Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.

MORNING MESSAGE: Will Anyone Cover The Levin-Coburn Report?

OurFuture.org's Richard Eskow: "It should have been the lead story from coast to coast: A bipartisan panel of Senators, including some of that body's most conservative members, released a damning report that slammed bankers, regulators, and ratings agencies - and they made it clear that they'd like to see warrants issued against the CEO of Goldman Sachs and other financial executives ... The media responded with a collective yawn."

Goldman Lies

Senate report proves Goldman Sachs "didn't tell the whole truth," finds NYT's Andrew Sorkin: "'We didn’t have a massive short against the housing market,' Lloyd C. Blankfein, Goldman Sachs’s chief executive, insisted ... [But the] findings of the Congressional report are straightforward and damning. The Senate subcommittee said it found the phrase 'net short' some 3,400 times in documents from Goldman related to the mortgage market ..."

NYT's Joe Nocera trashes federal foreclosure fraud settlement: "The proposed terms call on servicers to have a single point of contact for homeowners with troubled mortgages ... stop the odious practice of secretly beginning foreclosure proceedings while supposedly working on a mortgage modification [and] hire consultants to do spot-checks to see if people were foreclosed on improperly ... If you’re thinking: that’s what they should have done in the first place, you’re right. If you’re wondering what the consequences will be if the banks don’t abide by the terms, the answer is: there aren’t any."

Wonk Room's Pat Garofalo lists "Three More Ways House Republicans Are Trying To Weaken Financial Reform": "The 2012 Republican budget that was approved last week (with no Democratic votes) aims to repeal a provision in Dodd-Frank that allows the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. to unwind failing financial firms that, because they are so large and interconnected, can’t go through traditional bankruptcy ... Dodd-Frank allows federal regulators to deem large, interconnected financial firms (banks or otherwise) as systemically significant and therefore subject to enhanced regulation (such as higher capital requirements). House Republicans want to remove this power...."

S&P's Empty Threat

"Gang of Six" jumps on S&P threat to downgrade US credit rating. WSJ: "'This is one more warning sign that the financial markets are paying close attention to see if we are serious about addressing our budget deficits and long-term debt,' said Sen. Mark Warner ... 'Today’s warning from S&P highlights the dangers of waiting for the perfect political moment to tackle our debt crisis,' said Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn..."

But Wall Street didn't panic. LAT: "Market interest rates on U.S. Treasury bonds initially rose after S&P issued its statement, but then quickly fell back, demonstrating that the securities remain a favorite haven for many investors in times of global turmoil."

New Deal 2.0's Marshall Auerback notes S&P has no credibility: "Debt downgrades had no impact on Japan when Moody’s and S&P tried to pull the same stunt with them."

A late deal on raising the debt limit would still cause great damage, argues Ezra Klein: "'The risk is not that we get to July and run out of desperation measures,' says Citigroup’s Peter Orszag, who previously served as Obama’s budget director. '...the worry is you’re in June and you think you have time and the market blows apart early.' ... the debt ceiling is not the moment to demonstrate to the markets that Washington is broken. Once we pull the pin on that grenade, there’s no putting it back in."

President's round of local TV interviews focus more on jobs and investments than deficit reduction. CBS: "...Mr. Obama opted to highlight issues like job growth- 'we've seen numbers each month' - and blasting the Republican's proposed budget as one that 'turns Medicare into a voucher program.' ... In an interview with CBS News Denver affiliate KCNC, the president focused on clean energy and education and rarely used terms like debt or deficit ..."

Vice-President schedules deficit reduction talks, unclear if GOP will show up. NYT: "Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. on May 5 will host the first meeting on deficit reduction with members of Congress ... The Republican House and Senate leaders have not named their negotiators and show little inclination to do so ... [Sen. Maj. Leader] Reid’s picks — Senators Max Baucus and Daniel K. Inouye ... are widely perceived as hostile to the talks and because Mr. Reid passed over, among others, the Senate Budget Committee chairman, Kent Conrad, who has been working for months with a small bipartisan group known as the Gang of Six..."

Tax The Rich

New poll says: tax the rich, don't cut Medicare. McClatchy: "...voters by a margin of 2-to-1 support raising taxes on incomes above $250,000, with 64 percent in favor and 33 percent opposed. Independents supported higher taxes on the wealthy by 63-34 percent ... Support for higher taxes rose by 5 percentage points after Obama called for [it] ... Voters oppose cuts to [Medicare and Medicaid] by 80-18 percent. Even among conservatives, only 29 percent supported cuts..."

HuffPost's Leon Friedman does the math on a possible "wealth tax": "As of December 21, 2010, the total net worth of all Americans was $56.8 trillion. Assuming that the 34.6% figure of the Federal Reserve Board is still valid, that means that the top 1% owned 34.6% of the $56.8 trillion total wealth or $19.65 trillion ... Instead on increasing income taxes, which might arguably affect single proprietorships and small businesses, we could impose a tax based on wealth ... a tax of 1% of the net worth of the top 1%, until our financial health improves ... over ten years it would amount to $1.965 trillion, about half of what President Obama was seeking in his recent speech."

GOP Now On The Record

Dean Baker thanks Rep. Paul Ryan for putting Congress on the record about dismantling Medicare: "Thanks to Representative Ryan, we have the Republican Party on record as supporting these massive transfers to the wealthy. We just have to hope that the Democratic Party takes a different position."

Jonathan Chait scolds media for being manipulated by Rep. Ryan: " By portraying himself to the mainstream media as a deficit hawk rather than a right-wing ideologue, he places his ideas within comfortable, well-worn grooves of establishment thought. He is merely telling uncomfortable truths, and his opponents are 'demagogues.'"

Breakfast Sides

AFL-CIO's Richard Trumka rips WH over Colombia trade & budget deals. Politico: "AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka -- normally a steadfast ally of President Obama and congressional Democrats -- aired his differences with the administration in a closed-door meeting on Capitol Hill last week and reiterated his complaints on MSNBC today, criticizing the administration over pending free trade agreements and the President's own spending plan."

Mother Jones' Kate Sheppard lists "10 Reasons To Still Be Pissed Off About The BP Disaster": "...Fish and other sea life in the Gulf are still struggling after the disaster ... Congress hasn't changed a single law on oil and gas drilling in the past year ... GOP House members want more drilling off all our coasts with less environmental review..."

"Obama revives immigration reform" reports The Hill: "Obama is holding a meeting [on immigration reform] at the White House on Tuesday with current and former elected officials along with business and faith groups ... Ahead of that meeting, the president insisted the fight for major immigration reform legislation is not yet over ..."

Mother Jones looks at presidential candidate Tim Pawlenty's distrubing right-wing record on education: "[In 2003,] the newly elected Republican governor selected Cheri Yecke, a little-known Bush administration veteran, to produce new educational standards ... Members of Yecke's handpicked standards committees dismissed sharing and cooperation as 'socialist' ideas, suggested replacing 'We Shall Overcome' with 'Dixie' in a unit on protest songs..."

Each morning, Bill Scher and Terrance Heath serve up what progressives need to effect change on the kitchen-table issues families face: jobs, health care, green energy, financial reform, affordable education and retirement security.

MORNING MESSAGE: Proposed Spending Cap Savages Middle Class

OurFuture.org's Isaiah Poole: "Our sister site, TheMiddleClass.org, gave a "thumbs down" to the Corker-McCaskill CAP ("Commitment to American Prosperity") Act ... Any cap that forces federal spending anywhere near 21 percent of GDP, and includes Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security under that cap, would most likely force a massive shift of health care costs to seniors as well as Social Security benefit reductions. It would require implementation of something on the order of the Rep. Paul Ryan Medicare privatization plan in order to get spending under the cap, or hundreds of billions in cuts elsewhere in the budget. Such a cap would also magnify already deep cuts in a host of programs ... That includes job training programs, various forms of economic development aid to states and localities, green energy investment, high-speed rail and other forms of transportation, and research."

Does Bin Laden's Death Speed End Of Afghan War?

Afghan government officials argue Taliban still a threat. NYT: " In Afghanistan ... senior political figures welcomed the news of his death, [but] they cautioned that it did not necessarily translate into an immediate military victory over the Taliban, and urged the United States and NATO not to use it as a reason to withdraw."

The Nation's Katrina vanden Heuvel argues "it's time to end the war on terror.": "[President Obama's] call to Americans to remember what unifies us, to remember that 'justice has been done,' is a defining opening to seize ... It is time to stop defining the post 9/11 struggle against stateless terrorists a 'war.' And it is time to bring an end to the senseless war in Afghanistan that has cost this nation so much in lives and money ... what we are engaged in is not primarily a military operation. It’s an intelligence-gathering operation, a law-enforcement, public-diplomacy effort."

Debt Limit In Spotlight As Congress Reconvenes

Parties choosing sides between "spending cap" and "deficit cap." NYT: "House Republicans, saying they were leery of budget limits that could easily be circumvented, quickly came out against Mr. Reid’s suggestion that deficit caps could be a legislative solution. But many Democrats are equally opposed to automatic spending restraints that they say could apply a meat-ax approach to the budget or deny the government sufficient financial flexibility in periods of conflict or economic hardship."

Politico suggests "Gang of Six" deal needed to "spark" a final compromise over the debt limit: "...if that panel can produce a bipartisan budget framework, it could be the spark for a debt ceiling deal ...Biden, who is charged with breathing life into Obama’s new House-Senate commission on the debt ceiling vote, desperately needs such a spark. But [his] panel, which meets Thursday at Blair House, is top heavy with hard-edged, entrenched leadership types skeptical of real compromise. By contrast, the Gang of Six represents more Senate middle management and fancies itself as almost an insurgency, pressing for bolder bargains — affecting Social Security and taxes — than nervous higher-ups are prepared to make."

Debt limit expected to be reached in two weeks. CNN: "That's only two weeks away. If Congress doesn't act, the Treasury would employ a range of extraordinary measures to prevent the United States from defaulting on its obligations. That reprieve will last until July 8."

Division at GOP town halls over the recess. AP: "Televised replays of boisterous exchanges suggested that a Democratic counterattack [on the GOP budget] may have stemmed the Republicans' momentum. But many of the Republican-sponsored forums [had] plenty of Republicans [who] defended it and applauded their representative. The April gatherings had an edgier, more partisan tone than did similar events in March. First-term GOP Rep. Allen West of Florida, a tea party favorite, received mostly praise and friendly questions when he allowed constituents to speak from microphones on March 22. But last week, West, a retired Army officer with a more confrontational style than Guinta's, responded only to written questions screened in advance. Some hecklers were removed by security agents."

Key GOP talking point on plan to dismantle Medicare doesn't hold up. NYT: "House Republicans say their budget proposal would make Medicare work just like the health insurance that covers federal employees, including members of Congress ... [But in] the federal employees’ health plan, which covers eight million people, the government pays a fixed share of premiums ... No such guarantee exists under the Republicans’ plan to transform Medicare..."

The Daily Beast's Gary Rivlin argues that higher income taxes on wealthy are less important than higher capital gains taxes on the wealthy: "It’s a hollow gesture to say the federal government should raise the tax rate on the country’s top wage earners when the likes of Zuckerberg have most of their wealth tied up in stock. Many of the super-rich see virtually all their income as capital gains, and capital gains are taxed at a much lower rate—15 percent—than ordinary income."

Bloomberg News assess how the economy will shape the presidential race: "Candidates weighing a run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012 see an opening because of ... voters who blame Obama for not doing more to reinvigorate the economy following the recession ... [But] Republican candidates will have to pivot from a relatively dark and complex message of austerity and spending cuts that has dominated the budget debate in Washington to a more positive, campaign-oriented vision for job creation and economic growth..."

GOP Assault On Wall St. Reform

NYT's Paul Krugman takes down GOP attempt to scrap Wall St. reform: "...the recent House budget proposal, which calls for privatizing and voucherizing Medicare, also calls for eliminating resolution authority, in effect setting things up so that the bankers will get as good a deal in the next crisis as they got in 2008. Of course, that’s not how Republicans put it. They claim that their goal is to 'end the cycle of future bailouts,' ... But as we’ve already seen, future bailouts will happen whatever today’s politicians say — and they’ll be bigger, more frequent and more expensive without effective regulation."

USA Today edit board criticizes GOP for trying to scrap Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: "The 2010 law already places an unprecedented check on the bureau. A 10-member council of financial regulators can veto many bureau actions by a two-thirds vote — a power not granted over any other financial regulator. Republicans, who will vote in committee on the changes Wednesday, want to strengthen that veto power so much that a single council member could delay and threaten just about any bureau action — turning the bureau into an expensive, ineffective pawn of the lenders it would oversee."