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More than 165,000 previously unregistered voters have signed up since the first of the year.

Between January and March of this year, more than 30,000 currently registered voters changed their party identification. Over 12,000 of those, about 40%, are previously Republican voters who have moved OUT of the party to register either as Democrats or as unaffiliated voters able to participate in either primary on May 6th. Subtract from that the number of Dems and unaffiliated voters who moved into the GOP, and there’s still a net LOSS of about 6,700 Republican voters in three months. By contrast, the Democratic Party nabbed a net of about 4,000 voters -- previously Republican or unaffiliated -– who moved into the Dem column.  And the unaffiliated group, which gained almost 50,000 new voters in the last three months, added an additional 2,700 net from the shuffle.

Teresa Heinz Kerry joined Michelle Obama at a rally at Carnegie Mellon University today, saying she hoped the state would support Obama the way it had voted for both of her husbands.

“Pennsylvania voted for both of these good men,” she said, referring to the late John Heinz, a former Republican senator in the state, and Sen. John Kerry, the 2004 presidential candidate. “And this election, I hope Pennsylvania will join me in casting a ballot for another great and good man, Sen. Barack Obama.”

One of them helped deregulate the financial services industries in the 1990s, and now sits in the corporate suites of Swiss banking giant UBS, which yesterday announced $19 billion in investment losses tied to the crumbling U.S. real estate market.

Democratic opponents are already plotting attacks on two advocates of what Robert Reich, a former Clinton labor secretary, described as "dog eat dog capitalism," an economic philosophy that works well when the economy is on the upswing but may not play so well in a trough.

To economists across the political spectrum, much of the criticism is unfair oversimplification.

The spiraling crisis in the credit and housing markets has kept Gramm in focus, fairly or not...More to the point may be Gramm's aggressive efforts when he was chairman of the Senate Banking Committee to deregulate the banking and financial services industry. That culminated in passage in 1999 of a sweeping financial services law that tore down the Depression-era Glass-Steagall wall separating regulated commercial banks from largely unregulated investment banks. And little regulation was put in to replace it.

Gramm has some unlikely defenders. Robert Litan, a Brookings Institution economist who advised the Clinton administration on financial industry deregulation, said that if anything, the crisis might have been mitigated if Gramm had gotten more of his way when he opposed the Community Reinvestment Act in the 1990s.

Gramm maintained that the act, which allowed regulators to review a bank's record on lending to the poor before approving financial industry mergers, allowed advocacy groups to effectively blackmail banks into making risky loans in poor communities. But the Clinton administration prevailed in saving the CRA.

"If they wanted a merger approval, they had to show they were making a conscious effort to make loans to subprime borrowers," Litan said. "If the CRA had not been so aggressively pushed, it is conceivable things would not be quite as bad. People have to be honest about that."

My hunch, as I’ve said before, is that this will end up like Israel’s war with Hezbollah insofar as (a) the media pronounced it an unmitigated disaster, (b) the damage to the bad guys was much greater than reported, and (c) even so, the mission ultimately failed to cripple a lethal Iranian proxy, leaving it to regroup and fight another day after it’s been extravagantly resupplied.

Big Oil is once again being called on the carpet.

Senior executives of the five largest U.S. oil companies were to appear before a congressional committee Tuesday where they were likely to find frustrated lawmakers in no mood for small talk.

Markey, chairman of the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming, said he wants to know why, with such profits, the oil industry is steadfastly fighting to keep $18 billion in tax breaks, stretched over 10 years.

He said the executives would be asked to explain how they can get energy prices down in the short run and "in the long run what are they going to do to shift the focus to a renewable energy agenda."

"We have to move beyond this oil economy," Markey said Tuesday on CBS' "The Early Show." "We have to move to a renewable energy economy. ... We can never get out of this trap as long as the oil companies want to hold us hostage to this old agenda."

Sigh.

One of the things that might actually encourage a move "beyond the oil economy" are high oil prices, which discourage unnecessary consumption by motorists through perfectly logical self-interest instead of government-imposed conservation mandates or whatever heavy-handed measure it is Markey wishes for. Making gas prices artificially respond to your whims makes the process of buying gas artificially painless, thereby removing all indicators for the consumer that he should have any concern at all about an oil economy.

According to publicly available data on the top 27 energy companies tracked by the EIA, the total current income taxes paid worldwide by these companies nearly doubled between 2004 and 2006, increasing from $44.8 billion to $81.5 billion.”

News has leaked out from the folks at Muppet central (The Jim Henson Company) that the next Muppet feature film will sport a story line that attacks oil companies. According to CHUD.com, the story will center around all our favorite Muppets producing a show to raise money to save their old theater. They need the money, of course, because an "evil character" is trying to buy the building so that he might tear it down to "get at the oil underneath."

He was devoted to the Navy, but in personal comportment, he was anything but regulation.  He was a rumpled, informal man, who wore a crushed cap with the crown removed that the wife of one of his aviators had given him; kept his shoes off when he worked in an office; tobacco leavings were always scattered about him, as he rolled his own with one hand; possessed a mischievous sense of humor, and was unusually close to sailors and junior officers who served under him, and revered him.  They called him, “Popeye;” his family called him, “Sid;” and his fellow officers, “Slew,” for reasons I never learned.