If it's true, and he wins, it wouldn't surprise me to see Crist caucusing with the Democrats. Wouldn't that be a shocker?

When Florida Gov. Charlie Crist announced that he was formally leaving the Republican Party, it was seemingly in label only. An impossible primary path to a Senate nomination compelled him to launch an Independent bid. On philosophical terms, he remained a fairly basic conservative, albeit one who backed the president's stimulus package.

Months later, it's becoming more and more difficult to label Crist's departure from the GOP as simply a superficial endeavor. Either out of electoral expedience or ideological disenchantment, the governor has spent the past few days either purging himself of his Republican roots or actively courting Democratic audiences.

Crist recently refunded the $9,600 contribution he had received from Jim Greer, the indicted former chairman of the Republican Party of Florida. On Wednesday morning, he campaigned in the Democratic-stronghold Broward County, to solid reviews. The day before, he was caught on camera mocking the GOP colleagues he left behind: "I used to be a Republican... Thank God."

As progressives, bloggers and experts like Paul Krugman said at the time, cutting the stimulus package the first time around to make Republicans happy only weakened the stimulus effect to the point where it was enough to deter the worst effects of the financial crisis, but not enough to fix it. (Kind of like having a bacterial infection and taking half a dose of antibiotics.)

Krugman said then that he doubted the political climate would permit a later stimulus package, and he was right - which is probably why David Axlerod is tying himself in knots to avoid calling it that:

President Obama wants Congress to spend more money to help states and localities struggling with huge deficits. But he does not want to call it a stimulus package, apparently.

Mr. Obama has intimated in the past that the federal government’s job of propping up the economy was not yet done. Last week, he sent a letter to Congress supporting efforts to pass two separate measures totaling as much as $50 billion in aid for states and cities.

With states still facing large budget shortfalls, Obama wants to minimize the potential loss of teachers, law-enforcement officers, and firefighters. He estimates that as many as 300,000 teachers could be laid off. In this way, the money would largely pick up where the $787 billion federal stimulus bill left off.

Yet on NBC’s “Meet the Press” Sunday, Obama adviser David Axelrod plumbed the depths of the English language in order to try to avoid calling the money a stimulus.

In the end, he conceded: “We should not be too careless about pulling out of our stimulative efforts too quickly.”

Mr. Axelrod’s discomfort is an acknowledgment that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act did not deliver in precisely the way it was promised. Touted as the only way of keeping unemployment below 10 percent, the unemployment rate tipped 10 percent anyway.

Obama’s push for more stimulus, however, suggests that the administration believes that the stimulus package blunted the worst of the recession – as the White House has repeatedly argued. The state and city stimulus is a bid to repeat the process this year for states and localities that cannot run deficits by law.

Critics argue that this tactic has created only the veneer of a recovery. Jobs numbers released June 4 showed that the vast majority of new jobs were Census jobs paid for by the government. The private sector created only 41,000 jobs – its worst performance since January.

UPDATED: John Amato:

Paul Krugman has been attacking the lurch towards 'Fiscal Austerity' for a few days becoming very shrill in the process. That's always a good move. He uses Ireland and Spain for his example.

But I suddenly realized this morning that there’s yet another question for the deficit hawks: what evidence do you have that fiscal austerity of the kind you’re demanding would reassure markets, even if they did lose confidence? Consider, if you will, the comparative cases of Ireland and Spain.

The countries responded differently, however. Ireland quickly embraced harsh austerity; Spain has had to be dragged into austerity, and still faces major political unrest.

--

So, I’m glad to hear that Ireland’s stoic acceptance of austerity is reassuring markets; it must be true, because that’s what everyone says. Because if I didn’t know that, I might look at the data and conclude that markets actually have less confidence in Ireland than they do in Spain, and that austerity in the face of a deeply depressed economy doesn’t actually reassure markets at all. But hey, what are you going to believe: what everyone knows, or your own lying eyes?

And as Digby says:

I feel as if we are watching a slow motion train wreck, mouths agape, powerless to do anything to stop it --- the Very Serious People are all on board, assured in their own minds, for different reasons, that history has ended and nothing that came before can possibly be of any consequence.

In fact, I feel exactly the same way I felt in the lead up to the Iraq war.

(Image courtesy of Danziger cartoons)

There's rumblings afoot over the deficit, "entitlements" (a term I take exception to), and how best to cut spending and debt in as painless a fashion as possible.

This is where we all get to grow up a little, because both sides are right. The debt is too high. Certainly wars and defense budgets are part of it, but there's also the pesky little fact that for far too long, high wage earners paid far too little in taxes. Two years ago I wrote a post warning that taxes need to go up. That was before the recession, the stimulus package, the health care reform package and the newest natural disaster in Louisiana.

The problem isn't taxes. The problem is the tendency of politicians to slam those who can least afford the increase while claiming they're doing it to preserve our "benefits". Whether it's a power pander or just the mistaken belief that the middle class will suck up whatever it's handed without a peep, this time it needs to be different.

Check out this New York Times debate about increasing the Social Security retirement age. There isn't anything I can think of that would be more ill-advised than that, especially now. It's a cheap money grab that looks pretty on paper but carries far too high an economic and political price. Yet, look how it's being framed:

Continue reading »

The Other 95% crashed the teabagger rally on Tax Day in DC:

The Tea Partiers are being countered by a start-up group called "The Other 95%," which descended on D.C. on Thursday to protest "right across from Tea Party rally."

"Obama passed 25 separate tax cuts," Sheryl Stein, founding member of "The Other 95%" said in a statement announcing the group's plans, "including $300 billion in middle class tax cuts -- one of the largest in history - as part of the stimulus package. Unlike President Bush's 2001 tax cuts, which went to the wealthiest 2.2%, President Obama's tax cuts overwhelmingly benefit working and middle class families -- in fact, 95% of all Americans."

Have the Democrats finally realized how to act like winners? (Or, as Bill Maher just put it, use their recently-descended testicles.) Good to know they're not going to curl into the fetal position for a change:

Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants House Democrats to go on offense during the critical two-week recess that begins this weekend.

Members returning to their districts should tout the new healthcare law’s benefits to their constituents, according to the “recess packet” issued by Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) office this week and obtained by The Hill.

“With the passage of health insurance reform, this District Work Period is a critical time to go on offense,” the memo states.

Members should “convey the immediate benefits of health reform to your constituents (such as better prescription drug benefits for seniors, tax credits for small businesses and prohibiting insurance companies from canceling your policy if you get sick),” the memo said.

[...] Pelosi’s advice to members illustrates that she and other Democratic leaders believe they can capitalize on healthcare to rally before the fall.

The message in the memo wasn’t limited to healthcare.

Lawmakers also should also “demonstrate the work of this Congress to create jobs and strengthen the economy,” and “publicize the benefits of the $800 billion in tax cuts this Congress has enacted” through last year’s $787 billion stimulus package, according to the memo.

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Lindsey Graham, who is a media darling appearing on the Sunday talk shows almost as much as John McCain tried to rewrite history and blame the Democratic Party for the failure of the Bush immigration bill. Apparently, he doesn't remember that Karl Rove's plan to try and capture the Latino vote failed miserably as the xenophobic right wing talk shows, bloggers and Tom Tancredo's went ballistic.

TAPPER: Well, the leader of the Republican charge, other than President Bush, for immigration reform last time was your dear friend Senator John McCain, who, as far as I can tell, is completely AWOL from the debate.

I know he has a tough primary against a more conservative -- arguably more conservative challenger there. But shouldn't -- I mean, where -- what is his commitment? It certainly doesn't look unwavering.

GRAHAM: Well, to me, his commitment is what it has always been. He has done the heavy lifting on immigration. He has been fighting the health care bill that the country dislikes and Republicans can't tolerate. He has fought the stimulus package. And he has worked with the president on (INAUDIBLE).

Here is my advice to the administration, I will release a document with Senator Schumer about my views on how to fix immigration. The campaign is over, you told Senator McCain. President Obama, lead. You write a health care -- immigration reform bill. You do the heavy lifting. You put together a comprehensive immigration reform package. You bring it to the Senate and House and see how many Democrat and Republican supporters you can get.

All you have done is talk about what we should do, now is the time to lead. Tell the people at the rally next weekend that your administration will write a comprehensive immigration reform bill. I will be glad to look at it. If I like, I will sign on. If I oppose it, I'll tell you where I disagree. And see how many votes you can get.

TAPPER: To be fair, Senator Graham, the reason that immigration reform didn't pass last time, even with you, Senator McCain and President Bush pushing for it, was because of the Republican Party. The Republican Party seems in no --

GRAHAM: That's not fair.

TAPPER: Why is that not fair?

GRAHAM: That's not fair at all.

TAPPER: Even Republican members who are part of the coalition voted against it.

GRAHAM: I can show you 10 Democrats in the Senate today who voted against immigration reform: Tester, Baucus, Bayh, Webb --

TAPPER: And how many Republicans voted against it?

GRAHAM: It was a bipartisan --

(CROSSTALK)

GRAHAM: A lot of us voted for it. We got over 60 votes at one time. It fell apart because the bill was attacked from the left and the right.

The Minutemen were on FOX News everyday practically. Graham can thank the Sensenbrenner bill in the HOUSE that said all illegal were felons. I can tell you that broke the camel's back as far as Latinos were concerned in Los Angeles. In 2004, many Latinos voted for bush because he was religious, but after the Sensenbrenner bill the GOP---that cancelled out all religious ties that held Latino support for the GOP.

Digby called it Huckleberry Sunday and writes:

I hope everyone realizes that this is a set-up on immigration reform. Graham is a snake. He is trying to position the Republicans as friends of the Hispanic community, but he will torpedo anything meaningful and then blame it on the Democrats. The GOP has no intention of going up against their tea party bigots, but they'd sure like to demobilize the Hispanic community by undermining their loyalty to the Democrats.

I consider Graham to be one of the most dangerous Republicans in the government. He's a very bad faith player whom the villagers love as a sort of cornpone Jimmy Stewart. I hope the Democrats don't underestimate him.

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Seems that Sarah Palin isn't the only right-winger out there trying to convince the world that the "death panels" actually exist. Indeed, as Media Matters notes, there's a whole bandwidth of wingnuts out there trying to revive the notion.

One of these is the Troll Who Lives Under the Bridge And Sucks Your Toes, aka Dick Morris, who was on The O'Reilly Factor earlier this week with fill-in host Monica Crowley:

Morris: Look, Monica, it's one thing to load a big bill with pork. That's what the stimulus package was. But to load a health-care bill, where Americans are seriously worried that this is gonna destroy the health care their parents get, that this is gonna lead to government-imposed euthanasia, where they'll say, 'No, you can't have this annual mammogram, because I know it might save your life, but it costs too much.' 'No, you can't have this drug for colon cancer, because the drug we're going to let you take isn't as good as this one, but we can't afford it.' When we come to those kind of euthanasia-like decisions, to learn that the reason the Senate approved this was some little bitty payoff that went on to some insurance company that gave you a campaign contribution -- that kind of tawdry stuff for this kind of magnitude of deformity on the system is enough to drive people crazy -- me included.

I've always said that anyone who takes Dick Morris's advice deserves everything they get, because the man is such a font of misinformation. That includes a lot of intentional disinformation, promoting provably false "facts" that unhinge the people who absorb this crap. As we can see.

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You knew that when Dick Cheney went on Sean Hannity's Fox News show for a sit-down interview last night, it was going to be a nonstop Obama-bashing fest.

Indeed, not only did Cheney back up the long-running Fox News theme that "Obama is a radical leftist America-hater whose plan is to weaken us and destroy us", but he went a step further -- essentially accusing the Obama administration of committing treason.

Hannity: You said that the president's cerebral approach projects weakness, and that the president is looking far more radical than you expected. I was, during the campaign, criticized a lot because I was warning, I thought, of the president's radical associations. How radical do you view him now? How radical do you view his opinions?

Cheney: I saw him, when he got elected, as a liberal Democrat -- but conventional, in the sense of sort of falling within the parameters of the national Democratic Party. I think he's demonstrated pretty conclusively now during his first year in office that he's more radical than that. That he's farther outside the parameters, if you will, of what we've traditionally had in Democratic presidents in years past.

Excuse me, but WTF?????!!!!! Neither Cheney nor Hannity explain this remark or give any example of Obama's supposed demonstration of his radicalism.

Let's see, was it Obama's decision to eschew a single-payer plan and head for a "public option" compromise on health-care reform that marked him a "radical"? His decision to increase troop strength in Afghanistan? Or maybe his willingness to scale back his stimulus package, at conservatives' behest, to the point that it failed to properly spark job growth? Maybe it was his willingness to throw Van Jones under the bus the moment right-wing talkers began circling around him. I dunno. They never tell us.

But Cheney keeps going, slagging and attacking Obama's presidency in some of the most vicious terms available -- including the suggestion that Obama and his administration have committed an act of treason.

This came when he and Hannity were discussing the upcoming trials of Khalid Sheikh Mohammad and other 9/11 terrorists in New York:

Hannity: You said in an interview that New York City is great, this trial in New York City is 'great for Al Qaeda'. That's a pretty strong statement. What did you mean by that?

Cheney: I mean that I think it will give aid and comfort to the enemy. I mean that it will make Khalid Sheikh Mohammad something of a hero in certain circles, especially in the radical regions of Islam.

Um, yeah, except of course that KSM is already "something of a hero" in "the radical regions of Islam."

More importantly, the language "give aid and comfort to the enemy" just happens to be the same language as the very legal definition of treason, as laid out in Article III, Section 3 of the Constitution: "Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort."

Cheney is essentially accusing Obama of treason.

Hannity caps it off by asking Cheney if the Obama administration "maybe doesn't believe there's a war on terror," and Cheney agreeing that it doesn't.

History has already recorded that Dick Cheney not only was one of the worst vice presidents in history just in terms of governance, but moreover one of the most vicious character assassins and ethics-deprived manipulators ever to set foot in the White House.

Now he's just adding to that legacy.

You know, between the crooks, the politicians and the payoffs, this issue shouldn't be a third rail anymore. Democrats need to decide which we can afford: Shoveling trillions of dollars into the military-industrial-congressional complex (and the pockets of defense donors), or rebuilding this country's economic and social infrastructure. David Sirota:

In 2000, the Pentagon admitted it has lost -- yes, lost -- $2.3 trillion. In 2003, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a subsequent Department of Defense study said it was only $1 trillion. To put such numbers in perspective, contemplate what those sums could finance. $1 trillion, for instance, could pay the total cost of universal healthcare for the long haul. $2.3 trillion would cover universal healthcare plus the bank bailout plus the stimulus package.

Obviously -- obviously! -- these points are no cause for alarm and certainly no cause for defense spending reductions, right? All they must prove is that the archconservative Cato Institute, William Randolph Hearst's newspaper chain, National Journal employees and Pentagon officials are secretly America-hating liberals. And -- obviously! -- so are two of the most aggressive neoconservative hawks ever to hold government office, Sen. John McCain and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. After all, they’re the ones who issued those scathing statements about wasteful defense spending in the pop quiz above. That means they’re actually terrorist-appeasing lefties, right?

Really, how could anyone other than traitorous communists see the data and then consider backing the mildest Pentagon spending cuts? I mean, come on -- in a country whose paranoid conservative movement now makes a dead-serious ideology out of Stephen Colbert wisecracks, how dare any red-blooded American even think of pondering basic budgetary facts?

Of course here's a typical conservative reaction:

Lost in all the typical liberal hyperventilating over increased defense spending during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, is just how low current defense spending compared to the last 45 years.

Oh, well then! Quit yer griping!

Economist James Galbraith on the Obama administration's approach to the country's financial crisis:

Technically it would have been fairly easy, 10 months ago, to get this bus back on the road. There could have been open-ended fiscal assistance to stop the budget hemorrhage of the states and cities. There could have been a jobs program and effective foreclosure relief. There could have been a payroll tax holiday. There could have been a strategy for sustained massive effort on infrastructure, energy and climate. There could have been prompt corrective action to resolve, instead of coddle, the worst of the banks.

I mostly don't blame President Obama; he and his team went as far as they felt they could. I blame the head-in-the-sand politicians in Congress, the over-optimistic forecasters, the half-educated press, and the power of the financial lobby. I blame the avatars of fiscal virtue, the public debt scare-mongerers, the astrologers for whom thirteen significant digits (a trillion) for the stimulus package was just too much. I blame the Senate, which hands the balance of power to small states at the expense of disaster areas like California, Florida and New York. I do blame the Bush-Obama financial policy team, who either believed that "credit would flow again" if you stuffed the banks with money, or knew that it wouldn't.

The Bretton Woods point deserves another word. According to the system established in 1944, the U.S. current account deficit -- and by extension our public budget deficit -- was limited by an obligation to exchange foreign-held dollars for gold. Richard Nixon abolished that arrangement. Since the early 1980s, the world has held the Treasury bonds that the U.S. chose to issue. The system is fragile. But so long as it lasts, it doesn't discipline our budget (and if it broke, we could replace it). Low interest rates prove this: despite all the dire predictions, there is no difficulty in placing Treasury debt. Hence, we are free to pursue high employment, if we choose to do it.

Can anything be done now? Well yes, technically: the same steps that could have been taken in January 2009 could be taken in January 2010. But they won't be, because for the moment we are seeing the inventory bounce, a productivity surge, real GDP growth, and other "good signs." So we'll be told to wait, to be patient, and to make sure we don't buy what we can't afford. And double-digit joblessness will linger on, breeding frustration and anger -- perhaps all the way through to the mid-term elections. After which, what will be possible is anyone's guess.