Aside from its separate effort to pretend it is implementing Paul Ryan’s budget resolution (which, of course, was buried in the Senate), House GOPers are moving ahead this week to pretend to enact serious safety-net reductions in order to avoid the “automatic sequestration” of defense funds set up in last year’s debt-limit deal. That’s not going anywhere in the Senate, either, and in any event, the president’s promised to veto it.

Notes Think Progress:

Under the Republican plan, millions of Americans would lose access to services they depend on. Nearly two million would lose food assistance through the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP); at least 750,000 would lose access to health insurance from cuts to Medicaid and the Affordable Care Act; and 23 million would be affected by the repeal of the Social Services Block Grant, which helps fund child care and disability assistance to low-income Americans, among other programs.

Normally Members of Congress don’t call for these sorts of painful and unpopular cuts unless they are making some sort of a compelling argument that it is necessary. In this case, since the whole exercise is a sham, they just want to go on record as saying they are determined to give the Pentagon money it says it doesn’t need in order to inflict some serious privations on people who truly are in need. And they’re loud ‘n’ proud about it.

Just a reminder: Tomorrow’s election activity centers on three states, Indiana, Wisconsin and North Carolina.

In the Hoosier State, there is scattered talk of Sen. Richard Lugar pulling off some kind of audacious upset over Richard Mourdock to save his job, but the polls show no such signs, and all in all, it looks like the state’s hard-core conservatives learned from their narrow defeat by Dan Coates in 2010 to combine their resources behind a single candidate. Lugar’s only chance would be a significant crossover vote from Democrats, and if that’s about to happen, it’s a very quiet campaign.

In Wisconsin, Tom Barrett and Kathleen Falk battle for the Democratic nomination to succeed Scott Walker if he is recalled on June 5. The only recent published poll, from Marquette, showed Barrett with a comfortable lead despite vocal opposition to his candidacy from public employee unions. Barrett lost to Walker in 2010, but Democrats think the polarized effect of Walker’s policies plus more balanced turnout patterns could give him a decent chance; Barrett/Walker polls are very close.

And in North Carolina, opponents of Amendment One are hoping for a huge turnout of younger voters and the success of last minute “educational” efforts to make voters understand how draconian the measure is. But the polling shows Amendment One likely to pass by a comfortable if not overwhelming margin.

Meanwhile, in the Democratic gubernatorial primary, Lt. Gov. Walter Dalton looks to be pulling away from former Congressman Bobby Ethridge. Dalton does need to top 40% to avoid a runoff, but probably will. On the Republican side, former Charlotte mayor Pat McCrory is expected to win the gubernatorial primary easily.

You know, I’m really beginning to enjoy the mini-campaign underway to puff Ohio Sen. Rob Portman into something other than a boring Beltway conservative lifer who’s more or less the default-drive Veep option. Last week we had the exciting news that in the barrios of America, Hispanic voters are practically chanting his name, so inoffensive are his views about immigration (and he learned Spanish in college!).

Now we learn that this mild-mannered party hack has been auditioning as an attack dog—one of those time-honored roles for a Veep. Jonathan Karl of ABC has the story, as spun to him by Portman’s staff:

Just over the past week, the normally soft-spoken Portman has issued a series of blistering - for him anyway - attacks on Barack Obama.

By today’s standards, these attacks are actually fairly tame (nothing compared to what Newt Gingrich has said about Romney, for example), but the tough new tone shows Portman is not afraid to play the traditional attack-dog role of a vice presidential candidate.

Here’s a rundown of what we’ve heard from Portman of just the last week

- In an interview with Bret Baier on Fox News, Portman turned a question about his lack of “sizzle” into a slam on Obama. “America made a decision in 2008 to go with a president who did have sizzle. And look, he was kind of a celebrity. He also had a very compelling message which was, remember this, ‘I’m going to bring people together to solve problems.’ Didn’t happen. And it didn’t happen because he didn’t have the experience, he didn’t have the record, he didn’t have the policies to do it.”

- A few days later, Portman accused the President of offering only “lofty rhetoric and poll-tested platitudes” when he visited Ohio. “Instead of changing course, President Obama wants to double down with more job-killing taxes, higher spending, dangerous levels of debt, and more burdensome regulations from Washington.”

- When the disappointing jobs report came out on Friday, Portman blamed the President for an economy that has 5 million fewer jobs than before the recession, saying “Unfortunately, time and time again, the Obama administration chooses politics over policy and style over substance.”

I’ll pause for a moment to let your heart stop racing.

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In a fine rant for TAP about Mitt Romney’s relative success in convincing people that his private-sector experience will make him a “Mr. Fix-It” for the U.S. economy, Paul Waldman hits on a pretty important point:

Romney does have a lengthy economic plan, but it amounts to the same thing Republicans always advocate: tax cuts, particularly on the wealthy; spending cuts in domestic programs; eliminating regulations; free trade; undermining labor unions, and so on. The closest thing to an innovative idea is the creation of a “Reagan Economic Zone,” which presumably will create wealth through the repeated incantation of the great one’s name.

Which is just the point: if Mitt Romney’s experience in private equity gives him such unique understanding of the economy, why is what he proposes exactly what you’d hear from any Republican who spent his working life in government? It’s partly because Romney is a Republican, and things like tax cuts and reductions in regulation are just what Republicans believe. But maybe it’s also because when it comes to the things government can do to affect the economy, being a businessman doesn’t give you such special insight after all.

Waldman made a similar argument back in 2010 when California was being bombarded with ads from Carly Fiorina and (especially) Meg Whitman touting their business experience as being their top credentials for statewide office.

Ultimately, such “I know the economy” claims usually come down to little more than a personal character reference: I’ve succeeded in one area of life, and so you should trust me to succeed in another. As Waldman notes, you can undermine such claims in different ways:

[You can] comb through Romney’s career and figure out what combination of attacks will create a negative association in the public’s mind when the words “Romney” and “business” are mentioned together. Maybe the key will be his personal wealth and hilarious habit of saying things that reinforce his distance from the struggles of ordinary people, or maybe it will be stories of layoffs at companies Bain Capital acquired, or maybe it will be some new story we haven’t yet heard of.

But ultimately, the argument that corporate titans know more about government policies that might strengthen the economy than anyone else needs a direct hit. If, as appears to be the case with Romney, said titans are essentially arguing that there is no positive government role in the economy and that all his brilliance and experience will be brought to bear on the task of “getting government out of the way” as quickly as possible, why not just elevate a laptop to the presidency, running the best available destroy-the-government software available from conservative think tanks? Mitt’s detractors often mock him as a robot or a cyborg based on his peculiar personality and/or his apparent lack of inhibition about doing absolutely anything it takes to curry favor with today’s voters even if it contradicts what he was saying yesterday. But there’s a more basic point to be made that any fool, or any machine, can implement Romney’s economic platform. As I’ve noted earlier, if he gets a Republican-controlled Congress, a President Romney could whip through his agenda in less than 100 days.

So perhaps Mitt should be asked as often as possible: what will you do as president to revive the economy that anyone with a copy of your platform—or the Ryan budget—could do? Aren’t your talents more suited to being a “job-creator” than a government-destroyer? Give us just one example of something you learned at Bain that the rest of us don’t know, that would create jobs, okay, Mitt?

Don’t know if this sort of line of inquiry would turn votes, but it would sure get under his skin, or his case, or whatever it is that holds him together.

Monday news is often slow, but things are picking up, so here’s some energy bites:

* Yglesias suggests Hollande might introduce an element of “perestroika” into Eurozone debates.

* WaTimes’ Joseph Curl hints Obama is a racist for failing to publicly note death of Beastie Boy MCA.

* Arne Duncan acknowledges support for marriage equality; not so clear Biden did the same over the weekend.

* For those who love journalistic insider stories, this AdWeek report on doings at WaPo is the bomb.

* TPM’s Ryan Reilly argues Super-PACs will have biggest impact in state races.

And in non-political news:

* Octomom completes first porn video, films publicity shot covered in Spaghetti-Os.

While you absorb that idea, I’ll take a brief blogging break.

There are a couple of big polls (one the Battleground Poll sponsored by Politico and George Washington University, the other, which only covers 12 “swing states,” from Gallup/USA Today) out today showing the presidential contest as a dead heat. Romney’s gains from previous polls by these outfits are mostly predictable, and reflect the consolidation of Republican voters behind their “presumptive nominee.”

There’s one wrinkle in the Battleground Poll that bears a bit more scrutiny, however: Obama’s unusually high “personal favorability” ratings (70% approve of him “as a person,” 56% strongly). These numbers are probably higher than in similar “favorability” measurements precisely because the poll explicitly dissociates the sentiment from job approval and thus may elicit positive feelings; Romney scores a pretty impressive 56% “favorable” in the same poll, though only 29% approve of him “strongly.”

So what’s the relationship between personal favoriability, job approval, and voting preferences? Last August Reid Wilson of National Journal explored this question at a time when Obama’s job approval rating looked to be cratering, and came up with a pretty persuasive answer:

Favorability ratings generally represent a ceiling, above which job-approval ratings do not rise. And poor job-approval ratings, over the long term, can prove a drag on an incumbent’s favorability ratings. A short-term drop in approval ratings doesn’t portend a corresponding drop in personal favorability—but when favorable numbers begin to descend, it’s an ominous sign for anyone planning to run for another term.

Wilson contrasts Bill Clinton in his first term with George W. Bush in his second:

[I]n 1994, Clinton’s approval rating dropped to a low of 38 percent, as measured by the Pew Research Center. Clinton endured a period, from March 1994 to October 1995, during which his approval rating hit 50 percent only once. And yet, during that same period, his favorability rating stayed strong, starting around 58 percent and ending, after only a single dip below the 50 percent mark, at 56 percent in January 1996. Beginning with that January poll, Clinton’s approval rating rebounded; by November, when he asked voters for a second term, his job-approval rate stood at 57 percent….

A string of bad news and federal government failures—starting with Hurricane Katrina in 2005, the spiraling chaos of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and political problems in Washington—sent George W. Bush’s job-performance rating plummeting. His performance rating hit 50 percent in January 2005, just after he was reelected, and never reached the halfway mark again. The number of Americans who disapproved of his performance hit 52 percent in early September 2005, just after Katrina; it didn’t fall below 52 percent for the rest of his tenure.

Americans began to view Bush as personally unfavorable at about the same time. A July 2005 Pew survey showed 51 percent of Americans had a favorable impression of the president. By late October, that number had sunk to 46 percent, then stayed in the high 30s for most of the rest of his term. Voters had had enough; Bush’s job-approval rating led the way down, and once the favorable ratings followed, there was no way to recover politically.

So by either example, the fact that Obama’s personal favorability is holding up so well six months from election day is a positive sign for him—an indication, as Wilson puts it, that swing voters “are rooting for him to succeed.” It certainly suggests that the door is open for him to make a case not only that he’s done a better job than undecided voters might initially think, but that his policies offer a better path forward than those of Mitt Romney, particularly after a highly polarizing general election campaign that tends to make it clear it’s a real, and stark, choice.

I wrote earlier today about our Sneak Preview of Laura Colarusso’s fascinating cover article from the May/June issue of the Washington Monthly about the Romney/Rubio problem with the dominant Spanish-language media outlet in the country, Univision, and its highly influential nightly news anchor, Jorge Ramos. I also mentioned in passing Fox’s effort to compete with Univision via a new channel named MundoFox, set to debut this fall.

But there’s another development today which could strengthen Univision’s influence: an announcement that ABC and Univision are about to launch a new English-language cable network aimed at Hispanic audiences in this country. Here’s the New York Times’ report by Brian Stelter:

The companies, which will each own 50 percent of the joint venture, said Monday morning that the channel — which is, as yet, unnamed — would start sometime in the first half of 2013. Ben Sherwood, the president of ABC News, said it would be “a 24/7 news, information and lifestyle network primarily in English that will serve the youngest and fastest-growing demographic in the country: U.S. Hispanics.”

The channel will include lifestyle, entertainment and health-related programming as well as traditional news programming, thereby distinguishing it from cable news channels like CNN and Fox News. Nonetheless, it will likely garner comparisons to traditional cable news channels.

Both companies get something distinctive out of the collaboration. ABC obtains a cable subscriber base to help subsidize its broadcast news coverage (much as MSNBC helps defray NBC News’ costs) along with penetration of an important market. And Univision goes hunting where the ducks are in terms of its core audience:

Media companies like Disney are eager to provide advertisers new ways to reach Hispanics, whose numbers are swelling according to census estimates. A recent report by Nielsen projected that the buying power of Hispanics in the United States, estimated at $1 trillion in 2010, will grow to $1.5 trillion in 2015.

Spanish-language programming alone isn’t sufficient. Researchers say first-generation Hispanics in the United States tend to watch shows in Spanish, but many second- and third-generation Hispanics gravitate toward shows in English — which partly explains why Univision has been trying to expand in this area. Univision recently started providing English-language subtitles for some of its Spanish-language prime time shows.

Univision has also been expanding its news division, which isn’t nearly as well known as the English-language news divisions of NBC, ABC and CBS. It has added newscasts at some of its local stations and rolled out a Spanish-language news channel on Dish Network.

As TPM’s David Taintor notes today, this collaboration is a challenge to NBC on two different fronts:

Monday’s announcement is bound to make some NBC executives nervous. That network’s spanish-language network, Telemundo, distantly trails Univision’s ratings.

Guess I should feel lucky my TNR column on Ron Paul appeared over the weekend, since his supporters were certainly making some political news. But it’s not news I specifically anticipated. As I was writing about the Revolution’s delegate coups in Massachusetts and Iowa, the Paulites were pulling off fresh acts of audacity in Maine and Nevada.

The Maine state GOP convention, whose results Romney’s legal team (featuring a star of the 2000 outrage, Benjamin Ginsburg) will ask the RNC to overturn, appears to have delivered the Doctor 20 of the state’s 24 national convention delegates. Meanwhile, in Nevada, in a situation analogous to Massachusetts, Paulites overhwhelmingly dominated delegate selection at a state convention (22 out of the 25 at stake), but will have to abide by rules instructing them to vote according to the results of the caucuses back in February, won by Romney.

It now looks like followers of the Revolution will represent (whether they can vote for his actual candidacy or not) at least a plurality of delegates in a minimum of seven states: Maine, Nevada, Iowa, Massachusetts, Louisiana, Colorado and Minnesota. They will be a noisy presence in Tampa.

There was some suspense thanks to a last-minute polling trend in favor of the incumbent, but in the end Socialist Francois Hollande edged Nicolas Sarkozy to become president of France, dealing a direct blow to “Merkozy”, the German-Franco alliance sponsoring EU austerity policies. Since it was accompanied by an absolute meltdown for the governing parties in elections in Greece, the French results indicate a new departure in European politics, notes Paul Krugman:

Both countries held elections Sunday that were in effect referendums on the current European economic strategy, and in both countries voters turned two thumbs down. It’s far from clear how soon the votes will lead to changes in actual policy, but time is clearly running out for the strategy of recovery through austerity — and that’s a good thing.

Needless to say, that’s not what you heard from the usual suspects in the run-up to the elections. It was actually kind of funny to see the apostles of orthodoxy trying to portray the cautious, mild-mannered François Hollande as a figure of menace. He is “rather dangerous,” declared The Economist, which observed that he “genuinely believes in the need to create a fairer society.” Quelle horreur!

Angela Merkel’s party also experienced a setback in a state election in Schleswig-Holstein that was widely viewed as a table-setter for next year’s German national elections.

All in all, it’s a bit of a muddle for those in our country who view the European political landscape as one of virtuous, powerful austerity advocates taming financially bankrupt reactionaries hanging onto “unsustainable” welfare state policies, with the United States eventually facing the same choice of austerity or ruin.

There’s little doubt that the unsavory reputation that Mitt Romney and his party have earned among Hispanic voters is a major challege to a Republican victory this November. And a very specific problem they face is one that most Anglos don’t know much about: many millions of Hispanic voters will get a lot of their political information via the Spanish-language network Univision, and will pay particular attention to the nightly take on the news of Jorge Ramos, a.k.a., “the Walter Cronkite of Hispanic News.” Romney—and moreover, the man many consider his savior among Hispanic voters, Sen. Marco Rubio—have at best a rocky relationship with Univision and with Ramos, explains Laura Colarusso in “The Anchor,” the cover article from the upcoming May/June issue of The Washington Monthly.

Colarrusso’s piece, available today in a Sneak Preview online, provides an excellent backgrounder on Spanish-language media, Univision, and Jorge Ramos’ uniquely trusted position in Hispanic-American culture. It is Ramos who tripped up Mitt Romney in an interview just prior to the Florida primary by asking him if he considered himself “Mexican-American” because of his family’s involvement with a polygamous community in Mexico; Ramos has also been pursuing Rubio for an interview, a challenge he will probably have to meet if he intends to appeal to Hispanic voters outside Florida.

Moreover, Colarusso explains, aside from its coverage of candidates, Univision is planning an extensive campaign of its own to encourage Hispanic voting this fall—in part to overcome Repubican-sponsored voter ID laws and other impediments to voting. It probably won’t affect the current election, but conservatives in the long run will expect help from MundoFox, a Fox News Spanish-language channel that will begin broadcasting this fall as well.

“The Anchor” is extraordinarily timely, and covers an aspect of the 2012 presidential contest that is widely misunderstood and often oversimplified. Please check it out.

There’s a very nice weather report today where I live, so I couldn’t resist beginning the day with this classic video of the Allman Brothers from 1991, performing “Blue Sky.” I first saw the Brothers in 1970, when they were still a largely provincial act, and they’ve had their ups and downs, but this performance is way up there. Enjoy.

Have a great weekend, guys. It was fun stopping by.

I like Peter Cohan’s take on edX, the big collaboration between Harvard and MIT to put a bunch of college courses online:

So if pricing is a market signal, what message is the free edX sending out to consumers and suppliers of higher education? To answer that, it’s worth pointing out that there are many reasons that people apply to these top colleges - and among those reasons, free edX sends a signal that knowledge of an academic subject is nowhere near the top of the list of what is important to parents who are making the tuition payments.

What Harvard and MIT and the other globally-leading schools offer students are two priceless assets - branding and professional networks. Branding means that the most exclusive club in the world has decided that you have the magic combination of brains and personality that will result in exceptional career accomplishment. And their alumni networks occupy top positions in fields that matter to their students - thus providing students with access to opportunities they would not otherwise have.

As long as students who take edX are blocked from the branding and professional networks that their parents pay so dearly to obtain, such top schools have nothing to fear from giving away what the teachers are getting paid modestly to deliver.

Right. The vast majority of what college students learn could be learned differently and less expensively. College degrees exist in large part as a signalling mechanism to employers—“Oh, he completed four years at Harvard? He must have been smart to have gotten into and through such a difficult institution”—not to mention, in many circles at least, potential friends and romantic partners.

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I missed it when it went up a couple days ago, but Noam Scheiber had a great post about the relationship between Wall Street’s denizens and Obama.

He pulls out this nugget from a piece in today’s Times Magazine:

For the next hour, the [Wall Street] donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. …

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich?

Yes, it would be a historic speech—a powerful person finally standing up for other powerful people!

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