Eugene Robinson at
The Washington Post looks at the overhyped, under-competent Paul Ryan and his flawed budget plan:
Voters were supposed to believe that Ryan was an apostle of fiscal rectitude. But his real aim wasn’t to balance the budget. It was to starve the federal government of revenue. Big government, in his worldview, is inherently bad — never mind that we live in an awfully big country.
Ryan and Mitt Romney offered their vision, President Obama offered his, and Americans made their choice. Rather emphatically.
Now Ryan, as chairman of the House Budget Committee, is coming back with an ostensibly new and improved version of the framework that voters rejected in November. Judging by the preview he offered Sunday, the new plan is even less grounded in reality than was the old one.
Jump below the fold for more analysis from opinion writers across the country.
Jay Bookman at the Atlanta Journal Constitution says if Rand Paul is your party's future, your party is in big trouble:
Rand Paul, the junior senator from Kentucky, is drawing attention as a potential Republican candidate for president come 2016, part of a new generation of GOP leadership.
But ladies and gentlemen, Rand Paul is also a bit of a nut. The deep streak of paranoia that he displayed for almost 13 hours on the Senate floor last week would, in ordinary times, disqualify him as a party leader, let alone a potential president. But sadly, these are not ordinary times.
Let’s start by admitting that the stunt itself was a nice piece of political stagecraft. The one-man, TV-friendly filibuster gave Paul the opportunity to play Jimmy Stewart, a lone hero standing up in defense of the Constitution. It’s the type of role that Paul covets.
However, if you’re going to grandstand on the national stage like that, shouldn’t you have something sane to say?
The New York Times editorial board urges a sustained campaign to protect the right to vote for all citizens:
The recent announcement by President Obama that he is creating a bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration represents an opportunity to begin this work. The group’s purpose is to prevent long voting lines, which in many cases were deliberately created by officials who cut back on early voting or reduced polling places in urban areas. Blacks and Hispanics waited nearly twice as long to vote as whites did last year.
But long lines are just a symptom of the problem, and the commission’s goals are too narrow to make a dent in the larger issue. (Of course, that hasn’t stopped Republicans from trashing the effort before it’s even begun; Representative Candice Miller of Michigan, who leads the House committee in charge of voting laws, opposes the commission and federal intervention into voting issues.)
What’s really needed is a new act that makes access to the polls a universal American right. The Voting Rights Act remains necessary to prevent continuing racial discrimination, but bringing lawsuits under Section 2 of the act (which applies to the entire country and is not being challenged) is enormously difficult and costly. Preliminary injunctions to stop discriminatory election practices outside covered areas are rarely granted.
Nelson Lichtenstein at
The Washington Post writes about increased local community organization is an added benefit of Obama's health insurance law:
As the poor, alienated and fearful realize that tangible benefits can be won through their neighborhood clinic, civic group or local trade union, and are drawn into civic life and grass-roots action, these organizations that are essential to the health reform's implementation will be strengthened as agents of civic engagement and citizen mobilization.
This is not a case of creating more voters who will support Obama because of Obamacare. This is a 21st century example of Alexis de Tocqueville's 19th century observation that the health of American democracy depends on the vibrancy of numerous voluntary organizations.
In recent history, we've seen the way such groups feed activism and are fed by it.
Guest columnist
Frank Breslin, a New Jersery school teacher, writes about scapegoating teachers over at The Times of Trenton:
The emotional, familial and social problems of too many inner-city students are often so deeply embedded and, in many cases, treatable only by professional help, that the paltry resources of the school cannot even begin to address them. As if that weren’t enough, insult is added to injury when cash-strapped schools are then routinely accused of academically “failing their students,” when they should rather be praised for courageously carrying on in the face of such impossible odds.
But what makes matters worse is that these same schools are now set up for additional failure by being denied vitally needed funding now diverted to charter schools as part of a cleverly devised right-wing strategy of privatizing public education across the country to reward political cronies and contributors.