The Senate will vote this week on the House GOP budget that ends Medicare, slashes Medicaid, and makes radical cuts to many other needed services. This is the budget that Newt Gingrich called "right-wing social engineering" and is the clearest example yet of the goals and policies of the Republican Party. It's been, not to put too fine a point on it, a colossal failure. Not only is it terrible - TERRIBLE! - policy, but it's turning into a political blunder of historic proportions.

Here's Nate Silver in the New York Times:

Voting for Mr. Ryan’s bill probably did not help many of the 60 or so Republican representatives whose districts were carried by Barack Obama in 2008. Still, if the public regarded the vote as more or less the usual partisan posturing on the budget — Democrats vote one way, Republicans the other — the down side of backing the Ryan plan might have been limited.

Once some Republicans start to defect, though, the public may come to view the bill in a different way. Instead of seeing it as a division between Republicans and Democrats — neither of whom are trusted much on budget issues — voters may instead start to see it as a division between moderate Republicans and extremely conservative ones. Voters who are not steeped in the bill’s particulars may well take that as a signal that it is too extreme, and that the “reasonable” majoritarian position is to oppose the plan.

The bigger problem for the Republicans, though, is a snowball effect: each Republican lawmaker who comes out against the bill makes it a bit less popular — and that in turn increases the incentive for other Republicans to break ranks too. Some Republican House members might be willing to stomach voting for a bill that has the support of 45 percent of the voters in their districts, but if popular support is just 40 percent, or 35 percent, they may throw in the towel. So a feedback loop develops, and one defection begets another.

And that's where we are now. Senators are fleeing the sinking ship, and POLITICO is running stories about "who's to blame" in the Republican Party.

But, in the end, this is just the Republican Party showing their true colors, and the American people not liking what they see.

We give up an enormous amount of our private information just to take part in the modern economy, and communicate with modern technology. Credit card companies track all of our purchases, online email providers mine our emails for contextual clues to what we're interested in, social networking sites gather detailed pictures of what we're interested in and who are friends are.

And, up to now, there are remarkably few rules on what they can do with it. John Kerry and John McCain recently introduced the Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights to try to set the rules of the road. Today, they wrote in The Hill explaining what it's all about:

Last year, Internet users sent 107 trillion emails, Facebook hosted 600 million users, Twitter hosted 155 million tweets per day, and Americans across the country shared personal data when checking into hotels, shopping for groceries and refilling their cars. In many ways, all this information sharing is good for consumers. When companies collect data and use it with high ethical standards and the full knowledge and participation of their customers, they can generate immense economic activity, innovate and tailor the services they deliver to the clients they serve. 

But today the data collectors are setting the rules. Companies can harvest our personal information and keep it for as long as they like. They can use it and sell it without asking permission. You shouldn’t have to be a computer genius to figure out how to opt out of a company’s information sharing policy. In short, these companies, from mobile phone operators to hotels to websites, can do almost whatever they want with our personal information, and we have no legal right to stop them. 

That’s why we introduced the The Commercial Privacy Bill of Rights to keep our private data safe by laying down fair information practices for anyone collecting it. Our legislation will ensure that businesses collecting personal information secure that information, tell people why their data is being collected and allow people to have a say in whether they want their information used. If these companies turn around and transfer this information, any agreements they have made to secure the privacy of their consumers’ information would travel along with it. And if someone requests a company to stop using personal information, they finally have the legal power to make that demand.

Our country is falling ever-further behind most of the developed world when it comes to infrastructure spending. We currently spend about 2% of our GDP on infrastructure, while Europe spends around  5% and China a whopping 9%!

John Kerry has introduced, with bipartisan support, the BUILD Act to revolutionize the way we build and maintain our national infrastructure. Today, he was in Taunton, describing the situation:

Greater innovation combined with new investments in infrastructure and energy is vital to the nation’s future, Sen. John Kerry told a group of local business and education leaders Friday during a stop in Taunton.

“This is an important time for all of us to think about your country and where it’s going,” said Kerry, D-Mass., who was speaking at the Taunton Inn to state Sen. Marc Pacheco’s Business and Economic Advisory Council. Pacheco created the informal group several years ago to discuss economic issues facing the region.

Kerry touted his BUILD Act legislation and criticized the Republican Sen. Paul Ryan’s budget plan, which he called “reckless” and “dangerous.”

America’s infrastructure and transit system is dated and has fallen behind that of many other industrialized nations, the 2004 presidential nominee said. The BUILD Act legislation, if enacted, would create an infrastructure bank to fund large-scale infrastructure improvements projects. The fund, which would not use grants, would only fund projects that will generate revenue and will be able to repay the loan.

“We need to out-innovate, out-educate and out-build the rest of the world,” Kerry said.

The 21st century economy we need depends on a modern infrastructure. Right now, we need to do better to be competitive in this new economy.