Other than beginning to run out of old rock videos with “morning” themes faster than I had imagined possible, I’m having a pretty good day. Here’s some tasty news treats:

* Whoa! Michelle Malkin goes medieval on Juan Williams for suggesting there’s racism in Tea Party. You have to wonder how long Williams can last on Fox.

* AP survey of economists yields prediction that unemployment rate will slowly drift below 8% by Election Day.

* WSJ reports Dems struggling to finance convention because they’ve banned contributions from corporations and lobbyists and unions are unhappy with site.

* Romney shirking Spanish-language media. A sign he expects running-mate to handle that chore?

* Least surprising news of the day: Courtesy visit with Roger Ailes now routine for GOPers traveling to NY to shake money tree.

And in non-political news:

* USAToday reports all blue-eyed people may be distant cousins. Hilariously, AOL video discusses which celebrities might be related.

Back within the hour with regular blogging.

So the RNC hosted a briefing and getting-to-know-you session for the Online Right yesterday, attended by party chieftain Reince Priebus and (at least for a while) the Big Man himself, Mitt Romney. It’s unclear from the BuzzFeed report on the event who exactly ran it, but GOP online communications guru Patrick Hynes apparently organized it, and it was obviously intended to get the Star Wars Bar Scene of the wingnutosphere comfortable with taking orders from a candidate and campaign that a lot of them have considered RINO sellouts.

Interestingly enough, the main feel-good moment of the meeting appears to have been celebration of a Twitter traffic graph showing how much godless liberal butt was kicked by right-wing tweeters during the great national debate over Hilaryrosengate. That would appear to be a bad omen for those hoping this sort of idiocy does not become a regular feature of the general election campaign.

According to HuffPost’s Michael Calderone, some 60 of the chatterers at this RNC gathering were invited to a private mixer with Mitt and Ann Romney at the nearby Capitol Hill Club, lasting two hours, which is an awful lot of face time with a presumptive presidential nominee. It seems some of the discussion involved concerns that the Romney campaign was not sufficiently interested in big “stories” like the wingnutosphere belief that the ATF’s “Fast and Furious” fiasco wasn’t just a botched operation against Mexican drug lords and gun-runners, but part of a plot to confiscate all U.S. firearms. I betcha at that point Mitt was reaching in his pocket for the hand sanitizer.

In any event, sounds like everyone had a grand old time. Remember this development next time you hear some conservative shrieking about liberal new media folk conspiring with the Obama campaign to influence news coverage.

Tomorrow’s April Jobs Report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics is going to get a ridiculous amount of attention, particularly if, as some economists predict and virtually all Republicans hope, it’s less positive than last month’s, which was less positive than February’s.

The problem is, as Jonathan Bernstein reminds us at WaPo’s Plum Line, single-month economic indicators are rarely all that significant. Aside from the fact that this spring’s numbers may have been distorted by unusually mild winter weather that pushed up some seasonal activity from its usual timing, it’s all about the context and the trends:

Barring some unexpected major event, nothing will matter more to the outcome of the November election than how the economy is perceived.

But here’s what you should keep in mind when making sense of each new bit of economic news: It doesn’t matter who wins each individual news cycle over the economy. Instead, each economic report should be seen in the context of all the economic reports. And remember that economic data is subject to major revisions, often large enough to completely change the initial interpretation.

What to do? There’s no general index of economic conditions out there to refer to, the way that we can use the various polling averages as a reality check against which to judge individual polls that seem like outliers. But at least try to see overall trends, and try not to be distracted by isolated data.

Jonathan points to Brother Steve Benen’s useful charts on the trend-lines for unemployment claims as the kind of data that ought to be commanding more attention than monthly reports.

But get ready for Jobageddon in conservative medialand if tomorrow’s numbers fall, say, under 100,000 in net new jobs. Just keep reminding yourselves and everyone else that as Devo once said facetiously about evolution, it’s mostly “wind in sails.”

As you know if you read “Terminal Sickness,” the much-discussed article by Phillip Longman and Lina Khan in the March-April issue of the Washington Monthly, airline deregulation has proved to be a nightmare for former “hub” cities abandoned due to airline closures and mergers, such as St. Louis, Cincinnati, Memphis and Pittsburgh. But it’s even worse for smaller cities served largely by regional airlines that are struggling to survive.

The New York Times’ Jad Mouawad provides a depressing but useful overview of the darkening picture for small-city air service, using as his point of departure a 12-hour itinerary for one unlucky traveler trying to get from Mobile, Alabama to Cincinnati over Easter. Such horror stories aren’t so unusual these days.

The major airlines have been paring service for much of the last decade. But their cutbacks accelerated three years ago as carriers merged, fuel prices spiked and the recession reduced demand for seats. Even after the economy started to recover and passengers came back, the big airlines did not restore many of their flights, particularly on routes to small airports, as they sought to bolster their profits.

The strategy has squeezed the regional airlines, whose purpose is to ferry passengers on behalf of the major airlines and provide the backbone of air service to the nation’s small airports. Three regional carriers have filed for bankruptcy protection since 2010, including Pinnacle Airlines in April.

Mergers that reduce hubs, rising fuel costs, airline profit strategies, and a host of competitive (or non-competitive!) factors have hit all airlines and virtually all cities, but it’s the regional carriers and the smaller cities that have seen the most severe cutbacks in service, particularly for nonstop flights, notes Mouawad:

The result is that travelers now face more complicated itineraries, often involving a connection at a big hub airport, and trips that used to take two or three hours can now stretch all day.

Fares in the smaller cities have also risen the most. Ticket prices out of Bellingham, Wash.; Harrisburg, Pa.; and Fort Myers, Fla., for instance, jumped 16 to 18 percent from the third quarter of 2010 to the third quarter of 2011, while the average nationwide increase was 6 percent, according to the latest data compiled by the Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Higher fares for less service: that’s the general trend in an airline industry where deregulation has not worked out as advertised. Smaller cities are simply on the tip of the spear, and bleeding.

At Mother Jones today, Nick Baumann has a revealing article on a fine bit of Republican hypocrisy regarding the power of the states in health care policy. In a bill designed to implement the Ryan/Romney policy of turning Medicaid into a block grant enabling states to restrict eligibility or cut benefits as federal funding is steadily reduced, there’s a provision that would actually reduce state flexibility to use their own funds for one kind of service—you guessed it, abortion.

Rep. Todd Rokita’s (R-Ind.) State Health Flexibility Act, also known as HR 4160, contains a provision that would force 17 states, including California, Massachusetts, and New York, to either discontinue programs that help low-income women pay for abortions, or spend a lot more money to purchase new insurance plans for those women….

Rokita’s bill “would be a significant change from how current law operates today,” adds Judy Waxman, the vice president for health and reproductive rights at the National Women’s Law Center. Timothy Jost, a health law expert at Washington & Lee University’s law school who identifies as pro-life, also believes the bill would change the status quo. “Current law allows states to spend their own money on medically necessary abortions if they do not spend [federal matching funds] on it,” Jost wrote in an email. “This doesn’t seem to be what the provisions…say.”

Requiring states to purchase separate abortion-only plans “would be a change and one that would be harmful to women in those states,” Waxman says, noting that the current structure has stood for decades without interference from Republican or Democratic administrations.

The whole idea here is to expand the long-standing Hyde Amendment prohibiting use of federal Medicaid dollars to the use of state dollars in conjunction with Medicaid. It’s a power grab made all the more interesting by its inclusion in a bill dumping low-income health care policy and costs on the states in the name of federalism. As Baumann puts it, when it comes to abortion, Republicans want to “give the federal government the final word: no.”

This is hardly unique. On the larger canvas of GOP proposals to “replace” the Affordable Care Act if it is repealed by a Republican-controlled Congress or overturned by a conservative-controlled Supreme Court, Mitt Romney and many of his colleagues repeatedly say they want the states to take the lead in figuring out what if anything to do about people with no access to affordable health insurance, as opposed to any “one size fits all” federal solution. But one of the few federal “reforms” almost all Republicans support is the innocuous-sounding idea of allowing interstate insurance policy sales, which will supposedly increase competition and reduce costs. In fact, the one thing for sure this “reform” would do is to destroy the power of the states to regulate health insurers, as Ezra Klein has succinctly explained:

Insurance is currently regulated by states. California, for instance, says all insurers have to cover treatments for lead poisoning, while other states let insurers decide whether to cover lead poisoning, and leaves lead poisoning coverage — or its absence — as a surprise for customers who find that they have lead poisoning. Here’s a list (pdf) of which states mandate which treatments.

The result of this is that an Alabama plan can’t be sold in, say, Oregon, because the Alabama plan doesn’t conform to Oregon’s regulations. A lot of liberals want that to change: It makes more sense, they say, for insurance to be regulated by the federal government. That way the product is standard across all the states.

Conservatives want the opposite: They want insurers to be able to cluster in one state, follow that state’s regulations and sell the product to everyone in the country. In practice, that means we will have a single national insurance standard. But that standard will be decided by South Dakota. Or, if South Dakota doesn’t give the insurers the freedom they want, it’ll be decided by Wyoming. Or whoever.

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The appearance of the fourth volume of Robert Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson saga, titled The Passage of Power, is quite an event, as indicated by the fact that one of LBJ’s successors in the White House, Bill Clinton, penned a review of the book for the New York Times yesterday.

Today the Washington Monthly is pround to feature a review of The Passage of Power by Benjamin Dueholm that gives both the subject and its author the thorough consideration they deserve. He explains this volume in the context of Caro’s earlier books on LBJ and on Robert Moses, but also in the evolution of popular history and publishing. To put it simply, Dueholm thinks we probably won’t see anything quite like Caro’s meticulous, distinguished, but less than commercially sensational work, in the future.

Dueholm also uses Caro’s portrait of LBJ to examine a more contemporary topic: frequent liberal assessments of Barack Obama as lacking his predecessor’s tenacity, powers of persuasion, or legislative skills—in a word, his “cunning.” Even if you’ve already snared a copy of Caro’s book and devoured it, or have read other reviews, you owe it to yourself to read Dueholm’s if only for that discussion.

And if you haven’t read The Passage of Power, perhaps the review will convince you, like it has me, to make the investment in time and money, beginning this weekend. Enjoy.

Today, get in the wayback machine again for “Morning Maniac Music” from Jefferson Airpline at Woodstock, 1969.

Hard to beat the end of the Gingrich campaign as a capper, but here are a few more new items:

* Unemployment in the Eurozone reaches 14-year high. Time for more austerity!

* New Marquette poll shows Tom Barrett with 17-point lead over Kathleen Falk in Dem recall primary, and Barrett dead even with Scott Walker.

* 9th Circuit rules Jose Padilla cannot sue John Yoo over “torture memos.”

* Late to the party: Bachmann endorses Mourdock, and will endorse Romney tomorrow.

* Big Dog reviews Caro’s latest LBJ volume for New York Times. And I bet he read every word.

And in non-political news:

* Former NFL star Junior Seau dead at 43, of apparent suicide.

Back tomorrow morning at 8:00 sharp.

Selah.

So it’s finally, officially, over: Newt Gingrich suspended his campaign today, though he denied the press what many sought in a “crowded ballroom” today, an actual endorsement of Mitt Romney. That will provide Newt still another opportunity for attention at some future date.

Instead of providing news, it appears Newt tormented the assembled media by making a long speech reciting all those “ideas” that thrilled audiences throughout the primary season. It’s not too hard to hear the exasperation in Ginger Gibson’s account:

Going forward, Gingrich said: “Callista and I are going to focus on a series of key issues … and try to educate and move policies in Washington, D.C. Probably central to this is a deep commitment to American exceptionalism.”

He provided few specific details about his plans, but during his lengthy suspension speech recapped the entirety of his policy positions and vowed to continue to work on them.

That was a promise, and a threat.

Last week the House Energy and Commerce Committee voted to kill a program that offered states bonuses for doing a better job of enrolling eligible low-income children in the Medicaid and S-CHiP programs. This was part of the House Republican effort to pretend to implement the Ryan Budget Resolution, which was not, of course, actually enacted by Congress. So it pretty clearly represents their priorities.

In Matt Dobias’ report on the action for Politico, there’s lots of talk from Republicans about how the bonuses undermine tough policing of the programs for possible fraud, and boost costs that states might have trouble covering when the bonuses run out. On the other side of the argument is Ron Pollack of the advocacy group Families USA:

The whole purpose of the funds is to make sure that children who are eligible based on state-determined standards have an easier time — rather than a harder time — getting enrolled.

Matt Salo, executive director of the National Association of Medicaid Directors, however, said he sees a broader divide at play.

“In Congress and across the country, there are philosophical differences about whether public programs should be available to everyone with as little effort as possible,” he said. “And there are others who believe they should be made available, but don’t beat down their doors to force it on them.”

I’d say the “philosophical differences” run a little deeper than that. Why do we offer health insurance to low-income children? Is it because we just want to do them or their parents a favor? Or is it because giving kids basic health services tends to save an incredible amount of money in the long run, in chronic illnesses that might otherwise be prevented or managed, in expensive emergency room visits they won’t have to make, in costs that the rest of us will eventually bear? Could it even be that we value health as an end in itself, and would like to reduce the number of unnecessary deaths from untreated health conditions? Is it possible we think healthier children produce a healthier, happier, more prosperous country?

Oh, sorry, I forgot. Anyone sharing that sort of “philosophy” might also see the value of universal health coverage, instead of treating the very idea as a socialist abomination sure to lead to health care rationing and euthanasia. That doesn’t describe our current breed of congressional Republican.

I’ve mentioned the ongoing TNR symposium on “Obama and Populism” a couple of times in the lunchtime and day’s end notes, and since my submission was published today, figured I’d give you a taste of the discussion.

Asked to discuss whether Obama should wage a self-consciously “populist” general election campaign, Geoffrey Kabaservice kicked off the colloquoy with a piece arguing that the populist style is alien to Obama’s personality and background:

Obama makes a far likelier target than tribune of populism. Obama is nobody’s idea of “just folks.” He’s too cosmopolitan, multiracial, professorial, self-controlled, and physically fit to present himself as an incarnation of the American common man. His otherness has always inclined him toward an E Pluribus Unum approach rather than Us Against Them. He’s too sophisticated to pretend that politics is a straightforward clash of good and evil, that vile elites conspire to enslave the little people, or that the experience of balancing the family checkbook and raising children is adequate preparation for governing the United States. Rage-choked sobs, low quavering moans, righteous bellows, whoops, hollers, hallelujahs—none of these are in his repertoire. He doesn’t do anger. The political strain Obama most obviously seeks to channel is not populism but some mix of John F. Kennedy’s cool, Dwight Eisenhower’s moderation, and Abraham Lincoln’s gravitas. The ability to do a convincing imitation of Huey Long just isn’t in him. Populist pandering would undermine the only-adult-in-the-room persona he has worked so hard to establish.

While acknowledging that there’s plenty of raw material out there for a “populist” campaign, Kabaservice believes Obama just can’t credibly pull it off—but nor, fortunately, can Mitt Romney.

In another submission published today, Ruy Teixeira offers a very different take focusing on specific general election messages. Unlike Kabaservice, he believes a populist message is possible and indeed unavoidable: “[C]urrent polling suggests that to not do so would be political malpractice.” But he argues for what he calls an “aspirational populism” that broadens the blunt class-based “fairness” argument into a call for restoring opportunities for individual upward mobility:

[T]his aspect of his populism has received less play than his general emphasis on fairness. That needs to change. He needs to double down on the argument that inequality is a drag on mobility and growth and articulate a strong aspirational program to go along with it. President Obama wants you to go to college! Or get the training you need! Or start a business! Or do whatever fits your definition of getting ahead! And here’s how we’re going to help you do it. Oh, and did I mention that my opponent’s program provides you with nothing, since it consists entirely of giving more money to those who already have a lot?

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When Mitt Romney blurted out the other day that “even Jimmy Carter” would have approved the operation to kill Osama bin Laden, he invited some pretty pointed criticism (especially, as we noted here, from James Fallows) for treating the 39th president as no more than a symbol of weakness. But it seemed a passing reference to many.

But now today in a campaign rally in Northern Virginia, Romney seems to have Jimmy Carter on the brain, this time in the context of domestic issues, as Politico’s Reid Epstein reports:

Romney, who has built his campaign pitch around the idea that Americans remember better economic times, sought to draw a contrast between the current economy and the one during Jimmy Carter’s presidency.

“It was the most anti-small business administration I’ve seen probably since Carter,” he said. “Who would’ve guessed we’d look back at the Carter years as the good ol’ days, you know?

So what’s up with this? Republicans routinely scold Obama for any hint of blaming George W. Bush for the state of the economy or of the federal budget. Jimmy Carter left office well over thirty years ago, and like most ex-presidents, built a generally positive reputation, though one that has suffered recently (yet is still in positive territory) thanks to some highly controversial foreign-policy statements. Why is Mitt Romney running against Jimmy Carter?

For one thing, it should be remembered that Romney is still in the mode of trying to reassure GOP conservatives that he’s “one of them.” Carter was vanquished by Ronald Reagan, so the identification of Obama with Carter creates a framework where MItt is the new St. Ronnie. The parallels were drawn most directly by Romney in a March WaPo op-ed about how he’d deal with Iran, in which he draws upon Reagan’s behavior towards the mullahs as though quoting from Holy Scripture. Going a tad deeper, it’s not just a matter of creating warm and fuzzy associations with conservatives’ favorite president since Calvin Coolidge: Reagan “proved” that the Republican Party could win not only despite because of taking a decisive conservative turn. That’s precisely what they’ve been trying to do since Election Day 2008.

But I suspect the main reason for bringing up Carter and Reagan is a message to the media: the appropriate precedent for this election is 1980. Then, as now, you had an incumbent Democratic president with a poor economy who tried to make the election something other than a straight referendum on his record. It didn’t work, and it won’t work for Obama, either, so the media should ignore all of the incumbent’s efforts to make the election a choice of “two futures” and instead stare monomaniacally at the economic indicators and Obama’s job approval rating, even if Mitt’s out there saying crazy things to fire up his conservative “base.”

This became most apparent immediately after Obama’s tough speech last month to the newspaper editors association blasting Paul Ryan’s budget and suggesting that the general election campaign “will probably have the biggest contrast that we’ve seen maybe since the Johnson-Goldwater election.” Romney immediately went on Fox News and challenged that parallel:

“I think the contrast is better — not so much Goldwater and Johnson — but more Carter and Reagan.

I think this president represents a throw-back to the old style Democrats of the past — big government, welfare state Democrats, and that most Democrats moved away from that.

Most of the arguments we’ll hear from the two campaigns about historical precedents for this election will continue to more or less involve Democrats talking about 1964 and Republicans talking about 1980, even if it winds up looking more like 2004. But for Mitt, it’s a big-time two-fer: comparing Obama to Carter and Reagan to himself is sweet music to the ears of conservatives, and it’s very important to keep telling the people covering this campaign that all he needs to do to win is to cross a low threshold of credibility and let the economy drag Obama down.

* After bad bout with pizza (the pizza won), I’m back to healthy snacks today. Here are a few mid-day treats:

* Gingrich campaign lurches to an end $4 million in debt. And this was the guy who was going to restore fiscal responsibility in Washington (along, of course, with the traditional family).

* CREW asks FCC to cancel Fox broadcast licenses because of News Corp’s behavior in UK phone-hacking scandal. It ain’t happening, but an interesting shot across the bow.

* Another profile in courage from a WV Dem: Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin says he, like Sen. Manchin, not sure he’ll vote for Obama.

* Romney rally in NoVa has women, women, women ever-present in supporters and rhetoric. They can read polls.

* At TAP, Amanda Marcotte analyzes hipster-bashing of latest American Crossroads ad.

And in non-political news:

* Joan of Arc’s 600th birthday celebrated in France.

Until today, I was only vaguely aware that Scott Brown’s campaign and its allies were trying to make a big deal out of Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren’s past self-identification (and once, her identification by Harvard Law School) as a “Native American.” It mainly caught my attention because, like Warren (and for that matter, like many white people I’ve known from North Georgia or Oklahoma), I have a Cherokee ancestor, a great-great-grandmother as it happpens, though I’ve never self-identified myself that way.

Then I ran across a Boston Herald (the original source of the whole story) column by a certain Howie Carr that shows exactly how ugly and overtly racial this attack-line has become. It’s not, in fact, really about Elizabeth Warren, but about an increasingly aggressive effort on the Right to invent a nightmare-world where incompetent women and minorities are lording it over the poor afflicted white male.

Keep in mind that there is not a shred of evidence that Warren ever benefitted in any way from her self-identification; indeed, every university who’s hired her in the course of her very distinguished academic career has indicated they weren’t even aware of it, and certainly didn’t make it a factor in employing her.

That doesn’t deter Carr from asserting that “Pocohantas” Warren “parlayed the racial-spoils racket all the way to a tenured position at Harvard Law,” or that her case “shows just how morally and intellectually bankrupt ‘affirmative action’ is.” For good measure, he lurches into an equally unsubstantiated claim that President Obama got a “free pass to Columbia and Harvard Law” because of his race.

Look, I can understand how people can legitimately question this or that aspect of academic affirmative action policies, but this seething hatred against any woman or minority member who has won a measure of success in a system where white men still massively, overwhelmingly run the country is just bizarre. Anyone looking at Barack Obama or Elizabeth Warren and immediately seeing the beneficiary of a “spoils racket” is just deranged beyond redemption—or perhaps, in Carr’s case, just cynical beyond belief.