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Let Me Start: A Grand Bargain?

President Obama is still looking for a grand bargain with Republicans.
US President Barack Obama waves as he arrives at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California, on April 3, 2013. (Photo by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images)
US President Barack Obama waves as he arrives at San Francisco International Airport in San Francisco, California, on April 3, 2013.

President Obama is still looking for a grand bargain with Republicans. He's presenting a budget plan that includes cuts to Social Security and Medicare -- essentially the same plan he offered House Speaker John Boehner at the end of last year -- in an attempt to show Republicans he's willing to compromise. Of course, that's not winning him any points with progressives. But it's a strategic move by the president: He is hoping that constituents will complain to their members of Congress about the sequester cuts to the military and domestic programs, and that these new proposed cuts would eliminate the need for the sequester cuts. The White House is banking on voters blaming Republicans for the fiscal standoff that may ensue. And that may be an overly complicated bank shot for President Obama to pull off.

Unemployment dropped to 7.6% and the economy added jobs for the 30th straight month, although last month's 88,000 new jobs aren't enough to put a big dent in the jobless rate. Perhaps those sequester cuts weren't such a good move...

A new report in ThinkProgress finds that the real cost of tax dodging by corporations and the wealthy is staggering -- and it hurts all of us.

Here's the same tired argument we heard last night on the show from Larry Pratt of Gun Owners of America: The NRA's Wayne LaPierre blasts Connecticut's tough new gun laws because -- he says -- criminals won't follow the laws. And when you boil it down, that's an argument against having ANY laws.

President Obama tried to explain the tricky politics of the environment -- and the Keystone XL pipeline -- so donors in the Bay Area.