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dailykos.com — As we've seen today, a group of senators have jumped ahead of President Barack Obama's immigration proposal today and announced their own plan. It's okay, for the most part, except for one glaring problem: Full citizen rights for undocumented immigrants are contingent on Arizona wingnut Gov. Jan Brewer saying the border is "secure." But lest you think this is some sort of accidental flaw, it isn't. And while conservatives are furious at this proposal, they shouldn't be. Because this is the perfect solution for them.

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prospect.org — Should the Supreme Court uphold it, last Friday’s decision by three Reagan-appointees to the D.C. Circuit Appellate Court appears at first glance to rejigger the balance of power between Congress and the president. The appellate justices struck down three recess appointments that President Obama had made to the five-member National Labor Relations Board during the break between the 2011 and 2012 sessions of Congress partly on the grounds that Congress wasn’t formally in recess. It’s not that Obama has made a lot of recess appointments. He’s only made 32—compared to the 171 made by George W. Bush. Presidents have been making recess appointments since the mid-19th century, but this is the first time that the courts have objected. Certainly, the three judges on the D.C. appellate court voiced no such opinions when Bush was president. The real issue here is who Obama appointed, and to what agencies.

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dailykos.com — Republicans can't win national elections anymore, having lost the popular vote in five of the last six, and with demographics shifts moving solidly against them, rather than try to better represent the will of the American electorate, they're instead going to try to break the system so that the will of the American electorate no longer matters. And it would be perfectly legal, because we choose our presidents through the Electoral College, and there are very few rules about how the electors are allocated. Make no mistake: This is a war on the very concept of democracy and republic. This is a war on the very nature of our system of governance. If it succeeds, it will tear this country apart.

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huffingtonpost.com — Immigration is one of the great stories of America's history. It is immortalized in the words penned by Emma Lazarus, and engraved on a bronze plaque that hangs on an inner wall of the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free." The United States is a nation built on the blood and sweat of immigrants; it is a great melting pot of cultures that together have strengthened the country, and have broadened its horizons. America, the land of opportunity, of immense freedom, and of a generous people, has attracted millions of people from all over the world. Nonetheless, immigration has been politicized for decades, and reasonable reforms have eluded Washington. But now is the time to do something meaningful. President Barack Obama will announce an effort to overhaul immigration on Tuesday in Las Vegas, Nevada, a critical state, where he carried the Latino vote this past November.

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dailykos.com — How did Obama turn what was a seven-point deficit for the Democrats in 2010 into a four-point win in 2012, in spite of roughly similar numbers among the three ideological subgroups? The answer was that the ideological makeup of the electorate fundamentally shifted between 2010 and 2012. In 2010, 42 percent of the electorate self-identified as conservatives, while only 20 percent of the electorate self-identified as liberals. In 2012, the gap narrowed to a historic low. Only 35 percent of the Obama-Romney electorate called themselves conservative. Meanwhile, a full quarter of the electorate (25 percent), the high water mark for the modern era), self-identified as liberal. Therein lies a big part of the victory. It wasn't Obama's marginally better performance among conservatives that saved the day, it was the simple fact that conservatives comprised a substantially smaller share of the electorate than they had in 2010.

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consortiumnews.com — Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the Old Confederacy, is a fitting place for the neo-Confederates who now control the Republican Party to reinstate a version of the slave-era provision counting African-Americans as “Three-Fifths” of a person for the purpose of representation. This revival of the infamous “Three-Fifths” clause of the U.S. Constitution is part of a Republican scheme to give lesser value to the votes of African-Americans and other minorities who tend to cluster in cities than to the votes of whites in rural, more GOP-friendly areas. The goal is to give future Republican presidential candidates a thumb-on-the-scale advantage in seeking the White House, as well as to assure continued Republican control of the House of Representatives. The scheme is a direct Republican response to the emergence of Barack Obama’s coalition, which pulled together the votes of African-Americans, Hispanics, Asian-Americans and young urban whites (who are more comfortable with a multi-cultural future for the United States).

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alternet.org — In wars, sometimes there comes a moment when the tide turns. The collapse of Ludendorff's offensive in 1918 presaged the Armistice; failure in the Ardennes meant the end for Germany in 1944. Today we have two drone wars in a similar state. One is mainly in Pakistan. Built on a gee-whiz technology that can't do what it promised, this war has claimed too many victims for too little effect. It is a diplomatic disaster and its days are numbered, almost surely, for that reason. The other drone war is in Washington. The drones are in groups with names like the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget and Campaign to Fix the Debt. They drone on, and on, about the calamities that await unless we cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. That the goal of the deficit drones is to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid has been plain for years to anyone who looks at where the money comes from.

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nytimes.com — Republicans have a problem. For years they could shout down any attempt to point out the extent to which their policies favored the elite over the poor and the middle class; all they had to do was yell “Class warfare!” and Democrats scurried away. In the 2012 election, however, that didn’t work: the picture of the G.O.P. as the party of sneering plutocrats stuck, even as Democrats became more openly populist than they have been in decades. As a result, prominent Republicans have begun acknowledging that their party needs to improve its image. But here’s the thing: Their proposals for a makeover all involve changing the sales pitch rather than the product. When it comes to substance, the G.O.P. is more committed than ever to policies that take from most Americans and give to a wealthy handful. Consider, as a case in point, how a widely reported recent speech by Bobby Jindal the governor of Louisiana, compares with his actual policies.

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washingtonpost.com — If you care about deficits, you should want our economy to grow faster. If you care about lifting up the poor and reducing unemployment, you should want our economy to grow faster. And if you are a committed capitalist and hope to make more money, you should want our economy to grow faster. The moment’s highest priority should be speeding economic growth and ending the waste, human and economic, left by the Great Recession. But you would never know this because the conversation in our nation’s capital is being held hostage by a ludicrous cycle of phony fiscal deadlines driven by a misplaced belief that the only thing we have to fear is the budget deficit. Let’s call a halt to this madness. If we don’t move the economy to a better place, none of the fiscal projections will matter. The economic downturn ballooned the deficit. Growth will move the numbers in the right direction.

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thedailybeast.com — In the wake of their decisive 2012 election defeat, Republicans aren’t digging the demographic changes making once safe states like Virginia go for Obama the last two presidential elections. Their response, as Michael Tomasky detailed yesterday, is to try and change the rules to allow electoral votes to be split up by congressional districts, compounding their advantage created by the rigged system of redistricting. In many of the states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Ohio – this is at the level of legislative discussion rather than action.This is an inversion of the basic principle of democracy: that elections are won by the candidate who gets the most votes. To add insult to the intended injury, Virginia humorist and political blogger Paul Bibeau pointed out that the bill would have the effect of making Obama voters count as three-fifths of a person.

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motherjones.com — Charles Spies has seen the future of American elections, and it is drenched with super-PAC cash—much of it aimed at getting single politicians elected. Super-PACs may have spent $635 million during the 2012 elections, but that's chump change compared to what they'll likely unload in the next presidential election. (Only 45 months away!) Ditto for the 2014 midterm elections compared to the 2010 midterms. Spies predicts at least 250 new super-PACs will spend serious money on races up and down the ballot in 2014. And he says voters should expect a lot of them to be devoted to promoting the fortune of a single House or Senate candidate, big-money bazookas firing away to nudge their preferred politician that much closer to Washington.

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robertreich.org — Soon after President Obama’s second inaugural address, John Boehner said the White House would try “to annihilate the Republican Party” and “shove us into the dustbin of history.” Actually, the GOP is doing a pretty good job annihilating itself. As Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal put it, Republicans need to “stop being the stupid party.” The GOP crackup was probably inevitable. Inconsistencies and tensions within the GOP have been growing for years – ever since Ronald Reagan put together the coalition that became the modern Republican Party. All President Obama has done is finally find ways to exploit these inconsistencies.

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nationaljournal.com — Equality was the North Star in President Obama’s confident and ambitious Inaugural Address this week. But the speech defined the idea around two distinct poles, and his path to progress is much clearer on one than the other. In his first words, Obama reached back to the Declaration of Independence to anoint as America’s founding and most foundational conviction the belief “that all men are created equal.” The heart of what followed was his argument that this timeless principle contains both an economic and a social dimension—and that collective action through government is essential to realizing both. In essence, Obama argued that fidelity to America’s founding beliefs requires a widening circle of economic opportunity and social tolerance. When Obama defined equality as widening social tolerance, he had the wind of history at his back. The president’s prospects are much murkier on the other dimension of the challenge that he identified, expanding economic opportunity and reversing inequality.

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huffingtonpost.com — President Obama is off to a good start in his second term. "We, the people," he pledged in his second inaugural, "still believe that every citizen deserves a basic measure of security and dignity." Amen to that. But as the economy continues its agonizingly slow recovery, his greatest challenge will be to reverse the economy's widening inequality. Ordinary working families are falling further and further behind the cost of living. The picture is especially brutal for young adults, who are likely to find themselves saddled with college debt, facing jobs that offer neither benefits nor career security. So the challenge, as President Obama famously told "Joe the Plumber" is to spread the wealth around. How do we do that? Here are four ways.

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prospect.org — That 400,000 votes separated Romney from the presidency is a quirk of our electoral system, and Republicans will mislead themselves if they focus on that number. Mitt Romney didn’t just lose to Obama in the 2012 presidential election: He underperformed. Exit polls provide a few clues about why voters rejected the Republican Party at all levels. If you weren’t well-off—if you were struggling—you didn’t vote for Romney; the GOP had nothing to offer you. Romney might disparage politicians who give “gifts” to the public, but the fact of the matter is that voters support leaders who provide—or can promise—tangible benefits. At most, Republicans promised greater “growth” from cutting taxes, slashing spending, and reducing regulations. Americans didn’t bite, because those policies don’t work (they remember the previous administration) and because they don’t trust Republicans to govern (they remember the previous administration).

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nytimes.com — President Obama’s second Inaugural Address offered a lot for progressives to like. There was the spirited defense of gay rights; there was the equally spirited defense of the role of government, and, in particular, of the safety net provided by Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security. But arguably the most encouraging thing of all was what he didn’t say: He barely mentioned the budget deficit. Mr. Obama’s clearly deliberate neglect of Washington’s favorite obsession was just the latest sign that the self-styled deficit hawks — better described as deficit scolds — are losing their hold over political discourse. And that’s a very good thing. Why have the deficit scolds lost their grip? I’d suggest four interrelated reasons.

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huffingtonpost.com — In the past 20 years, the world has witnessed the death of social contracts. We have seen a massive breakdown in trust between citizens, their economies and their governments. In our own country, we can point to years of data painting a bleak picture of the confidence Americans have in any of our traditional institutions. Former assumptions and shared notions about fairness, agreements, reciprocity, mutual benefits, social values and expected futures have all but disappeared. The collapse of financial systems and the resulting economic crisis not only have caused instability, insecurity and human pain; they have also generated a growing disbelief and fundamental distrust in the way things operate and how decisions are made.

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prospect.org — Republicans are wondering why they didn't manage to make Hillary Clinton fall whimpering into a fetal position of the floor of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing room, then get up and admit that the Obama administration had engaged in a massive cover-up of their terrible crimes in Benghazi. Senator Ron Johnson, one of the most intellectually challenged members of that august body, with whom Clinton had an exchange that ran on all the news programs, triumphally told a reporter he had got "under her skin." John McCain, on the other hand, blamed an "adoring media" for not helping the Republicans stick it to Clinton. Could be. Or it could be that when you trump up some inane faux outrage over something, and then the person at whom you're directing said outrage actually has a chance to respond directly and decides to call bullshit on you, you don't end up looking too good.

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baselinescenario.com — Unsurprisingly, most Americans are split between various misconceptions of what Social Security and Medicare are. Many, particularly right-wing politicians and their media mouthpieces, see them as pure tax-and-transfer programs: they gather money from one set of people and give it to another set of people. From this point of view, they are bad bad bad bad bad and should be cut. Many others, particularly beneficiaries and people who hope to see beneficiaries, see them as earned benefits. The common conception is that you pay in while you’re working, so you earned the benefits you get in retirement. You didn’t “earn” them in the moral sense that people who work hard should get benefits; you “earned” them in the accounting sense that you’re just getting back “your” money that you set aside during your career. Both of these perspectives are wrong, the latter more obviously so.

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dailykos.com — Republican Sen. Ron Johnson had a bit of a tough day yesterday. His attacks on Sec. Clinton did not go well (if there is one person you ought to think twice about trying to bully in a hearing, it would possibly be the ex-senator and former first lady most intimately familiar with the last 20 years of asinine Republican scandal-trawling), which resulted in a wounded Johnson sniffling that Clinton dodged his questions by being "emotional." Today isn't shaping up much better for Johnson, who this morning was gets quietly chastised by secretary of state nominee John Kerry for missing the damn Senate briefing on Benghazi where Johnson could have gotten some clarification on the things Johnson has decided are, probably, outrages.

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