Adding to his list of victories, Mitt Romney’s convincing win in Illinois has many bloggers analyzing what it means -- and if it could signal the end of the GOP race.

Conservative Erick Erickson of Red State simply says: “In Illinois, Romney won. Period.”

"The Santorum campaign stumbled badly in Puerto Rico, gave up a lead in Illinois, and the candidate proved horribly undisciplined. Like Dug the dog in Up getting distracted by every random squirrel, Rick Santorum loses all ability to focus when social issues come up. His lack of discipline and message focus steering those issues to families as he did so beautifully in the Mesa, AZ debate has hindered him and solidified a media narrative that he is more concerned with those issues than jobs and the economy. It is not fair. It is not even accurate. But fairness and accuracy are rare commodities in American retail politics and Rick Santorum has not leveraged his strengths well.

On the other hand, Mitt Romney’s win in Illinois still highlights his struggles. Blue collar voters are not fond of him. Staunchly conservative voters are not either. Evangelical voters also are not fond of him. The voters do not feel quite comfortable with their pick. But though evangelicals and social conservatives are the base of the base of the Republican Party, they are not enough to stop Mitt Romney and a spending advantage some have estimated topped 20 to 1 against Santorum in Illinois.”

Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast notes that although Romney won, he continually struggles to convince the Conservative base, which can pose a problem in November.

“…In a state where Romney did very well, with a 12 point margin over Santorum, that he still lost non-college educated whites by 7 percent and was essentially tied with Santorum among those earning under $50,000 a year. I think this means real vulnerability to the attack line coming in the fall that he is the Wall Street mega-rich candidate who wants even more tax cuts for people like him and Ryan-style cuts in the safety net. And he still lost the white evangelical vote by seven points.

I don't think his weakness among the very conservative matters much for the general. They'll turn out for him. But I do think his continued weakness with the core enthusiasts in the GOP base, white evangelicals, is a potential problem for turnout this November. Some of it is surely about his Mormonism; some of it his patrician Yankee style. But he'll need something powerful to motivate these voters, while not poisoning his appeal to moderate Republicans by emphasizing issues like abortion, gays and contraception.”

But Jay Cost, conservative contributor at National Review Online, says if Romney continues to win with his core groups, the path to the GOP presidential nomination will come sooner than later.

“Without a substantial shift in these major blocs (suburban, upscale, relatively moderate voters), there is no way Santorum will come close to Romney in terms of votes or delegates. The electoral math is simply undeniable: The Mid-Atlantic states and California, where demographics favor Romney, are still to vote; plus, the big delegate hauls remaining in the South — North Carolina and Texas — are more like Florida than Mississippi, full of upscale, suburban voters who have typically backed Romney...

Thus, the Pennsylvania primary in late April is key. The demographic mix will favor Romney, but it is Santorum’s home state. If Romney wins there, game over. If Santorum wins, then the race will probably drag out until June.”

Jennifer Rubin, a pro-Romney conservative opinion blogger for the Washington Post writes that after Romney’s victory last night in Illinois, he is finally receiving the credit he deserves. 

“Mitt Romney’s Illinois win was so impressive that neither Rick Santorum nor the press corps bothered to spin the results. Whatever the verb — “crushed,” “rolled,” or “clobbered” — there was rare consensus that Romney had finally crossed the threshold from “weak front-runner” to ”presumptive nominee.” Both the extent of the victory and the reminder that Santorum is essentially a well-funded Mike Huckabee (winning only in rural areas or among very conservative evangelicals) have, it seems, forced the chattering class to adjust its analysis to fit reality...

As we’ve said before, by the end of a presidential primary, the winner seems more polished and presidential than at the beginning of the contest. This is both a factor of how we view him and the shot of confidence a candidate gets after all the elections, speeches, debates and interviews. It is a grueling process, but in the end the winner is elevated. The press and Democratic operatives would have us believe that Romney has been diminished by the process. In fact, as last night demonstrated, quite the opposite is true.”

The blogosphere erupted with reactions to the White House’s release of President Obama’s so-called “long-form” birth certificate today.

Liberal blogger Steve Benen at The Washington Monthly doubted the disclosure would discourage conspiracy theorists who believe President Obama wasn’t born in the United States.

If there's one thing right-wing voices have made clear, it's that reason and evidence are irrelevant. They didn't come up with a birther garbage out of sincere concerns; they came up with this to cast doubts on the president's legitimacy and make him out to be The Other in the eyes of the mainstream.

I don't necessarily blame White House officials for wanting to end this nonsense once and for all, but if they're expecting the hysterical right to move on, they're likely to be disappointed.

John Aravosis at the liberal AMERICAblog suggested the move is too little, too late.

There doesn't appear to be anything more on this form than on the other one they released three years ago.  Why didn't they just release this then and be done with it?

Blogger Andrew Sullivan at The Daily Beast also asked why Obama waited so long, and assailed the media for not putting more pressure on the Obama administration for providing the long-form certificate in order to give the birthers the material evidence they were calling for.

I think this should have been done long ago. Because a president has to put his public responsibilities before his pride and his privacy. That's the price of the job - to defuse or debunk conspiracy theorists or just skeptics with all the relevant information you have.

It's also the job of the media always to press for more information, not less. But so many spent their energy arguing that Obama need do no more and piling on the Birthers. They still seem to think they are gatekeepers, possessors of the power to decide what is or is not legitimate for citizens to ask of their public officials.

Get over yourselves, MSM. And do your job - not defending the right of people in power to protect themselves, but scrutinizing them relentlessly, with every fact and document you can get. You don't defuse conspiracy theories or end legitimate doubts by telling public officials they need not provide clear and available evidence to rebut them. Yes, some will still suspect. But many will walk away. That's worth doing.

Meanwhile, Tanya Somander at the progressive blog Think Progress noted that Donald Trump said last week that he would release his tax returns when the president released his birth certificate.

Of course, now that Obama has officially put this issue to rest, the secretive billionaire may find another excuse to avoid releasing the potentially damning documents — like demanding Obama’s college records, his SAT scores, college thesis, and on and on…

In fact, conservative blogger Erick Erickson at Red State wondered if the president would now also release his college transcripts, adding that the release of the birth certificate confirms “what most of us have always known.”

Of course, once the birth certificate issue is dispatched, will he release his college transcripts? That’s the issue for me.

When the birth certificate is reviewed and we can see what most of us have always known — that he was born in Hawaii — we can move on. For some, moving on will be to wonder what religion the man is.

He can’t win on this. Not that I care.

Jonah Goldberg at the conservative NRO noted what he views as the irony of President Obama decrying this episode of “silliness” just before engaging in, as Goldberg sees it, frivolous pursuits.

[Obama] railed against “distractions” and “silliness” that prevent us from grappling with our very serious problems.  Then, he left to go tape the Oprah Winfrey show and hold a fundraiser. No word on when his next tee time will be.

Goldberg’s NRO colleague Daniel Foster predicted that this disclosure would not assuage the hardcore “birthers.”

Here’s the long-form birth certificate, so birthers can get to work on explaining why we now need a photograph of President Obama’s parents standing in front of Kapiolani hospital with a copy of the August 4, 1961 edition of the Honolulu Star Advertiser in one hand and a complete genome in the other.

Conservative blogger Ed Morrissey at Hot Air said the news is actually a lost political opportunity for President Obama, as he tried to paint the issue, and those pushing it, as a distraction, relatively early in the election cycle.

Some of those who pushed this issue over the last two-plus years are now crying foul, saying “Why did he wait this long to release it?”  Why would Obama have wanted to release it?  After all, it made for a perfect way to paint his opposition as lunatics.  Frankly, I’m surprised he didn’t wait until after the GOP primaries.  He could have used the bump more then than now.

Morrissey also said the issue dissipated “whatever credibility [Donald] Trump had.”

Who gets hurt worse by the White House release of Barack Obama’s long-form birth certificate?  If you think that it might be the man who practically made it his campaign platform, think again.  Donald Trump says he totally had Adonis DNA on the issue, or something… He won in the same sense that Charlie Sheen is #winning! by getting canned and then embarrassing himself on a national tour.

The reaction to the news that the unemployment fell to 8.8% in March was received soberly by bloggers on the left and the right.

White House chief economic adviser Austan Goolsbee laid out the official White House view in his own blog post.

As long as millions of people are looking for jobs, there is still considerable work to do to replace the jobs lost in the downturn. Nonetheless, the steep decline in the jobless rate and the solid employment growth in recent months are encouraging.

Goolsbee also noted in his post that this month of job growth was driven primarily by increased employment, not people leaving the labor force – a point that conservative blogger Ed Morrissey at Hot Air also picked up on.  Both Morrissey and bloggers on the left noted, however, that while the addition of 216,000 jobs is good news, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the jobs lost in the recession.

As good as that news is, it will take a very, very long time to create enough jobs to restore the pre-crash levels of employment.  The civilian participation rate has not changed from its previous 64.2%, which means that those who have stopped looking for work are still sitting on the sidelines.  A year ago, that number was 64.9%.  At this rate, it will take more than five years to add six million jobs back into the economy.  However, one other sign of good news was a slight drop in the number of people not in the work force (a drop of 11,000), which was the first time in more than two years that number has not risen.

The top-line number is still deceptive in that it compares apples to oranges on unemployment, thanks to the depressed participation rate, but it’s good news to see job additions rise above 200,000 for the second straight month.

Meteor Blades at the liberal blog Daily Kos has a similar reaction, noting that the projected number of jobs added this year is nowhere near the number lost at the end of 2007, as well as the low percentage of unemployed people actively looking for work.

At the current rate of hiring, however, the number of Americans with a job will not reach the pre-recession peak until January 2014. And the current rate of hiring is exactly what most analysts predict will be the case. By the end of the year, that might mean 2.5 million new jobs. But 8.4 million jobs were lost in the downturn, which began in December 2007. The unemployment rate is now at the same level as it was two years ago. But that's partly a reflection of the fact so many people have stopped looking for work, which means they're no longer counted among the unemployed. If they rejoin the labor force but can't find jobs, the unemployment rate will rise.

A few liberal blogs used the news to accuse Republicans of enacting policies that stunted further growth.

Liberal Comrade DougJ at Balloon Juice:

 It’s pretty clear the markets are responding to the clarity of House Republicans’ policy goals.

Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen blames Republican federal and state legislators for budget cuts that translated into public sector job losses.

The 8.8% unemployment rate, while obviously still way too high, is now at its lowest level in two years. What's more, the 216,000 created in March was the best month in about a year, and improved upon February's encouraging numbers.

Also note, the total would have been even higher had it not been for state and local budget cuts -- the private sector added 230,000 jobs, but the public sector lost 14,000 jobs. Those were jobs that could have been saved were it not for conservative fiscal policies.

Liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan at the Atlantic said he wants President Obama to address the cost to the United States of the Libya offensive in his 7:30 pm address to the nation tonight.

A president addressing the nation on a war should be quite explicit on how it will be funded, under a range of scenarios. Some reports this time around suggest that the Saudis may pay the bill. Fine, but tell us. And each year of the costs needed for Afghanistan and Iraq should come out of some other part of the defense budget or require cuts in domestic spending elsewhere. Of course, none of this would be necessary if the Congress just did its job - and demanded fiscal responsibility from the increasingly trigger-happy executive branch. 

On the right, Victor Davis Hanson at NRO asserted that the United States has two options: take Mummar Khaddafy out immediately or patrol the skies of Libya endlessly, eventually earning the resentment of the rebels and enabling Khaddafy to overpower them. He also laid out some other assumptions about ground and air intervention that he said have been established in previous engagements in the Middle East. Regardless of what the president says tonight, Hanson wrote that he should be working to remove Khaddafy from power.

● Those we are seeking to help are usually the weaker of the two parties, and may at some point make deals with our enemies by deprecating the hand that feeds them.

● With the exception of Britain, any allies, European or Arab, will not stay to the end, and reappear only when it is in their interests, either in the financial or political sense.

● We can take whatever level of public support there was in the beginning and after three months halve it; the most prominent politicians and pundits who championed the intervention will be the most likely, as support withers and the unexpected becomes the norm, to claim the intervention was a mistake, they were misled, or their brilliant original intervention was screwed up the administration’s disappointing (fill in the blanks).

● When it is all over, the president always takes a hit: Carter’s screwed-up rescue operation, Bush I with Kurds in the cold on the hills, Bush II with the Iraq insurgency, Clinton with American bodies dragged through Mogadishu, Reagan’s empty shelling after the Marine barracks, etc. Democratic presidents operate without much of an antiwar movement either in Congress or in the public, but their failures tend to confirm, fairly or not, inherent ill-at-ease with and incompetence in the use of force.

● Gas prices will either rise or be predicted to rise.

Given the above, and given the fact that this intervention was a bad idea, poorly articulated and not thought out from the very beginning, the best denouement is to get Qaddafi and get him quickly. Let us hope that, whatever the president says, he has advisers who see what must be done. 

 

 

The UN Security Council’s vote to authorize the international community “to take all necessary measures” to protect Libyan civilians (after which the Khaddafy regime announced a cease-fire, although reports say shots are still being fired) elicited a surprising consensus among some liberal and conservative bloggers: a sense of doubt that moving forward with military operations will be worth the commitments the United States will have to make.

Liberal blogs seemed to have visions of the development of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Balloon Juice’s John Cole, in a post titled “The Hawks Are Winning”

I’ve already stated my piece on this, and appear to be in a mind-meld with Angela Merkel, who wants to know what comes next when the no-fly zone inevitably fails.

Well, we all know what comes next- FREEDOM BOMBS FOR EVERYONE.

He continues:

The number one goal is not saving civilians, it is getting the no-fly zone in place so that escalation will be easier. When the no-fly zone doesn’t work, we’ll move up to shock and awe, and before you know it, we’ll have troops on the ground. After all, we’re Murrika!

I’ll let you figure out how this is in our national interest and how entering another war with no clear definition for victory or understandable mission is what we need. And someone let me know what color to change the blog to so we are not accused of being with the terrorists.

Liberal blogger Andrew Sullivan at The Atlantic:

So the United States is embarking on another effort at nation-building in a Muslim country where there is no nation.

And don't tell me we can stop short of this. If you are bombing a territory and arming and advising rebels within it, you are a part of the war. And you are responsible for its consequences. I simply cannot believe that the US is taking custody of yet another chaotic region we cannot begin to understand in favor of people we do not know against a crazy tyrant we spent the past few years rehabilitating.

Well, I can believe it. If we had elected John McCain, it would be highly believable.

Over at the Weekly Standard, conservative blogger John Tabin wrote that while the Obama administration took too long to get behind a no-fly zone, he expressed concern over the length of an American military committment.  

There's no doubt that, as I argued yesterday, the cost/benefit analysis of this course of action has gotten significantly less favorable as the Obama administration has dithered for weeks.

More:

I can't shake the feeling that this isn't so much laying the groundwork for Gaddafi's end as it is committing US forces to a longterm mission to enforce a de facto partition. Protecting Eastern Libya may be laudable in and of itself, but it's quite an effort to make if it doesn't topple Gaddafi any time soon.

Bloggers come up with a few nicknames for the procedure used by Wisconsin Republicans to vote separately on the collective bargaining portion of the spending bill:

“The nuclear option” – Hot Air’s Allahpundit 

“The Cee Lo Green option” – NRO’s Jim Geraghty (via a reader)

Bloggers on both sides of the Wisconsin budget issue seemed to agree that Republicans would have been politically better off trying this tactic when the standoff first started.

Liberal blog Balloon Juice’s christian mistermix:

If the Wisconsin Republicans’ plan was to jam through the defeat of collective bargaining with a sketchy parliamentary move, they should have done it the minute that Democrats vacated the state. If that had happened, the howls would have been loud but fairly short-lived, since it’s easier to energize people when they’re trying to prevent something from happening, rather than complaining after the fact.

Instead, we have today’s trainwreck. Walker got his number one item, but he paid a huge price. He’s almost certainly a one-term governor. There’s a dissenting Republican in the Senate, and presumably we’ll hear more from him. If there’s a general strike, the union’s side of the case is now clearly outlined in the public mind. If the unions don’t strike, they look like paragons of restraint. And what about the recalls? No matter the outcome, they’ll occupy the press and public attention for the next few months.

Conservative NRO’s William Voegeli:

Gov. Scott Walker and the Republicans have been audacious, but not conspicuously nimble… The work-around of passing the non-spending parts of the bill in a separate piece of legislation, one not requiring a super-majority quorum, could have been effected many days ago, without giving the pro-union zealots weeks of free publicity. 

Allahpundit at the conservative HotAir recognized the political danger of passing a bill this way, but alluded to the last time procedural gymnastics were used to pass a bill: the Democratic push to pass the health care reform bill.

There may be a backlash to doing it this way, but the backlash is already in effect via the recall campaigns the left is mounting against them. Like Ace says, probably the best thing they can do for themselves politically at this point is pass the damned thing, get it off the table, and let people cool down as it fades from the media cycle.

Exit question: Don’t you hate it when irregular procedures are used to destroy a de facto filibuster of an unpopular bill?

But liberal blogger Steve Benen at Washington Monthly said there was irony in Republicans using similar maneuvers that they complained about during the health care fight (even though both sides frequently employ such tactics). He added that in the case of Wisconsin, protestors aren’t as upset about the procedure as they are about what’s in the bill.

About a year ago, in the midst of a bitter fight over health care reform, one of the top areas of concern among Republicans was about procedure. They cared about the pending legislation, but they really cared about the process.

And so we were bombarded with complaints about discussions "behind closed doors" and "secret deals." GOP lawmakers who'd relied many times on the same legislative maneuvers were suddenly disgusted with reconciliation, deem and pass, self-executing rules, and the like. Legislation that passed through entirely legitimate means was condemned for having been "rammed through."

It's curious, then, to consider Republican satisfaction with what occurred in Madison last night.

…

To be sure, though, the point of the Democratic outrage in Wisconsin is over the substance, not the process. If there's hypocrisy on display here, it's not bipartisan.

 

As CPAC gets under way, bloggers so far on both sides of the aisle give their take on the rift between some conservative politicians and groups who have boycotted the conference because of the presence of GOProud, a gay conservative organization.

John Cole at liberal blog Balloon Juice:

It’s kind of wild to think about it, but CPAC, which was made up of wingnuts so crazed they cheered Beck and Limbaugh as speakers the past two years, is no longer the nuttiest group of the GOP. There are even more extreme folks who don’t think CPAC is quite bigoted enough and has been too nice to the gays.

And Jim DeMint, tea party extraordinaire, is the leader of thew new wing.

And conservative blogger Erick Erickson at RedState said that he is breaking his silence on the divide because GOProud co-founder and board chairman Christopher Barron criticized the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation, which dropped out of the confab because of GOProud’s participation.

In an interview with Metro Weekly, Barron said of Heritage:

”They’ve chosen to – and it’s a mystery to me why – but they’ve chosen to align themselves with the losers.”

Erickson:

I have done my best to stay out of this business, keep my mouth shut, and appreciate my friends on both sides of the CPAC divide. Had I not seen this particular attack by GOProud against long time solid conservatives I’d continue keeping my mouth shut. But this is too much. And my guess is that there aren’t many if any willing to call foul, so I will do it.

As someone who spent time trying to give them the benefit of the doubt, I accept this as conclusive proof that, while it is a Republican organization, GOProud is not a conservative organization.

Those groups and people who have sat out CPAC this year have done so not because they hate the gays, as Grover Norquist and GOProud would have you believe, but because GOProud is not a conservative organization and its agenda is not a conservative agenda.

For that, they are called losers and nasty bigots.

These losers and nasty bigots have done a lot more for the conservative movement than GOProud. And I am very happy to call them my friends.

This week, I’d much rather be with them than be at CPAC.