NY Times:
Jorge Ramos, the Univision and Fusion television anchor who is often called the Walter Cronkite of Latino America, was in his suburban Miami broadcast studio when he all but pounced on the chairman of the Republican Party, Reince Priebus, who was appearing from Washington. The Republicans’ immigration policy is “deportations, deportations, deportations,” Mr. Ramos said. “Why?”
Mr. Priebus, who stared out from multiple screens in a control room here looking as if he would rather have been doing anything but talking to Mr. Ramos, insisted it was not so. But Mr. Ramos would not have it.
“The message,” he retorted, “is anti-immigrant.”
For years, Mr. Ramos largely aimed his ire at President Obama for breaking his 2008 campaign promise — made directly to Mr. Ramos — that he would propose an overhaul of the nation’s immigration system in his first year in office, and for deporting two million people since. Even after Mr. Obama announced late last year that nearly half of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants could apply to work without fear of deportation, Mr. Ramos confronted him during a Nashville forum for having “destroyed many families” by not acting sooner.
But Mr. Ramos’s focus has changed, he said in an interview here: “Now is the turn of Republicans.
Art Goldhammer:
Some Post-Charlie Surprises
In the immediate aftermath of the terror attacks, the assumption was that the big winner would be Marine Le Pen. Few if any observers predicted that François Hollande would double his approval rating from 19 to 40%. Fewer still foresaw that 67% of those polled would say that Marine Le Pen had not "measured up" in her response to the attacks.
What is more, the ensuing weeks have revealed a deep split in the Front National. The head of the FN's EU delegation, Aymeric Chauprade, has been removed from his post for blurring the message that MLP wished to send to her countrymen. Chauprade announced that France "was at war with Muslims," that the Muslim minority constituted "a fifth column" inside France, and that Islam posed a "grave threat" to French values. This contradicted MLP's desire to soften her Islamophobic image by directing her fire against only those Muslims who opted for militant jihad. To complicate matters, her father, honorary president for life of the party, backed Chauprade (after adopting for himself the slogan "je suis Charlie Martel"), as did her niece, Marion Maréchal-Le Pen, one of the party's two deputies. So, contrary to all expectation, the attacks have been devastating for the FN.
More politics and policy below the fold.
Jamelle Bouie:
Republicans Are Finally Talking About Inequality
Democrats should listen.
For as odd as it is to hear Romney (of “47 percent” fame) disdain the plutocratic economy, it’s also a welcome change. After 15 years of bad economic news—from sluggish growth and wage stagnation to a world-historical recession—we are finally at a point of real progress. Now is the time to talk frankly about what we need to further our gains and ensure broad prosperity. And, sincere or not, it’s good that Republicans want to be part of that conversation. At its best, conservative thinking on inequality puts a laser focus on the particular problems of families. “Perhaps the most basic challenge facing middle-class families,” said Utah Sen. Mike Lee in an expansive speech to the Heritage Foundation in October 2013, “is how expensive it has become for couples to simply start and grow their families.”
And while liberals will not agree with Republican prescriptions, there’s real value in their critiques and counterproposals. For example, one of the smarter conservative criticisms of President Obama’s plan for larger child and child care tax credits is that they penalize stay-at-home parents. Specifically, Obama’s plan would give new tax credits to dual-income families as well as provide larger credits to parents who need child care to do paid work. But if a family chooses to forgo market income by having a parent stay home, it loses these credits.
Politico:
Republicans keep talking about rape, and the political consequences keep coming.
It’s a lesson learned the hard way so many times, most recently Wednesday night. With the GOP in control of both chambers of Congress, Republicans in the House were poised to pass a ban on abortions after 20 weeks of pregnancy to try to advance it in the Senate. The bill is an outright challenge to Roe v. Wade, decided exactly 42 years ago.
Instead, House leaders had to cancel the vote after objections from some female Republicans who deemed a rape exemption unacceptably narrow and burdensome. The bill would not let rape or incest victims get an abortion after 20 weeks unless they had filed a police report, although most women who are raped do not report it.
Once again, the party of Todd Akin and transvaginal ultrasounds seemed to undo its own imminent victory.
“It’s a messaging issue,” said North Carolina GOP Rep. Renee Ellmers, whose objections to the restrictive rape language helped scuttle the bill and whose office later drew dozens of protesters who had wanted the stricter approach. “I believe our heart is in the right place, and we’re standing up for what is right. But I think in order to be able to have that conversation with the American people, we have always got to be speaking from the perspective of the individual and … having compassion for women in all situations.”
Jason Millman:
If you care about the politics of Obamacare and the future of health-care reform, Arkansas's new Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson just gave one of the most important health-care speeches in recent memory.
For the past two years, Arkansas has played a significant role in getting a number of conservative states to accept Obamacare's Medicaid expansion. The state's previous Democratic governor, Mike Beebe, in early 2013 struck a deal with Republican state lawmakers and the Obama administration to use federal Medicaid expansion dollars to purchase private coverage for low-income adults.
Since then, more than 200,000 Arkansas residents have enrolled in what's known as the "private option," and it signaled to Republican-led states that they could craft alternative coverage plans to accept Medicaid expansion funding in their states. Bill Clinton, in a fall 2013 speech highly advertised by the Obama administration, called on Republican state officials opposing the Affordable Care Act to follow in Arkansas's example.
But a lot has happened in Arkansas since then.
David Ramsey:
Gov. Asa Hutchinson made his case today for the future of the private option: he is asking the legislature to fund the policy for two more years and he is asking for the creation of a task force which would look into extensive reforms to the entire health care system in the state starting in 2017. Hutchinson said that the changes for 2017 and beyond "will include a compassionate and reasonable cost-effective response for care of those currently on the Private Option."
This is good news for the immediate future of the healthcare coverage expansion in Arkansas. But Hutchinson's speech is far from the end of the game. The private option still needs supermajorities from both the Arkansas House and the Senate to continue. That remains a very steep climb — it only takes nine senators or 26 in the House to block the appropriation.
Aaron Blake:
The new Washington Post-ABC News poll shows Hillary Rodham Clinton leading five potential GOP presidential candidates by between 16 and 20 points. But as the good folks of social media were quick to point out, it is January 2015, and the 2016 election isn't until November 2016. (Thanks, guys!)
And we sympathize; Clinton, after all, is a known quantity, and the crew of Republicans who could run against her, while well-known to anybody who reads The Fix, is decidedly less well-known to the broader public. So the poll match-ups aren't quite fair and only tell us so much.
Except for when it comes to one of her opponents.
Willard Mitt Romney, you see, was the 2012 Republican presidential nominee. His name ID is probably about the same as Clinton's is. So it's harder to look at his 17-point deficit and chalk it up to just some early poll that, to quote the poll doubters, "means nothing."
And in fact, this isn't the first time he has trailed badly against Clinton in a hypothetical match-up. A McClatchy-Marist College poll from last month showed him down 12 points.
Mitt Romney 3.0, climate change champion?
Politico:
Mitt Romney is slamming Republicans and Democrats alike for side-stepping some of America’s most pressing issues.
“The major challenges that this country faces are not being dealt with by leaders in Washington,” Romney said in a speech Wednesday night in Salt Lake City, Utah, according to The Associated Press.
Simon Maloy:
The new, new, new Mitt Romney: A blame-both-sides champion of … climate change?
"Severe conservative" reemerges as a centrist warrior against climate change. His 2016 opponents will be thrilled