Hey Andy, me ‘n’ Barney didn’t have nuthin’ better to do, so we decided to crash the economy!

Posted: July 8, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Democratic Politics, Economy, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, Team Obama, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, unemployment, voodoo economics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | 9 Comments

Barack O'Gomer and Deputy "Barney" Geithner*

This morning Sky Dancing’s resident economist Dakinikat wrote about Tim Geithner’s latest trial balloon about maybe stopping Social Security checks in August if Congress refuses to raise the debt ceiling. That’s right, he wants to use the trust fund that elderly people paid into all their working lives to pay China and other foreign debtors. Now that’s a brilliant plan boys–throw grandma and grandpa out in the streets to starve and die. It’s genius!

Then while we were all commiserating in the comment thread, we got the jobs report for June: only 18,000 jobs were added, and the phonied-up unemployment rate is now at 9.2%.

O’Gomer dragged his sorry a$$ out to the Rose Garden in late this morning to mumble a few weak excuses.

“Today’s job report confirms what most Americans already know,” Obama said. “We still have a long way to go and a lot of work to do to give people the security and opportunity that they deserve.”

The president tried to lay some blame at Congress’ feet. He said lawmakers could pass a handful of policies today to create jobs. His list included an infrastructure bank, free trade deals and patent reform.

“There are bills and trade agreements before Congress right now that could get all these ideas moving,” he said. “All of them have bipartisan support, all of them could pass immediately, and I encourage Congress not to wait.”

Yeah, patent reform, that’s the ticket! And more trade agreements to create more outsourcing of American jobs. Brilliant! And cutting off Social Security checks! That’s really gonna give Americans “the security and opportunity they deserve.” Who is advising this guy anyway?

Well, one of O’Gomer’s top advisers, David Plouffe, made an unfortunate remark before the jobs report came out. Minkoff Minx wrote about it in her SDB reads earlier this evening. From The Christian Science Monitor:

David Plouffe, Mr. Obama’s top political adviser, got things started Thursday at a breakfast sponsored by Bloomberg News.

“The average American does not view the economy through the prism of GDP or unemployment rates or even monthly jobs numbers,” Mr. Plouffe said. “People won’t vote based on the unemployment rate; they’re going to vote based on: ‘How do I feel about my own situation? Do I believe the president makes decisions based on me and my family?’ ”

Ask yourself, Mr. Plouffe, how do you think most ordinary Americans feels about their situation right about now? O’Gomer’s buddy Timmy Geithner is talking about cutting off Social Security payments. O’Gomer himself is trying to talk the Republicans into cutting Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. This administration hasn’t done diddly-squat about jobs except occasionally have O’Gomer mention that we need to create them. Talk is cheap, Mr. Plouffe. Actions speak louder than words as my mom used say.

According to Julian Brookes at Rolling Stone, Plouffe also made this odd assessment:

the president, says Plouffe, has a good shot with independent voters, who’ll reward his bipartisan, bend-over-backwards approach the debt talks; is a seasoned campaigner with a huge war chest; has moved to the center without losing the base (the oft-noted “enthusiasm gap” seems to have closed); and has demographic trends working in his favor (he won big with minorities in 08, and they’ll make up a larger share of the electorate next year). Plus, of course, the GOP field is weak: Frontrunner Mitt Romney is the most formidable of the bunch, but he’s nobody’s idea of a galvanizing standard bearer.

What is wrong with this guy? Does he really believe that Independents like politicians who “bend over backwards” instead of showing some strength? Does he really believe O’Gomer hasn’t lost his base? And the center? O’Gomer has gone so far right he’s out-crazying the Tea Party!

Then there’s William M. Daley, the White House chief of staff. Check out what he recently had to say about Americans’ attitudes about the crappy economy. According to Peter Nicholas at the LA Times, O’Gomer’s main defense is that the middle class was already suffering under Bush, so it’s not really his fault. Never mind that unemployment has gone from 7.8% to 9.2% on his watch. So O’Gomer is asking for more time:

Speaking at a fundraising dinner in Philadelphia last week, he said that the nation’s challenges “weren’t a year in the making or two years in the making, but are actually 10 years in the making.”

But Obama’s nuanced message isn’t breaking through. A Gallup Poll last month showed that Americans’ economic confidence was near its low for the year.

For the White House, it’s tough to get the public to pay attention to anything else.

A Democratic senator spoke by phone recently with White House Chief of Staff William M. Daley. “He said, ‘Honest to goodness, if we’re not talking about jobs and the economy, nobody is listening,’” recalled the senator.

Surprise, surprise, surprise!!

Gee, do you think maybe you ought to stop talking and actually DO something then? Just wait until Grandma finds out she might not get her Social Security check in August. Maybe O’Gomer and his advisers need to get a clue. And find O’Gomer a couple of advisers who know something about economics, Mr. Daley.


*NOTE: The graphic at the top of this post is the work of our old friend StateOfDisbelief.

President Hornswoggle and the Debted Hallows

Posted: July 7, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: Barack Obama, Catfood Commission, Democratic Politics, Economy, Federal Budget, Federal Budget and Budget deficit, Global Financial Crisis, John Birch Society in Charge, legislation, Psychopaths in charge, Surreality, The Great Recession, U.S. Economy, voodoo economics | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 39 Comments

So, you know me.  I’m out looking for exactly how bad this debt ‘deal’ is going to austere our economy in to the Great Recession Redux.   BostonBoomer has been writing about President Hornswoggle putting Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security–not even part of the federal budget–on the table.  I’ve searched and searched and can’t find the details on the great American Give Away other than a few articles showing a beaming Boehner saying we’re at a 50-50 chance of reaching a deal now.   If Boehner is beaming, all but the richest among us should be holding on to our personal liberties and wallets.

We know that the President has caved on a bunch of things during both the HRC negotiations and the extension of the Dubya Tax Breaks for Billionaires pogrom.  However, the Democratic leadership was aware of this, grumbled some, and backed his usurpation of responsibility for our future.  Imagine my surprise when I watched Chuck Schumer on Andrea Mitchell say that he had no idea about the details of the current deal so he couldn’t really comment on it.  The most noticeable detail was his face that said “I’ve got a sick tummy, mommy”.  Senator Schumer is on the Senate  Committee on Finance that handles all of these things and is supposedly a key person on the budget deal.   You would think he would know.  But, he doesn’t and neither does any other Democratic Senator or Congressman.  It appears the press told them what Obama was handing over to the Republicans.

Senate Democrats reacted angrily Thursday to a report that President Obama has proposed significant cuts to Medicare and Social Security in closed-door talks with GOP leaders.

Democratic lawmakers said they were dismayed to read about Obama’s offer in the press rather than hearing it from the president himself. Their frustration is exacerbated by Obama’s snub of their invitation to speak to the Senate Democratic caucus Wednesday.

Instead, Obama is meeting with Democratic and Republican leaders from both chambers Thursday morning.

“We would have preferred to hear it from the president instead of from the press,” said Sen. Barbara Mikulski (Md.), a senior member of the Senate Democratic conference. “We first have to go after tax earmarks.”

Mikulski said cuts to Medicare and Social Security should be a solution of last resort. She said closing tax loopholes and pulling back from Libya should be considered before entitlement cuts.

She said Obama should not assume Democratic support for a deficit reduction plan that cuts entitlements.

I now fully expect President Cave-in to hand the keys to the nation over to a bunch of punch-drunk Republicans.  What I don’t get is why the Democratic members of Congress continue to let him get away with it.  They are the very face of “sound and fury signifying nothing”.  Let me ask you if you’d want to be a congress member from some solid Democratic district facing re-election by having to defend a Democratic President that’s happy to cut Medicare and Social Security?  Social Security doesn’t even need to be on the table.  He’s just offered it up for some reason that I can’t fathom. How on earth could you face your electorate and back such a  deal?

Let me remind you, all of the economic data gathered in the last 80 years tells us that this austerity agenda is just going to tank the economy. We continue t0 enact the very same crap that put us in the worst economic position we’ve seen since the Great Depression.  Why oh why are they doing this to us?  Here’s a taste of Noble Prize winning Joseph Stiglitz for some perspective.

A decade ago, in the midst of an economic boom, the United States faced a surplus so large that it threatened to eliminate the national debt. Unaffordable tax cuts and wars, a major recession, and soaring health care costs—fueled in part by the commitment of George W. Bush’s administration to giving drug companies free rein in setting prices, even with government money at stake—quickly transformed a huge surplus into record peacetime deficits.

The remedies to the U.S. deficit follow immediately from this diagnosis: Put America back to work by stimulating the economy; end the mindless wars; rein in military and drug costs; and raise taxes, at least on the very rich. But the right will have none of this, and instead is pushing for even more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, together with expenditure cuts in investments and social protection that put the future of the U.S. economy in peril and that shred what remains of the social contract. Meanwhile, the U.S. financial sector has been lobbying hard to free itself of regulations, so that it can return to its previous, disastrously carefree, ways.

Here’s a thorough, peer-reviewed, strong methodology-based  IMF study–cited by Paul Krugman–that provides evidence that austerity programs are recessionary and bring on worse budget problems.

The paper corrects this by using the historical record to identify true examples of deliberate austerity — and it turns out that they are contractionary. The multiplier is less than one, but that may reflect the fact that these austerity programs did not take place in the face of a zero lower bound, so they were partly offset by monetary expansion.

The paper also provides a tentative answer to the apparent tendency of spending cuts to be less contractionary than tax increases: it looks as if central banks take more aggressive action to offset spending cuts than tax hikes, reflecting some combination of inflation concerns, belief that spending cuts are more durable, and (the paper doesn’t say this) bankerly ideology.

If we were discussing a politically neutral subject, the evidence here would long since have been considered definitive: expansionary austerity is a doctrine that failed. But since we’re in the political realm, of course, such a convenient doctrine can’t be abandoned. On the contrary, it now seems to be the official doctrine of both the GOP and the White House.

Also, let me remind you that Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security are very successful programs.  They have successfully stopped the elderly from being the poorest segment of society.  Just as an example, the majority of single, elderly women would be in poverty without Social Security.

Elderly unmarried women — including widows — get 51 percent of their total income from Social Security. Unmarried elderly men get 39 percent, while elderly married couples get 36 percent of their income from Social Security. For 25 percent of unmarried women, Social Security is their only source of income, compared to 9 percent of married couples and 20 percent of unmarried men. Without Social Security benefits, the elderly poverty rate among women would have been 52.2 percent and among widows would have been 60.6 percent.

Here’s a recent,  powerful, academic study showing the benefits of providing Health Insurance for the poor.

When poor people are given medical insurance, they not only find regular doctors and see doctors more often but they also feel better, are less depressed and are better able to maintain financial stability, according to a new, large-scale study that provides the first rigorously controlled assessment of the impact of Medicaid.

While the findings may seem obvious, health economists and policy makers have long questioned whether it would make any difference to provide health insurance to poor people.

It has become part of the debate on Medicaid, at a time when states are cutting back on this insurance program for the poor. In fact, the only reason the study could be done was that Oregon was running out of money and had to choose some people to get insurance and exclude others, providing groups for comparison.

I continually feel as though we’ve all been drug down the rabbit hole. It is like the President is purposefully enabling  joblessness, poverty, and public health problems.  No amount of research, historical data, and polls appear to be able to penetrate the Washington, D.C. group think these day. The biggest issue is that the President himself believes in the confidence fairy, the bipartisan elves, and the high priests of voodoo economics.  He’s not just part of the problem, he is THE problem.  Can  just one or two members of the Democratic caucus please stand up to this man and his notion that bipartisanship that surrenders the country to right wing reality-deniers is better than any form of principled leadership?   Can at least one of the please be brave and start talking some sense and representing the will of the people for a change?

Invoke the 14th Amendment and end the damned sell outs now!

Forget giving away the store — Obama is handing the store to Republicans and inviting them to burn it down.

Posted: July 5, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: income inequality, Medicare, Psychopaths in charge, Republican politics, Surreality, Team Obama, The Great Recession, The Media SUCKS, the villagers, U.S. Economy, U.S. Politics, voodoo economics, We are so F'd | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 22 Comments

Please read this shocking story at The New York Times — there’s no way for me to excerpt all the important parts.

Obama administration officials are offering to cut tens of billions of dollars from Medicare and Medicaid in negotiations to reduce the federal budget deficit, but the depth of the cuts depends on whether Republicans are willing to accept any increases in tax revenues.

Administration officials and Republican negotiators say the money can be taken from health care providers like hospitals and nursing homes without directly imposing new costs on needy beneficiaries or radically restructuring either program.

What this really means is that more doctors and hospitals will refuse to accept Medicare and Medicaid patients, and nursing homes will turn away frail elderly patients who can’t pay out of pocket–because Medicaid will no longer be able to assist those who are poor or have already spent their life savings on health care.

“Congress smells blood,” said William L. Minnix Jr., the chief lobbyist for nonprofit nursing homes.

Mr. Minnix, the president of a trade group known as LeadingAge, is urging nursing homes to “bombard your senators with the message that Medicaid cannot be cut by $100 billion” over 10 years, as President Obama and many Republican lawmakers have suggested.

A coalition of hospital lobbyists, worried about the direction of the budget talks, has begun a national advertising campaign to block further cuts in the two health care programs, which account for about 55 percent of hospital revenues. The hospitals have made a commitment to spend up to $1 million a week through August on television, print and online advertising.

Now check this out: Chuck Schumer, supposedly a Democrat, is quoted in the article as saying, “We are very willing to entertain savings in Medicare. Medicare gives very good health care very inefficiently.”

Really? Medicare has almost no overhead, and it pays way below the going rate for health care services. That’s why so few private doctors accept Medicare patients right now.

Now think about what Dakinikat has told us about the dangers of cutting federal spending and read this:

Medicare and Medicaid insure more than 100 million people, account for 23 percent of all federal spending and are likely to be an important part of any budget deal. Military spending, which accounts for about 20 percent of federal expenditures, is likely to be included as well.

President Obama and his Republican pals are on a mission to bring down the American economy and bring on a repeat of the Great Depression. Can anything or anyone stop them? We need riots in the streets, but can elderly people do it alone?

Michele and Marcus Bachmann and Cher’s Gaydar

Posted: July 2, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: 2012 presidential campaign, GLBT Rights, religious extremists, Republican presidential politics, Surreality, U.S. Politics | Tags: , , , , , , , | 24 Comments


GOP Presidential Candidate Michele Bachmann and her potential “first dude” Marcus Bachmann have been campaigning together since her recent announcement that she is running for President. At a rally on June 28, in Myrtle Beach, NC, Michele gave a rousing stump speech and then the happy couple danced together onstage to the strains of “Wabash Cannonball”

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In 2010, Marcus Bachmann explained to a “christian” radio host that homosexuals are “barbarians” who “need to be educated.” Now that the Bachmanns are in the spotlight, their attitudes about homosexuals are beginning to be noted by the corporate media.

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After Cher saw the above MSNBC segment, she tweeted the following to her followers:

“Just heard Michele Bachmann’s OH SO CHRISTIAN husband talk about ‘Gays’ in the most UNCHRISTIAN way WTF!”

“But Boys please utube this asshole & tell me what u think … Cause My Gay-Dar is GOING OFF!!!”

More of her tweets are posted at the above link.

Here’s another radio interview of Marcus discussing his advice to his daughter about choosing her prom dress and how that process relates to identity.

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These two are just a bundle of contradictions. Now check this out:

After a long hard day of wingnutting, what does the family of crazy-eyed Minnesota congresswoman Michele do to kick back? Well, of course, they watch Glee! Are the anti-gay Michele Bachmann and her “Christian counselor” husband Marcus hypocrites, stupid or all of these things?

Justin Bieber disappointed U.S. representative and potential presidential candidate Michele Bachmann at last night’s Time 100 by not showing up — she’d brought copies of his book to sign for one of her older sons, who is a special-ed teacher. But she did delight her other, younger children (she’s taken care of 23 foster kids over the years) by meeting another popular teen icon and singer. At the event last night, at Jazz at Lincoln Center, Bachmann and her husband posed with Glee star Darren Criss and e-mailed the pictures to their children. “We looked for Chris Colfer,” she said, but they didn’t find him. “We don’t watch TV, generally speaking. But the kids were thrilled. What kids don’t watch Glee?” Well, maybe the children of potential presidential candidates who think God sent them to stop gay people from having equal rights? Maybe Bachmann doesn’t know that the main message of the popular teen hit is tolerance, respect, and equal treatment — particularly for gay people. She doesn’t watch TV, after all.

My head is spinning!

NOTE: Videos taken from Youtube orginally posted by the Dump Bachman blog, and indispensible source for information on Michele and Marcus Bachmann.

Friday Reads

Posted: July 1, 2011 | Author: | Filed under: income inequality, morning reads, Politics as Usual, Surreality | Tags: , , , , , , , , | 20 Comments

We’re closing in on a long weekend.   It’s Independence Day!  Do you know where your constitutional rights are?  The first amendment right to keep the government from institutionalizing one religious viewpoint appears to be under systematic assault these days by the Republican Party.  How can we stop candidates like Michelle Bachmann who create their own American history and distort our laws and civil rights in the process?  Here’s Jonathan Chait’s suggestion.

The Michele Bachmann surge (confirmed most recently by the latest PPP poll) suggests the question is not whether Bachmann is a legitimate contender for the Republican nomination but what it will take to stop her from winning. As I’ll explain, I do think Bachmann can be stopped. But the general advance of conservatism within the Republican Party over the last three decades has been a repeated pattern of the unthinkable becoming thinkable, and the trend has sharply accelerated over the last two years. Moderation simply lacks any legitimacy within the GOP. It exists, but — unlike the Democratic Party, where moderation is a frequent boast — it’s undertaken almost entirely in secret. Since Barack Obama’s inauguration, virtually every quarrel within the Republican Party between moderates and maximalist partisans has been resolved in favor of the latter. Bachmann has positioned herself as a mainstream, serious figure who has also outflanked the other as-yet announced candidates. They will have a hard time attacking her without seeming to attack conservatism itself.

So, what could defeat her? One thing could be the entry of another candidate who can match her conservatism while appearing more electable. Rick Perry is the leading candidate here. Paul Ryan would be another.

A second possibility is that Republican insiders could spill the beans on why she so freaks them out.

I have no idea why any of them think that Rick Perry or Paul Ryan are batshit crazy lite.  Maybe it’s because they aren’t vagina impaired or probably because they kiss up to cults instead of joining them.  But wait, Perry belongs to a similar religious cult and Ryan is in the Ayn Rand cult, so, we’re back to vajayjay of doom explanation.   Frankly, the entire party seems bat shit crazy these days. So, we’re still stuck between bat shit crazy and totally worthless.  (Sigh.)

Another stranger than truth bit of news these days is Steven Colbert and his “SuperPac”.  A “SuperPac is”a political group that can legally accept unlimited contributions from people, corporations, and unions to campaign for candidates and causes”.

Because Colbert’s group will not give any money directly to candidates — instead airing independent ads to support them — Colbert can take donations of any size.

He forced the FEC to make this decision by planning to operate as a real political group, not a parody.

“If we’d viewed this as a funny request, that would have been a lot easier,” Commissioner Ellen Weintraub, a George W. Bush nominee, told Colbert at today’s hearing.

In the end, the commission voted 5-1 to approve Colbert’s PAC according to guidelines under consideration at today’s hearing.

Colbert had sought guidance from the FEC on how to handle air-time and help from Viacom, Comedy Central’s parent company — and this is the area in which his SuperPAC has forced precedents with implications for other media companies, like Fox News.

The FEC ruled today that Viacom can fund Colbert’s group, without limit, as long as it only helps out with ads that air during his show …

I’m wondering if this is giving Scalia, Thomas and the rest of the Neanderthal SCOTUS Beastie Boys nightime heart burn?  Whoops!  No hearts!! Some analysts believe that what Colbert is actually doing is exposing holes in campaign finance law.

“I think Colbert is trying to dramatize problems in the campaign finance world in the way that he dramatizes other things,” said longtime campaign finance reform advocate Fred Wertheimer, a longtime advocate for stricter campaign finance rules who is president of Democracy 21. “But nevertheless, the proposals here would potentially open gaping disclosure loopholes in the campaign finance laws.”

Wertheimer is so concerned about what Colbert is doing, in fact, that Democracy 21 has joined with the Campaign Legal Center, another advocacy group, to petition the FEC to reject his request because it could result in the “radical evisceration” of campaign finance rules.

If Colbert gets his way before the FEC, it could blur the lines between political money and media to an unprecedented extent.

For instance, it might enable Fox News pundit-politicians such as Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee to use the network’s resources to boost their own political committees, assert Democracy 21 and the Campaign Legal Center in their FEC filing. It concludes: “Mr. Colbert’s ultimate goals here may be comedic, but the commission should not play the straight man at the expense of the law.”

Colbert’s PAC bit started as a parody of the PAC started by former Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty to lay the foundation for his presidential campaign. But after lawyers for Comedy Central’s parent company Viacom expressed reservations about Colbert using their corporate resources — in the form of his eponymous late-night faux news show — to promote the PAC, the bit morphed into a riff on how corporations like Viacom can spend cash on politics, thanks to the 2010 high court decision in a case called Citizens United v. FEC.

The Gawker’s John Cook has an interesting piece up on “Roger Ailes’ Secret Nixon-Era Blueprint for Fox News”.   He had me at “secret Nixon-Era” blueprint.  Nothing from Nixon people even shocks me any more.  Is there such a thing as group paranoia?

Republican media strategist Roger Ailes launched Fox News Channel in 1996, ostensibly as a “fair and balanced” counterpoint to what he regarded as the liberal establishment media. But according to a remarkable document buried deep within the Richard Nixon Presidential Library, the intellectual forerunner for Fox News was a nakedly partisan 1970 plot by Ailes and other Nixon aides to circumvent the “prejudices of network news” and deliver “pro-administration” stories to heartland television viewers.

The memo—called, simply enough, “A Plan For Putting the GOP on TV News”— is included in a 318-page cache of documents detailing Ailes’ work for both the Nixon and George H.W. Bush administrations that we obtained from the Nixon and Bush presidential libraries. Through his firms REA Productions and Ailes Communications, Inc., Ailes served as paid consultant to both presidents in the 1970s and 1990s, offering detailed and shrewd advice ranging from what ties to wear to how to keep the pressure up on Saddam Hussein in the run-up to the first Gulf War.

The documents—drawn mostly from the papers of Nixon chief of staff and felon H.R. Haldeman and Bush chief of staff John Sununu—reveal Ailes to be a tireless television producer and joyful propagandist. He was a forceful advocate for the power of television to shape the political narrative, and he reveled in the minutiae constructing political spectacles—stage-managing, for instance, the lighting of the White House Christmas tree with painstaking care. He frequently floated ideas for creating staged events and strategies for manipulating the mainstream media into favorable coverage, and used his contacts at the networks to sniff out the emergence of threatening narratives and offer advice on how to snuff them out—warning Bush, for example, to lay off the golf as war in the Middle East approached because journalists were starting to talk. There are also occasional references to dirty political tricks, as well as some positions that seem at odds with the Tea Party politics of present-day Fox News: Ailes supported government regulation of political campaign ads on television, including strict limits on spending. He also advised Nixon to address high school students, a move that caused his network to shriek about “indoctrination” when Obama did it more than 30 years later.

It’s a long strange read that’s just perfect for a celebration of America!

Well, one democratic senator has a job plan.  I wonder if any one will discuss it?

A bill to create construction jobs and fund new highway infrastructure. A clean-energy jobs program. Reforming the immigration system for high-skilled workers. And a variety of tax cuts and credits.

None are new ideas, but they’re all part of Senate Democrats’ jobs agenda Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) laid out in greater detail Thursday as he portrayed his party as proactively trying to spur economic growth and accused the GOP of deliberately trying to undermine the recovery for political gain.

“We have now been playing entirely on the Republicans‘ field for six months and the recovery has only slowed. We have seen enough to know that their approach is not working,” said Schumer, who heads policy and messaging for Senate Democrats, in a speech to the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

“And we need to start asking ourselves an uncomfortable question — are Republicans slowing down the recovery on purpose for political gain in 2012? … [N]ow it is becoming clear that insisting on a slash-and-burn approach may be part of this plan — it has a double benefit for Republicans: It is ideologically tidy and it undermines the economic recovery, which they think only helps them in 2012.”

Republicans have scoffed at that notion, arguing that Democrats’ solution to the broken economy is tax increases and a continuation of failed stimulus spending. This week, the GOP renewed its push for a constitutional amendment that would require the government to balance its budget each year.

I can’t believe the Republicans are trying that balanced budget crap again.  It’s absolutely the worst thing in the world to do and it’s one of the reasons that states’ economies have caused this recovery to be the worst on record.  They are actively making it worse by crippling state budgets and services.  A balanced budget amendment means that governments get to spend like crazy when tax revenues come in which is precisely when you don’t need it because it’s inflationary.  It also stops governments from deficit spending when they have to and should during a recession.  It causes governments to make recessions longer and more painful.  Just like now!  People like Mitch McConnell shouldn’t be making economic policy decisions based on faith-based Voodoo Economics.  He and other Republicans have basically made a living of telling people complete untruths about economic and financial theory.  Remember, even Ronald Reagan’s economic team has called all this stuff insanity!

Okay, one MORE economics story and then I’ll leave you to firecrackers, beer and the grill.  It’s not much of a surprise, but it’s an academic study that pretty much shows what we’ve thought for some time.

Economists at Northeastern University have found that the current economic recovery in the United States has been unusually skewed in favor of corporate profits and against increased wages for workers.

In their newly released study, the Northeastern economists found that since the recovery began in June 2009 following a deep 18-month recession, “corporate profits captured 88 percent of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1 percent” of that growth.

The study, “The ‘Jobless and Wageless Recovery’ From the Great Recession of 2007-2009,” said it was “unprecedented” for American workers to receive such a tiny share of national income growth during a recovery.

According to the study, between the second quarter of 2009, when the recovery began, and the fourth quarter of 2010, national income rose by $528 billion, with $464 billion of that growth going to pretax corporate profits, while just $7 billion went to aggregate wages and salaries, after accounting for inflation.

The share of income growth going to employee compensation was far lower than in the four other economic recoveries that have occurred over the last three decades, the study found.

“The lack of any net job growth in the current recovery combined with stagnant real hourly and weekly wages is responsible for this unique, devastating outcome,” wrote the report’s authors, Andrew Sum, Ishwar Khatiwada, Joseph McLaughlin and Sheila Palma.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average real hourly earnings for all employees actually declined by 1.1 percent from June 2009, when the recovery began, to May 2011, the month for which the most recent earnings numbers are available.

Yup, we’re all poorer and the one per cent is richer.  But then, you knew that!

So, here’s the firecrackers!   Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice Prosser was videotaped by a news crew basically ripping a mic away from a reporter trying to ask him a question.  Be sure to go watch the video!

Grabbing the microphone – and the spotlight. Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice David Prosser did both when FOX6’s Mike Lowe attempted to speak with him about the serious allegations of a physical altercation with Justice Anne Walsh Bradley on Thursday.

Six of Wisconsin’s Supreme Court Justices witnessed an alleged physical altercation between Prosser and Bradley in Bradley’s chambers on June 13th.

The basic story is that Prosser was upset about Chief Justice Shirley Abrahamson’s decision to delay release of the high court’s opinion in the collective bargaining case.

The story was leaked, presumably by the Justices themselves, to both liberal and conservative publications. Both cited unnamed sources. But Bradley was quoted as saying Prosser placed her in a choke-hold. Prosser has since denied that.

On Thursday, when FOX’s Mike Lowe asked Justice Prosser about the alleged incident, he grabbed the FOX6 microphone and then gave it back. Prosser did not answer any of Mike Lowe’s questions.

You can watch his odd behavior as captured by the Fox News 6 reporter.  Four of the justices who witnessed the altercation refused to comment and said the matter was under review by the judicial commission and that the sheriff was investigating the situation too.  Prosser never said anything but the body language says a lot.

Hope your long weekend will go great and that you have a few minutes to spend with us!  I understand Wonk’s got a great Hillary post coming up for us tomorrow!   Our Secretary of State is out there putting the world’s women and children first again!  You’ll want to read it for sure!  I’ve stocked up on bacon wrapped filets, Abita Amber, and corn on the cob. Just a little fun down here on the bayou!

So, what’s on your reading and blogging list today?

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