Euro is mostly rangebound today, making small gains against the US dollar, after a Dutch bond auction proved reasonably successful. The euro has been struggling lately due to concerns about the political stability of eurozone countries, as well as continued worries about Spain.

Japanese yen is mixed today as Forex traders look for direction. There is a lot to think about today, in terms of news and forecasts, and currencies are part of the confusion. Yen has slipped against the euro after choppy trading, but is higher against the pound and the dollar.

Euro Rangebound in Forex Trading

Euro is mostly rangebound today, making small gains against the US dollar, after a Dutch bond auction proved reasonably successful. The euro has been struggling lately due to concerns about the political stability of eurozone countries, as well as continued worries about Spain.

The Great Britain pound rose today against the US dollar after a report showed that confidence of Britons unexpectedly improved last month, muting speculations about quantitative easing from the Bank of England. The currency was down against the Japanese yen.

The Great Britain pound rose today against the US dollar after a report showed that confidence of Britons unexpectedly improved last month, muting speculations about quantitative easing from the Bank of England. The currency was down against the Japanese yen

GBP/USD Higher as Consumer Confidence Improves

The Great Britain pound rose today against the US dollar after a report showed that confidence of Britons unexpectedly improved last month, muting speculations about quantitative easing from the Bank of England. The currency was down against the Japanese yen.

Euro Struggles on Weak Sentiment Data

Euro is struggling this morning, thanks in large part to weak sentiment data. Losses have been limited, though, by the information out of the United States about what could happen next with the Federal Reserve. As a result, the euro is hovering around the level of its open, and struggling to move much higher.

Swedish Consumer Confidence Rises, Krona Follows

The Swedish krona climbed today against most major currencies after a report showed that confidence on Swedish households improved this month, reducing probability of a next interest rate cut by the nation’s central bank.

Aussie Gets a Boost Amidst Concerns

Aussie is getting a boost today, amidst concerns plaguing other currencies around the world. Australian dollar is moving higher, with a little help from higher gold prices, as well as comparisons to other currencies.

Euro Falls as S&P Downgrades Spain

The euro fell today as Standard & Poor’s downgraded Spain’s sovereign credit rating, adding to speculations that the debt crisis is spreading across Europe despite measures taken by European governments

Yen Gains Even as Bank of Japan Adds Stimulus

The Japanese yen gained today as demand for safety overcame Bank of Japan’s attempts to weaken the currency. The yen slumped earlier as the BoJ expanded its asset purchase program to support the struggling economy.

US Dollar Falls Across the Board

US dollar is falling across the board today as some optimism makes an appearance in the markets, and as traders continue to digest the latest statement from the Federal Reserve. The dollar index is down today, and greenback is struggling against its major counterparts.

Canadian Dollar Gets a Boost in Forex Trading

Canadian dollar is getting a boost today in forex trading, receiving some help from disappointing US economic data. Indeed, a lot of the loonie’s gains today are coming as a result of disappointing news, and less about solid advances made by the Canadian currency.

Aussie Posts Gains as Bank of Japan Boosts Liquidity

The Australian dollar climbed today, reaching a monthly high versus its US counterpart, after the stimulating measures of the Bank of Japan boosted commodities and global stocks. The currency was down against the yen, though.

mexican-peso-erases-losses-as-bank-of-mexico-doesnt-cut-interest-rates

The Mexican peso trimmed its losses versus the US dollar today after the nation’s central bank left it key overnight interbank funding rate unchanged for the 26th consecutive meeting, disappointing traders who expected an interest rate cut.

Bank of Japan Not Able to Spoil Good Week for Yen

The Japanese yen gained this week against other major currencies and headed to the biggest monthly gain since June against the US dollar on fears of the crisis in Europe and concerns that the health of the US economy is not as good as was previously considered.

Angry Boehner to Dems: Enough with the “war on women” crap already

The exciting conclusion to the great student-loan interest-rate debate. Remember, Romney sided with Obama on extending the current lower rate a few days ago so the questions for House Republicans were (a) whether they’d go along and (b) if so, how they’d pay for it. The solution: Extend the rate and offset the $6 billion cost by cutting a similar amount from the new Prevention and Public Health Fund in ObamaCare instead. No way were the Democrats going to let the GOP get away that easily, though, so here was Pelosi this morning demagoging the issue in the shrillest, most electorally advantageous way possible:

“Their priority is to protect the subsidies for Big Oil,” said Pelosi at a Capitol Hill press conference on Thursday. “Our priority is to prevent breast cancer, cervical cancer, to immunize our children, so that they are healthy.”
Pelosi also charged that Republicans view Obamacare as a slush fund for the administration. “It may be a slush fund to him [House Speaker Boehner], but it’s survival to women,” she said. “It’s survival to women. And that just goes to show you what a luxury he thinks it is to have good health for women. We do not agree.”

Interesting point. If the Prevention Fund is this important to saving lives, obviously it’s pure insanity to touch it. Except that … Democrats themselves already tried to cut billions from the Fund:

Democrats voted solidly earlier this year to take money from the preventive health fund to help keep doctors’ Medicare reimbursements from dropping. Obama’s own budget in February proposed cutting $4 billion from the same fund to pay for some of his priorities.

Turns out women’s health isn’t any special priority of the Fund either. Skim the list of programs for yourself; WaPo’s Suzy Khimm notes that it’s aimed mainly at training doctors and reducing obesity and tobacco use. “War on Obesity” doesn’t do much to move votes, though, which is where Pelosi comes in. And that bring us to Boehner’s angry meme-busting rebuttal, which, according to ABC, inspired Maxine Waters, Donna Edwards, Marcy Kaptur, Yvette Clark and a few other women Democrats to actually walk out in fake-outrage. Perfect Friday night viewing.
The bill passed 215-195, incidentally, although fully 30 Republicans defected. (So did 13 Democrats or else the measure would have failed.) Obama’s threatening a veto but that’s pure posturing since Senate Democrats are bound to reject the House proposal in favor of one of their own before it reaches his desk. O simply wants to be on record as opposing this dangerous woman-hating cancer-spreading legislation in case any undecideds are following the coverage. Exit quotation from the White House: “Women, in particular, will benefit from this Prevention Fund, which would provide for hundreds of thousands of screenings for breast and cervical cancer.”

* * Vault * Green Room * Ed Morrissey Show Video: Obama’s campaign movie gets the “Mystery Science Theater” treatment

Via Jim Treacher, this is actually more “Pop-Up Video” than MST but Andrew Klavan and Bill Whittle are game in the Tom Servo and Crow roles, respectively. Carve out eight minutes and then forward it to any fencesitters you know. It’s an engaging, easily digestible way to counter Team Hopenchange’s myth-making about his first term with facts that the average voter might not otherwise spend time on. A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down.

The unserious nature of Washington, Exhibit A: The student loan debate

Over the last week, President Obama made a series of speeches at colleges around the country in which he decried the coming rise of student loan interest rates on July 1. Obama, joined by Mitt Romney, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY)  and House Republicans, has said he refuses to let rates rise from 3.4% to 6.8%. Following his lead, as Morgen Richmond noted yesterday, Democrats immediately jumped on the chance to raise taxes on upper earners. Republicans, meanwhile, pushed a bill through the House today that takes $5.9 billion from what Speaker Boehner called an “ObamaCare slush fund” to pay for the extension.
Unwittingly, this student loan debate highlights the debacle that is politics in Washington. To wit:
1. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said the House legislation was part of the “war on women” because it took from a women’s health program. I must say, she’s good at staying on message. Good at solving the nation’s problems, or leading her caucus to do so? Not so much.
2. Pelosi also denounced “robbing from Paula to pay Peter.” This from the same women who wants to tax the wealthy because they are wealthy. And while I actually agree with her that we should get rid of oil subsidies, tax credits, etc., a) I support eliminating all such subsidies and credits, not just for companies I personally or professionally dislike, and b) Pelosi is being intellectually dishonest in pretending many of the oil industry’s “subsidies” are specifically targeted to them. Jazz Shaw nicely pointed this out last year.
3. Much like they did with the payroll tax holiday extension, Republicans let themselves get suckered into a media game. The fact is that federal subsidies to higher education institutions and/or students increase the tuition students pay, and helps increase the size of the college bubble that is likely to come crashing down soon. Republicans would better serve the public in highlighting this fact instead of playing to the voters’ lack of economic knowledge.
4. The Republican National Committee has stepped up to challenge Obama’s travels to various states under the auspices of “official events,” despite the obvious campaign style and intention of the tour. (For the record, I am aware that President Bush did the same thing. That was just as wrong.) However, the fact that it took ABC News’ Jake Tapper to really bring this issue to the public’s attention says a lot about the willingness of Congress to do its duty and challenge the President on this and other issues of the public trust and corruption, since the RNC’s challenge has no actual legislative power or authority.
5. How many more “temporary” patches to subsidies, tax breaks, pay cuts and like can the federal government afford? The Alternative Minimum Tax, the Bush tax policies, the Doc Fix, the payroll tax holiday, etc. have all been temporarily patched to prevent angering this constituency or that demographic. Once again, elections take priority over effective policy on taxes, spending and other critical issues.
As the two parties head into formal election mode – Romney is about to be the GOP nominee for President, and President Obama just announced his first “official” campaign rally will be May 5 – the voters should note the unserious nature of Washington and give a bipartisan reminder in November that we want real solutions. After all, there are 1.2 million abortions annually in this country. We have the federal government violating the First Amendment with various mandates. Debt is skyrocketing, the economy stinks, Social Security and Medicare are going bankrupt fast, we refuse to solve our immigration problems, major tax hikes are on the horizon and we’re still sacrificing troops for Karzai despite no discernible national interest…and the primary focus of Washington is on student loans.
Of course, the people may not want real solutions. In that case, I’d say it’s time to start packing; America’s decline may soon be steepening.
Dustin Siggins is an associate producer with The Laura Ingraham Show and co-author with William Beach of The Heritage Foundation on a forthcoming book about the national debt. The opinions expressed are his own.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
To see the comments on the original post, look here.

Study: Analytic thinking causes religious belief to diminish

Alternate headline: “Hey, who’s up for an angry, thousand-comment thread on Friday night?”

First, students were randomly assigned to look at images of Auguste Rodin’s sculpture “The Thinker,” or of the ancient Greek statue of a discus thrower, “Discobolus.” Those who viewed “The Thinker” were prompted to think more analytically and expressed less belief in God — they scored an average of 41.42 on a 100-point scale, compared with an average of 61.55 for the group that viewed the discus thrower, according to the study.
Two additional experiments used word games rather than images. In one case, participants were asked to arrange a series of words into a sentence. Some were given neutral words and others were presented with trigger words such as “think,” “reason” and “analyze” to prime them to think more analytically. And indeed, those who got the “thinking” words expressed less religiosity on a 10-to-70 scale: They ranked themselves at 34.39, on average, while those in the control group averaged 40.16.
In the final experiment, students in the control group read text in a clear, legible font, while those in the other group were forced to squint at a font that was hard to read, a chore that has been shown to trigger analytic thinking. Sure enough, those who read the less legible font rated their belief in supernatural agents at 10.40 on a 3-to-21 scale, compared with 12.16 for those who read the clear font.

Lots of news stories about this on the wires today, as you might expect, but I think people are overinterpreting the results. As I understand it, the researchers aren’t claiming that analytic thinking will turn you atheist or that nonbelievers are sharper critical thinkers than the faithful. They’re claiming that intuition is a component of religious belief and that intuition tends to dim when the mind is preoccupied with reasoning, which means religious belief dims with it. Note: Dims, but not disappears. Per the study, you’re talking about small, if statistically significant, differences in belief between the test subjects and the control group. Says one psychologist of the results:

“In some ways this confirms what many people, both religious and nonreligious, have said about religious belief for a long time, that it’s more of a feeling than a thought,” says Nicholas Epley, a psychologist at the University of Chicago. But he predicts the findings won’t change anyone’s mind about whether God exists or whether religious belief is rational. “If you think that reasoning analytically is the way to go about understanding the world accurately, you might see this as evidence that being religious doesn’t make much sense,” he says. “If you’re a religious person, I think you take this evidence as showing that God has given you a system for belief that just reveals itself to you as common sense.”

Yeah, I’m not sure why these results are controversial; they can be interpreted in different ways. For instance, religious friends tell me that their faith isn’t merely something they’ve reasoned through but something they “feel” or “experience.” For God to enter your heart, you must be “open” to him. In other words, faith isn’t strictly analytic; there’s more to it, or so I’m told. It may be that, as your mind adjusts to perform analytic tasks by applying certain known criteria, its capacity to analyze something that doesn’t operate according to known criteria momentarily decreases. You become less “open” to supernatural possibilities. If that’s true, then it’s not that “intuitive” understandings are necessarily false (although maybe they are), it’s that it’s hard for the brain to switch quickly from one paradigm to the other. Or maybe there’s another explanation? I’m all for the “atheists are inherently awesome” theory, if anyone wants to offer it!

Quotes of the day

“A year after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, President Barack Obama’s team is launching another precision operation: a full-scale public relations offensive aimed at using the bin Laden mission to boost the president’s reelection bid…
“‘It was the defining moment of the first term. To think people aren’t going to talk about it, Republicans are really naive,’ said Chris Lehane, a former spokesman for Vice President Al Gore and Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.). ‘It’s going to be very difficult for the Republican Party, [whose] entire campaign in 2004 was predicated on issues like this, complaining somehow about all of this. … Any number of presidents, Democrat and Republican, did not succeed in getting bin Laden, and there’s one who did.’…
“‘There really is a double standard. … President Bush could barely use the number 9/11 in a sentence without somebody accusing him of politicizing 9/11,’ Fleischer said, adding that he thinks it is ‘perfectly appropriate for both presidents’ to discuss such events in their campaigns.

*** “President Barack Obama, taking an election-year victory lap of sorts one year after the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, did an unprecedented television interview in the White House’s strategic nerve center, the Situation Room.
“NBC’s sit-down with Obama will air on May 2, one year after Navy SEALs dropped into the al-Qaida chief’s compound in the Pakistani garrison city of Abbottabad and killed him. The network said it had also interviewed Obama’s top national security and foreign policy aides, including: Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, then-Joints Chiefs of Staff Chairman Adm. Mike Mullen, National Security Adviser Tom Donilon, Deputy National Security Adviser Denis McDonough and John Brennan, Obama’s homeland security and counterterrorism adviser.”

*** “U.S. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) released the following statement on President Obama’s decision to play politics with the one year anniversary of Osama bin Laden’s death:
“Shame on Barack Obama for diminishing the memory of September 11th and the killing of Osama bin Laden by turning it into a cheap political attack ad. This is the same President who once criticized Hillary Clinton for invoking bin Laden ‘to score political points.’
“This is the same President who said, after bin Laden was dead, that we shouldn’t ‘spike the ball’ after the touchdown. And now Barack Obama is not only trying to score political points by invoking Osama bin Laden, he is doing a shameless end-zone dance to help himself get reelected.
“No one disputes that the President deserves credit for ordering the raid, but to politicize it in this way is the height of hypocrisy.”

*** “Hours before McCain, a spokeswoman for Romney’s campaign likewise criticized the video.
“‘The killing of Osama bin Laden was a momentous day for all Americans and the world, and Governor Romney congratulated the military, our intelligence agencies, and the president. It’s now sad to see the Obama campaign seek to use an event that unified our country to once again divide us, in order to try to distract voters’ attention from the failures of his administration,’ press secretary Andrea Saul said.”

*** “But in 2008 Obama likewise thought killing the 9/11 mastermind wasn’t the central goal, saying the top priority should be capturing the leader alive.
“‘What would be important would be for us to do it in a way that allows the entire world to understand the murderous acts that he’s engaged in and not to make him into a martyr, and to assure that the United States government is abiding by basic conventions that would strengthen our hand in the broader battle against terrorism,’ Obama said as he unveiled his new national security team in June 2008.”

*** “Vice President Joe Biden traveled to New York University to give a speech lauding the decision to kill bin Laden, at the same time accusing Romney of shying away from the hunt. Biden quoted a 2007 Associated Press interview in which Romney said, ‘It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person,’ and suggested that Romney essentially gave up on the bin Laden hunt while Barack Obama courageously stayed the course…
“So just what did Romney say in that interview? Yes, he did say ‘moving heaven and earth,’ but he also discussed at some length a greater war on terror that targeted not only al Qaeda but other terrorist groups as well…
“GOVERNOR ROMNEY: I think, I wouldn’t want to over-concentrate on Bin Laden. He’s one of many, many people who are involved in this global Jihadist effort. He’s by no means the only leader. It’s a very diverse group – Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, Muslim Brotherhood and of course different names throughout the world. It’s not worth moving heaven and earth and spending billions of dollars just trying to catch one person. It is worth fashioning and executing an effective strategy to defeat global, violent Jihad and I have a plan for doing that.”

*** “Earlier this week, an Obama-appointed federal judge ruled in favor of the government in a national security case (needless to say), when he denied a FOIA request to obtain all photos and videos taken during and after the raid in Pakistan that resulted in Osama bin Laden’s death. The DOJ responded to the lawsuit by arguing (needless to say) that the requested materials ‘are classified and are being withheld from the public to avoid inciting violence against Americans overseas and compromising secret systems and techniques used by the CIA and the military.’ Among other things, disclosure of these materials would have helped resolve the seriously conflicting statements made by White House officials about what happened during the raid and what its actual goals and operating rules were.
“But while the Obama administration has insisted to the court that all such materials are classified and cannot be disclosed without compromising crucial National Security secrets, the President’s aides have been continuously leaking information about the raid in order to create politically beneficial pictures of what happened.”

*** “President Obama is shamelessly turning the one decision he got right into a pathetic political act of self-congratulation,’ McCain boldly declared, despite backing the President on the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, defending the President’s involvement in Libya from Republicans, and applauding the President’s decision to block the release of photos documenting abuse of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan.
“Candidate McCain also used the idea that he would make the decision to order the killing of Osama bin Laden while a putative President Obama would not on the campaign trail in 2008.
“Expect more to come of the Romney campaign trying to paint President Obama’s foreign policy as “weak” while agreeing in principle with everything the President’s done and pushing for more of the same.”

*** “If showing OBL-as-a-corpse photos would incite the Islamists, why wouldn’t reelection campaign ads incite them, too?”

Weekly initial jobless claims at 388K

Up? Down? All around?  The new level for weekly jobless claims this week hit 388,000, according to the Department of Labor, which would have been an increase of 2,000 over last week’s initial level of 386,000.  Last week’s report got revised upward by 3,000, though, so the DoL calls this a decrease of 1,000:

In the week ending April 21, the advance figure for seasonally adjusted initial claims was 388,000, a decrease of 1,000 from the previous week’s revised figure of 389,000. The 4-week moving average was 381,750, an increase of 6,250 from the previous week’s revised average of 375,500.
The advance seasonally adjusted insured unemployment rate was 2.6 percent for the week ending April 14, unchanged from the prior week.
The advance number for seasonally adjusted insured unemployment during the week ending April 14 was 3,315,000, an increase of 3,000 from the preceding week’s revised level of 3,312,000. The 4-week moving average was 3,311,750, a decrease of 9,750 from the preceding week’s revised average of 3,321,500.

The four-week moving average tells the story more clearly.  Just two weeks ago, it was at 368,500 while the jobless claims increased.  The ramp-up in joblessness is not a huge trend, but it’s definitely turning into a trend, and it’s going in the wrong direction.
AP’s Chris Rugaber notes that this is the highest level in three months, both in the weekly level and in the four-week rolling average:

The number of people seeking U.S. unemployment benefits remained stuck near a three-month high last week, a sign that hiring has likely slowed since winter.

The Labor Department said Thursday that weekly applications dipped 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 388,000. It was little changed from the previous week’s figure, the highest since Jan. 7.

The four-week average, a less volatile measure, rose to 381,750, also the highest in three months.

Rugaber shoots down the notion that the slowdown occurred because of “temporary layoffs during the spring holidays” by noting that hiring has obviously not rebounded since.  I’m not aware of any significant seasonal cycle of drops in employment over spring breaks.  The fact that the March jobs report was so mediocre and that this trend has been under way for a month makes it pretty clear that this is no seasonal burp.
For comedy, try Reuters, which headlines its report “Jobless claims ease but four-week average rises”:

 New claims for unemployment benefits fell slightly last week but a trend reading rose to its highest since January, the latest sign of a weaker pace of healing in the still-struggling labor market.

Initial claims for state unemployment benefits dropped by 1,000 to a seasonally adjusted 388,000, the Labor Department said on Thursday. The prior week’s figure was revised up to 389,000 from the previously reported 386,000.

Er … right.  Jobless claims “eased” only if you compare the revised number from last week to the initial number from this week.  If the pattern holds, next week’s revised number will be a few thousand higher than today’s number, which is exactly what we saw over the last few weeks.  The story in this case isn’t that jobless claims are easing, but that they’re increasing.  The AP gets it right, while Reuters apparently is trying out for a spot on Team Obama.
Hey, at least they didn’t repeat the 400K myth this week.  Maybe we’ll see less of it as claims keep climbing higher to the 400K level.
Update: Suitably Flip has more on the revisions game:

For the 59th week of the last 60, the previous initial jobless claim report was revised upward, from 386,000 to 389,000.  And once again, this enables the Labor Department to report a week-over-week decline in new jobless claims, from the adjusted 389,000 to an adjusted 388,000.  Upon next week’s revision, this week will almost certainly have shown another increase.
If that sounds familiar, it may be because last week, the government reported a decline of 2,000 (but only after upwardly revising the previous week by 8,000).
Looking back over the last five weeks, the cumulative reported weekly changes (from previous weeks’ adjusted data to the new unadjusted numbers) showed a net decline of 1,000, despite an actual cumulative net increase of 24,000.  And that’s without the 5th revision factored in, at which point the cumulative increase will be closer to 30,000.
In addition to serving as fodder for another round of “Jobless Claims Fall” headlines, this week’s underestimate has the additional side effect of avoiding the probably true headline “Jobless Claims Reach New 2012 High” from being written (at least for another week).  They started at 390,000 in early January and, assuming next week brings an upward revision of more than 2,000 (revisions have ranged from +3,000 to +10,000 over the last month), then we’re already sitting at year-to-date highs.

Give credit to the AP for actually headlining the news, rather than the spin.

The Ed Morrissey Show: Kerry Picket, Steven Crowder

Today on The Ed Morrissey Show (3 pm ET), Kerry Picket brings us up to date on the goings-on inside the nation’s capital, and Steven Crowder returns to discuss his latest video efforts.
The Ed Morrissey Show and its dynamic chatroom can be seen on the permanent TEMS page — be sure to join us, and don’t forget to keep up with the debate on my Facebook page, too!Video streaming by Ustream

Marizela Perez has been missing for a year.

Marizela’s case has a connection here at Hot Air, as she is the cousin of the Boss Emeritus, Michelle Malkin. Michelle is trying to spread the word through Facebook and Q13Fox/KCPQ in Seattle. We want to encourage prayers for Marizela’s family, and also try to reach anyone in the area who knows where Marizela might be and ask them to contact the police.

The search has its own website now, Find Marizela, for the latest in the efforts to bring Marizela home. There is also a fund for the family to keep the search efforts going. Be sure to check there and at Michelle’s site for further developments, and keep the family in your prayers.

America’s Most Wanted is now on the case, too.

Michelle has a new update on the case on the one-year anniversary:

Exactly one year ago today, my 18-year-old cousin Marizela (known affectionately to her family and friends as “Emem” or “Mei”) Perez disappeared from the University of Washington campus in Seattle.

She is still missing.

Those words form on the computer screen with disembodied disbelief. But my heart is screaming:

SHE IS STILL MISSING. WHY, DEAR GOD, WHY?!!!!!

The not-knowing is every parent’s worst nightmare. It brought normal life to a standstill for Marizela’s parents, Edgar and Jasmin. And yet, they have to keep living and working and praying for their only daughter. Because that is what they must do. Their strength and dignity through all the suffering has been an inspiration to me.

There have been no new developments in Emem’s case. No word from the police or the medical examiner’s office. No activity on her bank accounts or social media accounts.

And no response from the Google legal department to our request for help in January.

Keep the prayers coming.

Great news: Pitiful sporting event likely to be canceled

In an age when left and right agree on so little, my friends, let’s at least agree on this.

Many players who will be selected during this week’s NFL draft are regarded as future Pro Bowl selections, but the game itself likely will be suspended this season and beyond, according to league sources…
If the game is suspended, the league still would have a Pro Bowl balloting process to identify the season’s top players and would direct teams to remain open to negotiating Pro Bowl clauses into player contracts and to honor Pro Bowl incentive and escalator clauses to avoid any serious conflict with the players association. Those players also likely would be honored in some fashion during Super Bowl week.
The league and union held discussions last week on whether the Pro Bowl can become more attractive but neither side has embraced an alternative solution, sources said. Both sides also concede that heightened player health and safety issues have been a contributing factor to a diminished product.

Over at NBC’s “Pro Football Talk” site, the online poll on whether to cancel the game is currently split 82/17 in favor of euthanasia. I’ll neither confirm nor deny that I’ve ever watched the Pro Bowl, but if I’ve watched, then hypothetically I might have wondered if the game would actually be better as flag football. With the fear of brute contact gone, guys could play harder. You’d tune in to watch the NFL’s best and brightest using rules designed for eight-year-olds, right?
In honor of the occasion, here’s one of my all-time favorite Onion vids. Question: Is there any way to make this game kinda sorta competitive? There are plenty of other things the league could do the week before the Super Bowl to pique fans’ interest — here’s one — but if they’re intent on keeping the Pro Bowl, their options are slim. One obvious possibility is paying giant bonuses to the winners. To America’s everlasting shame, the Pro Bowl actually gets higher ratings than baseball’s All-Star Game; a newly competitive Pro Bowl would get higher ratings still. Give the winning side an enormous chunk of the ad revenue. The other possibility that occurs to me is following baseball’s lead by rewarding the winning side with some sort of home-field advantage. That won’t work for the Super Bowl since it’s played on a neutral field, but what if teams in the winning conference got an extra home game the following season against teams in the losing conference? I doubt that’d fly since there’s likely too much money to be lost in playing seven games at home instead of eight, but if you want a competitive game, that’d do it. Any other ideas? Surely there are ways to make this embarrassing spectacle slightly less embarrassing.

* Home * Vault * Green Room * Ed Morrissey Show Fed to WH: We’re not going to bail you out

With economic indicators flashing red all over the place, the Obama administration may be looking at some bad news this spring on economic growth. If they’re looking to the Fed to toss them a lifeline, they may be waiting a while. Despite some expectations that the Federal Reserve might embark on a third round of quantitative easing, Fed chair Ben Bernanke announced yesterday that they will wait and see — and keep from causing any more damage:

Facing fire from the left and the right, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke on Wednesday mounted a spirited defense of the central bank’s wait-and-see approach to the economy, arguing that his detractors fail to grasp the damage that could be done if the Fed were to prematurely take any new actions.

After its third policymaking meeting of the year, the Fed left short-term interest rates near zero on Wednesday and said it planned to hold them there until at least late 2014. As it has all year, the Fed continued to say that the economy faced headwinds but would gradually improve. Economic projections from senior Fed officials suggested the economy would grow a bit faster than anticipated early this year and the unemployment rate would come down a bit more than earlier thought, perhaps ending the year around 8 percent.

Bernanke attacked Paul Krugman for demanding an inflationary policy in order to produce a little more incentive for jobs growth. One would think that the two previous rounds of quantitative easing — which has weakened the dollar and helped drive energy prices higher — would be enough for any interventionist to love. Bernanke called Krugman’s demands “very reckless”:

Bernanke seemed to take most umbrage at Krugman’s critique, in the New York Times Magazine, which suggests that the Fed has refused to take action to help the out-the-work because it worries too much that such efforts can cause inflation. Economic theory holds that creating money to spur lending and drive economic growth — what the Fed does — tends to cause prices and wages to rise, but the Fed expects that inflation will come in at or below its target of 2 percent for the next few years.

“The question is, does it make sense to actively seek a higher inflation rate in order to achieve a slightly increased pace of reduction in the unemployment rate?” Bernanke said. “That would be very reckless.”

Not to mention ineffective. We’ve already had two rounds of quantitative easing. Has that solved unemployment? Spurred economic growth? Not at all. In fact, we’re heading into the third straight Stagnant Spring thanks to the incompetent and interventionist policies of this administration, the weakening of the dollar, and regulatory and tax environments which have predictably driven investors out of the market. Few of those who hold capital want to take risks in the US economy, thanks in large part to all of the uncertainties introduced by Obama’s team and all of the ad hoc interventions that keep taking place.

Bernanke did say that if the economy deteriorates significantly, the Fed would be prepared to intervene again. They don’t have much choice. The current administration won’t change course, and the only option Bernanke has is to take the helm and steer the ship away from the biggest icebergs. If the Fed has to do that a third time by essentially printing money, the temporary lift it provides to the economy will be far outweighed by the demonstration of Obama’s impotence and incompetence in economic policy.

Sebelius refuses to shut down “demonstration project” criticized by GAO

Earlier this week, the New York Post warned readers that the Obama administration planned to use an $8.3 billion in HHS appropriations as a “slush fund” to hide the impact of ObamaCare on choice options for seniors that would otherwise have hit just before the election in November. That same day, the General Accounting Office blasted the Obama administration for its attempt, and called on HHS to reverse itself. Today, Rep. John Kline, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, confronted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over the GAO report, but Sebelius remained defiant — and insisted that the Obama administration would proceed with its slush-fund plans:

Sebelius refuses to shut down “demonstration project” criticized by GAO
posted at 5:21 pm on April 26, 2012 by Ed Morrissey

Earlier this week, the New York Post warned readers that the Obama administration planned to use an $8.3 billion in HHS appropriations as a “slush fund” to hide the impact of ObamaCare on choice options for seniors that would otherwise have hit just before the election in November. That same day, the General Accounting Office blasted the Obama administration for its attempt, and called on HHS to reverse itself. Today, Rep. John Kline, chair of the House Education and the Workforce Committee, confronted HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius over the GAO report, but Sebelius remained defiant — and insisted that the Obama administration would proceed with its slush-fund plans:

U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius today vowed to continue a controversial “demonstration project” that has come under fire recently by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The Democrats’ 2010 health care law cut $200 billion from Medicare Advantage, a program that currently serves 12 million seniors. The Congressional Budget Office estimates the cuts will result in 5 million fewer seniors participating in the popular program. The GAO recently criticized an $8 billion national demonstration project run by the administration that may have been intended to mask the impact of these cuts until 2013. The GAO reports the design of this project “precludes a credible evaluation of its effectiveness.”

The GAO has called on HHS to cancel this unprecedented multi-billion dollar program. However, when asked by Education and the Workforce Committee Chairman John Kline (R-MN) if the administration would follow the GAO’s recommendation, Secretary Sebelius stated she has “no intention of canceling the project.”

Here’s a reminder of what the GAO thinks of this “demonstration project”:

GAO, the investigative agency of Congress, did not address GOP allegations that the bonuses are politically motivated. But, its report found the program highly unusual. It “dwarfs” all other Medicare pilots undertaken in nearly 20 years, the GAO said.

Most of the bonus money is going to plans that receive three to three-and-half stars out of a possible five stars on Medicare’s quality rating scale, the report said.

Available through 2014, the bonuses will soften much of the initial impact of the Medicare Advantage cuts, acting like a temporary reprieve.

This year, for example, the bonus program offset about 70 percent of the cuts in the health care law. Indeed, Medicare Advantage enrollment is up by 10 percent and premiums have gone down on average.

But GAO questioned whether the bonus program will achieve its goal of finding better incentives to promote quality. “The design of the demonstration precludes a credible evaluation of its effectiveness in achieving (the administration’s) stated research goal.”

So Sebelius wants to spend over eight billion dollars on a “demonstration project” whose design makes it impossible to evaluate, which just coincidentally provides some political cover for the White House just before seniors go to the polls in the presidential election, and which won’t actually improve care. Did anyone expect anything different from Chicago-sur-le-Potomac?

Egyptian parliament considering bill legalizing, er, sex with spouse after death?

Reminds me of that story in 2006 about Iran supposedly requiring its Jewish citizens to wear yellow badges: Hard to believe, yet not nearly as hard to believe as it should be. In fact, blogs across the political spectrum have bit on this item today, suggesting that when it comes to claims involving Islamists behaving like rank degenerates, even the left can’t muster much skepticism anymore.

One question, though. Am I right in thinking that this whole thing is being pushed by a single source? Read the Al-Arabiya piece for yourself and see:

Egypt’s National Council for Women (NCW) has appealed to the Islamist-dominated parliament not to approve two controversial laws on the minimum age of marriage and allowing a husband to have sex with his dead wife within six hours of her death according to a report in an Egyptian newspaper.

The appeal came in a message sent by Dr. Mervat al-Talawi, head of the NCW, to the Egyptian People’s Assembly Speaker, Dr. Saad al-Katatni, addressing the woes of Egyptian women, especially after the popular uprising that toppled president Hosni Mubarak in February 2011…

According to Egyptian columnist Amro Abdul Samea in al-Ahram, Talawi’s message included an appeal to parliament to avoid the controversial legislations that rid women of their rights of getting education and employment, under alleged religious interpretations.

“Talawi tried to underline in her message that marginalizing and undermining the status of women in future development plans would undoubtedly negatively affect the country’s human development, simply because women represent half the population,” Abdul Samea said in his article.

A cleric in Morocco did indeed approve the practice of, er, “farewell intercourse” within the past few years, but unless I’m missing something in the Al-Arabiya story, the evidence that the bill exists — and that the NCW has complained about it to the speaker — is purely Samea’s say-so. Half a dozen other articles I read today about this all point back to the Al-Arabiya article; as far as I can tell, no one named in the story has spoken to any media about it or otherwise confirmed that what Samea claims is true. And who’s Samea? According to the CSM, that’s curious too:

Today, Egypt’s state-owned Al Ahram newspaper published an opinion piece by Amr Abdul Samea, a past stalwart supporter of the deposed Hosni Mubarak, that contained a bombshell: Egypt’s parliament is considering passing a law that would allow husbands to have sex with their wives after death…

There’s of course one problem: The chances of any such piece of legislation being considered by the Egyptian parliament for a vote is zero. And the chance of it ever passing is less than that. In fact, color me highly skeptical that anyone is even trying to advance a piece of legislation like this through Egypt’s parliament. I’m willing to be proven wrong. It’s possible that there’s one or two lawmakers completely out of step with the rest of parliament. Maybe.

But extreme, not to mention inflammatory claims, need at minimum some evidence (and I’ve read my share of utter nonsense in Al Ahram over the years). The evidence right now? Zero.

Al-Ahram is controlled by the Egyptian government, which I assume means it’s heavily influenced by the ruling military junta. And the junta, of course, is invested in discrediting the Islamists in order to defend its prerogatives against parliament’s growing power. (It’s worth noting too that Al-Arabiya, which picked up the story from Al-Ahram, is a Saudi outfit and the Saudis are mighty anxious about the idea of Islamist populists seizing power from sclerotic tyrannical regimes.) Again, none of this is to say the story isn’t true — the part about the marriage age being lowered is all too plausible — but it’s not hard to see why Mubarak allies might want to make something up or inflate something one of the fringier parliamentarians said in order to galvanize international opinion against the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists. It is, however, hard to see why the MB would allow parliament to entertain a law like this at a moment when they’re busy gladhanding westerners to reassure them that the Brotherhood are “modern” Islamists who are worthy of foreign aid and trade deals. If this really is being kicked around by MPs, I’d bet it’s the Salafists who are pushing it. But we’ll see.

Anyone seen any news items today confirming this with sources besides Samea? If so, shoot us an e-mail at the tips line and I’ll update.

Exciting new EPA enforcement method revealed: Single out a few offenders and crucify them

Well it’s not new exactly, just new to the intertubes, but it certainly explains a lot. From the Foundry via Weasel Zippers:

This clip actually originated from Sen. James Inhofe’s office so thankfully the GOP is already on this. A little more background from the Senator’s press release:

Not long after Administrator Armendariz made these comments in 2010, EPA targeted US natural gas producers in Pennsylvania, Texas and Wyoming. In all three of these cases, EPA initially made headline-grabbing statements either insinuating or proclaiming outright that the use of hydraulic fracturing by American energy producers was the cause of water contamination, but in each case their comments were premature at best – and despite their most valiant efforts, they have been unable to find any sound scientific evidence to make this link.

Probably the most offensive thing about this clip, aside from the crucifixion analogy, is the implication that the EPA singles out potential offenders to make an example of on a random basis. To be sure, fostering fear through arbitrary, and unduly punitive enforcement actions can be an effective means of ensuring broad compliance. But it’s not exactly in line with the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.

Is Obama really in trouble with young voters?

There has been a wavelet of stories from outlets like The Atlantic, The Hill and Yahoo! suggesting Pres. Obama could be in trouble with the youth vote. The Atlantic’s Molly Ball notes:

Less than half of 18-to-24-year-old voters want Obama to win reelection, and he leads a generic Republican candidate by just 7 percentage points, according to a survey of youth voter attitudes released Thursday by the Public Religion Research Institute and Georgetown University’s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace and World Affairs.

The poll did not test Obama against Romney directly, but found more enthusiasm for Obama than Romney. The Hill’s Amie Parnes found a somewhat different result in another poll:

Obama leads presumptive GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney 60 percent to 34 when it comes to the youth vote, according to a recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll. But Obama’s enthusiasm has taken a nosedive, the poll shows. In 2008, 63 percent of 18- to 34-year-olds took a big interest in the election. Four years later, 45 percent have the same level of interest, reflecting the most sizable drop in one of the major voting groups.

Yahoo’s Chris Moody reports on yet another survey:

The wide-ranging survey of 3,096 18-29 year-olds conducted by Harvard University’s Institute of Politics shows 43 percent said they plan to vote for Obama in November, while just 26 percent plan to vote for Romney. The last time Harvard matched Obama against a GOP challenger, in December 2011, they asked who young voters thought would win the election: 36 percent said Obama would lose, a sign that support for Obama is increasing closer to the election.

***

However, Obama’s approval rating has dipped by six percentage points from Obama’s first year in office, according to a Harvard poll taken in November 2009, from 52 percent to 58 percent. That could be a sign that the youth vote is far more up for grabs in 2012 than it was in 2008, when Obama overwhelming won the youth vote.

As John Sides notes, these types of stories should always be read in the context of a number of polls, as well as the broader population and other demographics. Sides notes that a recent Pew poll has Obama over Romney 61%-33% among 18-29 year-olds, in comparison to Obama’s 66%-33% victory with the demographic in the 2008 exit poll. Those numbers are better for Obama than some of the polls cited above, but what Sides notes is that Obama’s numbers now are down 3%-5% among all of the age demographics from the 2008 exit poll results. Moreover, as Andrew Gelman notes, nonuniform swings are difficult to detect in a survey, because they have a larger margin of error. In short, Obama’s problem with young voters is likely reflective of Obama’s problem with voters generally.

So why is Obama wooing college students and slow jamming the news with Jimmy Fallon at taxpayer expense this week? Because Team Obama, like most everyone, is anticipating a much closer election in 2012 than in 2008. If Obama were to drop from 66% to the level of youth support John F. Kerry got in 2004 (~54%), he would lose ~2% of the overall vote, which he likely cannot afford. We cannot know this for certain. Obama’s 2008 performance with young voters was tied in part to his boost in performance and turnout of minority voters. Conversely, we do not know whether the Republican-leaning youth vote was particularly depressed. While the latest raft of polls might look like Obama’s youth vote has softened, the GOP should not take it for granted any more than Obama does.

Update (Allahpundit): One more data point for you. New from Gallup:

That 64/29 split is right in line with O’s margin over McCain in 2008, which is a testament to the amazing durability of his appeal to young voters. Even after four years of economic dreck, with recent college grads facing a brutal job market, they’re still his strongest age demographic by far. I think Romney’s strategy with respect to young adults during this campaign will be simply to avoid giving Obama any powerful wedge issues to get them excited. That’s why he sided with O on extending the student-loan interest rate and against the congressional GOP. He knows he’s going to lose this demographic by 30 points; his best bet at neutralizing them is making sure they have no strong reason to turn out. Judging by Gallup’s numbers, it’s working so far.

This post was promoted from GreenRoom to HotAir.com.
To see the comments on the original post, look here.

New Secret Service scandal in El Salvador?

It didn’t take too long for KIRO-TV to confirm what the Washington Post suggested yesterday — that the Secret Service scandal in Colombia was not a unique event. CBS picked up on the report this morning, and reporter Chris Halsne tells what he found when he traveled to El Salvador this week: This source witnessed the majority of the men drink heavily (“wasted,” “heavily intoxicated”) at the strip club. He says most of the Secret Service “advance-team” members also paid extra for access to the VIP section of the club where they were provided a number of sexual favors in return for their cash. Although our source says he told the agents it was a “really bad idea” to take the strippers back to their hotel rooms, several agents bragged that they “did this all the time” and “not to worry about it.” Our source says at least two agents had escorts check into their rooms. It is unclear whether the escorts who returned to the hotels were some of the strippers from the same club.

These alleged incidents in El Salvador occurred a full year prior to recent revelations that secret service agents used prostitutes in Cartagena, Colombia, on a presidential trip this month.

To further confirm information provided about behaviors in El Salvador that reportedly occurred in March of 2011, Halsne interviewed the owner of the San Salvador strip club in which the subcontractor said they visited. The strip club’s owner confirmed a large number of U.S. secret service agents (and some military escorts) “descended on his club” that week prior to President Obama’s visit. He claims agents were there at least three nights in a row. “No surprise to me.” The owner told Halsne his club routinely takes care of high-ranking employees of the U.S. embassy in San Salvador as well as visiting FBI and DEA agents. The owner says his reputation for “security” and “privacy” makes him a popular strip club owner with “those who want to be discreet.” He told Halsne during a lengthy interview, he doesn’t allow prostitution inside the club and that all his “girls” are at least 18-years-old. He says the girls can do what they want after work, but he discourages them from making contact with customers at other locations.

Once again, this involves an advance team sent ahead to determine security risks and map out routes for the President. The advance teams are critical for security, since the President’s protective detail cannot leave him to make those determinations for themselves. Security depends on having a professional advance team focused on the job, and not on the strip clubs and hookers — and certainly not on allowing the hookers to stay in rooms where sensitive information about the visit and travel plans might be accessible.

Halsne says the Secret Service hasn’t contacted him yet to hear about his information on the El Salvador trip, but they will soon enough. CBS reports that Halsne has the names of at least some of the agents involved:

Halsne reportedly has names of some of the agents allegedly involved in the partying and has viewed records which add credibility to the subcontractor’s eyewitness account.

Perhaps the House and Senate committees on Homeland Security will be interested in talking with Halsne, too.

Video: The sadly obligatory “Biden talks about the size of Obama’s stick” clip

To cleanse the palate, via the Examiner, a reminder that size matters in foreign policy too. I saw the headline on this hours ago and glowed with pride on the thought that it’s now fair game in modern campaigns for the vice president of the United States to deploy puns about the size of the president’s schwanz. Then I watched the clip. Guys, I … don’t know if he planned the joke. I think he did — the audience obviously gets it — but when he gets to the big payoff he almost seems to pull up short, as if the double meaning is only dawning on him at that moment. Am I wrong about that? If it were anyone else in the administration I’d say there’s no doubt, but look who it is we’re talking about here. I’d prefer to believe that his childlike naivete led him to an inadvertent punchline than that he and his speechwriters are deliberately adding jokes about Obama’s junk to his foreign policy addresses to liven them up.

Incidentally, when it comes to government, superior size does not necessarily mean superior performance:

Independents’ view of the federal government is actually less favorable now at 27 percent than it was in the final year of Bush’s second term, when it was 33 percent. Interestingly, though, it rose to 39 percent in Febhttp://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=8265345694772230791ruary 2010, when Congress was on the brink of passing ObamaCare. Does that mean indies have soured on Hopenchange or have they just soured on congressional gridlock?

EPA: Hey, sorry about that whole “crucify” thing, we’re all about being ethical

The EPA has scrambled to contain the damage from the clip highlighted by Morgen Richmond this morning, which went viral yesterday, showing an EPA administrator bragging about crucifixion as a means to impose the EPA’s will on American subjects, er, citizens. The EPA’s Richard Armendariz apologized late last night for his remarks, and the EPA rushed to assure people that they are all about “ethical enforcement”:

The Obama-appointed Environmental Protection Agency official who explained that the agency uses a “crucify them” enforcement philosophy against oil and gas companies apologized for his comments on Wednesday night.

“I apologize to those I have offended and regret my poor choice of words,” Region 6 EPA Administrator Al Armendariz said in a statement provided to The Daily Caller. “It was an offensive and inaccurate way to portray our efforts to address potential violations of our nation’s environmental laws. I am and have always been committed to fair and vigorous enforcement of those laws. …

While Armendariz apologized, EPA Assistant Administrator for Enforcement and Compliance Assurance Cynthia Giles asserted that the agency is still committed to ethical enforcement of the law.

“Strong, fair and effective enforcement of the environmental laws passed by Congress is critical to protecting public health and ensuring that all companies, regardless of industry, are playing by the same rules,” she said in comments provided to TheDC. “Enforcement is essential to the effectiveness of our environmental laws, ensuring that public health is protected and that companies that play by the rules are not at a disadvantage. The same holds true for companies involved in responsible and safe development of our nation’s domestic energy resources.”

Sure they are. Why, just ask the Sacketts about the EPA’s idea of “ethical enforcement.” They ruled that the land that the Sacketts bought were wetlands after the Sacketts starting building a house on residential-zoned land even though it had not been classified as such beforehand, and then refused to allow them to access the court system without paying tens of thousands of dollars each day that they delayed the EPA’s mandated abatement. The Supreme Court hit the EPA with a unanimous smackdown on a process which could only be called a financial crucifixion of the Sacketts, and a lesson to everyone else — just as Armendariz described in the video.

Don’t count Senator James Inhofe among the easily impressed with this apology and endorsement of the EPA’s approach to enforcement:

Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe is not buying the mea culpa offered by the EPA official who bragged about the agency’s “crucify them” enforcement philosophy against oil and gas companies.

“His apology was meaningless,” Inhofe told The Daily Caller in a Thursday morning interview.

“You’re going to treat people like the Romans crucified the church? Get real,” he said.

According to Inhoffe, Obama-appointed Region 6 EPA Administrator Al Armendariz’s claim in his apology that the agency is focused on “fair and vigorous enforcement” isn’t supported by the facts.


Inhofe appeared on Fox and Friends this morning to talk about his intent to investigate the EPA, and to tie Armendariz’ comments to Barack Obama’s war on domestic oil and gas production, especially gas:

Sen. Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) on Thursday blasted an Environmental Protection Agency official’s claim that the agency was using a “crucify them” strategy against oil and gas companies, calling it a part of President Barack Obama’s “war on domestic energy.”
“Let’s keep in mind, this is all a part of Obama’s war on domestic energy,” Inhofe said on “Fox & Friends.” “He’s the one who said that we have good natural gas and it’s plentiful and all of that but we’ve got to stop hydraulic fracturing. This is the war on hydraulic fracturing.”

It’s more than a war on hydraulic fracturing, or on energy production.  It’s a war on liberty, waged by bureaucrats who want to crucify people like the Sacketts in order to pacify the rest of us.  The apology won’t fool anyone.
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Pew poll: Support for gun rights, gay marriage up since 2004 and 2008 campaigns

I think a similar phenomenon is at work in both cases, as strange as that may sound, but I’m completely open to counterarguments. First the gay marriage numbers:

The most amazing thing to me about those trendlines is how steady they are across nearly every demographic. No matter how you slice the pie, with the important exception of religious groups, opposition drops about eight or nine points every four years; the only outliers are among Republicans, where it’s dropped 10 points total since 2004, and among blacks, where it dropped just four points between 2004 and 2008 and then a whopping 14 points from 2008 until now. While conventional wisdom holds that blacks are overwhelmingly opposed to gay marriage, the margin here between favorable and unfavorable has shrunk to just 10 points and the number who are strongly opposed is on par with whites. In fact, the only group that manages strong opposition above 40 percent is evangelicals, who are at 56 percent. (They’re also the only group that’s grown more strongly opposed over time.) I assume the broader population trend is due mainly to some gay-marriage opponents finding their worst fears of ill social effects unrealized as the practice has become more commonplace. That won’t sway all opponents — if you have a strong moral objection, you don’t need to reach the question of social effects to oppose gay marriage — but it’ll sway some. Note that even among seniors, opposition is creeping down towards 50 percent and strong opposition is already roughly on par with middle-aged adults.

Then there’s guns. Amazing:

That indie number will give you a good idea of why Democrats have stayed far, far away from this subject lately. This too is a policy matter on which black opinion is changing: 35 percent now say it’s more important to protect gun rights to own guns than to control gun ownership, more than double the number (17 percent) who said so in 2007. That puts blacks on par with women, 39 percent of whom say the same. (Really, ladies? Only 39 percent?) As for that astounding jump circa 2007, though, I’m eager to hear your explanations. My theory is that it’s a combination of the Heller litigation, which raised public awareness about the Second Amendment as a core American right, and increasing popular consciousness of the drop in crime rates over the last few decades. One of the key arguments for gun control is that the more freely available guns are, the more chaos there’s bound to be. Instead, empirically we’ve seen the opposite. Here too, then, as with gay marriage, you’ve got doubters who worried about ill social effects getting to see with their own eyes that the libertarian position isn’t nearly as dangerous in practice as they thought. Am I wrong about that? If so, what’s the alternative explanation? Media bias in favor of gay marriage is surely helping to nudge the numbers on that issue but I’m hard pressed to say that’s true for gun rights. Granted, Hollywood glorifies guns, but they’ve glorified guns since day one and only recently have we seen sharp movement in favor of gun rights in the polls.

Update: Ah, here’s an obvious alternative that should have occurred to me sooner: There’s a partisan effect on the gun question. Once you’ve got a liberal in the White House, Republicans and independents start to get nervous about gun-control measures being pushed and respond with a backlash. Not sure how that explains the rise in Democratic support during the first few years of O’s term, though. Maybe that’s rural Dems feeling the same fears?

Two other questions. If this is a partisan effect, why do the lines drop during Clinton’s presidency? And what’s with the jump after 2000? A reaction to 9/11 and terrorism, maybe?

Terrific: Senate Dems offset cost of student loan bill with higher taxes on small business

Let the games begin. With Romney expressing his support earlier this week for extending the freeze in student loan interest rates, defusing this as a wedge issue just as the President was embarking on his college tour, Democrats in the Senate have decided to counter with, what else, the class warfare card. Via Bloomberg (emphasis added):

Senate Democrats and the White House are seeking a one-year freeze in the interest rate. The $6 billion cost would be offset by limiting a tax provision that allows some owners of so-called S-corporations to avoid paying Medicare payroll taxes on their earnings, Senator Tom Harkin, an Iowa Democrat, told reporters yesterday.

Harkin said the legislation would require the Medicare payroll tax on income of more than $250,000 a year earned at S-corporations with fewer than three shareholders.

“This is a loophole that needs to be closed anyway,” he said. “So this is the right time to do it and for the right cause.”

Current law exempts the profits earned by S-corporations from Social Security and Medicare taxes, taxing only the salaries earned by shareholders who are employed by these firms. The IRS requires the allocation of reasonable compensation for work performed, so closely held S-corporations cannot (legally) classify all of their net income as profits, thus bypassing these payroll taxes. To call it a “loophole” is disingenuous. It’s no more a loophole than hundreds of other avenues through which businesses and individuals can cheat on their taxes, if they are willing to subject themselves to the consequences of breaking the law.

Millions of small, family owned businesses around the country are classified as S-corporations, and would be caught up in this tax net for no reason other than that they are small, and successful. And keep in mind that the profits which are credited to shareholders of S-corporations often remain in the business, funding the salaries of new employees and other investments.

The worst of it is that this a new, permanent tax on small businesses – $9 billion over 10 years according to the CBO - to fund the cost of just one year of the interest rate freeze ($6 billion). If this is the “right cause” then the cause isn’t long-term financial relief for college students, it’s the re-election prospects of Democrats in November.

Backing this bill would be a dangerous precedent to set ahead of the real class warfare battle to come this summer, and thus Republicans in Congress, as well as the Romney campaign, should withhold their support unless another means is found to pay for it.

Labor Dep’t drops regulations banning kids from working on farms other than parents’

Alternate headline: “Obama administration decides against picking pointless, hugely politically perilous fight in election year.”

“The decision to withdraw this rule — including provisions to define the ‘parental exemption’ — was made in response to thousands of comments expressing concerns about the effect of the proposed rules on small family-owned farms,” the Department said in a press release Thursday evening. “To be clear, this regulation will not be pursued for the duration of the Obama administration.” [Translation: "Please, please let's forget about this." -- ed.]

The rule would have dramatically changed what types of chores children under the age of 16 could perform on and around American farms. It would have prohibited them from working with tobacco, operating almost all types of power-driven equipment and being employed to work with raw farm materials.

“Prohibited places of employment would include country grain elevators, grain bins, silos, feed lots, stockyards, livestock exchanges and livestock auctions,” read a press release from last August…

Parents and children who grew up on farms across the country told TheDC that the rule was overprotective and would have prevented kids from learning valuable skills at early ages.

We didn’t blog this yesterday but I think part of the reason the original story broke big online was that some readers thought the regs would have barred kids from working on their own parents’ farm. Not so. See Doug Mataconis’s piece at Outside the Beltway clarifying that point. In fact, if you read down into Wednesday’s DC piece, it notes right there that there’s a parental exemption to the regulations. The concern was (a) that kids would be barred from doing “hazardous” chores for extended family like uncles and grandparents and (b) that the exemption might only apply to farms that are wholly owned by a child’s parents and not farms in which they own merely a share. Not sure that fear was well founded, though:

“It’s good the Labor Department rethought the ridiculous regulations it was going to stick on farmers and their families,” said Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa. “To even propose such regulations defies common sense, and shows a real lack of understanding as to how the family farm works.”

The surprise move comes just two months after the Labor Department modified the rule in a bid to satisfy opponents. The agency made it clear it would exempt children who worked on farms owned or operated by their parents, even if the ownership was part of a complex partnership or corporate agreement…

Sen. Jon Tester, D-Mont., a grain farmer known to till his fields on weekends away from Washington, had come out strongly against the proposed rule. The Democrat continued to criticize the Obama administration rule even after it was tempered earlier this year, saying the Labor Department “clearly didn’t get the whole message” from Montana’s farmers and ranchers.

What if several generations of a family own a farm together but don’t have the right type of ownership agreement? Who knows? Don’t sweat the details, though. The takeaway from this story is that someone in the Labor Department actually thought the White House would let them construct a “big liberal government clamping down on family farms in the heartland” narrative for the GOP six months out from a presidential election. I’m actually surprised it took them a whole day to back down. Presumably Axelrod had to wait to call Hilda Solis because he was literally rendered speechless.

Coming soon from the Labor Department, presumably: Exciting new regulations on mom and apple pie.

Karl Rove’s first 2012 electoral map: Including “leaners,” Obama 284, Romney 172, toss-up 82

Via Dave Weigel. For a compulsive eeyore like me, if the daily polls showing O ahead are like a shot of whiskey, this is like a shot of heroin. Eyes rolling back in my head.

Dude, I’m nervous.

On the one hand, how seriously should we take a projection that has South Carolina as a toss-up? Maybe this is Rove knowing that his map will get attention and using it to scare conservatives into donating and GOTV volunteering. On the other hand, none of his other state projections look obviously wrong to me. Even if you take New Hampshire and Nevada out of Obama’s “lean” column, he still gets to 271 and a second term.

HuffPo’s Mark Blumenthal is out today with his first electoral map of the campaign too:

The big difference with Rove’s map? Blumenthal gives Florida and its 29 electoral votes to Obama. I’m skeptical that O will take that state again this time, partly because of how well Romney did there in the primary and partly because Rubio will be stumping for him there either as senator or VP nominee. Put that back into the toss-up column and Obama’s at 269, but even then, all he’d need is one win among Nevada, Colorado, or Iowa to give him another four years.

In lieu of giving you my own projection, go look at this one from Ben Domenech, as it seems quite plausible to me. Romney wins Florida, Nevada, and New Hampshire while O takes Iowa, Colorado, and the coveted trifecta of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. The only state on which I differ, I think, is that last one. Problem is, even turning Virginia red on Domenech’s map isn’t enough to deliver the election to Romney. He needs to win either Ohio or Pennsylvania on top of it, which is why (a) The One is already busy pandering to blue-collar voters with gimmicks like the Buffett Rule and (b) Rob Portman is likely to be Romney’s VP. The rust belt will probably decide things. Again.