If I had to caricature a fundraising event for the country’s wealthiest people, it would look like this:
The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman’s estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman’s property—the Creeks—checked off names under tight security. […]
As expected, President Obama has called for an extension of the middle-class Bush tax cuts—which apply to all incomes under $250,000—and an end to the additional tax cut for income greater than that amount. Given the degree to which the GOP program is devoted to more and greater tax cuts for the wealthy, it’s no surprise that Republicans are completely opposed to this plan to modestly raise taxes on higher-income Americans. Indeed, in a renewed bit of hostage taking, congressional Republicans have refused to renew the middle-class tax cuts unless Democrats also vote to extend further tax cuts for wealthier Americans.
At TheWashington Post, Chris Cillizza and Aaron Blake note that the battle for control of the Senate is basically a toss-up:
Assuming King wins and picks the Democrats, Republicans would need four seats to take over the majority if former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney wins and five seats if President Obama is re-elected. (The vice president serves as President of the Senate and casts tie-breaking votes when necessary.)
Public-sector jobs continued to disappear last month; according to today’s report, government employment is down by 4,000. To Republicans, these aren’t “real” jobs. For the rest of us, however, the decline of the public sector over the last three years has been a tremendous drag on economic growth. Since June 2009, state and local governments have shed more than 600,000 jobs. At the Economic Policy Institute, Josh Bivens and Heather Shierholz crunch the numbers to find that the economy would have 2.3 million more jobs if not for those ongoing losses:
Methodologically, it doesn’t make much sense to do a poll of just the swing states. In presidential elections, the country moves as a whole; if President Barack Obama gains support nationally, then it will be reflected in individual states. Yes, some states will show more movement than others (Nate Silver calls these “elastic”), but there’s no real reason to focus exclusively on swing states, since you can predict the change with national polling. At most, it furthers the common but misguided notion that the election comprises 50 individual contests.
A significant part of the Affordable Care Act’s unpopularity had less to do with the law itself, and everything to do with its contested status. With Democrats unhappy and Republicans furious, voters saw the law as something controversial and potentially terrible. As such, the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold the law was an important signal to low-information voters; it communicated a certain amount of legitimacy, which—as we saw at the beginning of this week—translated to increased support for the bill. According to a poll from CNN, for example, support for Obamacare increased to 50 percent after the Court’s ruling.
Mitt Romney is back to accusing President Obama of having no plan for economic growth:
The president’s policies have not gotten America working again. And the president is going to have to stand up and take responsibility for it. I know he’s been planning on going across the country and celebrating what he calls ‘forward.’ Well, forward doesn’t look a lot like forward to the millions and millions of families that are struggling today in this great country. It doesn’t have to be this way. The President doesn’t have a plan, hasn’t proposed any new ideas to get the economy going—just the same old ideas of the past that have failed. [Emphasis added]
Rand Paul’s debut on the national stage was marked by a firestorm over his comment that he would have voted against the Civil Rights Act, on account of the fact that it intruded on a business’s “freedom” to discriminate against black people. Since then, Paul has been circumspect about commenting on anything related to civil rights. However, it seems that the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act has caused the Kentucky senator to throw caution to the wind. Via ThinkProgress:
(Ralph Alswang/Center for American Progress Action Fund)
In many ways, the 2012 presidential election looks a lot like the one in 2004. A divisive incumbent in a polarized electorate faces a surprisingly strong challenge from a lackluster politician against the backdrop of a stagnant economy. Like John Kerry, Mitt Romney is a Massachusetts-based candidate with a reputation for serial inconsistency, who lacks the full-throated support of his party’s base. And like George W. Bush, Barack Obama is running a campaign that highlights his strengths as a leader and portrays his opponent as untrustworthy and unprincipled. To wit, here is what Obama said in an interview with an NBC affiliate in Ohio:
For the third month in a row, job growth has been lackluster. In June, the number of new net jobs came in at 80,000—slightly below the 90,000 to 100,000 expected. Likewise, revisions for previous months were a wash—April’s numbers were revised from 77,000 to 68,000, and May's were revised from 69,000 to 77,000. There simply isn’t much news in this jobs report, which is another way of saying that our sluggish economic growth is grinding to a halt.
Awhile back, I suggested that President Barack Obama might have a problem winning Florida in November. The latest polls showed him with a significant deficit and emphasized the extent to which the Sunshine State has plenty of advantages for Republicans: Demographically, it’s an exceptionally favorable state, with a large population of older whites. Overall, among whites, Obama lost every age group by double digits; his best performance was among whites ages 18 to 29, whom he lost by 10 points, instead of 12.5 points for whites over the age of 45, and 22 points for whites ages 30 to 44.
For the Fourth of July, the Obama campaign released a new web video, highlighting the recent Vanity Fair look at Mitt Romney’s tax shelters and off-shore accounts. It’s fairly brutal:
The most important thing about today’s landmark ruling on the Affordable Care Act has nothing to do with Barack Obama or Mitt Romney and everything to do with the millions of people who will gain health insurance—or keep it—as a result of the Court’s decision. Tens of millions of people would have lost financial security if the law had been struck down. With the law intact, everything moves to the voters—where it should have been this entire time. If Obama is re-elected, then the Affordable Care Act will survive, and the administration will have enacted the largest expansion in social services since the Great Society. By contrast, if he loses, Republicans will have a tremendous opportunity to reshape or dismantle the welfare state.
Vermont Representative Peter Welch says that if the Supreme Court overturns the Affordable Care Act, Democrats should begin to push for universal Medicare:
“If the Supreme Court rules against Obamacare, we have to have a substantive policy and political response — in my view, that’s Medicare for All,” Welch said. “Medicare is very popular. People understand it.” […]
“If we argue for Medicare for All, it would reinforce our commitment to Medicare and highlight the Republican plan to turn it into a voucher system and unravel it,” Welch continued.
Farhad Manjoo has a great column on the pitiful performance of PC trackpads:
I switched to Apple notebooks more than five years ago, and I did so precisely because of things like the trackpad. I’ve searched high and low for a Windows notebook with a touchpad that comes close to the buttery bliss offered by the MacBook line. I haven’t found it, and you won’t either. At best, you’ll find a trackpad that can perform satisfactorily after you tweak a lot of settings—which may work fine for pros, but it’s not the kind of just-works experience that most computer users want.
