You have to give him pundit props: Krugman said from the start (this video is from February) that Obama's stimulus package was too small, and he was right. As expected, the unemployment claims went up to record-breaking levels this week. Via Bloomberg:

The unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the highest since 1983, from 9.7 percent in August, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Payrolls fell by 263,000, following a revised 201,000 decline the prior month that was less than previously reported.

As someone who's sent out 250+ resumes in the past year and gotten one face-to-face interview and one phone call in return, I can tell you first-hand it's not looking good on the job front.

Krugman says if we don't do something about this, not only will the human costs will be high but our economic growth will be depressed for a long, long time:

Wait. It gets worse. A new report from the International Monetary Fund shows that the kind of recession we’ve had, a recession caused by a financial crisis, often leads to long-term damage to a country’s growth prospects. “The path of output tends to be depressed substantially and persistently following banking crises.”

The same report, however, suggests that this isn’t inevitable: “We find that a stronger short-term fiscal policy response” — by which they mean a temporary increase in government spending — “is significantly associated with smaller medium-term output losses.”

So we should be doing much more than we are to promote economic recovery, not just because it would reduce our current pain, but also because it would improve our long-run prospects.

But can we afford to do more — to provide more aid to beleaguered state governments and the unemployed, to spend more on infrastructure, to provide tax credits to employers who create jobs? Yes, we can.

The conventional wisdom is that trying to help the economy now produces short-term gain at the expense of long-term pain. But as I’ve just pointed out, from the point of view of the nation as a whole, that’s not at all how it works. The slump is doing long-term damage to our economy and society, and mitigating that slump will lead to a better future.

What is true is that spending more on recovery and reconstruction would worsen the government’s own fiscal position. But even there, conventional wisdom greatly overstates the case. The true fiscal costs of supporting the economy are surprisingly small.

You see, spending money now means a stronger economy, both in the short run and in the long run. And a stronger economy means more revenues, which offset a large fraction of the upfront cost. Back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that the offset falls short of 100 percent, so that fiscal stimulus isn’t a complete free lunch. But it costs far less than you’d think from listening to what passes for informed discussion.

Look, I know more stimulus is a hard sell politically. But it’s urgently needed. The question shouldn’t be whether we can afford to do more to promote recovery. It should be whether we can afford not to. And the answer is no.

Robert Reich agrees, saying this is certainly not the time to worry about the deficit, and predicts if we do, the politics are going to get much uglier:

Let me say this as clearly and forcefully as I can: The federal government should be spending even more than it already is on roads and bridges and schools and parks and everything else we need. It should make up for cutbacks at the state level, and then some. This is the only way to put Americans back to work. We did it during the Depression. It was called the WPA.

Yes, I know. Our government is already deep in debt. But let me tell you something: When one out of six Americans is unemployed or underemployed, this is no time to worry about the debt.

[...] People who now obsess about government debt have it backwards. The problem isn’t the debt. The problem is just the opposite. It’s that at a time like this, when consumers and businesses and exports can’t do it, government has to spend more to get Americans back to work and recharge the economy. Then – after people are working and the economy is growing – we can pay down that debt.

But if government doesn’t spend more right now and get Americans back to work, we could be out of work for years. And the debt will be with us even longer. And politics could get much uglier.

The General digs up the, ah, hot tip:

The fine Real Americans at the Free Republic have found Obama's achilles heel: his Long Dark Staff of White Insecurity.

hoosiermama:

The only other thing that hit me was that Sinclair said BO was not circumcised. When my son was born in a hospital that was done as a matter of routine without even consulting us. Would the same be for Hawaii? OTOH People born at home or in some other cultures are not circumcised.

thecodont:

A relative of mine was born (in a hospital) a couple of years after BO's alleged birth date. He was circumcised also (as a matter of routine, not according to any family request).

afraidfortherepublic:

My son was born in June of 1961 in a hospital in CA, and the nurses released us because of miscommunication in a day and a half before the circumcision was done. We had to go back to the doctor’s office to have it done a week later, and the doctor was NOT HAPPY. My second son was born in the same hospital 4 years later. I don’t remember them asking me about it. Routine procedure for little boys.

hoosiermama:

Wish we had someone to make a phone call to the hospitols in HI and ask if they routinely do circumcism and when that practice started.

MHGinTN:

You might want to make that call to a Canadian hospital ...

MHGinTN:

No...it would have been in Kenya....not Canada.

Natural Born 54

I am having a vision of a court room scene. The judge turns to O sitting in the witness chair to his left and says “I am sorry, Mr. President, but I am going to have to ask you to stand and drop trou .....”

Anyone remember how Republicans wound up obsessing over Bill Clinton's Johnson, ad nauseam, even on TV? I remember Ann Coulter speculating over Paula Jones' claims about the shape and behavior of the Mighty Clenis, as we came to call it.

Now, I guess, they get to do the same for Obama's unit. This should get entertaining.

And were wondering why:

Millions of people across the Middle East and Asia have lost access to the internet after two undersea cables in the Mediterranean suffered severe damage.

Huge numbers in Egypt and India were left struggling to get online as a result of the outage, when the major internet pipeline between Egypt and Italy was cut.

Internet Service Providers (ISPs) throughout the region, including those in United Arab Emirates, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, also reported problems. International telephone calls, which have also been affected, are being rerouted to work around the problem.

It is stories like this that make me weep for my country. When people so low, so completely divested of a moral compass, can impact an election to the detriment of the whole nation. John McCain knows only too well how these kind of sleazy, win-at-all-cost tactics work and should be the FIRST person to stand up and speak against them.

Key West resident Joelna Marcus received a phone call today. She was asked if she is Jewish, and she replied in the affirmative.

She was asked if she was religious.

She was then asked if her opinion of Barack Obama would change if she knew that Obama had given lots and lots of money to the PLO.

There are no perjoratives strong enough to describe the kind of slimeball that would do this.

Jerry Wexler, RIP: I'm proud and grateful that Jerry was a friend of mine, beginning the day in 1975 he called me, out of the blue, and said, "I like the way you sing. Let's make a record." I couldn't have been more surprised and thrilled if I'd received a phone call from God. I'd grown up listening to Jerry Wexler-produced records. He's one of the reasons I'm a musician. He took me to Muscle Shoals, Alabama and we did an album for Warner Brothers. Being around Jerry was a constant joy. He was a walking encyclopedia of popular American music, especially R&B and jazz. Aside from his important contributions as a genuine musical pioneer, and his unique talents as a producer, he was a wonderful raconteur, a man of exquisite taste, a tough businessman, but a gentleman, and a soft touch for musicians.

I could ask him something like, "tell me about Solomon Burke..." and he'd do an hour of lively, informative and often hilarious commentary on that subject and related topics, one story sparking another. I spent countless hours with him in New York before and after our project, in Alabama while we were recording, and on many occasions in the succeeding 30 years, pestering him to talk about his life in music, which he was always happy to do. I learned a lot. About his experiences with everyone from Ray Charles, to Willie Nelson, to Wilson Pickett, to Aretha Franklin, to Bob Dylan, and on and on. The last time I spoke with him several weeks ago, I opened the conversation by asking how he was doing. "How the hell you think I'm doing," he replied..."I'm 91...!!" What an honor it was for me to have had the opportunity to work with Jerry Wexler. I lost a friend. American music lost one of the greats.

Thought Theater: Compare & Contrast: Family Values and the 2008 election

Frameshop: What America needs to hear about Jerome Corsi, and the denialists riding the slime machine.

Pam's House Blend: Do your homework or Teach might pop a cap in your ass.

The Big Picture: Financial Innovation

Good Girl Roxie: 8 million Americans are "potential suspects" in an illegal domestic surveillance program

TPMCafe: Liberal pundits offer an unprecedented apology.

Bring It On! A bad day to be a climate-change denying Christian creationist?

The Washington Independent: Burger King to tomato pickers: Have it your way

Pensito Review: One guy who won't ready for any 3 AM phone calls.

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: IFC, Fact-esque, The Edge of the American West, The Root

Long-time readers know that I take a certain amount of pleasure in mocking Florida, where I was born and raised. There’s just something … unique about it.

Take, for example, a Tampa-area school firing a substitute teacher for doing a magic trick for his students.

The telephone call that spelled the end of Jim Piculas’ career as a substitute teacher in Pasco County came on a January day about a week after he performed the disappearing-toothpick trick for a group of rapt middle school students.

Pat Sinclair, who oversees substitute teachers in the Pasco County School District, was on the phone. She told Piculas there had been a complaint about his performance at Rushe Middle School in Land O’ Lakes.

He asked what she meant. “She said, ‘You’ve been accused of wizardry,’” Piculas said.

He said the statement seemed bizarre to him, like something out of Harry Potter.

Piculas said he replied, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.” He said he also told Sinclair, “It’s not black magic. It’s a toothpick.”

Oh sure, it’s a toothpick today. But what about tomorrow? What will we tell parents when a substitute teacher starts trying to do spells? Or shows kids pictures of Willow from “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”? Or accidentally turns someone into a newt? Hmm?

As Piculas — who, as far as I know, is not a warlock — explained it, he got a call after doing his trick from the head of supervisor of substitute teachers. “He says, ‘Jim, we have a huge issue, you can’t take any more assignments you need to come in right away,’” Piculas said.

The disappearing tooth pick was, apparently, the “huge issue,” and led to the disappearing job.

When it comes to scandals at the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Reagan-era controversies would appear to take the cake. As Joe Conason explained not too long ago, Reagan’s HUD scandal included “politically connected Republicans criminally exploit[ing] the same housing assistance programs they routinely denounced as ‘wasteful.’”

As it turns out, Bush’s HUD scandals aren’t generating nearly the same amount of attention, but the controversies are nearly as serious.

Housing Secretary Alphonso Jackson demanded that the Philadelphia Housing Authority transfer a $2 million public property to a developer at a substantial discount, then retaliated against the housing authority when it refused to do so, a recent court filing alleges.

The authority’s director, Carl Greene, contends in a court affidavit that Jackson called Philadelphia’s mayor in 2006 to demand the transfer to the developer, Kenny Gamble, a former soul-music songwriter who is a business friend of Jackson’s. Jackson’s aides followed up with “menacing” threats about the property and other housing programs in at least a dozen letters and phone calls over an 11-month period, Greene said in an interview.

Greene and his colleagues have alleged in the court filing that Philadelphia is now paying a severe price for disobeying a Bush Cabinet official. The Department of Housing and Urban Development recently vowed to strip the city’s housing authority of its ability to spend some federal funds, a move that the authority said could raise rents for most of its 84,000 low-income tenants and force the layoffs of 250 people. […]

“The secretary was determined that we turn over this land to this specific developer,” Greene said in an interview. “I refused. . . . He didn’t have the ability to remove me. So he resorted to these extraordinary measures to extract what he wanted.”

Mark Kleiman notes that Bush and Jackson have effectively turned the Department of Housing and Urban Development into “an extortion racket,” which, under the circumstances, sounds about right.

Via TPM:

The FBI, working with an Alaska oil contractor, secretly taped telephone calls with Sen. Ted Stevens as part of a public corruption sting, according to people close to the investigation.

The secret recordings suggest the Justice Department was eyeing Stevens long before June, when the Republican senator first publicly acknowledged he was under scrutiny. At that time, it appeared Stevens was a new focus in a case that had already ensnared several state lawmakers.

The recorded calls between Stevens and businessman Bill Allen were confirmed by two people close to the case who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation is still under way. They declined to say how many calls were recorded or what was said.

Allen, a wealthy businessman and Stevens' political patron, agreed to the taping last year after authorities confronted him with evidence he had bribed Alaska lawmakers. He pleaded guilty to bribery and is a key witness against Alaska legislators. He also has told prosecutors he paid his employees to renovate the senator's house. Read more...

I wonder how Stevens feels about wiretapping now...

CREW has Stevens on the list of Most Corrupt Politicians, how much longer does he have before he is stripped of his seats or is forced to retire?

How positively ... Rovian:

Matt Ortega:

Republicans battling for the party's nomination in a South Carolina State House primary stooped to unbelievable lows, even for the GOP.

Sources are telling FITSNews that a black woman calling herself "Shaniqua" has placed telephone calls to several Republican voters in Beaufort County urging them to vote for Shannon Erickson in today's GOP State House runoff election. According to individuals who have received them, the calls say, "My name is Shaniqua, and I be voting' for Shannon Erickson 'cause she gonna give me all the money I need sos I don't hafta work." Another phone caller, alleging to be Erickson herself, tells voters that she will "spend money like a drunken sailor" if elected. [...]

The phoney phone calls have some Beaufort insiders pointing fingers at [primary opponent, Randy] Bates' political consultant, Rod Shealy, particularly given their overtly racial overtones. Shealy pled guilty to election fraud years ago after hiring an unemployed black fisherman to run against his sister in an effort to frighten white voters.

Rod Shealy, Jr., who is managing Bates' campaign, told FITSNews, "our campaign knows nothing about this, period."

"Any campaign worth its salt would be much smarter than to send out something that transparent," Shealy said.

Luckily, the utterly transparent push polling didn't have the intended effect. Shannon Erickson won the runoff yesterday.