On Monday, the court astoundingly ruled — 5 Republican appointees to 4 Democratic appointees — to give police carte blanche on strip-searches, even for minor offenses such as driving without a license or violating a leash law. Justice Stephen Breyer’s warning that wholesale strip-searches were “a serious affront to human dignity and to individual privacy” fell on deaf ears. So much for the conservatives’ obsession with “liberty.”

Men in Black – NYTimes.com – Maureen Dowd

[hat tip to Pat Lyford]

How come you can legislate morality (or one narrow perspective of such), but you can’t legislate healthcare?

The abqjoural’s headline was right on: Ryan’s Latest Budget Plan a Fiasco-in-Waiting for GOP.

Paul Ryan’s budget hurts the poor – The Washington Post by Dana Milbank

Ryan’s justification was straight out of Dickens. He wants to improve the moral fiber of the poor. There is, he told the audience at the conservative American Enterprise Institute later Tuesday, an “insidious moral tipping point, and I think the president is accelerating this.” Too many Americans, he said, are receiving more from the government than they pay in taxes. …

Ryan warned that a generous safety net “lulls able-bodied people into lives of complacency and dependency, which drains them of their very will and incentive to make the most of their lives. It’s demeaning.”

How very kind: To protect poor Americans from being demeaned, Ryan is cutting their anti-poverty programs and using the proceeds to give the wealthiest Americans a six-figure tax cut.

Ryan’s budget outline omits specifics about how much he would take from programs. Instead, it provided a string of Orwellian euphemisms. The budget “repairs the safety net” by allowing the states to award public assistance to fewer people — “those who need it most.” Financial aid for college would be slashed — er, “put on a sustainable funding path.” And the Ryan plan would give workers “the tools to thrive in the 21st century” — by killing off various job-training programs.

Ryan would cut Medicaid by a third and ship the remnants to state governments to handle. Or, as the congressman described it: “We also propose to strengthen Medicaid by empowering our states.” …

Such a coupling — tax cuts that disproportionately help the rich and spending cuts that overwhelmingly hurt the poor — makes Ryan’s budget a political loser. His patronizing justification — that he is cutting support for the poor and the old in order to help them — adds insult. “If we have a debt crisis, then the people who get hurt the first and the worst are the poor and the elderly,” he reasoned.

And Ryan thinks the eventual Republican presidential nominee will campaign on this plan? “I’ve spoken to all these guys,” Ryan assured reporters, “and they believe that we are heading in the right direction.”

This explains a lot about the Republicans’ difficulty.

Paul Ryan’s budget hurts the poor – The Washington Post

Good analysis — worth reading the entire thing.

Worst-case scenario for Republicans – CNN.com

Romney’s base problems were revealed in the fact that he lost North Dakota to Santorum, despite winning the state easily four years ago.

But it was Virginia that perhaps best revealed the depth of anti-Romney sentiment. Because of arcane and frankly idiotic ballot access rules, Romney had the Virginia ballot all to himself with the exception of Ron Paul. The Libertarian congressman won just 4.5% of the Old Dominion State vote four years ago. This year Paul won 40%, while Romney cleared 60%. That almost tenfold increase provided Paul’s best percentage showing of the night and served as a way of gauging just how committed some conservatives are to voting for someone other than Romney.

Worst-case scenario for Republicans – CNN.com

Mitt Romney’s Two Cadillacs Fallacy – The Washington Post by EJ Dionne, Jr.

So here’s a counterintuitive argument: These primaries have damaged the Republican candidates’ images in the short run. But in the long run, they may yet help Romney — if he prevails — because by comparison with Santorum and Newt Gingrich, he seems “moderate,” and his supporters are more “moderate” than the voters backing the other guys. And Romney has been on so many sides of so many issues that pundits can arbitrarily imagine their own Romney.

My friend and colleague Matt Miller wrote recently that “everyone knows Romney is basically a pragmatic centrist.” No, “everyone” does not know this. The evidence from his tax plan, in fact, is that he’s an extremist for the privileged.

We’re witnessing what should be called the Two Cadillacs Fallacy: Romney’s rather authentic moments suggesting he doesn’t understand the lives of average people (such as his comment on his wife’s two Cadillacs) are dismissed as “gaffes,” while Santorum’s views on social issues are denounced as “extreme.” But Romney’s gaffes are more than gaffes: They reflect deeply held and radical views about how wealth and power ought to be distributed in the United States. These should worry us a lot more than Santorum’s dopey “snob” comment or his tasteless denunciation of JFK. …

Romney’s most faithful constituency in primaries [is] Republicans earning more than $200,000 a year. In Michigan, they backed him over Santorum by 2 to 1.

They’re Romney’s base for good reason. That “across-the-board” tax cut sounds fair and balanced. But a Tax Policy Center study in November of the impact of a 20 percent across-the-board rate cut showed that the wealthiest 0.1 percent would get an average tax reduction of $264,000. The poorest 20 percent would get $78, and those smack in the middle would get $791.

Mitt Romney’s Two Cadillacs Fallacy – The Washington Post