." Presumably, their political wisdom endows them with the capacity to foresee the future and minimize its threats. Perhaps that is why prior to the 2009 pandemic they cut funding for research that might lead to speeding up vaccine production, or why prior to Hurricane Katrina they delayed funding for strengthening the New Orleans levee system. Maybe that is why they appear unconcerned about the health needs of women, minorities, or the 40 million people who lack health insurance.

Public health funds should not provide the ransom for funding programs that benefit middle class families. Since Republicans are fond of quoting our Founding Fathers, perhaps they should heed the words of Benjamin Franklin, "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure."

Leslie Gerwin is Associate Director, Program in Law and Public Affairs, Princeton University; she teaches Public Health Law and Policy as an Adjunct Professor of Law at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law.

Howard Kurtz, The Daily Beast
The president of the United States has just endorsed gay marriage - putting him not just in stark opposition to Mitt Romney but to Americans who firmly oppose it and have defeated every state referendum designed to legalize it. Obama made the declaration to ABC News just three days after Joe Biden said he was “absolutely comfortable” with men marrying men and women marrying women—which prompted some administration officials to suggest the vice president was freelancing and that his remarks had not been cleared in advance. 

The Truth-o-Meter says: False | Barack Obama says government job losses on his watch are unprecedented

In a May 8, 2012, speech on the economy in Albany, N.Y., President Barack Obama sought to put the nation’s economic challenges on his watch in historical context. He especially sought to explain how hard it’s been to increase the national employment level when governments have been hemorrhaging jobs. These job losses, he suggested, have weighed down the comparatively healthy private-sector job-creation statistics. "It's worth noting, by the way -- this is just a little aside -- after there was a recession under Ronald Reagan, government employment went way up," Obama said. "It went up after the ...

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