The Londoner

Republicans have a major Latino problem, but it didn’t cost them the 2012 election. According to a Fix review of election results, Mitt Romney would have needed to carry as much as 51 percent of the Hispanic vote in order to win the Electoral College — a number no Republican presidential candidate on record has been able to attain and isn’t really within the realm of possibility these days. Latinos did push President Obama over the top in several key states — including Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Pennsylvania — that he would have lost without them. (Obama also would have lost the popular vote without Latinos.) But it was a given that Obama was going to win a higher share of their votes; what mattered was the margin. And in order for Romney to have won the presidency, he would have needed to perform far better than any previous Republican presidential candidate. Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney speaks to the Hispanic Leadership Network in

By Katrina Trinko A s college costs rise rapidly in most places, Texas and Florida are trying to implement something that has become a radical notion: a degree that costs only $10,000. Texas governor Rick Perry announced this goal for his state last year. (Perry was inspired by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who had remarked that online learning ought to make it possible for students to pay just $2,000 per year for college.) In November, Florida governor Rick Scott announced that he, too, wanted to see state colleges offer bachelor’s degrees for $10,000 or less. In Texas, ten colleges have signed on (some of them working together in a partnership), while in Florida, twelve colleges — nearly half of the 23 four-year colleges in the Florida community-college system, which includes both two-year and four-year institutions — e

Union chants echoed off the Capitol dome before the Republican-controlled state Legislature's courageous vote on the right-to-work bill: "Whose house?" "Our house!" Not anymore. The Capitol now belongs to all the people of Michigan. For 60 years or so, labor unions have dominated policymaking and politics in this state. Even as their membership dwindled to a sliver of the work force — 17 percent — their stifling influence over Lansing kept Michigan from adopting the common-sense reforms that would have made it more competitive for jobs and investment. Competitiveness is what Gov. Rick Snyder is all about. His decision to lead the right-to-work push stemmed from his desire to give Michigan every advantage possible in competing with other states for economic development. It was not, as his critics charge, a capitulation to big money GOP interests or a hypocritical betrayal of his commitment to relentless positive action. The only hypocrisy at work

You hear a lot about openness and transparency—and the disinfecting power of sunlight—as keys to effective government. But let’s summon at least two cheers for the occasional usefulness of the backroom deal. T he most encouraging news in Washington in ages was the word that Barack Obama and John Boehner were talking—by themselves, and to each other —about how to avoid the series of automatic tax increases and spending cuts that could send the country over the so-called fiscal cliff. Boehner went to see the president at the White House last Sunday for their first solo meeting since the November election. It’s about time. Because it’s a truth universally understood—if not universally acknowledged—in the capital these days that absolutely nothing important gets done in public. If, as Emerson said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” transparency has become the mortal enemy of legislative achievement. The fet

President Obama has just days to decide, or reveal, whether he will be Santa Claus or the Grinch as an anxious nation speeds past our Christmas of crisis toward the fiscal cliff. He can choose to offer up a deal large enough to resolve not only the first cliff but the second cliff — requiring us to raise the debt ceiling — with entitlement reform that is consequential enough not only to move Republicans on tax increases, but to steer Medicare away from insolvency and the nation’s political debate away from brinkmanship, for a while at least. Or Obama can offer proposals that don’t begin to cushion the blow of new taxes for Republicans and either take us over the cliff or get at best a last-minute patch with more treacherous triggers, the kind the world has watched our country consistently fail to meet since mid-2011.  Read the full story here.

As long as unchecked American militarism continues, the phenomena of anti-Americanism will continue to spread and damage the ability of the US to find necessary allies in a strategically-important part of the world [EPA] The incongruity of it seemed to be nothing short of a betrayal. After lightheartedly dancing his way into the hearts of Americans and gaining entrance to the inner sanctum of their cherished cult of celebrity, the Korean rapper, Psy, whose song "Gangam Style" became the most watched video in the history of YouTube and made him a pop culture sensation, has been revealed to have a politically active past which places him directly at odds with the American mainstream worldview and which violently decries its most basic articles of faith . The man whom they enjoyed as an unthreatening, com

"Are you monitoring the construction?" asked the middle-aged man on a bike accompanied by his dog. "Ah, sì," I replied in my barely passable Italian. "Bene," he answered. Good. In front of us, a backhoe's guttural engine whined into action and empty dump trucks rattled along a dirt track. The shouts of men vied for attention with the metallic whirring of drills and saws ringing in the distance. Nineteen immense cranes spread across the landscape, with the foothills of Italy's Southern Alps in the background. More than 100 pieces of earthmoving equipment, 250 workers, and grids of scaffolding wrapped around what soon would be 34 new buildings. We were standing in front of a massive 145-acre construction site for a "little America" rising in Vicenza, an architecturally renowned Italian city and UNESCO world heritage site near Venice. This was Dal Molin, the new military base the U.S. Army has been readying for the relo

AS President Obama approaches his second term, few foreign policies are more in need of reassessment than his stance toward Russia. Recent events have eroded the promise of the “reset” proclaimed in 2009. Its achievements — the New START Treaty, cooperation on Afghanistan and Iran, Russia’s entry into the World Trade Organization — have faded, replaced by stubborn differences over Syria, Iran and other high-profile issues amid rising, gratuitously antagonistic rhetoric in both capitals. Obama will now try to reverse this deterioration, perhaps demonstrating some of the “flexibility” he promised Russian leaders earlier this year. Putin, for his part, has talked about giving the relations “a new quality” by adding a strong economic dimension. We may hear talk of a second phase of the reset. There may be more deals of the kind ExxonMobil struck with Rosneft . But glib formulations and major energy projects should not cover up the fundamental cho

Americans wondering why North Korea has gotten away with building A-bombs and ballistic missiles—like the one it successfully tested Tuesday—need only consider Jeff Immelt.  The day before the missile launch, the CEO of General Electric and friend of President Obama endorsed China’s economic model and said “state-run communism may not be your cup of tea, but their government works.” What do the unpatriotic sentiments of GE’s boss have to do with U.S. policy toward North Korea? Both are based on the faulty but soothing assumption held by the elite establishment in American government and big business: that China is our partner. Two successive administrations—Bush and Obama—have based U.S. policy on North Korea on supposed Chinese cooperation. The theory is that Beijing doesn’t want North Korea armed with effective nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles any more than Washington or its allies, and will thus be of help. In 2003, Washington kicked off six-way talks hoping to

At first glance, the British bank HSBC’s agreement to pay $1.9 billion to settle a money-laundering probe seems like very good news. It is the largest penalty ever imposed on a bank; the U.S. government accused HSBC of transferring funds “through the U.S. from Mexican drug cartels and on behalf of nations such as Iran that are under international sanctions.” Furthermore, the settlement is a “deferred-prosecution agreement,” which means that U.S. authorities can resume the case if HSBC does not strengthen internal oversight and avoid similar violations for the next five years. (Most settlements between big Wall Street firms and the U.S. government remove the threat of charges for the violations; the firms then make the same violations again a few years later .) Despite the impressive fine, the settlement still leaves much to worry about as regards Wall Street’s disproportionate power over the government. To begin with, while smaller companies’ executives  are (justly) head

By Steve Benen  -  Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's (R) school voucher scheme has been plagued by a series of problems, culminating in a legal defeat in a state court two weeks ago. But in a Brookings speech yesterday, the Republican governor said he still sees his plan as a national model . "I think there is a moral imperative that it's not right that only wealthy parents get to decide where their kids go to school," Jindal told an audience at Washington's Brookings Institution. [...] "To oppose school choice is to oppose equal opportunity for poor and disadvantaged students in America," he said. "What we are putting in motion in Louisiana can be done across the country." This is certainly standard rhetoric from the right. They're not trying to privatize public schools out of existence, the argument goes, they're simply trying to use tax dollars to provide new opportunities to "poor and dis

I t has largely gone unnoticed amidst the hullabaloo surrounding the fiscal cliff, but regardless of what happens with the cliff negotiations, taxes are going up next year. The president may be calling for $1.6 trillion in tax hikes by 2022 in exchange for not driving the country over the cliff, but that does not count Obamacare, which will impose an additional $1 trillion in new or increased taxes over the next ten years, a big portion of which take effect in 2013. For example, we’ve heard a great deal about President Obama’s demand that taxes go up for individuals earning $200,000 per year or families making more than $250,000. But under Obamacare, those families will already be hit with a 0.9 percent hike in the Medicare payroll tax on earnings over these thresholds starting January 1. Roughly 3 million Americans will end up paying more as a result of this hike, which is projected to raise $86 billion. And while $250,000 per year may seem like a great deal of money t

  Mr. President, it’s unbecoming for a columnist to beg, but since you’ve ruled out “ going constitutional ” on the debt limit, and CEOs won’t flex enough muscle to stop Republicans from using it for blackmail again, I’m down on my knees.  You simply have to enlist the press to generate a roar of protest against GOP hypocrisy and recklessness here — or else doom us to lurching painfully (and pathetically) from “fiscal cliff” to “debt cliff” for months. The good news is this can be done with an investment of a mere five minutes of your time. So here’s a plan. The linchpin of the Republican argument is that the debt limit represents their only leverage to curb your insatiable spending appetites — the only way to deny you a blank check that soaks the nation in debt. “We’re not going to let Obama borrow any more money .... until we fix this country from becoming Greece,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.c) in a typical

Not so many moons ago, President Obama urged us all to "make sure that we are talking with each other in a way that heals, not a way that wounds." He Who Heals advocated "a more civil and honest public discourse" in the wake of the January 2011 Tucson massacre. As usual, though, the White House has granted Big Labor bullies a permanent waiver from the lofty edicts it issues to everyone else. This week, menacing union goons unleashed threats, profanity and punches in Michigan, which is now poised to become a "right-to-work" state. Obama met the initial outbreak of violence with the same response he's given to every other union outbreak of violence under his reign: dead silence. On the floor of the Michigan legislature on Tuesday, Democratic state Rep. Douglas Geiss thundered: "We're going to pass something that will undo 100 years of labor relations, and there will be blood. There will be repercussions!" Geiss referenced th