Heather Boushey: New Ryan plan is austerity on steroids

  The latest House Republican budget plan asks low-income and middle-class Americans to shoulder the entire burden of deficit reduction while simultaneously delivering massive tax breaks to the richest 1 percent and preserving huge giveaways to Big Oil. It’s a recipe for repeating the mistakes of the Bush administration, during which middle-class incomes stagnated and only the privileged few enjoyed enormous gains.

  Each component of the new House Republican budget threatens the middle class while doing nothing to add jobs or improve our economy. It ends the guarantee of decent insurance for senior citizens, breaking Medicare’s bedrock promise. It slashes investments in education, infrastructure, and basic research, all of which are key drivers of economic growth and mobility. And it cuts taxes for those at the top, asking the middle class to pick up the tab. It’s a budget designed to benefit the top 1 percent at everyone else’s expense.

Steve Flowers: Inside The Statehouse: The Casualties of the budget crunch

  The 2012 Alabama Legislative Session is in its seventh week and they are no closer to finding a solution to the daunting financial dilemma facing the General Fund Budget than when the session began on February 7th. There is even some talk that decisions or solution to the nightmare may be delayed to a special session later this year - closer to the start of the fiscal year - which begins October 1st. However, that procrastinating would cost the beleaguered General Fund an additional $200,000 that it does not have at this time. Maybe the legislature is hoping that some manna from heaven will rain down on them and they can avoid the Armageddon that awaits. This miracle has occurred the past few years in the form of federal stimulus dollars but that rodeo is over. The chickens have finally come home to roost.

Gary Palmer: Penalties for illegal gambling: Cost of business or a crime?

  If you wonder how much difference there is in the Alabama Legislature between the old Democrat majority and the new Republican majority that was elected in 2010, take a look at the bills that are on the agenda.

  From the early 1990s through the 2010 legislative session, gambling was the one issue that dominated the agenda of the Democrat-controlled legislature. During that time, gambling bills to legalize everything from full-scale casinos to video gambling machines posing as electronic bingo dominated practically every legislative session. Gambling interests spent millions of dollars to beat down opponents in an effort to get their gambling operations legalized … but according to Speaker of the House Mike Hubbard and Senate President Pro Tem Del Marsh, the days of the legislative session being held hostage by gambling interests are over.

Michael Josephson: The Paradoxical Commandments

  In 1968, when Kent M. Keith was a 19-year-old sophomore at Harvard University, he wrote “The Paradoxical Commandments” as part of a booklet for student leaders. He describes the Commandments as guidelines for finding personal meaning in the face of adversity:

1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway.

2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway.

3. If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway.

Sheldon Richman: Defusing the Middle East would lower gas prices

  Republicans see rising oil and gasoline prices as an opportunity to score political points on President Obama. To be sure, Obama is partly responsible for the rise in world prices and could do something about it. The irony is that Republicans would emphatically oppose the one measure that would be most effective in easing the pressure on prices right now: defusing tension in the Middle East by taking the war threat against Iran off the table.

  Tension in the Middle East tends to push prices up, because the threat of war puts this major oil region under a darkening cloud of uncertainty. With Iran the tension is even greater because it is located on the Strait of Hormuz, a narrow waterway between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman, 21 nautical miles at its narrowest point. Roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil moves through the strait, which is key for getting oil from the gulf countries to the rest of the world.

Ian Millhiser: Not Even Close: 3 Reasons why the health care lawsuit is an aasy case

  In the words of Judge Laurence Silberman, a leading conservative who received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President George W. Bush, the lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act’s requirement that most Americans have to either carry health insurance or pay slightly more income taxes have no basis “in either the text of the Constitution or Supreme Court precedent.” Nevertheless, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit broke with three other appeals courts to hold the law unconstitutional last August.

  The 11th Circuit decision was wrong, and the Supreme Court will reject it. Here are the three reasons why.

Eric Snitil: Head in the clouds

View photos from this interview on the Capital City Free Press Facebook page!

  In this case, it's actually true... his head is in the clouds.

  Nestled away in a cavernous studio beneath a bank of lighting worthy of a Stones concert and corralled by a horde of monitors he sits, much like Alfred from the Batman films, only without the wrinkles or a buddy who sports a cape. I'm first struck by the fact that WSFA meteorologists cannot view the weather from this perch. The nearest window is lost somewhere down a labyrinth of hallways. I guess he's just that good....

  "I feel so fortunate," Eric Snitil says. "I shouldn't be here."

Steve Flowers: Inside The Statehouse: The End of old fashioned retail politics in Alabama

  I have a cadre of political friends around the state with whom I love to visit and talk politics. We regale stories of old campaigns and reminisce about tidbits of tales of Big Jim Folsom, George Wallace, Howell Heflin and other legendary icons and even embellish them a bit.

  Recently, we have lamented how politics has changed. In the old days, Wallace and Folsom would go from town to town with a country band and make 15 speeches a day and shake as many as 1000 hands daily and look folks squarely in the eye and ask them for their vote.

  That, my friends, was referred to as old fashioned retail politics. Today, you simply get on the phone or internet and raise money and buy television ads. The day of one-on-one state campaigning is over.

Mike Walker: National Debt: The Straw man... and pay no attention to the man behind the curtain!

  In December 2002, Vice-President Dick Cheney, in a heated discussion with Treasury Paul O’Neal over the rapidly expanding national debt, famously said, “Reagan proved that deficits don’t matter.” Oddly, that was about as close to the truth as Cheney would ever come during the Bush administration, and the result of Cheney/Reagan and their theories of government and economics are looming darkly on the horizon.

  Nobel prize-winning economist Paul Krugman wrote a series of articles for the New York Times at the end of 2011 and early in 2012 that gave a true picture of the “debt boogie man” we are cowering from today. He first described our foreign debt as being manageable, because for every dollar we owe foreign interests, those foreign interests owe us $.89. In other words, China does NOT own the United States and there is no threat, either imminent or remote, that they ever will. By far, the largest chunk of our national debt is money we owe to ourselves.

Richard Schwartzman: An Unlikely ally

  It’s unlikely that anyone would confuse Pat Robertson with Walter Cronkite. While both are known as broadcasters, Robertson — an evangelical Christian and host of The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network — is a controversial commentator in the conservative religious right. Cronkite, during his stint as anchor for the CBS Evening News, had such a reputation for political impartiality that he was called “the most trusted man in America. ”

  The story goes that Cronkite was so well trusted by his audience, the largest network news audience at the time, that when he did a commentary against the Vietnam War, then-president Lyndon Johnson reportedly turned to an aide and said, “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the country.”