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truthdig.com — The leadership of the Catholic Church has launched what amounts to a holy war against President Barack Obama. Archbishop Timothy Dolan appealed to church members, “Let your elected leaders know that you want religious liberty and rights of conscience restored and that you want the administration’s contraceptive mandate rescinded,” he said. Obama is now under pressure to reverse a health-care regulation that requires Catholic hospitals and universities, like all employers, to provide contraception to insured women covered by their health plans. Bill Donohue of the Catholic League said, “This is going to be fought out with lawsuits, with court decisions, and, dare I say it, maybe even in the streets.” In the wake of the successful pushback against the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure’s decision to defund Planned Parenthood, the Obama administration should listen to the majority of Americans: The United States, including Catholics, is strongly pro-choice.

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digbysblog.blogspot.com — It's a well-documented fact of history that for the past half-century at least, conservatives have used race resentment as a way of cutting the safety net in order to further enrich the already well-to-do. It's been a remarkably successful tactic, and one that is still being used with frequency to this day. One of the keys to the race-baiting attack has been to take the social malaise that develops in economically depressed communities and attribute that malaise to some in-born defect of the people of the communities themselves. But that program is now becoming a victim of its own success. As economic libertarianism has dragged down middle-class wages and benefits, suddenly the social malaise that has long gripped minority communities is starting to make itself felt across the entirety of America, including among working-class whites.

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washingtonpost.com — Republicans couldn’t stop President Obama from installing Richard Cordray as director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. But they hope they can rein the bureau in by passing legislation. The House GOP is now moving forward with bills that would remove the CFPB director from overseeing the Federal Deposit Insurance Company and allow Congress to directly control its funding every year. The bills are DOA in the Democrat-controlled Senate. But the GOP’s new bills provide a clear guide to what is likely to happen to the CFPB if Republicans take full control of Congress and/or the White House.

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washingtonpost.com — What do Rick Santorum and Clint Eastwood have in common? Sorry, Rick, you haven’t made it yet as an Eastwood-style make-my-day cultural icon. But in different ways, Santorum and Eastwood have demonstrated the limits of both an entirely negative slant on politics and a pessimistic take on America’s future.

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huffingtonpost.com — Joe Nocera's op-ed in the New York Times yesterday deserves a response and a reiteration of the facts surrounding the Keystone XL tar sands pipeline. President Obama rejected the pipeline's permit last month when the GOP, in a political stunt, forced his hand to approve it without even the final route evident. Let's put the rhetoric aside, and simply focus on the facts. Nocera wants us to believe that approving this pipeline is a matter of national security. He also seems to think that we should all be kicking ourselves because the Canadians are flaunting a tar sands sale trip to China. Nocera might ask himself how likely this oil is really to go to China from Canada if Keystone XL is not built. He might ask why the oil companies are looking to bring tar sands almost 2000 miles south rather than just send it across British Columbia for export to Asia.

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progressive.org — What a weird Tuesday it was, with Rick Santorum winning three contests on the same day that California’s Prop 8 was overturned. Santorum’s politics are yesterday. Gay marriage is today and tomorrow. But don’t tell the Republicans that. Santorum now seems to be the last hope of the anti-Romney crowd, and what an unlikely candidate he is. After all, he got trounced when he ran for reelection as a Pennsylvania Senator back in 2006. And for years, he’s been an object of ridicule for his primitive beliefs on sex and privacy. If Republicans want to lurch this far to the right, they can have him, but I’ve got to believe that a majority of voters will reject Santorum’s backwardness.

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prospect.org — The GOP presidential primary has offered some odd debates on who cares about the "very poor" and whether there should be a "safety net" or a "trampoline" to help people get out of poverty. Meanwhile, in Kansas, it seems Governor Sam Brownback is hoping to dig a bigger hole for the poor fall into. Between his tax plans and his approaches to school funding, Brownback's agenda overtly boosts the wealthy and makes things harder for the poor. While many liberals speculate this to be a secret goal, Brownback is hardly making a secret of his agenda.

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progressive.org — This week, conservatives will be gathering in Washington, D.C., to attend the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Dubbed “Mardi Gras for the Right” by one rightwing reporter, the three-day festival “celebrates everything conservatives hold dear, including free-market capitalism.” Conservatives hold Wisconsin dear, as two Republican Badgers are giving keynote speeches. Representative Paul Ryan from Janesville takes the stage Thursday night, while Governor Scott Walker addresses the crowd on Friday night.

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jaredbernsteinblog.com — As others have noted, conservatives who’d like bash the President on the economy are having an awfully hard time right now, as the recovery proceeds apace.  So, they’re stuck with “yeah, things are getting better, but if we were in charge, they’d be even better!” This, of course, is the flipside of a rap with which I’m intimately familiar: “sure, things are bad — but without our actions, they’d be even worse!” Neither are convincing to most people, because most people don’t engage in the economist’s counterfactual: the path the economy would have taken absent your interventions.  Thing is, I know and believe my counterfactual.  It comes from tried and true modeling based on the historical relationships of how advanced economies respond to stimulus. What I don’t get is their counterfactual. Other than unconvincingly waving hands, muttering how things should be better, how the EPA and OSHA rules are killing businesses, yada, yada — let’s see some analysis.

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thedailybeast.com — Consider a few numbers from last night’s voting and from these same contests four years ago. Missouri: Four years ago, Mitt Romney got about 172,000 votes out of 589,000 cast. Last night, Romney got around 64,000 out of roughly 233,000 cast. Minnesota: Four years ago, Romney drew 26,000 votes out of 63,000 cast. Last night — just 8,000 out of around 47,000 cast. Colorado: In 2008 Romney won 42,000 votes out of 70,000 cast. Last night he got 23,000 votes out of 65,000 cast. Across the board, then, Romney got fewer votes than he did last time, and each of these three contests drew fewer voters. Romney will still be the nominee, seemingly, but he has some big problems right now.

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nytimes.com — When Facebook goes public later this year, Mark Zuckerberg plans to exercise stock options worth $5 billion of the $28 billion that his ownership stake will be worth. The $5 billion he will receive upon exercising those options will be treated as salary, and Mr. Zuckerberg will have a tax bill of more than $2 billion, quite possibly making him the largest taxpayer in history. He is expected to sell enough stock to pay his tax. But how much income tax will Mr. Zuckerberg pay on the rest of his stock that he won’t immediately sell? He need not pay any. Instead, he can simply use his stock as collateral to borrow against his tremendous wealth and avoid all tax. Why is this? Our tax system is based on the concept of “realization.” Individuals are not taxed until they actually sell property and realize their gains. A drastic change is necessary to fix this fundamental flaw. The fix is called mark-to-market taxation.

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newdeal20.org — Last week’s job numbers were generally positive. Now if those numbers pick up steam, if the housing market begins to recover, if Europe doesn’t sink the U.S. economy, if the situation in the Middle East and especially Iran doesn’t cause oil prices to spike, and if we don’t immediately disrupt government spending through premature austerity, we could see some major job growth in 2012.
What about those who still have a job? We focus on the unemployed for many good reasons. But the economy also has major problems for those with jobs. Personally, many friends of mine have discussed how they want to move on and quit their current jobs and were putting in the energy to find new ones. They’ve mostly failed and are taking it as a personal failure. Except it’s less a personal failure than a macroeconomic one.

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politics.salon.com — Don’t be fooled by the fact that no delegates were directly awarded — what happened in the Republican presidential race on Tuesday night is very significant. The headline is that Rick Santorum won monster victories in the Minnesota caucuses and in Missouri’s non-binding primary and that he completed the sweep in Colorado, where his surprise victory over Romney was made official around 1 a.m. But the bigger story is what amounts to a meltdown for Romney, who would like us all to believe that he’s the candidate of inevitability. But the inevitable candidate isn’t supposed to get crushed by 30 points, as Romney did in Missouri. And he’s not supposed to finish a very distant third, 10 points behind Ron Paul, as he did in Minnesota. And he’s certainly not supposed to let a candidate like Rick Santorum, who before tonight had barely been relevant since the Iowa caucuses, post the clean sweep Santorum just did.

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washingtonpost.com — The January jobs report — 243,000 jobs added — was greeted with widespread relief. The economists over at the Wall Street Journal were virtually giddy. The best news of the day was not just the upside surprise of the jobs numbers, but the reaction of President Obama. He joined commentators in hailing the good news: “the economy is growing stronger. The recovery is speeding up.” But he wasn’t proclaiming “recovery winter,” a reference to the ruinous White House plan to campaign on the recovery in the summer of 2010, after prematurely turning to deficit reduction in the State of the Union that year. Instead, the president greeted the jobs report by pushing for more action. “We must do everything in our power to keep it [jobs growth] going.” This stance is both good policy and good politics.

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