When you compare them head-to-head, the Obama and Romney tax plans are nearly identical:

Mitt Romney, the Republican candidate, is offering a 20 percent tax cut for everyone. Given the mood of the conservatives in the United States today, that may not surprise you. But even President Barack Obama, who is routinely described as a socialist by his opponents, is peddling a plan under which 99 percent of Americans would pay less than they did under the last Democrat in the White House, Bill Clinton.

We probably shouldn't be, because something similar could happen to Democrats, eventually:

Washington (CNN) -- When presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney appears before Latino small-business owners in Washington on Wednesday, he'll address a group whose explosive birth rates foreshadow a seismic political shift in GOP strongholds in the Deep South and Southwest.

"The Republicans' problem is their voters are white, aging and dying off," said David Bositis, a senior research associate at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, who studies minority political engagement.

That's the pretty interesting, if simplistic, question posed by The Atlantic:

Not everyone is thrilled by the prospect of radical life extension. As funding for anti-aging research has exploded, bioethicists have expressed alarm, reasoning that extreme longevity could have disastrous social effects. Some argue that longer life spans will mean stiffer competition for resources, or a wider gap between rich and poor. Others insist that the aging process is important because it gives death a kind of time release effect, which eases us into accepting it. These concerns are well founded. Life spans of several hundred years are bound to be socially disruptive in one way or another; if we're headed in that direction, it's best to start teasing out the difficulties now.

Tyler Clementi committed suicide last year by jumping off the George Washington Bridge into the Hudson valley. While it has never been definitively established that Clementi's suicide attempt was directly tied to an ugly incident where one of his roomates, Dharun Ravi, broadcast a sexual encounter between Clementi and another student, it's seems to have been the straw that broke Clementi's back.

Ravi has been tried and convicted on multiple counts of bullying and hate crimes, and is scheduled to be sentenced today. He faces up to 10 years in prison and therein lies an interesting tale: many gay advocates and advocacy groups do not want him to be jailed.

A moment arrives tomorrow that is one of those markers in life that grabs your attention. My daughter graduates from college-- although she still needs a couple two credits-- and it makes all the difference.

I worry for her, as I worry for all young people of my acquaintance, from fellow bloggers to people at my gym and work, to her friends. I see trouble, deep deep trouble, ahead.

I guess if I could make a keynote at a graduation, I'd say something like this:

Today, you are glad to be finishing a stairway in your life. You've climbed to a landing, and can take a breath and look back down. Those steps, they looked so tall and steep as you walked up, but you made it. You perservered, and did what you had to and got through.

We all had a pretty good laugh at the woman who got up in front of the Lincoln, Nebraska city council and railed on about homosexuality in response to the proposed "Fairness Ordinance" extending anti-bias protections to the LGBT community.

Select quotes:
1. "A huge percent of gay men in school grounds molest boys, partly because they don't have AIDS yet."

2. "Whitney Houston was found without clothes in a bathtub. Every corpse found without clothes has a partner who did away with them."

One might begin to see the seeds of its decline here:

iMore reports that Google may make four times the ad revenue off of their use in iOS than they do from their own Android platform. Apple wants to change that. Apple has already begun intermediating search queries though Siri, effectively cutting Google out of the valuable identity information associated with those searches. Next up is that other large data components on iOS, maps.

The results of this poll sort of reflect my own feelings and experiences with Facebook:

According to a new AP-CNBC poll, 57 percent of Facebook users say they never click ads or other sponsored content when they use the site, with another 26 percent saying they hardly ever engage in such activity.

While the company makes money, in part, simply by displaying sponsored content, user clicks are a critical part of an advertiser’s calculus when gauging how effective those ads are and how much they’re willing to pay for them. In the first quarter, Facebook generated 82 percent of its $1.06 billion in revenue from advertising sales. In the company’s online IPO pitch to retail investors, CFO David Ebersman says the company is working to make ads “more relevant, more social, and more engaging” as it looks to grow.

Barack Obama taking on Mitt Romney's abysmal job creation record is a little like critiquing Stalin's abysmal human rights record:

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama is casting Mitt Romney as a greedy, job-killing corporate titan with little concern for the working class in a new, multi-pronged effort that seeks to undermine the central rationale for his Republican rival's candidacy: his business credentials.

At the center of the push — the president's most forceful attempt yet to sully Romney before the November election — is a biting new TV ad airing Monday that recounts through interviews with former workers the restructuring, and ultimate demise, of a Kansas City, Mo., steel mill under the Republican's private equity firm.

Some may think Barack Obama's hand was forced.

Some may think it was a cynical ploy to garner Gay Money campaign contributions or to pander to the youth vote.

Some may simply shoot themselves and the right wing in the foot, talking about distractions that their own party has raised in the middle of a recovery.

After reading this column, I have to scratch my head a little.

Check out Chuck Todd, NBC's chief White House correspondent, openly speculating that President Obama is going to embrace same-sex marriage because he needs money from gay people. "Gay money in this election has replaced Wall Street money," he reported. NBC's David Gregory agreed. For some reason, neither man seemed to think this theory reflects poorly on the president.

...I think.

As you no doubt have heard by now, the US foiled a new and improved underwear bombing scheme dreamed up by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (apparently, Al Qaeda has a franchise operation.)

Jingoistic heel-clicking aside, the counterterror operation involved human intelligence and a double agent:

(CBS News) NEW YORK - It's a stunning revelation in the foiled plot to blow up a U.S.-bound airliner: The triggerman chosen by al Qaeda was actually a double agent who was working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence services.

Well, Bibi is broken and will now have to sit down with the Palestinians for reals.

Now, before we open the champagne, let's note that Netanyahu forced the issue himself, which means he didn't just surrender to the alignment surrounding him: he's still in control which means he's still going to have final say on what transpires.

But it seems pretty clear that the Kadima Party-- Netanyahu's main adversary in the Knesset-- extracted a price from his flesh, which means he has to at least go through the motions of making overtures to Mahmoud Abbas and the PA in order to keep his own clutch on power.

I alluded yesterday to the elections in Greece, in which the EU plan to bailout the nation in exchange for austerity measures to be put in place was symbolically rejected and a new government elected.

Well, it's more than symbolic now.

A Greek political party leader who has vowed to rip up the terms of Greece’s international bailout was handed the mandate to try and form a government after Antonis Samaras of New Democracy failed to forge an agreement.

Francois Hollande scratched out a victory over Nikolas Sarkozy yesterday in the French elections.

I say "scratched out," because a three point victory over a wildly unpopular president is not exactly a drubbing, but it's also not exactly a close call.

Sarkozy showed himself to be a canny political card player. There was, for example, “l'ouverture” – Sarkozy's carefully-targeted effort to dismantle the Socialist Party by recruiting some of its brightest lights into Sarkozy's new right-wing government as ministers and senior officials. This cut the Socialist Party's leadership off at the knees, demoralized its membership, appropriated some of its best talent, reframed Sarkozy as a big-tent president who would govern for all the French – and left him perfectly free to pursue his policies exactly as he intended to do, validated by some of his most dangerous opponents. Demonstrating, as has occurred many times in politics in many countries before and since (in Britain, in the fate of the Liberal Democrats, for example), that weaving opponents into your team is an excellent way to defeat them.

I guess Newt's idea was to live fat off the hog of someone else's money for six months or so:

(CBS News) After bowing out from the Republican presidential race Wednesday, former House Speaker Newt Gingrich is no worse off than he was before he ran for president, says CBS News Chief Washington Correspondent Bob Schieffer. Mitt Romney, on the other hand, will likely have to deal with some of Gingrich's less-than-complimentary "sound bites" about him for the remainder of the campaign.

If I have a million dollars to spend on a candidate, and you have a dollar, then clearly the spirit of democracy is perverted. We are each one citizen in the nation, and so should have about equal say in matters.

However, if I have a million dollars and you have a million people with one dollar, the democracy works, but only a little bit better. You still have to persuade all those people to part with their dollar towards your cause, and that's not easy. It can be done, and as Barack Obama's early 2008 campaigning proved, it can be done effectively.

It's still easier for me to get my consensus of one to agree to spend the money, to whom and how. You'll probably have a million different, "Oh, by the ways" to deal with.

The sound you're hearing is the noise of a blast fax careering around the right wing echo chamber:

This is very clever--and very silly. The deficit last year was $1.3 trillion. With the Buffett rule in place, it would have been $1.295 trillion. Last year the tax credit for energy-efficient improvements to homes cost almost as much as the Buffett rule will raise annually ($4.7 billion on average). The President's proposal for keeping a low interest rate on some college loans, at $6 billion next year, costs more. The Buffett rule is government by catchphrase.

If you haven't read or heard anything about the annual White House Correspondent's Dinner on Saturday night, well, you missed a doozy.

It wasn't particularly funny, but it did have an underlying nasty edge to it. Jimmy Kimmel was MC, with performances by President Barack Obama and former NBC correspondent David Shuster, who got off the cutting remark of the night when he pointed out the Gingriches were attending, and noted "I guess their check cleared."

To his credit, Kimmel didn't fawn over Obama and had a zinger or two in his arsenal: "There's a term for Presidents like you, just not two terms."

You'd think the ACA, with its individual mandate, would qualify as THE case of the year, and I suppose politically it does, but for long term Constitutional impact, this case is far more important. ACA is pretty much settled by precedent. Immigration law and enforcement, however...

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, the president’s top courtroom lawyer, met resistance across ideological lines yesterday as he called on the court to strike down Arizona’s crackdown on illegal immigrants. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor, the court’s only Hispanic and an Obama appointee, told Verrilli his argument is “not selling very well.”

North Korea must have hired Baghdad Bob as a speechwriter:

North Korea is boasting of “powerful, modern weapons” that can defeat in a single blow the United States, which it accuses of plotting a war against it.

Chief of general staff, Ri Yong Ho, gave no further details about the weaponry in his speech to mark the North Korean army's 80th anniversary.

To no one's surprise, health insurance companies will rape us for every last cent:

The agreement required the companies to finance an objective database of doctors’ fees that patients and insurers nationally could rely on. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, then the attorney general, said it would increase reimbursements by as much as 28 percent.

It has not turned out that way. Though the settlement required the companies to underwrite the new database with $95 million, it did not obligate them to use it. So by the time the database was finally up and running last year, the same companies, across the country, were rapidly shifting to another calculation method, based on Medicare rates, that usually reduces reimbursement substantially.

You may recall that, during the Bush administration, when Nicolas Sarkozy won election as French president, conservatives were all righteous about the demise of liberal-- they called it "socialist"-- Europe and how even France had seen the light.

It was used to bolster everything from the war on terror to the dismantling of Social Security.

So I wonder what they'll make of this?

Francois Hollande charged back into campaign mode Monday with momentum on his side to capture France's presidency, after the Socialist won the most votes in the first round of voting that put him into a runoff with conservative incumbent Nicolas Sarkozy.

The silly season, of polling and speculation and outright lunacy, starts.

Altho I have to admit, the most intriguing name popped up on the trial balloon the Romney campaign floated yesterday: Condoleeza Rice.

She's actually not a bad choice for Romney: it would mitigate his problems with women, or at least give him some political cover, she has experience in the White House, and she's a bright and articulate person.

There are, however, enormous downsides too, not least of which is it will remind everyone of the name you will never hear in convention at Tampa: George W. Bush.

What to say about Dick Clark that hasn't been echoed and amplified over the past 60 years.

If The Ed Sullivan Show was the major leagues of rock and roll, then Dick Clark's American Bandstand was the entry draft. And in many ways, his was the better show for musicphiles.

Not that his taste was perfect: in 1963, he was offered the American rights to The Beatles' music and turned it down, saying they'd never amount to much. In case you were wondering why the Beatles never appeared on AB except in videos and a solitary taped telephone interview, that's why. Heck, even She Loves You scored badly on his segment Rate-A-Record, but it was undanceable, to be sure.