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washingtonmonthly.com — Way back in late May, House Republicans unveiled a plan to create jobs. Of course, "plan" was a strong word. It could charitably be described as a bad joke, and not even the most public-relations-savvy GOP leaders made an effort to talk about the agenda. It was unveiled, ignored, and forgotten, pretty much within the span of an afternoon. The most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won't work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it's already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either don't care or can't understand the famous axiom: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

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washingtonmonthly.com — Way back in late May, House Republicans unveiled a plan to create jobs. Of course, "plan" was a strong word. It could charitably be described as a bad joke, and not even the most public-relations-savvy GOP leaders made an effort to talk about the agenda. It was unveiled, ignored, and forgotten, pretty much within the span of an afternoon. The most glaring problem with the GOP jobs agenda is that it won't work, but nearly as painful is the realization that it's already been tried, over and over again, to no avail. They either don't care or can't understand the famous axiom: "Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results."

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huffingtonpost.com — This year is, as every American must know by now, the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of the Civil War; after a century and a half, the conflict still seems far from over. In fact, there is a striking similarity between the events that led up to the attack on Fort Sumter and the current war of the Right on the Federal Government. Now as then, an intransigent block of political and social reactionaries has committed itself to ending governance at the national level unless it is allowed to dictate policy in every particular. The response of President Obama to this challenge has been utterly different from that of President Lincoln. Obama let the reactionaries dictate the agenda for negotiations and this week he surrendered -- unconditionally, if the truth be told. He, understandably, was unwilling to confront the kind of crisis that a stronger response would have precipitated. Abraham Lincoln was not, and what ensued is instructive.

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washingtonmonthly.com — We knew that the Great Recession was bad. We didn't appreciate just how bad. When Obama administration's economists put together its Recovery Act, it was working with a certain set of data and expectations, and envisioned what a worst-case scenario might look like. They were right about the need for action, but wrong about the scope of the disaster they'd inherited -- the worst-case scenario was far too rosy and the stimulus response was overwhelmed by conditions that were more severe than officials even imagined. Part of this was the result of faulty expectations. The notion of the U.S. unemployment rate going from under 5% to over 10% in just two years was so absurd, many just didn't consider it possible. But it was -- the mess the Bush administration left for Democrats to clean up really was that mind-boggling bad. But part of this was also the result of faulty statistics.

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truth-out.org — Thirty years ago today, President Ronald Reagan threatened to fire almost 13,000 air traffic controllers unless they called off their strike and returned to work. He then followed through on his threat, firing most of the workers — represented by the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization (Patco) — and banning them from the federal workforce for life. Today’s GOP is celebrating by holding another group of airline industry workers hostage over the party’s radical anti-union stance. Republican demands that a measure making it harder for workers to unionize be attached to the re-authorization of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has led to the agency’s shutdown, costing the government more than $200 million a week, leaving 4,000 FAA employees and 70,000 construction workers out of work, and forcing airline inspectors to work without pay. And because Congress is now in recess until September, the shutdown is almost assured to last at least another month.

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washingtonpost.com — The White House is promising a pivot to jobs. But pivoting doesn’t create jobs. Demand creates jobs. And two of the three ideas Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner laid out in his op-ed this morning — the Social Security payroll tax cut and extended unemployment benefits — are already in effect. Letting them expire would hurt the economy, but simply extending them isn’t the same as adding support for a weak labor market. But there are other ideas out there. A canvass of economists and policy analysts returned five suggestions that have, at times, enjoyed bipartisan support, and that could potentially make a real difference.

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alternet.org — The conventional wisdom holds that the Tea Partiers were among the “winners” of the debt ceiling fight. That narrative conflates Tea Party-endorsed politicians and the professional conservative operatives working behind the scenes to advance their agenda with the rank-and-file Tea Partiers themselves. And it's important to understand what different creatures they really are.
The hard-right politicians and GOP operatives behind the scenes undoubtedly scored a big victory in the debt limit show-down, forcing deep spending cuts for years to come without any new revenues. But for the actual rank-and-file Tea Partiers themselves – those angry white people holding up misspelled signs claiming that Obama's either a socialist or a Nazi -- it's a completely different story. They lost big in this deal, even if they don't know exactly why or how. Here are four reasons why the conventional wisdom that says the Tea Partiers won is simply wrong.

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truth-out.org — The political posturing around the debt ceiling "crisis" was mostly a distraction from the hard issues. The hardest of those - underlying US economic decline - keeps resurfacing to display costs, pains and injustices that threaten to dissolve society. Its causes - two long-term trends over the last 30 years - help also to explain the political failures that now compound the social costs of economic decline. The first trend is the attack on jobs, wages and benefits, and the second is the attack on the federal government's budget. The first trend enables the second. A capitalist economy suffering high unemployment with all its costly consequences shapes a bizarre, disconnected politics. The two major parties ignore unemployment and the system that keeps reproducing it. They argue instead over how much to cut social programs for the people while they agree that such cutting is the major way to fix the government's broken budget.

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cepr.net — Since the U.S. “Debt Crisis” has been a big international story for the last few weeks, it is worth clarifying what is real and what is not. First, the U.S. government does not have a “debt crisis.” The U.S. government is paying net interest of just 1.4 percent of GDP on its public debt – this is not much by any historical or international comparison. There was never any chance that the U.S. would actually default on its debt. The whole “crisis” was manufactured from the beginning, with Republicans in the House of Representatives using a technicality to win unpopular spending cuts that they could not win at the ballot box. It worked. The right won because President Obama chose to collaborate with them, also seeking to take advantage of the manufactured “crisis” to implement cuts that offended and hurt the people who voted for him. Of course he also wanted to increase taxes on the rich, but because he had accepted the legitimacy of the Republicans’ extortion, he lost that too.

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motherjones.com — Few issues get Rep. Michele Bachmann going quite like light bulbs. At campaign stops across the country, she has repeatedly denounced a 2007 law that required manufacturers to develop energy-efficient light bulb varieties. Bachmann sees the law as an affront to American values. "I think Thomas Edison did a pretty patriotic thing for this country by inventing the light bulb," she told a New Hampshire audience in March. "And I think darn well, you New Hampshirites, if you want to buy Thomas Edison's wonderful invention, you should be able to!" In reality, no one's stopping anybody from buying any kind of light bulb they please. But Bachmann's crusade is about much more than energy-conserving bulbs: the Minnesota congresswoman is part of a movement that considers "sustainability" an existential threat to the United States, one with far-reaching consequences for education, transportation, and family values. If Bachmann is right, light bulbs will soon be the least of our worries.

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