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- A positive bit of news out of the G-20 summit in London is that Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and Barack Obama seem to be on the same page about nuclear arms proliferation, agreeing in principle to a 30 percent reduction in nuclear stockpiles via a new arms control treaty. This is undoubtedly a good thing, for all the reasons Matt Yglesias lists here, but it also ends the awkward juxtaposition of the official U.S. policy of nonproliferation (only the responsible few should possess nukes) sitting side-by-side with the accepted theory that nuclear weapons deter war (everybody should have nukes!).
- Say what you will about Republicans, they're anything if not whimsical, releasing an apparent April Fool's Day hoax alternative budget ("GOP Releases Detailed Budget with Specific Numbers" says MSNBC) that, among other things, features: a five-year spending freeze; privatizing Medicare; 70-year deficit projections generated out of thin air; making the Bush tax cuts permanent and focused on the wealthy; lowering the top tax rate to 25 percent and assuming taxpayers will voluntarily pay more; and proposing to transition to clean energy by opening up more land to oil and gas drilling.
- If you were to get your news exclusively from The Washington Post's op-ed page, you'd learn from Judd Gregg that the president is proposing a "light switch tax" that Republicans claim will cost American families $3,128 per year. You might also expect that the Post verified this claim instead of letting Gregg print lies in their paper, but you'd be wrong. Indeed, one of the MIT scientists who authored the paper that served as the kernel of this idea had to write a letter to John Boehner to urge congressional Republicans to stop misrepresenting the research. But it's not just the anti-intellectualism of the GOP that is happening here, it's the beltway media machine that still thinks Republican ideas need to be taken seriously and that the summit of wise politics is to draw deeply from the well of Ronald Reagan. Who cares what Americans actually want -- the wise insiders know what's best for the country, and that's an unbroken continuation of conservative rule.
- Norm Coleman's quest to deprive Minnesota of full representation appears to be dead, unsurprisingly leading the Coleman legal team to promise their case will be appealed all the way to the state Supreme Court and beyond, if necessary.
- Michele Bachmann has clearly done all of us a useful service by introducing her constitutional amendment to stop the Obama administration from replacing the dollar with a global currency. The amendment has picked up over 30 cosponsors in the House, which serves as a handy Who's Who of the House's top cranks. Of course, this is pretty mild-mannered compared to Erick Erickson's incitements to violence, or his deranged commenters' helpful advice that real patriots wait until the "Obamabots" "mow down a nice family somewhere, or maybe even a whole town" before taking their shot. Even David "Islamofascist awareness week" Horowitz thinks the wingnuts have gone too far.
- Remainders: Chris Dodd blows his reelection warchest on his 2008 vanity presidential run; Obama will headline fundraisers for Harry Reid; the Congressional Progressive Caucus shows us what a real alternative budget looks like; and Mark Sanford and Bobby Jindal are working hard to ensure children remain ignorant and the poor are left to suffer.
--Mori Dinauer
