President Roosevelt, on this day in 1935, signed into law the Social Security Act. By far, it has been the most successful and most beloved government program in history. Here is the President said 78 years ago:
“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.
This law, too, represents a cornerstone in a structure which is being built but is by no means complete. It is a structure intended to lessen the force of possible future depressions. It will act as a protection to future Administrations against the necessity of going deeply into debt to furnish relief to the needy. The law will flatten out the peaks and valleys of deflation and of inflation. It is, in short, a law that will take care of human needs and at the same time provide for the United States an economic structure of vastly greater soundness.”
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Byron York’s column at the conservative Washington Examiner confirms that my long held opinion — that the Dems can actually take control of the House next year — is starting to take hold in the conservative zeitgeist:
Behind the scenes — in whispered asides, not for public consumption — some Republicans are now worried that keeping the House is not such a done deal after all. They look back to two elections, 1998 and 2006, in which Republicans seriously underperformed expectations, and they wonder if 2014 might be a little like those two unhappy years. “The majority is at risk,” says one well-connected Republican strategist.
York goes on to say that the reason why is that they have no agenda. That’s wrong. They have an agenda. And that agenda appears to be 1) Repeal Obamacare at all costs, 2) Destroy the Country, and 3) Accomplish 1 by doing 2. Seriously, when they are not making racist remarks about Latinos, Republicans are talking about shutting down the government AND/OR not raising the debt ceiling if the President does not repeal and defund his own law. That is all they are talking about. And it is all their conservative base is talking about at Town Hall meetings.
Indeed, Rep. Tom Cole (R) of Oklahoma said some months ago that the “only way Republicans will lose the House is to shut down the government or default on the debt.”
So what does the base and many, if not the majority of the Republican caucus want to do? Shut down the government and default on the debt.
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Polling Goodness:
NEW YORK CITY–MAYOR–DEMOCRATIC PRIMARY–Quinnipiac: Public Advocate Bill de Blasio 30, City Council Speaker Christine Quinn 24, Fmr. Comptroller William Thompson 22, Fmr. US Representative Anthony Weiner 10. The rest of the wide field of candidates gets under 10%.
If De Blasio wins, it will be a huge deal, as Booman points out…
It’s going to matter a lot who wins the mayoral contest and then how they perform once in office. This is a point that Benjamin Wallace-Wells touches upon in his piece on Bill de Blasio and the New York Times. […] So, what is de Blasio talking about? Turns out, he’s talking about “neglected hospitals, a swelling poverty rate and a broken prekindergarten system.”
It is the campaign season’s riskiest calculation: that New Yorkers, who have become comfortably accustomed to the smooth-running, highly efficient apparatus of government under Michael R. Bloomberg, are prepared to embrace a much different agenda for City Hall– taxing the rich, elevating the poor and rethinking a Manhattan-centric approach to city services. […]
Describing what he calls a tale of two cities,rife with inequalities in housing, early childhood education and police tactics, he promised those gathered at the Brooklyn bar that this year’s mayoral race wasgoing to be a reset moment. A major reset.
De Blasio is also riding the wave of the Stop and Frisk news this week (where the Court has struck down the Bloomberg policy as racist and wildly unconstitutional). De Blasio’s own adopted son, Dante, has been a victim of the policy that signals out black men for unwarranted racial profiling.
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Associated Press: “Joe Biden may run for president in 2016, or he may not. But he wants you to know he could. Iowa. New Hampshire. South Carolina. Michigan. Three years out from the next presidential election, the vice president is polishing his connections and racking up favors in all the right states to ensure he stays part of the conversation, keeping his name near the top of a list of likely contenders even if the prime spot seems to have already been claimed by Hillary Rodham Clinton.”