These are my links for September 14th from 09:07 to 15:15:

• The Nevada Special Election: Where the Mediscare Attacks Went to Die? – But in Nevada's special election yesterday, the Medicare attacks failed to drive votes. Republican Mark Amodei defeated Democrat Kate Marshall 58% to 36%. The district gave McCain 49% of the vote in 2008 and 57% to Bush in 2004 (as you may recall, 2004 was a pretty good year for Republicans).

  The attacks also failed, as Mickey Kaus and David Weigel point out, in New York's special election. But NV-2 was a better test case of the Medicare attacks than NY-9. After all, the New York special election was quirky–it was precipitated by a Democratic scandal and a couple of unique factors divided the Democratic party (Weprin's vote for gay marriage and unhappiness in the sizable Jewish community over Obama's Israel policy). Turner would have voted "no" on the Ryan budget.

  On the other hand, Nevada Republican Mark Amodei, while saying he wouldn't have voted for the GOP budget because it didn't cut enough, gave his opponents a lot more grist for their Medicare attack ads:

  Amodei countered the Medicare attacks by pointing out that he wants Medicare reimbursement rates to be higher. That's pretty consistent with the GOP position that Obama's plan to reform Medicare through rationing is bad, and the Republican plan to reform Medicare through choice and competition for future beneficiaries is good.

  It wouldn't be accurate to say that the Nevada election proves Medicare will be a non-issue in 2012. It's always easy to read too much into a special election–that was certainly the case when Democrats heralded the NY-26 race as a "referendum" on GOP Medicare reform.

  What we do know is that in this case, Amodei didn't directly vote for Ryan's Medicare reform, but he did praise it. In the Democrats' minds that should have been enough to sink him in a district that was evenly divided between McCain and Obama in 2008. It didn't work.

• Obama’s Medicare blunder – Early this year, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) dug a huge hole for the Republican Party by proposing dramatic changes in the Medicare system. True, the changes would extend the life of the program. True, they would not affect current retirees. True, they won’t take effect for 10 years. But no matter. President Obama seized on the Ryan plan as a key element of his 2012 campaign.

  Then the House leadership compounded the problem by passing the Ryan plan with all but four House Republicans in support. All the rest just followed Ryan off the cliff, putting themselves on record in favor of a plan Americans overwhelmingly opposed. Democrats, reeling from the 2010 defeats, were jubilant. The Republicans had just, in their view, given away the 2012 election.

  Well, in Obama’s jobs speech, he gave it right back to the Republicans by embracing his own version of Medicare cuts.

  As I heard Obama blundering, my mind cast back to a conversation I had with George Stephanopoulos in 1995 when he was opposing my suggestion that President Clinton lay out his own plan to balance the federal budget. George was concerned that if we proposed our own budget cuts, we would lose the ability to attack those being pushed by Newt Gingrich and the Republicans.

  I countered that as long as we did not propose to cut Medicare, we would be OK and could still use the Medicare issue against the GOP. We did so with great success.

  Now Obama has run afoul of what would have been George’s advice and has nullified the advantage Ryan’s mistake afforded him. More than any other, this false step on the president’s part was the most important political outcome of the Wednesday jobs speech.

  How the Republicans respond should hinge on the details of Obama’s Medicare cuts. If the president wants to raise premiums or increase deductibles or means-test benefits, the GOP should agree. Obama will face plenty of flak in his own party and probably could only pass such a program in the Senate with Republican votes, but that’s his problem.

  If there is a bipartisan deal over these kinds of Medicare cuts, the Republicans will be off the hook over the Ryan plan. Congress will have acted, and the issue will be off the table in the 2012 election.

  But if Obama outlines cuts along the lines of his ObamaCare program, he will again be raising the rationing issue. Talk of death panels will resurface. In that case, Republicans must not let themselves be maneuvered into backing Obama’s program. To do so would be to break faith with their 2010 majority.

  If Obama wants to control healthcare delivery and prescribe what doctors can and cannot do, Republicans must take him on over the issue. That will set the stage for a rerun of the 2010 election, and we all know how that came out.

  In that case, the GOP will still come out ahead because the Medicare issue du jour won’t be the Ryan plan anymore, but the Obama Medicare cuts, and the Republicans will again be on the right side of the fight.

• What really terrifies Dems about NY-9 – It’s the possibility that the Democrats favorite issue–Social Security–didn’t work to save them because Obama, too, has embraced cutting Social Security and Medicare in “some undefined ‘everything on the table’ entitlement reform,” as Weigel puts it. Could it be that the differences between Obama’s Medicare cuts and GOP Rep. Paul Ryan’s Medicare cuts–differences that seem so significant to policy analysts in Washington (and to me)–don’t have much salience in the crude argumentation of direct-mail electioneering? Now that’s scary for a Dem. After decades of pledging not to touch the two sacred programs, it’s beginning to look as if Democrats can’t just suddenly agree to pull trillions out of Social Security and Medicare and expect voters to maintain their reflexive loyalties.

  According to the unforgiving traditional Dem appeal, after all, trillions in cuts are trillions in cuts. Dems oppose them because Dems are “fighting” on “your side”! If older voters won”t abandon that crudely combative formula as easy as positioning politicians, that has dire implications for Democrats running in every district in the land, not just those with 40% Jewish electorates. Scaring voters about Paul Ryan and the Tea Partiers’s entitlement cuts was what was going to save Obama’s party from being dragged down even if Obama himself goes the way of Jimmy Carter. Now it looks as if that life preserver won’t float. …

  At the very least, Democrats (starting with Obama) need to do a much better job of explaining why their cuts are so different from Ryan’s cuts. That’s something even Bill Clinton might have difficulty doing, though he’d be better at it than Obama will be. …

  Of course, President Obama may be able to save himself without the entitlement issue (if, for example, he draws a flawed opponent). But it’s hard to see how the Dems retake Congress without it. And without a friendlier Congress, Obama’s second term could look a lot like the past 9 months.

  =======

  Read it all

• Rick Perry’s kinder, gentler view on illegal immigrants: Will it cost him? – Perry finds himself in the unusual situation of sharing common ground with California Gov. Jerry Brown (D), who is poised to sign a bill that expands his state’s tuition law for illegal immigrant students by allowing them to apply for publicly funded financial aid. The California Assembly voted Friday to send the governor the bill, a companion to a bill Brown signed in July that allows illegal immigrant students access to privately funded college aid.

  California's financial aid incentives for students in the US illegally are the most generous in the US. In states that allow such students to pay the same tuition rates as legal state residents, they must prove they have lived in the state at least three years, received their high school diploma or G.E.D. in the state, and sign an affidavit promising to seek legal status.

  Texas and California were the first states to offer in-state tuition rates to such students. During the past decade, 11 states followed their lead: Utah, New York, Washington, Illinois, Kansas, New Mexico, Nebraska, Wisconsin, Maryland, Oklahoma, and Connecticut. In 2008, however, Oklahoma revoked its law, which had been on the books for five years.

  Advocates of the legislation say that by offering in-state tuition rates to children who bear no responsibility for the fact that their parents entered the US illegally, states are making higher education more available to young people who cannot afford the higher out-of-state price tags at public colleges. Critics say the allowance is a burden to taxpayers and unfairly takes resources from potential students who are legal residents.

  “These states are recognizing that these are the best of the best – kids who have overcome illegal status and have graduated high school and have gotten into competitive state universities. The states want to hold onto these kids and not have them lost into the underground economy,â€

  But the trend of states granting such tuition benefits to such undocumented students may have peaked, adds DeSipio, especially now that Republican majorities won many statehouses in the 2010 elections and made immigration reform a legislative priority.

  Since its passage in 2001, the Texas legislation has applied to 12,138 students, or 1 percent of all Texas college students, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board reported in 2010.

• President 2012: Pennsylvania Considering Change of Electoral College Vote Process | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – The states have discretion to change how their Electoral College Votes are apportioned.:
• Proposition 13 Proponents Crafting New California Pension Reform Initiative » Flap’s California Blog – Proposition 13 Proponents Crafting New California Pension Reform Initiative
  :
• Poll Watch: Three Years After Economic Crisis Little Sign of Amercian Relief | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Poll Watch: Three Years After Economic Crisis Little Sign of Amercian Relief #tcot #catcot
• California Field Poll: President Obama Not So Much » Flap’s California Blog – California Field Poll: President Obama Not So Much
• Flap’s Dentistry Blog: The Morning Drill: September 14, 2011 – The Morning Drill: September 14, 2011
• Government Regulation | Polls | Government regulation could be Democrats’ Achilles heel in 2012 | The Daily Caller – Government regulation could be Democrats’ Achilles heel in 2012
• Flap’s Links and Comments for September 13th through September 14th | Flap’s Blog – FullosseousFlap’s Dental Blog – Flap’s Links and Comments for September 13th through September 14th #tcot #catcot