There are these sudden loud noises in the hotel kitchen, one, two, three, probably a tray falling, and then there is so much screaming and a hand holding a gun high in the air and Robert Kennedy, who had walked into the gun, is on the floor with his eyes seeing nothing. On this June night in 1968 he has just won a Presidential primary and suddenly he is fit only for a gravedigger’s dirt.

 Reading between the lines, and based on what I’ve gleaned from some (mostly) informed sources, the argument is in some ways semantic. Yes, the White House is looking at initiatives that could both boost the economy. But while it’d prefer a bigger plan, focused more on infrastructure spending and aid to the states, Congress has no appetite for that. So it’s focusing on other, lesser measures that might have a shot. In a series of speeches and events next week, President Obama will propose and argue for these initiatives.

 Next week, President Obama is scheduled to propose new measures to boost the economy. I hope they’re bold and substantive, since the Republicans will oppose him regardless — if he came out for motherhood, the G.O.P. would declare motherhood un-American. So he should put them on the spot for standing in the way of real action.

 It was just about a year ago that we were hearing stories about President Obama's intention to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Again. The president's most ardent defenders insisted that we shouldn't listen to unnamed and anonymous sources, and should instead wait and see what happened. And then when he escalated, pretty much as had been reported, we were told that it was the right move, and we should support it. The same dynamic played out with the public option. For months, while it became increasingly apparent that the president wouldn't fight for a public option, we were told that he kept saying he supported one, and we didn't know what was going on behind the scenes. When the public option was punted, we were told that it never had been all that important, anyway, and the health insurance bill that was passed was all kinds of wonderful, so we should just be appreciative and grateful.

 The last time a Democrat sat in the White House, he faced a nonstop witch hunt by his political opponents. Prominent figures on the right accused Bill and Hillary Clinton of everything from drug smuggling to murder. And once Republicans took control of Congress, they subjected the Clinton administration to unrelenting harassment — at one point taking 140 hours of sworn testimony over accusations that the White House had misused its Christmas card list.

 Nothing is more important to Republican politicians these days than jobs and the deficit—at least according to Republican politicians. As House Minority Leader John Boehner put it in a "major economic address" on Tuesday, President Obama is "doing everything possible to prevent jobs from being created" while refusing to do anything at all "about bringing down the deficits that threaten our economy." Elect Republicans in November, Boehner assured his audience, and we will put an end to this insanity. 

 Our maddening times demand that the truth be forthrightly stated at the outset, and not just that the president has nothing in common with the führer beyond the possession of a dog. The outlandish stories about Barack Hussein Obama are simply false: he wasn’t born outside the United States (the tabloid “proof” has been debunked as a crude forgery); he has never been a Muslim (he was raised by an atheist and became a practicing Christian in his 20s); his policies are not “socialist” (he explicitly rejected advice to nationalize the banks and wants the government out of General Motors and Chrysler as quickly as possible); he is not a “warmonger” (he promised in 2008 to withdraw from Iraq and escalate in Afghanistan and has done so); he is neither a coddler of terrorists (he has already ordered the killing of more “high value” Qaeda targets in 18 months than his predecessor did in eight years), nor a coddler of Wall Street (his financial-reform package, while watered down, was the most vigorous since the New Deal), nor an enemy of American business (he and the Chamber of Commerce favor tax credits for small business that were stymied by the GOP to deprive him of a victory). And that’s just the short list of lies.

 Beck is a provocateur who likes to play with matches in the tinderbox of racial and ethnic confrontation. He seems oblivious to the real danger of his execrable behavior. He famously described President Obama as a man “who has a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture.”

He is an integral part of the vicious effort by the Tea Party and other elements of the right wing to portray Mr. Obama as somehow alien, a strange figure who is separate and apart from — outside of — ordinary American life. As the watchdog group Media Matters for America has noted, Beck said of the president, “He chose to use the name, Barack, for a reason, to identify not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify, with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical?”

 The Democrats may deserve to lose in November. They have been terrible at trying to explain who they stand for and the larger goal of their governance. But if they lose, it should be because their policies are unpopular or ill-conceived — not because millions of people believe a lie.

 Has anyone done a side-by-side comparison of the results (GDP growth, employment, etc,)of the Obama administration economic policies (stimulus, etc) and the policies advocated by the Republicans (spending freeze, no stimulus, etc.)?

 President Obama's much-maligned economic stimulus package added as many as 3.3 million jobs to the economy during the second quarter of this year, and may have prevented the nation from lapsing back into recession, according to a report released Tuesday by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office.

 As I look at what passes for responsible economic policy these days, there’s an analogy that keeps passing through my mind. I know it’s over the top, but here it is anyway: the policy elite — central bankers, finance ministers, politicians who pose as defenders of fiscal virtue — are acting like the priests of some ancient cult, demanding that we engage in human sacrifices to appease the anger of invisible gods.

 This is a radical break from journalistic convention, I realize, but today I'd like to give credit where it's due -- specifically, to President Obama. Quiet as it's kept, he's on a genuine winning streak.

 So where do claims of crisis come from? To a large extent they rely on bad-faith accounting. In particular, they rely on an exercise in three-card monte in which the surpluses Social Security has been running for a quarter-century don’t count — because hey, the program doesn’t have any independent existence; it’s just part of the general federal budget — while future Social Security deficits are unacceptable — because hey, the program has to stand on its own.

 The Republican Party's candidate for governor of Colorado believes that bicycle paths are "part of a greater strategy to rein in American cities under a United Nations treaty." The party's Senate candidate in Nevada wants to privatize Medicare and Social Security -- and has called for the United States to withdraw from the United Nations, though not because of the bicycle conspiracy. And the GOP's Senate candidate in Connecticut once climbed into a professional wrestling ring and kicked a man in the crotch.

 I'm with Gibbs.

At times I've found White House press secretary Robert Gibbs to be unnecessarily irascible, and maybe his lashing out at the constant grumbling of the "professional left" wasn't the best tactic. You want the base worked up -- but for you, not about you. 

 To begin, voters disapprove of President Obama's performance, 48 percent to 47 percent. That's a bit better than the 48 percent-45 percent he registered in the previous poll, but it's not much of a change either way. What's odd is that voters also say they saw this coming. In fact, 58 percent say he's doing "about as well as expected." Another 12 percent think he's doing better than expected. Altogether, that's 70 percent of voters saying he's performing at or above expectations. It could be that a lot of Republicans figured he'd do a bad job and now feel like they've been proven right, but it's still an odd result.

 The president's defenders often wonder whether Roosevelt faced such withering criticism from those presumably on his side, and the president's critics often criticize President Obama for not being more like FDR, who in their eyes is, understandably, the archetype and the standard to which Democratic presidents and politicians are held.  

In my examination of the historical record, it is clear that Roosevelt endured vicious, unrelenting attacks from his left that often exceeded the level of vitriol directed at President Obama, and correspondingly, Roosevelt was not viewed by liberals of his day with the adulation and reverence liberals view him today.  

 The House passed legislation giving states $26 billion for Medicaid and teachers today. The Senate had already passed the legislation, so now it's off to the president's desk.

The end product has, after three months of negotiations and compromises, less than half the $50 billion-plus the House originally wanted. Moderate Senate Republicans forced the legislation to be fully offset, so the bill shifts money around rather than injecting new money into an economy that needs it. One of the offsets was a $12 billion cut to the food stamp program.

 "We have spent the last 20 months governing.  They spent the last 20 months politicking.  Now we've got three months to go, and so we've decided, well, we can politick for three months.  They’ve forgotten I know how to politick pretty good."

Full transcript of the president's speech: 

 The lights are going out all over America — literally. Colorado Springs has made headlines with its desperate attempt to save money by turning off a third of its streetlights, but similar things are either happening or being contemplated across the nation, from Philadelphia to Fresno.

 COULD George W. Bush be a kind of Gipper-in-reverse and win yet one more for the Democrats? Clearly this White House sees him as the gift that will keep on giving. The 2010 campaign against the Bush administration is in full cry, with President Obama leading the charge. The Republicans are “betting on amnesia,” he confidently told the claque at a recent fund-raiser. “They don’t have a single idea that’s different from George Bush’s ideas.” It’s now the incessant party line.

 In less than 90 days, millions of irritable voters will go to the polls to choose a new House and much of the Senate. If Democrats hope to retain control of both chambers in a year of deep dissatisfaction with incumbents, they need a sharper and more inspirational playbook than the one they are using.

 According to a new report from the College Board, the U.S. is 12th among developed nations in the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds with college degrees. The report said, “As America’s aging and highly educated work force moves into retirement, the nation will rely on young Americans to increase our standing in the world.”

 One depressing aspect of American politics is the susceptibility of the political and media establishment to charlatans. You might have thought, given past experience, that D.C. insiders would be on their guard against conservatives with grandiose plans. But no: as long as someone on the right claims to have bold new proposals, he’s hailed as an innovative thinker. And nobody checks his arithmetic.

 Yes, growth is slowing, and the odds are that unemployment will rise, not fall, in the months ahead. That’s bad. But what’s worse is the growing evidence that our governing elite just doesn’t care — that a once-unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal.

The House was debating a bill last night that would provide up to $7.4 billion in health care aid to rescue and recovery workers who have faced health problems since their work in the wake of the September 11 attacks. The bill ultimately failed 255-159, and Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY) was not happy about it. Not one bit.

 Why does the Obama administration keep looking for love in all the wrong places? Why does it go out of its way to alienate its friends, while wooing people who will never waver in their hatred?

 The Senate's second highest ranking Democrat lent his support today to a growing effort, spearheaded by more junior members, to eliminate or diminish the power of the minority to enforce a 60 vote requirement on Senate business.

 When our republic was created, the population ratio between the largest and smallest state was 13 to 1. Now, it's 68 to 1. Because of the abuse of the filibuster, 41 senators representing less than 11 percent of the nation's population can, in principle, block action supported by 59 senators representing more than 89 percent of our population. And you wonder why it's so hard to get anything done in Washington?

 There they are on the cover of Us magazine, a teenage mom who managed to get her high school diploma after her baby's birth, and the father of her child, a high school dropout. They apparently intend to get married and live happily or unhappily ever after. Bristol Palin and her fiance, Levi Johnston, are what you get when you combine the religious right's dedication to abstinence as the only way to avoid teenage pregnancy, a celebrity culture that exalts and pays for these teenagers' dumb choices, and the contempt for education and "elitism" spouted throughout the country by Mama Grizzly Sarah Palin, who looks to be a much less happy mother of the bride-to-be than Hillary Clinton.

 Now that the 2nd half slowdown is here, it might be worth reviewing some of thearguments for a slowdown:

 Like a mantra, officials from both the Bush and Obama administrations have trumpeted how the government’s sweeping interventions to prop up the economy since 2008 helped avert a second Depression.

 There's no doubt about it, things aren't looking good for November for the Democratic party. It's way too early to know if they will lose the House, but there is broad agreement that 100 days from now, there will be losses and Democratic numbers in Congress will dwindle.

 Never say that the gods lack a sense of humor. I bet they’re still chuckling on Olympus over the decision to make the first half of 2010 — the year in which all hope of action to limit climate change died — the hottest such stretch on record.

 Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove of secret military field reports made public Sunday.

 Again, Republicans aren’t trying to rescue George W. Bush’s reputation for sentimental reasons; they’re trying to clear the way for a return to Bush policies. And this carries a message for anyone hoping that the next time Republicans are in power, they’ll behave differently. If you believe that they’ve learned something — say, about fiscal prudence or the importance of effective regulation — you’re kidding yourself. You might as well face it: they’re addicted to Bush.

 When the nation's leading civil rights organization passed a resolution condemning displays of racism by Tea Party activists, leaders of the movement reacted with umbrage so thick you could cut it with a knife -- then demonstrated that the NAACP's allegation was entirely justified.

 The White House needs to get off this stance and start showing some sympathy toward Ms. Sherrod. She has, clearly, been done terribly wrong by the White Supremacist fringe of the Republican Party. The White House acts like they are afraid of a bunch of bigots.

Martin Luther King, Jr. would be sickened by how this White House has behaved toward this woman.

 Back in the day, one of the key Republican arguments against the estate tax was that it forced hardworking, salt-of-the-earth children of small farmers to sell the family plot in order to pay their taxes after dad died. It was a sad story, but with one problem: no one could find even a single small farmer who had been forced to liquidate in order to satisfy Uncle Sam's voracious maw. Even the American Farm Bureau Federation was eventually forced to admit that it couldn't come up with a single example, and a few years later the Congressional Budget Office estimated that under the now-current exemption level, only a tiny handful of small farms were likely to owe any estate tax to begin with — and of those, only about a dozen lacked the assets to pay their taxes. And even those dozen had 14 years to pay the bill as long as the kids kept running the farm. In other words, the story was a fraud from beginning to end.

 Taking the blame for anything and everything that goes wrong in health care has always been the biggest political danger to reform, at least in the short term. The Obama administration and the Democrats now “own” health care just as surely as they own General Motors. But before Sean Hannity or the Wall Street Journal editorial page get their hands on these stories, let’s be clear about something: Those headlines don't highlight reform’s problems. They actually highlight its virtues.

 Getting things done matters, including electorally.  A just-released Gallup poll now gives Democrats a 6-point lead among registered voters in the generic Congressional ballot.  With Wall Street reform awaiting the signature of the President, the American people are beginning to pay attention, and they are starting to realize that this election is a choice: A choice between a party that wants to move forward and make progress - however imperfectly - and a party that has made a political decision to obstruct everything.

 Is the Tea Party Express' Mark Williams a racist? He certainly says he's not. But Williams -- the spokesman for one of the tea party movement's most Republican establishment-connected groups -- has shown himself to be a virtuoso when it comes to, I guess accidentally, writing and saying racist things. (Two quick examples: There was that time he called Muslims "animals of Allah" in an email and that other time he called President Obama an "Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug" on camera.)

The latest hot political topic is the “Obama paradox” — the supposedly mysterious disconnect between the president’s achievements and his numbers. The line goes like this: The administration has had multiple big victories in Congress, most notably on health reform, yet President Obama’s approval rating is weak. What follows is speculation about what’s holding his numbers down: He’s too liberal for a center-right nation. No, he’s too intellectual, too Mr. Spock, for voters who want more passion. And so on.

 Now the real why — the crisis is the plan:

Of course, flirting with crisis is arguably part of the plan. There has always been a sense in which voodoo economics was a cover story for the real doctrine, which was “starve the beast”: slash revenue with tax cuts, then demand spending cuts to close the resulting budget gap. The point is that starve the beast basically amounts to deliberately creating a fiscal crisis, in the belief that the crisis can be used to push through unpopular policies, like dismantling Social Security.

Let's linger here — Krugman is finally saying that the Republicans are deliberately creating a fiscal crisis to push through unpopular policies. 

The crisis is the plan.

 Well worth a look if just for the photographs - click on "Read More"

 Republicans are feeling good about the midterms — so good that they’ve started saying what they really think. This week the party’s Senate leadership stopped pretending that it cares about deficits, stating explicitly that while we can’t afford to aid the unemployed or prevent mass layoffs of schoolteachers, cost is literally no object when it comes to tax cuts for the affluent.

 Republicans are feeling good about the midterms — so good that they’ve started saying what they really think. This week the party’s Senate leadership stopped pretending that it cares about deficits, stating explicitly that while we can’t afford to aid the unemployed or prevent mass layoffs of schoolteachers, cost is literally no object when it comes to tax cuts for the affluent.

 Good for the NAACP. We need an honest conversation about the role of race and racism in the Tea Party. Thanks to a resolution passed this week at the venerable organization's national convention, we'll get it.

 It was a Democrat -- James Carville -- who coined the phrase "it's the economy, stupid." And to this day, leading Democrats understand that Carville was correct. They get it all the way down to their trembling bones. They'd love to take dramatic steps to improve the economy, but Republicans are using every tool at their disposal to prevent that. It's led Democrats to blame Republicans explicitly for causing Americans economic pain for short-term political gain, but it also means we're not going to see much in the way of economy-improving legislation in the months ahead.

 There are fiscal theories that I disagree with, and that I think are cruel, and that make me upset. But very few actually make me sad. Sen. Mitch McConnell, however, hit my sore spot today. "There's no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue," he toldBrian Beutler of TPMDC. "They increased revenue because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject." In other words, this is why Republicans don't think tax cuts need to be paid for. They pay for themselves.

 More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars are seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.

 It's odd how little we've heard lately from the skeptics who deny that climate change is real. What's the matter, people? Heat stroke?

 In recent months, economist Alberto Alesina has become popular among conservatives for research showing that deficit reduction can sometimes be accompanied by economic growth; that spending cuts are better than tax cuts; and for arguing that stimulus is less effective than Keynesians think and thus spending cuts can begin now. Business Week's Peter Coy is skeptical:

 There was a time when everyone took it for granted that unemployment insurance, which normally terminates after 26 weeks, would be extended in times of persistent joblessness. It was, most people agreed, the decent thing to do.

 Patrick_M wants to know whether fellow commenter Kevin_Willis is right in stating:

"... there is no evidence that indefinite extension of unemployment benefits has much of an economically stimulative effect, that I know of."

I actually touched on this a couple of weeks ago, when I highlightedMark Zandi of Moody's comparison of the per-dollar impact of various stimulus policies. Zandi used his econometric model to estimate the effect on GDP, per dollar, of different elements in the 2009 stimulus package. Here's his explanation of the methodology:

 Republicans want the fall election to be a referendum on a snapshot of the state of the nation -- they don't want people to think about the past or the future. If they can pull off framing the election that way, then they may win, because things are very tough right now throughout the notion.

Democrats don't accept that framing. They think the election is about a choice between whether to continue changing the direction of the country from where it was headed under Bush or whether we should go back to those policies and ideas that failed so miserably when Republicans were running the show.

 One of the strangest lead sentences I have ever encountered appeared in Politico last week. It read: "John Kerry has been the most aggressive advocate of climate change legislation in the Senate this year -- so aggressive that it's rubbed some of his colleagues the wrong way."

 Our Independence Day weekend winner of the title of Most Unhappy Person in Washington is: John Boehner, the House minority leader.

 Recessions are common; depressions are rare. As far as I can tell, there were only two eras in economic history that were widely described as “depressions” at the time: the years of deflation and instability that followed the Panic of 1873 and the years of mass unemployment that followed the financial crisis of 1929-31.

 In a conference call with reporters today, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) accused them of doing just that. She explained that, after spending "days and days and days, and weeks and weeks and weeks" to get just one Republican to join with Dems in passing the legislation, "it's very clear that the Republicans in the Senate want this economy to fail. They see that things are things are beginning to turn around.... We're gaining jobs, not as much as we need, but thing are beginning to move in the right direction.... In cynical political terms it doesn’t serve them in terms of their elections if things are beginning to turn around."

 The latest polling has some fascinating data on where the public is at, with plenty of mixed messages.

From the CBS/NY Times poll (full results here):

Overwhelmingly, Americans think the nation needs a fundamental overhaul of its energy policies, and most expect alternative forms to replace oil  as a major source within 25 years. Yet a majority are unwilling to pay higher gasoline prices to help develop new fuel sources.

 Senate Republicans last night blocked a jobs bill that would have extended unemployment insurance (UI) for long-term jobless workers. Some 250,000 unemployed workers a week are losing their unemployment benefits because they can’t find jobs.

 With that display of raw arm-twisting, Mr. Obama reinvigorated a debate about the renewed reach of government power, or, alternatively, the power of government overreach. It is an argument that has come to define Mr. Obama’s first 18 months in office, and one that Mr. Obama clearly hopes to make a central issue in November’s midterm elections.

 When you put people out of work, you cripple the quality of life of their entire families. When you start dismantling the public schools and driving teachers from the classrooms, you damage — and in many instances cripple — the lifetime prospects of untold numbers of pupils. When you undermine a recovery that is as fragile as this one, which is as fragile as a crate of eggs, you undermine the economic health of the entire nation.

These are the kinds of disasters that the deficit hawks, secure in their ideological dream world, are quite happily prepared to live with.

 The issue isn't what Obama is feeling, it's what he's doing. Why haven't skimmers been brought in from around the world to scoop up more of the oil? Why isn't the defense of the coastline being run like a military campaign, with failure not an option? Why is the answer to every question essentially the same -- "We've repeatedly asked BP to get that done" -- when we're dealing with a crisis that has to be seen as an urgent matter of national security and the public welfare?

 Why can't President Obama stop the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Why can't he get the Israelis and Palestinians to stop squabbling and make peace? Why can't he get the Europeans to contribute more troops to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan? Why can't he forge a global treaty to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases?

 I'm referring not only to roads and bridges but also to airports and air traffic control systems, urban transit, high-speed rail, schools and university facilities, national laboratories, national parks, "smart" electric grids, broadband networks, green generating plants, and health information networks. Properly chosen, these projects can have huge long-run economic payoffs while tangibly improving the lives of all Americans. They're the kind of government spending today's voters can get excited about while also leaving a valuable legacy for future generations -- along with the debt that was used to finance them. And if they wind up creating some jobs at a time when millions of people are unemployed, so much the better.