Flap’s Links and Comments for April 14th on 18:47

These are my links for April 14th from 18:47 to 20:07:

• Obama blows up the bridge – "Rather than building bridges, he's poisoning wells," said Rep. Paul Ryan, after listening to Barack Obama's scathing attack on his deficit-reduction plan as a shredding of America's social contract with the elderly and poor.

  Ryan is right. Yet, with Obama's partisan savagery, virtually calling the GOP plan immoral, we have clarity.

  There will be no grand bipartisan bargain on taxes and spending.

  The two parties on Capitol Hill and the president will not be coming together to solve the gravest financial and fiscal crisis America has faced since the Great Depression. Between them today is a high wall and a deep ditch.

  The heart of the Ryan plan is to turn Medicaid into block grants to the states, so each can decide for itself how best to use the funds, and to convert Medicare into a program where the U.S. government would provide citizens with the funds and freedom to chose whatever health insurance they wished to buy.

  Obama denounced both.

  But if the Republican Medicare and Medicaid proposals are dead on arrival in Harry Reid's Senate and Obama's White House, Obama's plan to raise taxes is equally lifeless.

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  So, did Obama do the GOP a favor with his "political speech" on Paul Ryan's budget proposal?

• Undeclared candidate Mitch Daniels becoming the big man on campus – It might be a stretch to call him the big man on campus. But Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels is getting some presidential buzz at colleges across the country.
  Daniels, a Republican, can thank Yale University students Max Eden and Michael Knowles, who launched the Students for Daniels website.
  "He has incredible executive experience, and what's more, he's just very down to earth, very direct. You don't see that from anybody else," Eden said.
  Borrowing a page from the 2008 playbook, the Students for Daniels organization uses social media to spread the word to chapters at 57 colleges and universities. Interest in the group spiked after it released a YouTube video featuring Knowles and former New York gubernatorial candidate Jimmy McMillan, who coined the phrase: "The rent is too damn high."
  "The deficit is too damn high," McMillan says in the Students for Daniels YouTube video, seizing on the Indiana governor's message on fiscal discipline.
  Eden, who volunteered for the Obama campaign in 2008, says he's disappointed in the president's approach to the mounting national debt.

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  Read it all…..

• Republican presidential primary: Many top GOP donors remain on the sidelines – Michael Ashner was one of Sen. John McCain's major fundraisers in the 2008 presidential campaign, bringing in $500,000 for the Republican nominee.

  That makes the Oyster Bay, N.Y., real estate investment executive one of the most sought-after bundlers for prospective GOP candidates in 2012. Supporters of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney have been particularly persistent in wooing him — New York Jets owner Woody Johnson even invited him to take in a game in his private box.

  But Ashner is reluctant to sign up with any of the White House hopefuls.

  "I'm sort of hiding under my desk when the calls come in," said Ashner, noting he still wanted to learn more about the contenders. "I don't see a dynamic candidate out there yet. A number of them have interesting credentials, but they just strike me as a little lackluster."

  Ashner is part of a large swath of top-tier Republican donors still sitting on the sidelines of the 2012 race, according to prominent Republican political operatives and fundraisers, in a reflection both of torn loyalties and ambivalence about the field of candidates.

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  Unless Mitch Daniels, Paul Ryan or Chris Christie run, the donors will stay on the sidelines and help in Senate races.