The Guardian has two good peices that need to be read together today. First, Mehdi Hasan points out that Barack Obama, like Mitt Romney, is an apologist for the 1%. Then Gary Younge writes that while the white working class is often said to 'vote against its own interests' by rejecting Democrats, we could equally ask why poor black and latino folk consistently vote against their interests by turning out for Dems.

Those who are struggling and believe Romney will improve their economic lot are wrong, regardless of their race. Eight years of George W Bush proved that. But it does not follow automatically from that that their home should be supporting Democrats under whom things have gotten less bad less quickly. True, those are the only two choices on offer. But if you're poor they are not great choices. What they need is a party that represents their interests. In a country where corporate money chooses the candidates and therefore shapes the debate that will demand a change in politics, not just politicians.

Or as one of my friends crudely put it: "the difference is that the Dems at least offer to buy you dinner before they date-rape you. But you still don't get that dinner."

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.

New York Times Editorial, May 19

Despite the persistent gender gap in opinion polls and mounting criticism of their hostility to women’s rights, Republicans are not backing off their assault on women’s equality and well-being. New laws in some states could mean a death sentence for a pregnant woman who suffers a life-threatening condition. But the attack goes well beyond abortion, into birth control, access to health care, equal pay and domestic violence.

Republicans seem immune to criticism. In an angry speech last month, John Boehner, the House speaker, said claims that his party was damaging the welfare of women were “entirely created” by Democrats. Earlier, the Republican National Committee chairman, Reince Priebus, sneered that any suggestion of a G.O.P. “war on women” was as big a fiction as a “war on caterpillars.”

Matthew Walberg, Lolly Bowean, Jeff Coen, David Heinzmann & Annie Sweeney | Chicago | May 19

Chicago Tribune - Chicago Police and NATO protesters clashed repeatedly in a series of pushing and shoving confrontations tonight in the Loop following a day of cat-and-mouse marches that tested the physical and mental stamina of both sides.

Police detained several protesters but allowed the march to continue as night approached and the crowd -- as few as 300 strong earlier in the day -- swelled to many times that.

The first big confrontation flared at Washington and State Streets when protesters tried to push through a line of police on bicycles. An officer went down, police in heavy garb and riot helmets moved in and several protesters were detained.

Peter Wallsten | May 19

WaPo Election 2012 Blog - The NAACP’s board of directors voted Saturday to endorse same-sex marriage rights – adding the influential voice of the country’s leading black civil rights organization to a debate that has divided the African-American community.

The decision has political implications for President Obama, who needs an enthusiastic turnout from black voters to help him win reelection in November but angered some African-American church pastors with his announcement this month that he believes gays and lesbians should have the right to marry.

Eli Clifton | Washington | May 18

Think Progress - The House of Representatives this morning took a hard line against efforts by Democrats and libertarian Republicans to limit the president’s power to indefinitely detain terrorism suspects captured in the U.S.

An amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) by Reps. Adam Smith (D-WA) and Justin Amash (R-MI) would have barred military detention of terrorism suspects arrested in the U.S. regardless of their nationality. Smith outlined the argument for his amendment last night:

What we’ve learned in the last 10 years is one power [the president] does not need the power to indefinitely detain or place in military custody people in the United States. Our justice system works.

But House Republicans hit back hard at the bipartisan amendment, attacking it as providing additional rights to foreign terrorists. This morning, the House defeated the Smith-Amash amendment in favor of a competing amendment sponsored by Reps. Jeff Landry (R-LA), Louie Gohmert (R-TX) and Scott Rigell (R-VA). Their amendment, which passed this morning, prohibits the government from denying U.S. citizens their constitutional rights.

Oh, good, amendment explicitly upholds constitution!

Sunlen Miller | Washington | May 17

ABC (The Note) - Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., has a status update for Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin: Stop attempting to dodge your taxes by renouncing your U.S. citizenship or never come to back to the U.S. again.

In September 2011, Saverin relinquished his U.S. citizenship before the company announced its planned initial public offering of stock, which will debut this week. The move was likely a financial one, as he owns an estimated 4 percent of Facebook and stands to make $4 billion when the company goes public. Saverin would reap the benefit of tax savings by becoming a permanent resident of Singapore, which levies no capital gains taxes.

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.

Kate Zernike | Trenton, NJ | May 10

NYT - In a swipe at President Obama’s signature health care legislation, Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey vetoed on Thursday an online marketplace that the Legislature created to help residents and small businesses buy health insurance.

The Affordable Care Act, the federal law passed in 2010, requires most Americans to have health insurance and mandates states to have health care benefits exchanges to help them buy it. With the Supreme Court debating whether the health care law is constitutional, Mr. Christie said in his veto message that the exchange, approved in March, was “premature” and could impose “unnecessary obligations upon the state’s citizens.”

“Indeed, the very constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act is cloaked in uncertainty, as both the individual mandate to procure health insurance as well as the jurisdictional mandate to establish an exchange may not survive scrutiny by the Supreme Court,” he wrote.

Washington | May 10

AP - Department of justice files lawsuit against Arpaio over claims his immigration patrols in Arizona amounted to racial profiling.

Federal authorities have sued Joe Arpaio, America's self-proclaimed toughest sheriff, after months of negotiations failed to yield an agreement to settle allegations that his Arizona police department racially profiled Latinos.

The US department of justice officials said the agency filed a lawsuit only once before in the 18-year history of its police reform work. The lawsuit escalates the standoff with Sheriff Arpaio, and puts the dispute on track to be decided by a federal judge.

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.

TPM has the rundown on the primary defeat of one of the last great moderate conservatives in government.

Indiana Sen. Richard Lugar (R), Senate stalwart known for a kind of moderate Republicanism well out favor in the modern GOP, lost his primary bid against insurgent state Treasurer Richard Mourdock Tuesday night.

The embarrassing defeat for Lugar caps off a 35-year career in the Senate and puts another nail in the coffin of centrist Republican political thought in government, which has been in deep decline since the Tea Party revolution of 2010 that put an increasingly ultra-conservative brand of Republican in Washington.

Lugar's work on nonproliferation alone guarantees his place in the short list of US statesmen who were worth a fuck. Dems helped oust him to get an easier target for the general.

Democrats were eager to help Mourdock along. They attacked Lugar, helping push the residency status hits and generally making life as hard for the veteran Republican senator as possible. Mourdock — who is vastly more conservative than Lugar — they left alone.

The reason is simple: Democrats see Mourdock as a Republican candidate of the Christine O’Donnell-Sharron Angle-Ken Buck school. Those three losing Republican Senate nominees (from Delaware, Nevada and Colorado, respectively) came to represent Tea Party over-reach in 2010, when the movement helped nominate candidates so unappealing they lost Senate races the GOP should have won.

So now that Lugar is done, Democrats are turning their full fire on Mourdock, painting him as a dangerous ideological extremist. They say centrists and independents who have been pulling the lever for Lugar for decades will be open to the Democratic nominee, Rep. Joe Donnelly, once they take a real look at Mourdock.

Six months until the election. Gods give me patience because if you give me strength you better also give me bail money.

Update BooMan has John Kerry's statement, a fond farewell to a man he worked closely with as often as they crossed swords. BooMan writes: "John Kerry didn't have to do this, but I am glad he did." Yep. Lugar's own statement is here.

The formerly-gagged FBI translator-turned-whistleblower's new memoir is 'a masterpiece revealing corruption and unaccountability in Washington, D.C.' and 'a rotten barrel of toxic waste that will sooner or later infect us all'...

The Brad Blog, By David Swanson, May 2

Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as "page-turners" and "gripping dramas," but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now...

Ari Berman at The Nation:

After being branded as too liberal by conservative GOP activists four years ago, Romney aligned himself with Bolton and other neocons in 2012 to protect his right flank. Today there’s little daylight between the candidate and his most militant advisers.

...“I can’t name a single Romney foreign policy adviser who believes the Iraq War was a mistake,” says Cato’s Preble.

Obama's military interventionism, dressed up as it is in neoliberal humanitarian sheep's clothing, is bad enough. Putting people like John Bolton, Dan Senor and Eric Edelman back in charge of America's foreign policy would, I have to admit, be even worse by an order of magnitude.

Still, it's not enough to seduce me to calls of "the most important election EVAH!" any more than the realization that Republican social and economic policies are far worse for the nation than the already bad Dem ones. On the one hand, despite being in power at least half the time, Republicans haven't completely destroyed the nation yet. (Nor have Dems, of course, if you're looking at it from the other side of the aisle.) On the other, I do think there probably has to be a foul-up so awful that it destroys one half of the two-party system before there'll be meaningful change, and the GOP are for sure the party most likely to deliver that.

By Michael Collins

When you take the right side, style trumps substance every time in politics. President Obama was on fire Saturday in Columbus, Ohio, hammering home populist themes that will define his campaign. This was his campaign kick-off. He couldn't have done a better job of stating his case as the candidate of the people, while painting Romney as the darling of The Money Party (Wall Street, big banks).

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The problem with our economy isn’t that the American people aren’t productive enough -- you’ve been working harder than ever. The challenge we face right now -- the challenge we faced for over a decade is that harder work hasn’t led to higher incomes. It’s that bigger profits haven’t led to better jobs. President Obama (Full text of Obama's remarks, Columbus, Ohio, May 5, 2012)

It's not your fault the president tells us, which happens to be absolutely correct. Then he nailed Romney:

The one where a stadium filled to over three-quarters of its capacity is "empty":

President Obama officially kicked off his reelection bid yesterday in Ohio, and right-wingers are informing me that OMIGOD THE HALL WAS ONLY 76.5% FULL HAR HAR HAR OBAMA HAS EMPTY STADIUM!!!1! Yes, "empty" is now a synonym on the right for "76.5% full": The Washington Post tells me that the attendance at the rally in question was 14,000 at a stadium that holds 18,300, which at Breitbart.com results in the headline "Obama Launches Campaign in Empty Arena."

Romney promises no Iran nuke, 500,000 new jobs a month, 6.8 % growth a year and even more tax cuts for the rich...overpromising much?

I am so incredibly done already with the partisan bitching and tit-for-tat name calling that passes for political debate in this country. I used to see it every Saturday at soccer matches, where it was about supporting your team no matter what, now I see the same tribal blinkers applied to deciding who the most powerful person in the world will be.

Look, yesterday a total nutjob who day-to-day almost certainly didn't know whether his ass was punched or bored took his guns and body armor and killed four people in Arizona. The usual Democratic Party shills want you to know that the killer was had been at some time a self-described Neo-Nazi, a border vigilante and a Maricopa County Republican precinct committeeman. The usual Republican Party shills want you to know that he'd turned up to "protect" the Occupy Pheonix camp with his guns and was planning to run for sheriff as a Democrat.

I'd like to say to these people: have you no fucking shame? The important thing is that four people are dead. That the fractured mind of their killer couldn't settle on any political label means exactly squat for the relative merits of your teams. Get over yourselves.

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.

New York Times, By Adam Davidson, May 1

Ever since the financial crisis started, we’ve heard plenty from the 1 percent. We’ve heard them giving defensive testimony in Congressional hearings or issuing anodyne statements flanked by lawyers and image consultants. They typically repeat platitudes about investment, risk-taking and job creation with the veiled contempt that the nation doesn’t understand their contribution. You get the sense that they’re afraid to say what they really believe. What do the superrich say when the cameras aren’t there?

With that in mind, I recently met Edward Conard on 57th Street and Madison Avenue, just outside his office at Bain Capital, the private-equity firm he helped build into a multibillion-dollar business by buying, fixing up and selling off companies at a profit. Conard, who retired a few years ago at 51, is not merely a member of the 1 percent. He’s a member of the 0.1 percent. His wealth is most likely in the hundreds of millions; he lives in an Upper East Side town house just off Fifth Avenue; and he is one of the largest donors to his old boss and friend, Mitt Romney.

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.

Rolling Stone, By Rick Perlstein, April 25

Once upon a time, in early 2004, I attended one of hundreds of "Parties for the President" organized nationwide for grassroots volunteers who wanted to help reelected George W. Bush, at a modest middle class home in Portland, Oregon. At one point, a nice old lady politely pressed into my hand a grubby little self-published pamphlet she had come upon, purporting to prove that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry had faked the heroics that had won him three purple hearts in Vietnam. I added it to my mental store of the night's absurdities that I expected to hear rattling across the wingnutosphere the entire fall: "I still believe there are weapons of mass destruction"; "There is an agenda—to get rid of God in this country"; "John Kerry attended a party in which there was bad language!" What I didn't expect was to see Kerry's war-hero cred earnestly debated night after night on CNN. Then came August and "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" — and that little old lady's fever dream began dominating the media discussion of the campaign, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Cracked.com has a surprisingly good article on avoiding the brain meltdown that
comes from reading political stories.

5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds

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."