LAS VEGAS -- Former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson is campaigning to win the White House as a Libertarian after receiving scant attention in the Republican presidential race.

Johnson easily became the party's presidential nominee at the Libertarian national convention in Las Vegas on Saturday. He hopes to appeal to voters fed up with the traditional two-party system this November.

Johnson was a longshot candidate for the Republican presidential nomination when he announced in December that he would instead pursue the Libertarian ticket.

He won 74 percent of the vote on the first ballot in Las Vegas, an unusual showing of support. In 2008, Libertarian delegates needed six rounds of voting to pick a presidential nominee.

Johnson supports legalized marijuana, low taxes and immigration reform.

He was elected New Mexico's governor in 1994.

A consistent frustration with President Barack Obama by those active on the left is his apparent unwillingness to pay political costs on behalf of core constituencies of his party. But the calculations are not hard to understand, and, just in case you missed them, acolytes of the president and his reelection team will quickly remind you of the anticipated closeness of the coming election and the costliness of embracing key priorities of the left while trying to win independent, middle-of-the-road voters.

But every so often, the almost congenital cautiousness of this administration and president results in decision making so weak, so absent of leadership, that the resulting outcome is wrong from both a policy and a political perspective. Such is the president's recent decision not to sign an executive order prohibiting discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) Americans by government contractors.

Seventy-one years ago, on the eve of World War II, Franklin Roosevelt signed Executive Order 8802, prohibiting racial discrimination by firms and unions doing work for the United States government. How ironic, then, that the first African-American president of the United States will not do for millions of LGBT Americans what Franklin Roosevelt did for racial and ethnic minorities.

Let's be clear. This is bad policy. Twenty-nine states lack any anti-discrimination protection for LGBT workers. Should their employers take exception to their sexual orientation, millions of LGBT Americans are without recourse if they are fired, regardless of how hard they work or how great a job they are doing. And even though an executive order, confined to federal contractors, is not as good as legislation applying to everyone, it is a huge start in protecting LGBT workers. The federal government, let's recall, is the largest purchaser of, well, everything.

But what's most vexing about this decision is that this bad policy choice comes with no political upside whatsoever, a conclusion for which there is a mountain of data. In the 2008 American National Election Study, over 73 percent of Americans (including supermajorities of every racial and ethnic group) favored protection from job discrimination for LGBT people. And this isn't new; in fact, the ANES has been asking this question for 20 years. Since 1992 a supermajority of American citizens have favored anti-discrimination protections for LGBT Americans.

To be sure, this is not a unanimous position. But it is not a big leap to suggest that those opposing these protections are either very unlikely Democratic voters or attach little salience to the issue. By contrast, supporters of anti-discrimination laws, which we see is the vast majority of the public, include not just enthused supporters of the president but also disaffected Democrats and many (most?) independent voters.

All of which is to say that the president's reticence to do the right thing is inexplicable from a political standpoint. For a nice change, good policy and good politics neatly line up. The only remaining question is why the president refuses to act.

President Obama should sign this order and eliminate anti-LGBT discrimination by federal contractors. And he should do so on June 25, the 71st anniversary of Roosevelt's historic act.

The Truth-o-Meter says: Mostly False | Ad says stimulus tax credits funded traffic lights in China

Is our stimulus money paying for traffic lights on Chinese streets? A TV ad running in eight states blames President Barack Obama for sending stimulus money overseas while Americans are out of work. "Tell President Obama, American tax dollars should help American taxpayers," the narrator says. Instead, $2.3 billion in tax credits funded jobs in Mexico, Finland and China, the ad claims. Americans for Prosperity, a group dedicated to "educating citizens about economic policy" that works closely with tea party activists and has been funded ...

>> More

The Truth-o-Meter says: False | Ad says stimulus tax credits funded jobs in Finland

Is your tax money paying for jobs in Finland? A TV ad running in eight states blames President Barack Obama for sending stimulus money overseas while Americans are out of work. "Tell President Obama, American tax dollars should help American taxpayers," the narrator says. Instead, $2.3 billion in tax credits funded jobs in Mexico, Finland and China, the ad claims. Americans for Prosperity, a group dedicated to "educating citizens about economic policy" that works closely with tea party activists and has been funded by the ...

>> More

Michael Warren, Weekly Standard
The May 8 election could also turn out to be the final fight of 80-year-old incumbent Dick Lugar's long career. A six-term senator and former Indianapolis mayor, Lugar is an institution, but conservative forces within the Republican party have long grumbled that he is too moderate and too ensconced in the Washington bubble, where he's been since entering the Senate nearly 36 years ago. Now, Lugar is in danger of losing the GOP nomination to Mourdock, who is giving Lugar the toughest electoral battle he's ever faced.

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
The implosion of the Newt Gingrich presidential campaign--the first implosion, before the weird resurrection and inevitable second implosion--came because he used four words: right-wing social engineering. He used the phrase, last May, to describe the Republican budget designed by GOP icon Paul Ryan. It was as if he had urinated on Ronald Reagan’s grave. Party leaders rounded on him. In Iowa, an angry voter cornered him and fumed, in a video captured by Fox News that quickly went viral, “What you did to Paul Ryan was unforgivable … You’re an...

Timing is everything, especially in a political campaign. Come out negative too early and you can turn off voters. Wait too long to try to brand your opponent and you may find it hard to get your message across.

That seems to be the case with the campaign of six-term Sen. Richard Lugar, whose efforts to paint Tea Party-backed state Treasurer Richard Mourdock as "untrustworthy" last week had all the markings of a desperate attempt to toss anything and everything at Mourdock to see what might stick less than two weeks before the vote that could end Lugar's political career.

Rich Lowry, National Review
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman likes to muse about how wonderful it would be if the United States could be like China for a day.The scandal engulfing former rising star Bo Xilai, the cashiered Communist Party boss of the city of Chongqing, suggests how this magical day might go down.A popular governor who rose to prominence based on his anti-corruption campaign while illicitly enriching himself would fall from grace. His wife would be accused of murdering a foreign businessman. His security chief, whom he relied upon to run an extensive spying operation on potential foes, would seek...

We begin by saying we certainly hope we can live up to such an exuberant headline. You will have to judge for yourself whether all those exclamation points were justified or not.

The real reason for such titular excitement is the convergence of two contests here at Friday Talking Points headquarters. See? I had to restrain myself from typing yet another exclamation point, there.

One contest is over, and we are able to (finally!) crown a winner. And one contest is just beginning, so haul out your crystal ball and peer into the future with us, in the comments.

Last December, we ran a column entitled "Call The Newtsplosion Contest." In it, we used explosive terminology (such as "Newtroglycerine" -- although we have to admit that "Newtonium" and "Newtron Bomb" didn't occur to us until later...) to describe what was likely going to end Newt Gingrich's presidential campaign.

Now, you'll have to harken back to an earlier time -- a time when Newt was seen (by himself, at the very least) as "the inevitable Republican nominee." That was the setting for this contest, which was announced on December 12. In it, we invited folks to guess when Newt would say something so outrageous that he, in essence, disqualified himself from the race and went down in flames.

We have to report, sadly, that Newt Gingrich exits the race this week with more of a whimper (desperately seeking Delaware?) than any sort of bang. My own entry in the contest was "right after Super Tuesday" which would have been around March 7, just to show how far off I was. There were even farther-out guesses, such as "December 27, during the Trump debate" and "Newt will win the White House in a landslide," to show how wide the field of prognostication was.

But our winning entry was, quite simply, stunningly accurate this time around. Over at the Huffington Post comments section, we got an entry for "April 17, 2012." This guess was only eight days off -- which we feel is pretty impressive, considering how long ago the contest ran.

What is even more impressive is that this is the first time ever -- since I've begun running these amusing contests, I believe -- that we have a certified two-time winner! If that doesn't deserve an exclamation point, I don't know what does....

TakeSake of the Huffington Post comments section is our winner in the "Call The Newtsplosion Contest." Earlier, way back in FTP[141], we awarded TakeSake the 500 Quatloos he earned by guessing -- within a single day -- when Rahm Emanuel would exit the White House. That contest began even further back, in FTP[114] ("When Will Rahm Go?"), and although TakeSake did hedge his bet a bit, he also won stylistic points for his pithy comment on the entire "Quatloos as a betting medium" thing:

Kirk was dealing with an alien world of perverse, socialpathic [sic] gamblers. Obama is dealing with something much more sinister: Washington politics.

In any case, our hat is off to our two-time winner, and a whopping 10,000 Quatloos is hereby awarded to TakeSake for so accurately predicting the exits from the stage of both Rahm Emanuel and Newt Gingrich. Well done! Well done, indeed!

When one contest ends, another must begin. Well, not always, but today at any rate.

Since all the excitement is over in the Republican primaries (boredom, thy name is Romney... ahem), we reluctantly turn to opening the field for entries as to who will be Mitt's running mate. We say "reluctantly" because we really despise the saccharine cuteness of the term "Veepstakes," but since that's what we'll be holding, we are forced to use it. Sigh.

The question "Who will Mitt pick?" is already on the lips of cocktail-sippers inside the beltway, and this question will be batted around many a Sunday morning punditfest until the Republican National Convention (or until we're all sick of it, which will come much sooner than that). The field of possibilities is either open to everyone sporting a Republican bumpersticker on their car, or will hinge solely on the question of whether Mitt will have to get down on one knee or two to beg Marco Rubio to accept -- depending on who is giving odds, at this point.

We're going to open the contest with our own wacky guess, which we limited to selecting from "people whose names we haven't heard mentioned yet" -- which turned out to be limiting indeed. So we're picking a sort of worst-case scenario that seems to (so far) have occurred to nobody else out there: Scott Walker. Yep, the guy in Wisconsin. If Walker beats his recall vote, than he will become a rallying figure for Republicans in 2012, with his conservative credentials flawlessly displayed. He's a Midwesterner who could turn a few states (so the Romney thinking will go), but he's not so charismatic that he'll continually upstage Mitt on the campaign trail.

We certainly hope this doesn't come to pass, we should mention. Again, we had only those whom nobody else had considered to choose from (so as to not pre-empt choices others may make in the comments), as a self-imposed rule, and this was the best we could come up with given such strict limitations.

Think we're wrong? Got your own ideas? Well, toss them out there in the comments! Prove your own prowess of prediction!

(Because there will likely be a tie, a valid entry must name the exact date and time (East Coast time) when the veep choice will be announced by Mitt's campaign. To aid you in this task, the Republican National Convention begins on August 27. Winner will be the person who selects the correct running mate, and who also gets closest to the actual date and time of the announcement.)

 

Moving on to our weekly awards, we have to at least give a nod towards Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, who just got the Violence Against Women Act renewal through his chamber with a very impressive 68-31 vote. That's a lot of Republicans for a Democratic bill, it bears mentioning. Republican senators (well, some of them, at any rate) have apparently woken up to the damage the War on Women is doing to their party among the electorate. In any case, for such a strong bipartisan victory, Reid deserves at least an Honorable Mention this week.

But the really impressive Democrat this week was none other than Barack Obama. While the mainstream media's "journalists" were competing with each other over how many times they could say the word "prostitute" on the airwaves, Obama was out in the countryside changing the Washington debate.

While we do realize that many would have awarded Obama the coveted MIDOTW award merely for his most-excellent "slow-jamming the news" segment on Jimmy Fallon's late-night show, we like to think we have higher standards here. I mean, the video is indeed priceless, but not impressive enough for the award.

Instead, Obama is our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week this week because he got the Republicans to concede a major issue -- keeping student loan rates low. Before this week, Republicans were against the very concept. This week, after Obama's strong showing on a few swing-state college campuses, Republicans have reconsidered and are now setting the battle up over "how to pay for it" -- exactly what they did when they caved on the payroll tax holiday. In other words -- Obama is going to get a legislative victory, and it is going to happen before the June deadline. Bank on it.

That's a pretty impressive week, for an incumbent president. For utterly changing the debate from "should we do this?" to "how will we pay for this?" our Most Impressive Democrat Of The Week, due to sheer leadership qualities (and not slow-jam qualities), is none other than President Obama.

(Congratulate President Barack Obama on the White House contact page, to let him know you appreciate his efforts.)

 

Joe Biden has been... um, saying some interesting things this week. Sigh.

We were -- right up until today -- convinced that the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week this week was going to go to Joe Lieberman, for several reasons: (1.) Just because. (2.) We're tired of seeing him pop up on our television screens for no reason (3.) We won't have ol' Joe to kick around much longer.

Seriously, the best thing about the 2012 election -- better even than Obama winning a 50-state landslide, should such a thing happen -- will be the fact that Joe Lieberman will not be back in the Senate next year. Following this logic, there are only a limited number of weeks we can possibly hand out more MDDOTW awards to him, and we want to make sure he gets all he's worth.

But then we checked the news this morning, and learned that the House has already voted on their version of the student loan rate extension, which conveniently also doubles as part of the Republican War on Women, because they're going to pay for the whole thing by raiding a fund set up to provide preventative care -- like breast exams, for instance.

The really disappointing news, however, was that John Boehner could not have passed this without Democratic votes. The Tea Partiers were apparently off in their perpetual snit, and the bill only passed by the grace of 13 Democratic votes -- by a total of 215 to 195. Without these votes, it would have failed.

Now, normally, when a bill passes and a few Democrats cross party lines, it winds up making no difference to the outcome. They are not the key votes, in other words. This time, they were.

Because the vote is so recent, at this time we are unable to provide a list of those 13 Democrats who voted against H.R. 4628 today. We must therefore award, in absentia, the Most Disappointing Democrat Of The Week to every House Democrat who voted against the bill.

[In a day or so, you should be able to search the Library of Congress' site for "HR4628" and see which Democrats voted against this bill. We apologize for the lack of contact information at this time.]

 

Volume 208 (4/27/12)

Welcome once again to our ceaseless efforts at convincing Democrats to get better at staying on message. Obama did a pretty masterful job this week on the student loan issue, so Democrats don't have much heavy lifting to do on that front.

But every little bit helps. We provide these talking points, as always, for everyone to use freely -- from prominent Democrats interviewed on Sunday morning political shows, down to rank-and-file Democrats standing around the water cooler on Monday morning.

Enjoy... and don't forget to cast your veepstakes vote in the comments!

 

   Voting for violence against women

Republicans are already on the run on the student loan issue. Democrats should turn this into a full rout with their advantage on the Violence Against Women Act.

"I see that the renewal of the Violence Against Women Act passed the Senate this week, but I was shocked that something like thirty Republicans voted against it. This wasn't a close vote -- the measure passed with 68 votes -- but still, it was eye-opening. Up until this year, this law was renewed with overwhelming support, but this year over half the Republicans in the Senate voted against it. Republicans say that there simply isn't any kind of 'War on Women' being waged by their party, but I think women voters are smart enough to judge them on what they do as well as what they say. Two-thirds of the Republicans in the Senate just essentially voted in favor of violence against women. That is shameful, to be bluntly honest. I have a message for Republicans in the House: women are watching you, on this bill."

 

   War on Women

This is really starting to get under Republicans' skins, which is excellent. They are on defense, and because they are they feed right into the Democratic "framing" on the issue every time they bring it up. So use the phrase whenever you get the chance, because they're obviously getting scared of it.

"Republicans in the House just passed their version of keeping student loan rates down, but they just couldn't resist opening another battlefield in their ongoing War on Women to do so. In order to pay for the student loan program, Republicans raided money set aside for preventative health care like breast exams and checkups for women across America. Even more insultingly, they call this a 'slush fund.' That's exactly how high women rate with the Republican Party: slush. Women are merely dirty snow to be scraped off Republicans' bootheels. No wonder women voters are fleeing the Republican Party and waking up to the fact that Democrats are the ones fighting for women's health, and not against it."

 

   Obama convinced Republicans

Give Obama a victory pat on the back, while the dust is still settling.

"President Obama showed real leadership this week on the student loan issue. Before Obama brought it up, Republicans were actually against keeping student loan rates affordable for millions of Americans. One even called it the 'stage three cancer of socialism,' whatever that means. By refusing to give up this fight, Barack Obama actually convinced the Republicans that his way of thinking was the right way, and they dropped their opposition to the idea like a hot potato. One wonders how many public opinion polls the Republicans had to conduct before the president brought them over to his position."

 

   Etch A Sketching

OK, this one is a blatant plug for a frivolous column I wrote yesterday. But still...

"I see Mitt Romney quickly Etch A Sketched on his position on keeping student loans affordable for middle-class American students. I look forward to watching Mitt Etch A Sketching on many other issues, in the next few weeks. I just wonder if the Republican base will let him get away with it -- especially if he comes out for any version of what conservatives sneeringly call 'amnesty,' after earlier being against such a concept. As I said, the Etch A Sketching has barely begun, folks."

 

   What was that about Europe, Mitt?

Salon pointed this one out, to give credit where it is due.

"I notice Mitt Romney's not saying much about Europe, after the news that the severe austerity measures Britain took -- all that budget-cutting that Republicans love -- has driven their country into a double-dip recession. Mitt used to love using Europe as an example in his speeches, but after -- yet again -- it has been proven that too much austerity in a weak economy is a bad thing, Mitt's been strangely silent on the issue. Still in favor of austerity, Mitt? The U.S. isn't going to become Greece if Mitt wins the election, instead we'll get Britain's double-dip recession."

 

   Bishops and politics

Let's just see how that political fracas with the Catholic Church is going, shall we?

"I see that Paul Ryan now sees the Catholic bishops in a new light, now that they've strongly come out against his budget plans. The bishops quite accurately noted that Ryan is balancing the budget on the backs of the poor and helpless, while continuing to shower tax cuts on the wealthy -- which I don't remember Jesus being in favor of, actually. I find it interesting that when the Catholic bishops say something the Republicans like, Republicans talk about how the church should be heeded, but when the bishops point out inconvenient truths, then it seems to be up to each individual Catholic to make up his or her own mind. Funny how that works, isn't it?"

 

   Let's just have a sing-off

Barack Obama -- while not technically singing -- caused apparent apoplexy in the Republican Party this week, on Jimmy Fallon's show. Going on the theory that whatever makes Republican heads explode the most must be a good thing, why not double-down? Heh.

"The White House has announced today that instead of three debates with Mitt Romney this fall, they will instead only participate in two formal debates. For the third event, President Obama will be challenging Mitt Romney to a singing contest, to be moderated by Simon Cowell. We'll let Americans vote with their phones and texts, and any money raised will be used to provide singing lessons for the loser. We feel this will provide American with a much more entertaining evening than another dry old political debate, and we invite all of America to participate in the voting afterwards."

 

Chris Weigant blogs at:

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All-time award winners leaderboard, by rank

 

Indira Lakshmanan, Bloomberg
Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a potential Republican vice presidential pick, outlined a vision of foreign policy that sounded more like President Barack Obama's than that of Mitt Romney, the presumptive Republican nominee.Rubio, 40, a first-term senator whose popularity with Tea Party supporters and Hispanics has raised his political profile, used a speech yesterday in Washington to praise international alliances and bipartisanship in foreign policy. His message -- that global coalitions are critical and American leadership is essential -- echoed talking points delivered almost weekly...

Michele Bachmann discussed her endorsement plans in the 2012 presidential race on Thursday, telling CNN's Wolf Blitzer that she would endorse presumptive Republican nominee Mitt Romney soon.

"As the line says in the 'Wizard of Oz,' 'All in good time, my pretty,'" Bachmann said of her coming endorsement. "It will happen."

Bachmann, who dropped out of the race following a poor showing in the Iowa caucuses, also discussed her post-campaign role in the Republican party.

"What I'm doing is working behind the scenes, bringing together all factions of our party," Bachmann said. "Don't forget, when there was the dust-up between Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama, there were 18 million women who had backed Hillary Clinton. They wanted no part of backing Barack Obama. It took time to get them to come over. I'm working behind the scenes to knit together the tea party, the evangelicals, to come together with the conservatives and back our nominee."

The Minnesota congresswoman made similar comments on Mike Huckabee's radio show earlier Thursday. During that interview, she predicted that Romney would listen to conservatives and the tea party.

"We will see an open ear from Mitt Romney," Bachmann said. "So far, he has proved to be a person who listens. That's what we need, a nominee who listens."

Bachmann is the latest prominent Republican to admit that Romney will almost certainly be their nominee, but have hesitated before throwing full support behind him. Rick Santorum, who left the race earlier this month, also stopped short of a full-fledged endorsement of the former Massachusetts governor.

"I will support the nominee of our party," Santorum said during an interview with CNN's Piers Morgan on Tuesday. "If he's the nominee, I'm going to do anything I can to help him win."

Elizabeth Warren is different. She is the Ted Williams of the battle on behalf of the men and women who are correctly called the 99 percent, from the heartland to the homeless, who want nothing more than a good job, a fair deal and a nation that fully lives up to its promise to all.

Warren is what Margaret Thatcher called a "conviction politician." Thatcher's convictions were steadfast principles of conservatism. Elizabeth Warren's convictions are fearless support for economic equity and betterment that brings jobs for the jobless, fair wages for workers, homes for families, loyalty to vets, learning for kids and a decent society that honors the values of the Sermon on the Mount and the great religions to love and help the poor.

Through the whip hand of the 1 percent even churches are being foreclosed, bank fees are climbing again and insurance premiums are rising, which is why:

The ground in this tired town will shake if Massachusetts voters send Warren to the Senate to stand for, speak for, work for tirelessly and fight for fearlessly the workers and consumers who are the heart and soul of America.

Teachers, police, firefighters, nurses, librarians, women, Hispanics, vets and all whose jobs and rights are under attack would find a fearless friend and fighter in a Sen. Warren. Those hurt by fraudulent mortgages, Mafia-like bank rates, exported jobs, unfair wages, gouging premiums and ugly consumer rip-offs will find a faithful friend and fearless fighter in a Sen. Warren.

Warren should not be elected because she is a Democrat, but because she is what Democrats should be and many Republicans used to be. I have no doubt that John, Robert and Edward Kennedy would be supporting her and barnstorming alongside her with enthusiasm and passion, and:

I believe the Roosevelts would be standing beside Elizabeth, not only Franklin and Eleanor, who would applaud her battles for workers, consumers and the downtrodden, but also Teddy Roosevelt, who believed with the ferocity of his integrity that the great battles he fought must invoke not only his name but his deeds as a call to arms for the battles Warren has fought throughout her career.

In a Washington full of revolving-door sellouts who effortlessly glide between special-interest sinecures and government jobs earning personal fortunes on the payroll of the 1 percent, Warren will never sell her public conscience for private wealth. She is totally unbought and permanently unbossed.

Like Ted Williams at bat, her eye is clear, her mind focused and her swing perfect for the values she believes in and the men and women whose economic betterment she fights for with the ferocity of integrity that made Teddy Roosevelt unique in his times, as Warren is unique in ours.

Scott Brown is a decent man whose reelection could bring to power in the Senate the party that attacks programs to create jobs, advance pay equity, defend homeowners and protect consumers. Brown will do his duty for his party. Every time he does, the inequity and pain will rise.

Brown maneuvers. Warren leads.

The year 1941 was the greatest in baseball history, when Joe DiMaggio had his record hitting streak and Ted Williams hit .400. Williams opened the last day of the season hitting .39955. His manager suggested he sit out the doubleheader. His average would have been rounded up to the magic .400, but Ted said no way. Never. He would earn his .400 with no hiding on the bench. Williams went 6 for 8 that day and closed the year hitting .406.

Williams had integrity. So does Elizabeth Warren, which is why oceans of dirty money are working to destroy her and why I call her the Ted Williams of the battle for fairness, jobs and justice for the 99 percent in the war of the worlds of Election 2012.

This column was originally published at The Hill.

Harold Meyerson, Washington Post
In the short term, the recovery looks shaky. In the long term, the economy looks shaky "” so shaky that it may be many years before a president of either party or any ideology can count on winning a second term.Polls show that President Obama's lead over Mitt Romney is narrowing, but should Obama lose in November the decisive factor won't be Romney (who is as inept a presidential candidate as this country has produced in decades). The real culprit will be the economy.

Former Republican presidential candidate Jon Huntsman said Monday morning that his comments seemingly comparing recent GOP actions against him to communist China had been "taken out of context."

"I said, you know, if you're not on-script and you get knocked out of an event like that, the parties are supposed to be big-tent, you're supposed to bring in all ideas," Huntsman said on MSNBC. "And I said I thought for a moment about what they do in China if you're off-script. The [communist] party, they knock you out. We shouldn’t be doing that here, we should be accommodating all voices."

On Sunday, Huntsman spoke about being disinvited from a Republican Party fundraiser after calling for an "alternative voice" and the need for a third party movement.

"This is what they do in China on party matters if you talk off-script," Huntsman said at an appearance at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, according to BuzzFeed.

"I don’t know what world these people are living in," he continued, referring to unnamed Republicans' outspoken stances on American relations with China. "Is this the best we could do?"

Huntsman exited the GOP primary earlier this year after finishing third place in the New Hampshire primary. He's since been critical of the party and lukewarm on Mitt Romney, the Republican frontrunner. On Monday, however, he reiterated that he'd vote for the former Massachusetts governor, commending Romney's "commitment to jobs and his ability to articulate a plan for getting us back in action."

Joel Kotkin, The Daily Beast
The map is shifting, and Democrats see the nation's rapidly changing demography putting ever more states in play"”Barack Obama is hoping to compete in Arizona this year, to go along with his map-changing North Carolina and Indiana wins in 2008"”and eventually ensure the party's dominance in a more diverse America, as Republicans quite literally die out.Ruy Teixeira and others have pointed to the growing number of voters in key groups that have tilted Democratic: Hispanics, single-member households, and well-educated millennials. Speaking...

Jamelle Bouie, American Prospect
For years, liberals have argued that polarization his little to do with the Democratic Party—which they see as largely centrist—and everything to do with a Republican Party, which has moved far to the right since the 1970s. Recent research from political scientists Keith Poole and Howard Rosenthal, who have measured polarization and ideological shifts in Congress, confirms that theory. According to NPR, they’ve found that the GOP is more conservative now than it’s been in a century:

In a closed-door speech to donors at a private home in Florida on Sunday, Mitt Romney was unusually candid about his policy plans, offering details about what he expects to implement if elected president in November.

According to NBC News, the former Massachusetts governor said he may decide to eliminate several government agencies, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development, which was once led by his father, George Romney.

"I'm going to take a lot of departments in Washington, and agencies, and combine them. Some eliminate, but I'm probably not going to lay out just exactly which ones are going to go," Romney said. "Things like Housing and Urban Development, which my dad was head of, that might not be around later."

Although Romney refused to make specific calls about each agency, he did suggest that the Department of Education would see major changes under a Romney presidency.

"I will either consolidate with another agency, or perhaps make it a heck of a lot smaller," Romney said. "I'm not going to get rid of it entirely," explaining that to do so could be a political pitfall and would eliminate a way to push back on powerful teacher unions.

Romney also acknowledged the key role those unions will have on the election, since many of them have pledged support for President Barack Obama.

"The unions will put in hundreds of millions of dollars," Romney said. "There's nothing like it on our side."

According to the Wall Street Journal, Romney also outlined which tax deductions he planned to cut.

"I'm going to probably eliminate for high-income people the second-home mortgage deduction," he said. He also expressed similar plans for the state income tax deduction and state property tax deduction. As the Wall Street Journal points out, this is the first time Romney specifically named which deductions he would cut.

Romney also took the opportunity to discuss his campaign's efforts to win over key demographics in the general election against Obama. According to Romney, an inability to attract Hispanic voters "spells doom" for the Republican Party.

"We have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party," Romney said, citing a "Republican DREAM Act" as a potential way to give these voters a choice between the two parties. The version backed by Democrats offers a limited path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants.

He also acknowledged that in order to attract typically Democratic-leaning voters, his campaign would have to reach beyond the Fox News media sphere.

"Fox is watched by the true believers," Romney said. "We need to get the independents and the women."

Steve Erickson, American Prospect
To anyone so foolish as to have persuaded himself otherwise, the past three weeks have been a reminder that Barack Obama is at best a slight favorite for re-election by a narrow margin.  Rick Santorum’s exit on Wednesday from a Republican primary race that already was settled means that the de facto nominee of the party, former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, has time for damage control that would have been too late three months from now.  The odds are even or better that by June, the United States Supreme Court will overturn the president’s signal...

Richard Stevenson, NY Times
President Obama's campaign has left no doubt about how it intends to run against Mitt Romney, portraying him as a bazillionaire elitist and conviction-free flip-flopper who has allied himself with the Republican Party's most extreme positions.After a year in which he was excoriated on an almost-daily basis by Mr. Romney and the others seeking the Republican nomination, Mr. Obama is now letting loose his competitive, street-ball side, mocking his opponent's vocabulary and suggesting a Republican victory would lead to social Darwinism.

Will environmental issues play a role in the 2012 presidential campaign, and if so, how? Keep in mind that in previous White House contests, environmental concerns rarely surfaced in the exchanges between candidates.

Past presidential nominees -- regardless of political persuasion -- who had any environmental baggage successfully diffused the issue by using common sense as a cover. When pressed, they rhetorically asked: who in their right mind would be against cleaner air, cleaner water, and environmental enhancement in general? The answer invariably eased any concerns among the majority of voters, who turned their attention elsewhere.

But the 2012 campaign could be different. From a tactical standpoint, it would be to President Obama's advantage to make environmental concerns as persistent focus in his debates with presumptive Republican presidential nominee, Mitt Romney.

Ironically, it is a Republican politician who inadvertently (or maybe not so) has provided an environmental campaign blueprint that would allow Obama to put Romney on the spot. The Republican is Sherwood Boehlert, who hails from upstate New York and is the retired chairman of the House Science Committee.

There is a reason Boehlert's proposal is more in line with Obama than one would normally expect from a GOP source. If the "green" Boehlert were serving in today's Republican controlled anti-regulatory House of Representatives, he would be considered a relic and apostate within his own party. It should thus come as no surprise that he has expressed disenchantment with the GOP's current practice of treating environmental protection in a largely antagonistic, partisan way.

Boehlert posits that environmental concerns are too important to be excluded from the presidential campaign dialogues, and accordingly, he proposes the candidates agree to "a set of fundamental consensus principles to establish the parameters of debate." These principles would still leave plenty of room, Boehlert says, for the candidates to advocate different approaches to solving problems.

Boehlert's fundamental consensus principles that he wants Obama and Romney to embrace are:

• Conceding that protecting the air, water, and land is a basic federal responsibility for which the free market, corporate volunteerism, and state regulations cannot substitute.
• Global warming is real, largely caused by human activity, and must be promptly addressed
• The United States needs to move forward towards a more efficient, clean energy economy
• Federal government subsidies are important for research, development, and distribution of alternatives to fossil fuels.

Obama's core constituency and the American public in general would be comfortable with these principles, which have been championed in spirit, if not always practice, by the president. He would have no hesitation in parading them in the public spotlight, stressing for political effect that they were of Republican origin.

But the playing field would be different for Romney. Members of his conservative base are largely skeptical of global warming as a threat, much less as a product of human activity. They consider most environmental regulations an undue fiscal burdens and encroachment on individual freedom to engage in commerce. From their perspective, clean energy can only replace fossil fuels through free market competition, not as a result of federal government subsidies.

That would leave Romney with a toxic political challenge. If he agreed to Boehlert's debate ground rules, he would risk offending the ultra conservative core of his party that already is skeptical of his professed ideological purity. If Romney were to reject Boehlert's consensus principles, Obama could use the refusal against the GOP nominee with independent swing voters. They tend not to share conservatives' zealous ideological opposition to environmental reform.

It would be a win-win proposition for Obama and just the opposite for his Republican challenger.

WASHINGTON -- While some pollsters and journalists have recently argued that "voters are stupid," a new national survey shows that most Americans can, in fact, identify the relative positions of the Democratic and Republican parties on a series of important issues.

The Pew Research Center has measured knowledge of current affairs by the general public for decades. Past surveys have found an awareness of some very basic facts among American adults -- such as an ability to identify Hillary Clinton as the secretary of state or Muammar Gaddafi as the onetime leader of Libya -- but less knowledge about the details of politics in Washington. Late last year, for example, just 43 percent knew that Republicans have a majority in the House of Representatives but not the Senate.

The latest Pew Research News IQ survey, conducted March 29 to April 1, focuses more directly on Americans' knowledge of the views of the major political parties and the partisan affiliations of well-known political leaders. The survey finds that majorities of Americans can identify Democratic and Republican positions on several key issues.

The Pew report does note "considerable variance" in the survey's measures of political knowledge. On the higher side, 71 percent chose the Republicans when asked which party "is considered the more conservative party on most political issues" and 67 percent chose the Democrats as the party that supports "increasing taxes on higher income people to reduce the federal budget deficit." However, only 53 percent identified Republicans as the party generally more supportive of "reducing the size and scope of the federal government."

The survey also finds some significant partisan differences, suggesting that some of these questions may be measuring respondents' judgments about the performance of the parties as much as their knowledge of the parties. For example, just 46 percent of Democrats chose the Republican Party as the one more supportive of reducing the size and scope of government, compared to 76 percent of Republicans. That difference may indicate that some Democrats have come to see little current difference between the parties on cutting government, despite the historic commitment of Republicans to that goal.

While that particular question produced the largest partisan difference, the survey finds that Republicans are generally more apt to answer knowledge questions correctly, something the report notes is "typically the case in surveys about political knowledge." The reason is demographics. "On average," the report explains, "Republicans are older and more affluent than either Democrats or independents, and both of these are associated with knowledge about the parties' positions and leaders."

A second set of questions concerning the partisan affiliation of political leaders may provide a less complex measurement of knowledge. The results show most Americans can correctly name the party of two fairly recent former presidents. Specifically, 85 percent identified Ronald Reagan as a Republican, and 84 percent identified Bill Clinton as a Democrat. Far fewer, however, knew that House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is a Democrat (61 percent) or that House Speaker John Boehner is a Republican (55 percent).

Of course, these results are for all adults. The report did not break out data for past or likely voters, but earlier research shows a strong relationship between political participation and these sorts of political knowledge.

In response to a request from The Huffington Post, Pew Research shared tabulations of the results by party registration.

Not surprisingly, knowledge is consistently higher among self-identified registered voters, who were 70 percent of adults in the survey. According to Pew Research, registered voters answered an average of 12 of the 17 questions correctly, compared to an average of just nine correct answers from the unregistered.

White the debate over whether voters are rational or "stupid" is certainly larger than this one limited survey, the results do indicate that most voters are familiar with some of the key differences between the two parties.

The results also highlight the sizable minority of Americans who are disengaged from the day-to-day details of politics and illustrate the obstacles facing political campaigns and others seeking to mobilize potential supporters and increase voter turnout.

Andy Kroll, Mother Jones
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