From Ohio, Wednesday:

Dick Lugar lost his bid for re-election yesterday, ceding the primary to a tea party candidate. But he didn’t go quietly.

Here’s a clip from Lugar’s exit letter:

Unfortunately, we have an increasing number of legislators in both parties who have adopted an unrelenting partisan viewpoint. This shows up in countless vote studies that find diminishing intersections between Democrat and Republican positions. Partisans at both ends of the political spectrum are dominating the political debate in our country. And partisan groups, including outside groups that spent millions against me in this race, are determined to see that this continues. They have worked to make it as difficult as possible for a legislator of either party to hold independent views or engage in constructive compromise. If that attitude prevails in American politics, our government will remain mired in the dysfunction we have witnessed during the last several years. And I believe that if this attitude expands in the Republican Party, we will be relegated to minority status. Parties don’t succeed for long if they stop appealing to voters who may disagree with them on some issues.

Read the whole thing here.

And here’s one Hoosier’s take on what the tea party has wrought.

A modern day civil rights leader speaks out ahead of tomorrow’s vote:

Barber is a pastor, and also the president of the NC NAACP.

President Obama has also weighed in against the proposed law, though he’s taking heat from gay rights groups for not being more forceful on the issue. (I happen to agree with Michael Tomasky’s view on this, for what it’s worth.)

… what does Mitt do, when one of his supporters goes to far? Watch:

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

And why it matters…

The trouble for Romney is that his shrinking in the face of an obvious opportunity to stand up for decency, reinforces the notion of his fear of his own base, and his inability to stand on principle, assuming we understand what his principles are. Not a good narrative builder if you want to be leader of the free world.

It’s Sandra Fluke/Rush Limbaugh all over again.

It’s tempting to suggest that while Romney is busy inventing the notion that President Obama goes around “apologizing for America” — something that is demonstrably false, he ought to spend less time going around apologizing for the extremists inside the Republican party.

(Sigh)

And now for your bonus tracks …

And one more:

In which I take on Paul Ryan and his devotion to Ayn Randism...

The New York Times tees up a fascinating look at the delicate, awkward dance between WLl Street and a president they hate, but who they also fear, because the believe he is likely going to be re-elected.

The piece, by Nicholas Confessore, also underlines the sheer cluelessness of many hedge founders, who really don’t seem to get how most of the country feels about them. A clip:

One day in late October, Jim Messina, Obama’s campaign manager, slipped into the Regency Hotel in New York and walked up to a second-floor meeting room reserved by his aides. More than 20 of Obama’s top donors and fund-raisers, many of them from the financial industry, sat in leather chairs around a granite conference table.

Messina told them he had a problem: New York City and its suburbs, Obama’s top source of money in 2008, were behind quota. He needed their help bringing the financial community back on board.

For the next hour, the donors relayed to Messina what their friends had been saying. They felt unfairly demonized for being wealthy. They felt scapegoated for the recession. It was a few weeks into the Occupy Wall Street movement, with mass protests against the 1 percent springing up all around the country, and they blamed the president and his party for the public’s nasty mood. The administration, some suggested, had created a hostile environment for job creators.

Messina politely pushed back. It’s not the president’s fault that Americans are still upset with Wall Street, he told them, and given the public’s mood, the administration’s rhetoric had been notably restrained.

One of the guests raised his hand; he knew how to solve the problem. The president had won plaudits for his speech on race during the last campaign, the guest noted. It was a soaring address that acknowledged white resentment and urged national unity. What if Obama gave a similarly healing speech about class and inequality? What if he urged an end to attacks on the rich? Around the table, some people shook their heads in disbelief.

“Most people in the financial world,” a top Obama donor later told me, “do not understand how most of America feels about them.” But they think they understand how the president’s inner circle feels about them. “This administration has a more contemptuous view of big money and of Wall Street than any administration in 40 years,” the donor said. “And it shows.”

That it does.

Read the whole article here.

The mind reels.

This week’s Herald column tackles the GOP’s, and my fellow members of the political media’s obsession with Marco Rubio as Mitt Romney’s running mate.

A clip:

Rubio won his Senate seat with 55 percent of the Hispanic vote in Florida, notably, losing the share of that vote located in Central Florida, where more Hispanics are of Puerto Rican descent. He’s young and telegenic, and by the way, would bolster the self-belief of white conservatives that they, too, belong to a diverse party.

But the media fixation with Rubio, and the GOP’s attempts to drape him over their shoulders, speaks to a fundamental flaw in the Magical Minority theory.

For one thing, Rubio is Cuban American and, as such, he represents around 5 percent of America’s Latino population, fully two thirds of which is Mexican American. The experiences of those two communities could not be more different. Republicans (and the media) may not see the geographic, ethnic and cultural distinctions, but Latinos do. And in the case of illegal immigration, there is no “wet foot, dry foot” policy for Mexican, Honduran or other economic migrants, leading to a sense among many, fair or not, that Cuban Americans are afforded an unfair advantage.

Likewise, Cuban Americans are a predominantly conservative constituency, while the majority of Hispanics tend to be more liberal. They favor social programs, public education and healthcare reform, by wide margins.

More fundamentally, the notion that simply dangling a person with an Hispanic surname will negate the feeling among many Hispanics, based on the coarseness of the illegal-immigration debate, that one political party doesn’t much like them, is simplistic at best, insulting at worst. It would be like saying that adding Rep. Allen West to Romney’s ticket would win over African Americans. That theory was tested in 2010, when adding Jennifer Carroll, who is black, to Rick Scott’s ticket yielded the governor exactly 3 percent of the African-American vote — the same percentage of black Floridians who were already members of the GOP.

Read the whole thing here.

Oh and by the way, Rubio still says he doesn’t want it. I know no one in the political world believes that, except of course for me, because I can very distinctly recall all of the Rubio scandals that would re-air in the public vet.

Just sayin…