The Republican abuse of the filibuster is finally even getting to the American people.

Think Progress:

One of the greatest obstacles to passing progressive legislation in Congress has been the use of the filibuster in the Senate. With upwards of “40 cloture votes since the start of the 111th Congress in January, this Senate is on pace to record the second-largest number of filibuster roll calls,” transforming what was intended to be a seldom-used procedural tactic into an all-out tool for obstructionism. Now, a new CBS/New York Times poll finds that more Americans support ending the filibuster and requiring legislation to pass by a simple majority:

As you may know, the Senate operates under procedures that effectively require 60 votes, out of 100, for most legislation to pass, allowing a minority of as few as 41 senators to block a majority. Do you think this procedure should remain in place, or do you think it should be changed so that legislation is passed with a simple majority?

Should remain 44

Should be changed 50

[Don't Know] 6

I would bet you that on January 1, 2009, most American had no idea what the filibuster even was. The constant abuse of this practice is not escaping the notice of our citizens. And you know the only reason why Americans are getting fed up with the filibuster is because the liberal blogosphere has been getting this information out there to the American people.

This is bad news - not just for the many, many Americans who are still struggling to get by, but for the long-term economic health of the country. People not working are people not paying payroll taxes, and without that revenue, it's bad news for Social Security and other federal programs. That's why a real jobs program is necessary:

The economy is projected to add jobs this year at a pace too sluggish to make much of a dent in unemployment, according to a new White House forecast that suggests President Obama's advisers expect the jobless problem to be a fact of life throughout his term.

With the release of the annual Economic Report of the President, the Obama administration laid out a sweeping economic agenda that includes overhauling health care, restructuring financial regulation and dealing with long-term budget deficits. But the backdrop for all those initiatives is an economy that, if the administration's forecast is correct, will be functioning well below its potential for years to come.

The nation will add an average of 95,000 jobs a month this year, according to the forecast, a bit below the number that economists think needs to be generated just to keep up with population growth. The unemployment rate is projected to come down quite slowly after that, averaging 8.2 percent in 2012, when Obama will be up for reelection.

There appears to be a high turnout for MA's special election which possibly could be good news for the bumbling Martha Coakley.

A reader brings us up to speed after the jump ...

By noon, more than 55,000 voters cast their ballots in Boston - up from an estimate of 24,000 during the December primary. That puts Boston on pace to produce more than 150,000 votes. In raw votes, if this keeps up, that'll be slightly more than the 2002 or 2006 state elections, but well below presidential years. (The surge in enrollments in '08 means that a slight increase in the number of voters would still be a significantly lower percentage.)

It's also above the election eve forecasts. The Secretary of State predicated roughly double the December turnout - so far, Boston is actually up 130%. And with lines discouraging voters at some precincts and a snowy morning, coupled with much more intensive GOTV efforts, there are some indications that turnout may actually tilt toward the afternoon.

It's too soon for optimism. Turnout had to exceed projections for Coakley to have any chance. Well, it has - so she's still in the running. But we're going to need more numbers before we can guess whether she'll pull it out.

I would stress the readers caveat that this is really nothing for Dems to get too excited about. What it does suggest is that the kind of big turnout Coakley would need to pull this off seems to be happening. Solid turnout is a necessary but by no means sufficient condition.

mcjoan finds that the local media sees the same thing.

Local media is sounding the same theme. Depsite the bad weather, folks are voting.

From WBZ-TV in Boston:

In contrast to the light turnout for the party primaries last month, there are already signs of a heavy turnout. In the late Sen. Ted Kennedy's district in Barnstable, they're estimating a 60-percent turnout by the end of the day.

For you Bay-staters, what are you seeing on the ground? And for the rest of you, have you made your calls? Polls are open for several more hours. Keep on pushing.

Race tracker wiki: MA-Sen

Usually turnout is very small for special elections and state primary elections, but if Coakley has any chance to win it if the polls are correct is by a bigger than normal turnout. We'll see.

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Isn't that great news? He also told George Stephanopoulos on This Week there will be "growth in the spring." (Just like Chauncy Gardiner in "Being There.")

But it isn't true. The recession isn't over until jobs increase, and that's not really happening. Summers is saying we "only" lost 11,000 jobs last month, and that's not exactly true. The numbers were brought down by a number of factors, including the large numbers of people who have given up and stopped looking for work.

Nonetheless, everyone agrees Larry Summers is a Very Serious Person, so I will take his word for it and just sit here, waiting for my pony.

STEPHANOPOULOS: And Mr. Summers, let me begin with you, and let's start with just the overall economic situation right now, especially on jobs. We saw that drop in unemployment in November, but private economists predict that unemployment is likely to head back up. Mark Zandi sees it peaking at about 10.6 percent next year. Others say it could go up to 11 percent. Is that in line with your forecast?

SUMMERS: George, here is what I know. We were talking about depression, we were talking about the financial system collapsing. Today, everybody agrees that the recession is over, and the question is what the pace of the expansion is going to be. These things happen in stages. First, GDP goes up. That has happened. Then, hours that are worked by workers who already have jobs go up. That's starting to happen. Then employment goes up. We got very close to that this year, this month, with only 11,000 jobs lost. And then unemployment starts to come down. So these problems weren't made in a month or a year, and they are going to take a substantial time to solve. But what we can take satisfaction from is that we've walked back from the brink. And you know, forget what we say. Most professional forecasters are now looking for a return to job growth by spring.

Now, when job growth starts, more people are going to be looking for work, so it will take a little longer for the unemployment statistics to come down, but make no mistake, we were losing 700,000 a month when President Bush turned the economy over to President Obama. The number last month was 11,000.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Let me pin you down on that, though. You believe the economy is actually going to be creating jobs in the spring.

SUMMERS: That is the judgment of most professional forecasters. That's right, George.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So given that...

SUMMERS: If you look at the employment statistics, they will show employment growth. They were showing losing 700,000 a month. Last month, they showed losing 11,000 jobs. They will bounce from month to month, but I believe that, as do most professional forecasters, that by spring, employment growth will start to be turning positive.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So given that, we saw the president allowed some job creation ideas earlier this week. What is the upper limit on what he will sign into law in terms of new job creation measures early next year? $100 billion?

SUMMERS: The president is going to work with Congress to do what's necessary. George, it's a bit of a Washington thing to put this in terms of price tags. For example, the president is doing a whole set of things, working with other...

STEPHANOPOULOS: But the American people want to...

(CROSSTALK)

STEPHANOPOULOS: It's not a Washington thing.

SUMMERS: To promote our exports. That doesn't have a -- that does not have a direct cost. But the president has talked about doing things for infrastructure. It doesn't cost anything to encourage banks, as the president will be doing, to meet their responsibilities and expand the flow of credit to small business.

We're in a very different -- we are in a very special kind of economic situation, and frankly, jobs have to be the top priority, and every bill is going to be a jobs bill going forward. We hope we can find common ground. We emphasize support for small businesses, repairing the nation's infrastructure. These ought to be things that everybody can agree on.

STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, let me just pin you down, though, one more time on that. You did lay out a number of ideas that don't cost money, but extending unemployment costs money. Aid to states and local governments costs more money. Investing in infrastructure costs money. So what is the upper limit on what President Obama will sign?

SUMMERS: The president is going to do what's necessary to respond to this crisis. He's put a figure of $50 billion on the infrastructure support that he proposes. His proposals on unemployment insurance are primarily a continuation of the legislation that the Congress has already passed and that has been put in place. And he recognizes that when we take new steps, we have to do it in the context of a framework that is fiscally responsible. We can't just look in isolation at one measure. We've got to look at the $8 trillion in deficit over the next 10 years that the president inherited, and start making progress with respect to those deficits. That's what the president did in his budget. That's what the health care bill does with the most consequential set of health care reforms that have ever been put forward, and they are now on the brink of passage.

Those of us out here already know how bad it is. When are the economists going to catch up with reality?

Oct. 2 (Bloomberg) -- The U.S. economic slump earlier this year was so severe it short-circuited the government’s model for calculating payrolls, raising the risk that today’s jobs report may be too optimistic.

About 824,000 more jobs may be subtracted from the payroll count for the 12 months through last March when the figures are officially revised early next year, a Labor Department report showed today. The revision would be the biggest since at least 1991.

The bulk of the miss occurred in the calculations for the first quarter of this year, the Labor Department said. The economy shrank at a 6.4 percent annual pace in the first three months of 2009, the worst performance since 1982.

The figures raise the possibility that the government’s calculations continue to miss the mark.

“We are probably still underestimating job losses,” said John Silvia, chief economist at Wells Fargo Securities LLC in Charlotte, North Carolina. “There could be another 30,000 to 40,000” that the data isn’t picking up, he said.

That would mean the loss of jobs for September could turn out to be as high as 300,000, rather than the 263,000 reported today by the Labor Department. Today’s report also showed the jobless rate climbed to 9.8 percent last month, a 26-year high.

The potential revision for the year through last March would mean that the economy lost 5.6 million jobs for the period instead of the 4.8 million now on the books.

Chris Wallace has been whining at an accelerated pace lately about President Obama and that doesn't bode well for him or his show.

WALLACE: ...That’s exactly my position: I think Fox News Sunday is a truly fair and balanced show.

O’REILLY: You’re not an ideological show at all.

WALLACE: No. And it’s like they refuse to take “yes” for an answer. There’s a kind of childishness or pettiness about them…

O’REILLY: You know, that’s a…it’s an immaturity that if you don’t …if you don’t hold our line, we’re just gonna ice you.

He used to maintain the appearance of a neutral talk show because the media would never dare to call out a fellow Villager even though we've been exposing him for years now as a political hack.

Here he is again whining the night away on his own show:

Chris Wallace continued to criticize the president Sunday. "Every president is thin-skinned, but I wonder whether this administration, this White House, has a particular problem with criticism," he said.

His rating were always terrible for FOX on the Sunday Talk Show circuit and on Sept 13, he remained firmly at the bottom of the barrel. And ratings are the GOD that drives all TV shows, but I still find it unlikely that Rupert will fire him.

Eric Boehlert's column hits the mark on Wallace:

The subsequent whining and childish name-calling from Fox News Sunday's Chris Wallace became incessant and, of course, revealed more about the bitter and bruised host than it did the White House. No doubt the pity party that the thin-skinned journalist threw for himself in the wake of the embarrassing snub was genuine. But it went on for so many days and became so consuming that it seemed there was more to it than Wallace being forced to watch the Obama newsmaking parade from the sidelines. I think the slow-motion temper tantrum perhaps reflected Wallace's larger realization that his days of being taken seriously as a journalist are fading and that he can no longer be associated with the collectively unhinged Fox News family and maintain any dignity in the process.

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By contrast, Fox News anchor Shepard Smith had the courage and the decency earlier this year to call out the right-wing "crazies" on the fringe who targeted Obama and were feeding off incessant, conspiratorial hatred -- hate "that's not based in fact," as Smith stressed. (Naturally, right-wingers online immediately called for Smith's firing.) At least that Fox anchor expressed a commonsense concern about what that kind of raw, irrational hostility does to a democracy. But not Wallace. He knows to sit on his hands and to keep his mouth shut.

Except, of course, when he's not busy spreading nonsense like the charade about the "death book," an absolutely absurd conspiracy theory that Wallace must have known came without even the faintest hint of reality to it. (Here's the theory: In order to contain health care costs, the federal government under Obama is using a booklet on end-of-life counseling to urge U.S. veterans to kill themselves; it's trying to convince them that their lives aren't worth living.)

It was the type of patented foolery you'd expect a proud partisan like Sean Hannity to push. But it was Wallace who signed on as the smear's chief sponsor. It was Wallace who sat through two Fox News Sunday segments teasing out purposefully ignorant questions about how bureaucrats were trying to off veterans. Wallace played dumb like it was an Olympic sport. While the other Sunday shows were at least trying to engage in actual civic debate, Wallace spent his Sunday clowning on air.

And as a bonus, Wallace may have made the single dumbest statement uttered on a Sunday-morning talk show this year. Playing dumb, Wallace wanted to know why anyone would think about end-of-life counseling unless they're, you know, dying [emphasis added]:

Usually people don't even contemplate end of life until they're in an irreversible coma.

Flash to Wallace: When somebody slides into in "an irreversible coma," it's a little late for them to begin end-of-life counseling.

With the "death book" production, Wallace didn't merely engage in lazy journalism or allow his guest to sidestep important questions, he served as archetype -- as a co-sponsor -- of the debacle. He plucked the story (a smear campaign, really) from relative obscurity, and then he trampled the facts in hopes of launching the story nationally...read on

Maybe FOX will decide to bump him and make Glenn Beck the host of their Sunday Morning talk show. You know, a kind of Jerry Springer format for politics where white supremacists come on and throw chairs at African American guests and other guests call each other racists and socialists and Beck hands out apple pie to them as long as they agree to spend a week in his imaginary FEMA camps whose existence he can't disprove.

Anything that produces more jobs is good news, but it's a drop in the bucket when we're losing an average of a half-million jobs per month:

WASHINGTON – President Barack Obama promised Monday to deliver more than 600,000 jobs through his $787 billion stimulus plan this summer, with federal agencies pumping billions into public works projects, schools and summer youth programs.

Obama is ramping up his stimulus program this week even as his advisers are ramping down expectations about when the spending plan will effect a continuing rise in the nation's unemployment.

Many of the stimulus plans that Obama announced Monday already were in the works, including hundreds of maintenance projects at military bases, about 1,600 state road and airport improvements, and federal money states budgeted for 135,000 teachers, principals and school support staff.

The administration had always viewed the summer as a peak for stimulus spending, as better weather permitted more public works construction and federal agencies had processed requests from states and others.

But Obama now promises an accelerated pace of federal spending over the next few months to boost the economy and produce jobs.