When President Obama on Tuesday declared that decades of Republican trickle-down economics "never worked," conservatives were predictably apoplectic.

But for all of their protests of "class warfare", "socialism" and worse, Obama was being kind to the Republican ideologues. After all, as the historical record shows, from economic growth and job creation to stock market performance and just about every other indicator of the health of American capitalism, the modern U.S. economy has almost always done better under Democratic presidents. Despite GOP mythology to the contrary, America generally gained more jobs and grew faster when taxes were higher (even much higher) and income inequality lower. And while the U.S. recovery from the Bush recession remains painfully slow, most economists - including the nonpartisan CBO and some of John McCain's own 2008 advisers - believe President Obama saved it from the abyss.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

• Job Creation and Economic Growth
• The Stock Market
• Income Inequality
• National Debt
• The Bush Recession and the Obama Recovery

Job Creation and Economic Growth

To be sure, George W. Bush provided the perfect bookend to era of modern Republican economic management ushered by Herbert Hoover. The verdict on President Bush's reign of ruin was pronounced even before Barack Obama took the oath of office. Just days after the Washington Post documented that George W. Bush presided over the worst eight-year economic performance in the modern American presidency, the New York Times on January 24, 2009 featured an analysis ("Economic Setbacks That Define the Bush Years") comparing presidential performance going back to Eisenhower. As the Times showed, George W. Bush, the first MBA president, was a historic failure when it came to expanding GDP, producing jobs and fueling stock market growth.

On January 9, 2009, the Republican-friendly Wall Street Journal summed it up with an article titled simply, "Bush on Jobs: the Worst Track Record on Record." (The Journal's interactive table quantifies his staggering failure relative to every post-World War II president.) The meager one million jobs created under President Bush didn't merely pale in comparison to the 23 million produced during Bill Clinton's tenure. In September 2009, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee charted Bush's job creation disaster, the worst since Hoover:

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If we were having an actual national emergency, rather than corporations happily sitting on piles of cash and handing out record bonuses and dividends, this might --- might make sense. But since the only "emergency" here is corporate greed, I can only speculate as to why it only makes sense to take money from workers.

I think it would make a lot more sense to take 95% from CEOs:

With 9.5 percent unemployment and millions more underemployed, it seems like a daunting, almost impossible, task to find jobs for everyone. But Ken Maryland, president of ClearView Economics, has an idea: Cut everyone's pay by 10 percent.

"EVERYBODY -- from the president down to the chambermaid -- takes a 10% cut in compensation," writes Marlyand for Marketwatch. "This freed-up compensation expense is then used to re-employ the 8% (12.3 million) of the unemployed. Net-net, the nation's compensation bill has remained unchanged, and the unemployment rate is now 4.5%! Voila!"

The 4.5 percent Maryland refers to, is the optimal unemployment rate, which allows for employee turnover and doesn't risk inflation. While his idea may seem crazy, companies have begun to do it in small fashion, as Maryland points out, by having furloughs and pay cuts.

Maryland says this has a chance because there's an "inherent fairness" to the idea since everyone will be receiving the pay cut. But not really, since the employed would have to take the pay cut, while the unemployed will receive a significant increase in pay by suddenly having a paycheck.

Not to mention, the drop in pay doesn't mean a mortgage that's locked in will suddenly be cheaper or a car payment miraculously fall 10 percent. Maryland also says an issue with the idea would be making sure everyone falls in line, pointing out that unions would have a fit (although I'm not sure that CEO, whose pay increased more than anyone in business over the past 30 years, would be too happy with the idea as well).

Not to mention the biggest flaw in this proposal: Namely, why would you trust executives to hire people after they cut salaries?

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President Obama this morning took a clear stance against that crackpot immigration bill passed by Republicans in Arizona, and now awaiting the governor's signature:

Our failure to act responsibly at the federal level will only open the door to irresponsibility by others. That includes, for example, the recent efforts in Arizona, which threaten to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and their communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.

In fact, I've instructed members of my administration to closely monitor the situation and examine the civil rights and other implications of this legislation. But if we continue to fail to act at the federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country.

Indeed. It doesn't take a genius to see that the new Arizona law will essentially impose a police state in Arizona, especially for nonwhite people. And as we noted then:

Isn't it odd, really, how these right-wingers complain about government tyranny and how liberals are imposing a police state, yaddah yaddah yaddah, yet in the states where they have full control, they eagerly institute a police state themselves?

You can read the text of the bill here [PDF file].

But the president is making an important point: The Arizona craziness is a good example of why we can't let comprehensive immigration reform wait.

We know that lots of Democrats, especially the Blue Dogs, want to put immigration reform on the back burner till after the 2010 election. After all, it's the kind of issue that defines them: Blue Dogs always pander to conservatives on key issues, because they think that wins them more votes in the end than standing up for core principles.

In this case, as we saw from the 2008 election results, it's also nonsensical:

It's also apparent, from these results and from polling, that the nativists' "deport them all" immigration policy is wildly unpopular -- and that, moreover, Americans in fact take a pragmatic view of immigration: They're not interested in shipping out illegal immigrants, they're interested in seeing them become legal citizens.

The evidence is that voters get behind progressives who talk straight common sense on immigration -- as opposed to the fearmongering and scapegoating inherent in the Arizona Republican approach, which inevitably leads to the institution of a police state and the destruction of families.

It's also looking like Harry Reid will be pushing immigration reform as well. And there are many more reasons than fearful Blue Dogs why it's a politically smart move, too. Just ask those 200,000 people who gathered in D.C. last month.

(h/t Video Cafe)

Yes, it's tiresome, but we still have to report on the CCM. (Conservative Comedy Movement)

Sarah Palin went on Leno's new-old-show and really had me laughing.

Leno asked Palin what she thinks about joining the media by becoming a Fox News analyst. Palin told Leno that she's there to build trust in the media. "I think that the mainstream media is quite broken and I think that there needs to be the fairness, the balance in there. That's why I joined Fox." Leno laughed.

When asked about the "beautiful" Tea Party movement, Palin described it as a group of "many, many independent people, not excessively partisan, not one side or another." Palin acknowledged that if the movement were to become a political party that it would probably hurt Republicans.

As part of her stand-up routine, Palin told Leno's audience she planned to speak at a gun-rights convention: "Be there or else," she warned them.

She's single handedly going to build back the trust in our media by joining the propaganda arm of the GOP. Then she branded the teabaggers as basically non-partisan. OK, I'll bet her five pounds of salmon on that one. Even she is issuing warnings to the teabaggers not to form a third party. Don't worry Sarah, only a few from the arch-conservatives will branch off on their own to capitalize on the cash they can make. The rest will neatly fold into the GOP.

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Michael Steele went on MSNBC this morning before the health-care summit and began attacking President Obama for a "dog and pony show" -- and claimed that the president should have held this summit a year ago, when things were just getting started.

The problem with this: Obama did. On March 5 of last year. Fully televised. All that.

Republicans were so busy back then concocting plans to scuttle ANY health-care reform, though, that it kinda slipped their minds.

Kudos to Chuck Todd and Savannah Guthrie for calling him out for it:

STEELE: This whole dog and pony show that we're about to witness today is something that should have taken place a year ago, when the administration first came in last February and laid out its agenda for health care. This is how you should have started it - bipartisan, public forum, CSPAN, your cameras rolling to capture this and to capture, most importantly, what the American people want. And right now, they want us to start over, and I think we should.

TODD: Chairman Steele, in fairness to them, I mean, it was a year ago that they actually had a summit.

GUTHRIE: On March 5th.

TODD: And it wasn't just the legislative leaders. They brought in folks from the industry as well. And that one was televised. So...does that one not count? I'm just curious.

STEELE: Well, apparently it didn't. Because we don't have health care.

You know, you really can't blame Republicans for wanting to fire Steele as the RNC chair, when the level of incompetence is this deep.

But we progressives hope he sticks around, just for the comic relief.

Oliver North, who illegally sold weapons to Iran to fund the contras in Nicaragua has become a resident military expert for FOX News and the Washington Times. He's basically a war criminal that got off on a technicality, but that's like getting a medal of honor from AEI. This crackpot attacked President Obama for asking the military to left DADT:

North: Obama is treating military "like lab rats in a radical social experiment." Oliver North, host of Fox News' War Stories, said on the February 4 edition of Fox News' Hannity that repealing "don't ask, don't tell" is a "stunning assault" on the military and that Obama "now intends to treat them like lab rats in a radical social experiment." He also said, "[T]his isn't about rights. This isn't about fairness. It's all about national security. And, apparently, Mr. Obama has forgotten it."

Later, North said of repealing "don't ask, don't tell": "Now, here's what's next. NAMBLA members, same-sex marriages. Are chaplains in the U.S. military going to be required to perform those kinds of rituals? Do they get government housing?" North added that repealing DADT "affects readiness and recruiting and retention."

I think he forgot hermaphrodites too.

Recently the Senate passed Sen. Barbara Mikulski's Women's Health Amendment, which requires health insurance companies to provide free mammograms and other preventive health services for women. Sounds good, doesn't it? Women's health needs have traditionally been underserved by the insurance system. But, ironically, the Senate's excise tax will force many women to pay indirectly for these "free" services.

Here's how: For one thing, the cost of the services mandated in the Mikulski Amendment will cause even more health plans to exceed the cost cap for the excise tax. And it's expected that 20% of plans will already be over the limit when the tax takes effect. In practical terms, any added costs for new services provided by these plans (like those mammograms) will be taxable. So, in one very real sense, the Senate plans to tax some of this preventive care for women - at a staggering 40% of cost.

The Mikulski Amendment looks like a step forward, but many women will pay for these services indirectly - in the form of higher premiums or increased out-of-pocket costs. One hand giveth and the other taketh away. And speaking of irony ...

Guess who voted for the Mikulski amendment? Some Senators who haven't even committed themselves to voting for the final bill, including Lieberman, Landrieu, and Snowe (who even cosponsored the amendment. Here's an idea: They can make sure these women's services really remain "free" by supporting the Sanders-Franken-Brown Amendment, which would replace the excise tax with a tax on the extremely wealthy (the way the house does it.)

That would remove the irony in the Senate's actions and replace it with fairness.

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Lou Dobbs was interviewed on the Spanish-language network Telemundo yesterday by Maria Celeste (h/t Andrea Nill), and she cut quickly to the point:

Celeste: You mention that this criticism and this perception, misperception of yourself, it's only in the extreme, ah, extreme left, and that might be the case in the Anglo market, but trust me, in the Hispanic world, you are viewed by many, by many people as the No. 1 enemy -- maybe because of the many inflammatory and misleading statements about undocumented immigrants that you've made throughout the years. And let me go with the first one.

The most outrageous one was blaming immigrants for a dramatic rise in leprosy cases in the United States, stating that in three years, the cases of leprosy had suddenly jumped to 7,000, and that this was largely due to the influx of undocumented immigrants. By the way, according to the United States Department of Health [and Human Services], 7,000 cases of leprosy were reported over thirty years, not three, which is a big difference.

But even after that, that was proven wrong, what you had said, you stood behind your reporting, insisting that it was accurate. Why was that?

Dobbs: No no. Let's be very clear. For one, I did not stand behind that reporting. In fact, we corrected that reporting.

And secondly, in fairness to me, if you will, I never said a word about leprosy and undocumented immigrants, as you put it. My correspondent on our broadcast ad-libbed it, and as you are very familiar with the process of an edited report, and at the end of that she referred to a source with whom she had been speaking, and she said at the end of that report -- ad-libbed it, that is, without script or preparation, but simply said it -- that there were thousands of people on the registry for leprosy in the United States and those had shot up dramatically over the course of three years.

Dobbs is just baldfacedly lying. He did indeed defend that reporting, he did not correct it at any time, and Romans' didn't simply say "those had shot up dramatically over the course of three years," she clearly indicated that they had skyrocketed from 900 to 7,000 cases -- a grotesquely false claim.

Let's roll the tape, first back to April 14, 2005, when Dobbs first trotted out the phony leprosy story.

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Bill O'Reilly was helping lead the chorus of whining that erupted on Fox News yesterday in response to Anita Dunn speaking the truth about their right-wing propaganda operation.

He opened with a Talking Points Memo segment attacking Dunn and the White House. He wrapped it up with a series of claims that could only have been uttered by someone who's pathologically delusional:

Finally, Ms. Dunn is seeing the world through the prism of the other media, like NBC News and CNN. By all accounts, those networks favored Barack Obama over John McCain, and NBC actually promoted the president's candidacy and continues to give him excellent coverage.

So by that measure, Fox News is indeed troublesome to the White House. But our hard news coverage is fair and balanced. Again, if somebody doesn't believe that, let's see the evidence because bloviating walks.

Oy. Where to begin. Over the years, there's been a mountain of evidence amassed -- both here at C&L as well as such sites as Media Matters and ThinkProgress -- demonstrating Fox News' extraordinary right-wing bias, and its utter lack of anything approaching fairness or balance. Indeed, Fox's adoption of the phrase "fair and balanced" has transformed it into a popular reference to up-is-down Newspeak.

The fact that O'Reilly blithely dismisses this mountain as the product of a "far left bias" by those groups is itself clear evidence of his own bias: It's clear he a priori dismisses any facts produced by such groups, regardless of their actual validity.

O'Reilly wants evidence of an utter lack of "fairness and balance"? OK, let's try a single sample out of that mountain: Griff Jenkins' reportage from the "Tea Party Express" in which he not only blatantly led the teabaggers in their anti-Obama chants, but where a Fox producer was caught exhorting the crowds to cheer.

Of course, O'Reilly will never accept such evidence simply because it disproves his claim. Yeh, that's the Fox brand of "fair and balanced."

But O'Reilly really severed any tie with reality in the following part of the segment, where he talked over the White House meanies with fellow Foxite Brit Hume. Reaching his apotheosis when the subject of Fox's treatment of George W. Bush came up, O'Reilly claimed:

O'Reilly: And I have to say that when President Bush was in trouble in Iraq, this network and this program, and your program as well, routinely, routinely hammered President Bush. On Iraq.

Hume: Well, we certainly -- we, we were very faithful about covering all the bad news that came out of Iraq for a very long period of time. The criticisms that were made of him were reported and discussed at length on Fox News. Um, now, he had his defenders, the war had its defenders, there was commentary on Fox --

O'Reilly: But there was no cheerleading -- There was no cheerleading of President Bush on this network when his administration ran into trouble. There was no cheerleading, you know -- it was skeptical coverage, Iraq's going south, when the economy started to wobble last September, we were right on that.

OK, done with that long belly laugh? Good. Because we all remember how Fox not only fawned over every move made by the Bush administration, but how it viciously attacked anyone who dared criticize Bush or Dick Cheney or their incompetent gang of cronies.

Recall how it attacked war critics as the situation worsened in Iraq? (It also transformed proponents of the war into "critics" when it became convenient to do so.) How it openly cheerled for Gen. Petraeus?

Remember how O'Reilly routinely attacked anyone who criticized the Bush torture regime?

Then there was the way O'Reilly consistently dismissed the Abu Ghraib scandal as unimportant.

Remember how it routinely attacked Valerie Plame and Joe Wilson, and sturdily defended Scooter Libby?

And those are just a few examples of how Fox didn't merely cheerlead for the Bush administration, but also acted as its propaganda arm by viciously attacking its critics. And there's no shortage of evidence of that reality at all.

Digby writes:

One Year Ago Today

It was a privilege to be there.

RIP Teddy.

I was there too. It was awesome and Ted lit up Denver. I just heard historian Michael Beschloss say on MSNBC that when Ted was a boy he knew FDR. He saw it all and was part of so much American history.

Statement from The Kennedy Family:

“Edward M. Kennedy – the husband, father, grandfather, brother and

uncle we loved so deeply – died late Tuesday night at home in Hyannis

Port. We’ve lost the irreplaceable center of our family and joyous

light in our lives, but the inspiration of his faith, optimism, and

perseverance will live on in our hearts forever. We thank everyone

who gave him care and support over this last year, and everyone who

stood with him for so many years in his tireless march for progress

toward justice, fairness and opportunity for all. He loved this

country and devoted his life to serving it. He always believed that

our best days were still ahead, but it’s hard to imagine any of them

without him.”