So. In response to a Politico piece in which the authors and White House whine about the left wing blogosphere not being happy with all of Obama's "wins" and not caring about potential losses in 2010, Kevin Drum writes:

Here's the good news: this record of progressive accomplishment officially makes Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. And here's the bad news: this shoddy collection of centrist, watered down, corporatist sellout legislation was all it took to make Obama the most successful domestic Democratic president of the last 40 years. Take your pick.

Here's the thing. What matters is whether policy works. It does not matter if what Obama did was more left wing than anything that's been done in a while (though in absolute terms I would argue it mostly wasn't left wing, the health care plan, for example, was essentially a Republican plan from the 90s), what matters is if it was left wing enough (big enough stimulus, smart enough health care plan) to improve people's lives enough that they noticed.

It wasn't, and that's all that matters. Policies such as the stimulus were not done well enough, and everyone from Nobel prize winners with good predictive records like Stiglitz and and Krugman, down to nobodies like me, predicted it at the time. The President hired the wrong people to give him advice, didn't even do as much as many of them wanted, and now we all pay the price.

Sometimes half doesn't work. Half-assed rarely does. All Obama's half assed "left wing" policies have done is discredit the left for another generation. Combined with the ability of the media, Republicans and hysterical Tea Baggers unable to use a dictionary to define him as a "socialist" this means that Obama's policies are seen as left wing, and left wing policies are seen to have failed.

I don't want Obama doing anything I agree with, because he will screw it up and discredit it. In this respect he is like Bush. He is poison because he is incompetent at policy.

As for the original Politico post, the hysterical ranting at the peanut gallery the authors clearly don't even read, says more about them and the White House than it does about the left wing blogosphere they try to blame for Democrats own failures.

The other day, Krugman wrote that we're in the beginning of a new Long Depression.

Forgive me, but he's wrong: this isn't the beginning, it's been going on for about two years now.

During a Depression there are periods where GDP grows. There are periods where jobs grow. It's just that the periods of job growth don't last.

There were opportunities to end the Depression before it really dug in its heels. The last one was at the beginning of Obama's term. Kicking out of the Depression required two things.

The first was an adequate stimulus. This didn't just mean a large enough stimulus, though the one offered was not large enough, it meant one properly constructed. Tax cuts for ordinary Americans are not stimulative, because folks like banks who have pricing power (you must have a credit card, loans, etc...) will simply take that money away by raising rates and fees. And it doesn't mean short term shovel-projects, it means making commitments which will last for years so that businesses, when making plans know that hiring is worth it because those employees will be needed for more than a year or so.

Likewise the US has some serious problems with the structure of the American economy. The cornerstone of the stimulus had to be reducing US dependence on oil because as long as the US economy is so dependent on oil, full fledged growth is simply not possible. The days of $20/barrel oil aren't coming back, and every time the price of oil gets too high, it puts great pressure on the US economy (and every other modern nation.)

The second thing which had to be done is to force the banks to actually eat their losses. Wipe out the shareholders and let the bondholders take their losses. All the money plunged into the banks (and it was much more than the TARP money, which was the smallest part of it) was wasted. Banks are not lending, and restoring lending is what the bailouts were sold as doing. Moreover they have raised borrowing rates and fees on those who need credit most, soaking up money which otherwise would be helping the economy rather than simply being sopped up to plug holes in bank balance sheets.

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This should work. But should it take a major outcry to make President Obama step up his game?

WASHINGTON — President Obama will use his first Oval Office speech Tuesday night to outline a plan to legally compel BP to create an escrow account to compensate businesses and individuals for their losses from the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, administration officials said on Sunday.

It would be part of a week of activities intended to convey presidential command of a crisis that continues to test both the government and the company.

Mr. Obama will press for the escrow account if BP does not establish one voluntarily. The board of the London-based company will discuss the idea and other spill-related issues — including a brewing controversy over a big dividend for shareholders coming due this summer — at an emergency session on Monday, company officials said.

But it does not expect to announce decisions until after its chairman and chief executive speak with Mr. Obama at a meeting he has called for midweek.

Apparently BP has been dragging their feet on paying claims:

The 42,000 claims filed with the oil company so far go well beyond the shrimpers, oystermen and seafood processers who have been the spill's most visible victims. Hotels, restaurants, machine shops, bars, tour companies all became collateral damage when the Gulf of Mexico, one of the nation's most important fisheries and tourist destinations, became an industrial cleanup site.

The people whose lives depend on those businesses complain of claims that have been ignored, phone lines that ring unanswered and lost paperwork. One man said his BP claims adjuster didn't even know where Grand Isle, La., was.

"What the future will hold, I have no idea," said Emma Chighizola, owner of the Blue Water Souvenirs shop on Grand Isle, a barrier island full of colorful beach cabins at the southern tip of Louisiana that is normally flush with pink, sweaty tourists this time of year. "We've never been through anything like this. We've been through a lot of hurricanes and we always came back. We knew what to expect. This, we don't."

It's a complicated problem that comes down to which lien takes precedence, and the previous administration attempt to help people who are in over their head due to second mortgages was a failure. The program was also stymied by the unwillingness of banks to take losses on the loans:

Programs to help distressed borrowers so far have focused on lowering the payments on their primary mortgage. But during the go-go years of the housing market, millions of homeowners took out a second or even third loan backed by their home. Many were piggyback mortgages, which enabled home buyers to put little or no money down, while others took advantage of rising home prices to secure home-equity lines of credits.

Now, these secondary loans are aggravating the foreclosure crisis, adding an extra burden that can be the difference between borrowers digging out of debt and losing their home. The extra mortgages also make it far more unwieldy for lenders to untie the knot of excessive debt and provide relief to borrowers. And even when borrowers do get help with their primary mortgages, the second loans can continue to bedevil homeowners, raising the risk they will default later.

The Obama administration is about to ramp up its efforts to tackle second mortgages as part of an aggressive program announced by the White House on Friday to address foreclosures. Other steps include a requirement that lenders offer temporary mortgage relief to unemployed borrowers and increased incentives for lenders to cut loan balances for borrowers who owe more than their homes are worth.

Schoolhouse Rock - Three is a Magic Number

Okay, maybe not three, but would you believe that when it comes to Afghanistan, 30 is the magic number? As Moon of Alabama notes, each time a battle in Afghanistan is described, the losses are always around 30. Megan Carpentier of Air America suggests that it may be that the Pentagon's cold calculus is that 30 civilian deaths is the maximum we Americans will tolerate without questioning the wisdom of the battles:

In other words, the Pentagon determined that 30 casualties, even if they were civilian, were too few to matter politically or to attract the attention of the press for more than a few words. If commanders expected more civilian casualties than that, political leaders had to sign off on the attack in advance to make sure they were prepared for the PR fall-out.

That PR calculus of how many deaths matter to the average American has apparently carried over from the Bush Administration to the Obama Adminstration, at least insofar as ground commanders are concerned. But the American people deserve the truth about how many Afghans--civilian and otherwise--are being killed by our forces. Just because senior officials at the Pentagon think that killing 30 people doesn't warrant their attention doesn't mean they're right.

Okay, let's see if I'm following this. The administration is talking about lending money to small businesses because the banks to which they've already funneled billions didn't do the thing all that money was supposed to do: make them open up the taps and lend working capital to businesses.

Are we clear now?

The Obama administration is developing an initiative to take money from the $700 billion program for the banking system and make it available to millions of small businesses, which officials say are essential to any economic recovery because they employ so many people, according to sources familiar with the plan.

The new effort -- which would represent a striking shift from the rescue program's original mandate -- would direct billions of bailout dollars toward a program that aims more at saving jobs than righting the financial system.

A proposal being floated by senior Treasury Department officials calls for using the bailout funds to expand an existing government program that helps small companies borrow money from banks a low rates to keep their businesses going, the source said. These "working capital" loans would come with few restrictions and could be used for buying inventory, holding onto employees and paying off short-term debt.

The initiative would expand a Small Business Administration lending program called 7(a), the agency's most popular lending program. Lines of credit for small companies could greatly increase in size. If the firm failed despite receiving this help, the government would cover most of the losses on the federal loan, perhaps as much as 90 percent. Lines of credit act like the credit cards for companies -- short-term revolving debt used to pay a variety of immediate expenses.

Discussions about the plan have reached the highest levels of the administration. In a meeting at the White House last week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner expressed support of his staff's proposal, while National Economic Council director Lawrence Summers was more skeptical. Neither has made up his mind, officials said.

"Larry has supported every small business idea we have implemented so far," said Gene Sperling, a counselor to Geithner, who has been working on small business issues. "When we have a brainstorming session on new ideas, Larry as always asks the toughest questions in the room."

The debate over the proposal has centered on whether taxpayers would be protected and whether banks that make these loans would lower their standards if the government promises to cover most of any loan losses, according to participants present or briefed on the discussions. The spoke on condition of anonymity because the conversations were considered private.

On one hand, administration officials want to prevent healthy small businesses from closing their doors and adding their workers to the growing ranks of the unemployed. But small companies have poorer record of repaying loans compared to large corporations and would be the riskiest investment made under the bailout program to date.

The officials said the discussions are in the early stages and that no plan is expected before the fall. Ideas currently on the table may evolve or be scrapped altogether, they said.

Anything that creates or maintains jobs is good, but I wonder if this will really do that. I think too many of those small businesses are already gone.

Gordon Brown and his Labour Party are getting crushed in the latest elections in the UK.

Labour suffered humiliation in the local elections tonight after the party lost its four remaining county councils to the Tories. Nottinghamshire was the last to fall as the Conservatives took control gaining nine seats while Labour – which had held the council since 1981 – lost 22.

Earlier Derbyshire fell after 28 years of rule, while Labour was also beaten by the Conservatives in Lancashire and Staffordshire. Overall, Labour appeared to be heading for total losses of around 300 seats while the Conservatives picked up more than 200.

--

Mr Brown said yesterday's elections had been "a painful defeat for Labour".

He told reporters in Downing Street: "I am here to be totally candid, to accept my responsibilities and to set out what I intend to do.

"The elections yesterday were a painful defeat for Labour. Too many good people doing so much good for their communities and their constituencies have lost through no fault of their own."

And Brown is looking at being ousted from power too:

Hours before the crucial Euro results were due to be announced, the prime minister's hopes of survival suffered a further setback when the former Lord Chancellor Lord Falconer became the most senior figure yet to call for a leadership contest. The peer – once Tony Blair's flatmate – warned that potential candidates were waiting in the wings, ready to mount a challenge, if Brown was not prepared to stand down as prime minister.

Meanwhile, Tessa Jowell became the first member of the cabinet to speculate openly that Brown could be prepared to step aside if he believed he had become an "obstacle" to Labour winning the next general election.

DownwithTyranny:

If Labor comes in third-- or even fourth-- in the EU Assembly elections, Prime Minister Gordon Brown could be facing more than a headache. There has been talk about an attempt by backbenchers to oust him as party leader. Monday Brown will be meeting with Labor parliamentarians who see the election results as a Sword of Damocles hanging over all their heads.

As Howie states, the ruling parties are all getting killed throughout the EU elections.

It hasn't helped that Silvio Berlusconi is embroiled in a sex scandal with girls young enough to be his grand daughters. (He's 72 and his latest mistress and pimp is 18-- and he used a government plane to ferry her and his friends to his villa in Sardinia.) Yesterday the biggest newspaper in Spain published pictures of Berlusconi cavorting around naked with the topless girls and he called in "an invasion of privacy" and is now suing the paper.

Talking Points Memo: Announced the winners of the The Golden Dukes. The Golden Dukes are given in recognition great accomplishments in muckiness including acts of venal corruption, outstanding self-inflicted losses of dignity, crimes against the republic, bribery, exposed hypocrisy and generally malevolent governance.

uggabugga: A thoughtful observation on NYT's unresponsive 'response' to critics of the Kristol hire.

PERRspectives Blog: Huckleberry has no compunction about freeing recidivist rapists and drunk drivers who support his party or faith-based agenda. But he loves him some capital punishment and that makes him a natural heir to George W. Bush.

The Vanity Press: The assassination of Benazir Bhutto followed two months of urgent pleas to the State Department by her representatives for better protection.

skippy the bush kangaroo: Once in a great while, when the rich and powerful flagrantly break the law, they are held accountable in a court of law.

Southern Political Report: Using the reallocation methodology InsiderAdvantage used in 2004 – which correctly indicated a fairly comfortable win for John Kerry – our new poll reveals that John Edwards has a solid lead. Taylor Marsh has some thoughts...

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There's some doubt as to whether Einstein ever actually said that if honey bees died out, mankind only had four years left to live. But no matter the authorship, the truth is that we are very dependent upon bees for our food product and agricultural industry. And bees are dying, at a dangerously fast pace. By some estimates, a full 1/3 of the bee population has died off, in a phenomenon known as "Colony Collapse Disorder":

(A) mystery malady, dubbed "Colony Collapse Disorder," is sweeping through the apiaries, leaving many hives almost completely devoid of adult bees, which appear to abandon their hives and disappear. Apiculturists are looking at a number of potential culprits, from bad weather to bad corn syrup to genetically modified corn to pesticides to miticides, and many suspect the problem is compounded by the presence of the varroa mite, which weakens colonies so that invading pathogens pack a particularly destructive punch. (Scientists suspect the 2005 die-off was exacerbated by a viral event.) While Miller's bees have not, so far, been affected by the colony collapse, beekeepers in 24 states have reported losses as high as 80 and even 90 percent, and many of the afflicted bees have been in the almonds, rubbing shoulders with Miller's relatively healthy ones.

60 Minutes' Steve Kroft looks at the phenomenon with the apiarist credited for sounding the alarm, David Hackenberg. Full transcripts and video available at their website.

Via Media Matters:

In a June 7 Washington Post article, staff writer Paul Farhi wrote: "Faced with continuing financial losses and stubbornly low ratings for Washington Post Radio," WTWP owner Bonneville International Corp. is "considering" picking up "a show hosted by conservative Glenn Beck." Farhi added: "However, both Bonneville and The Post must agree on all programming decisions." As Media Matters for America has repeatedly noted, Beck -- who hosts a nationally syndicated radio show and a nightly program on CNN Headline News, and joined ABC's Good Morning America as a regular contributor in January 2007 -- has repeatedly spouted inflammatory comments about Muslims, Arabs, Mexicans, and female guests on his radio and television programs, a tendency that went unmentioned by Farhi. Read more...

What marketing genius thinks that the lowest rated host on HLN--whose ratings are lower than a year ago-- will actually bring up the ratings?