Why does the sun go on shining . .

Krugman asks the musical question:

There Will Be Blood

Former Senator Alan Simpson is a Very Serious Person. He must be — after all, President Obama appointed him as co-chairman of a special commission on deficit reduction.

. . .

So here’s what the very serious Mr. Simpson said on Friday: “I can’t wait for the blood bath in April. ... When debt limit time comes, they’re going to look around and say, ‘What in the hell do we do now? We’ve got guys who will not approve the debt limit extension unless we give ’em a piece of meat, real meat,’ ” meaning spending cuts. “And boy, the blood bath will be extraordinary,” he continued.

. . .

Think of Mr. Simpson’s blood lust as one more piece of evidence that our nation is in much worse shape, much closer to a political breakdown, than most people realize.

. . .

The fact is that one of our two great political parties has made it clear that it has no interest in making America governable, unless it’s doing the governing. And that party now controls one house of Congress, which means that the country will not, in fact, be governable without that party’s cooperation — cooperation that won’t be forthcoming.

It’s hard to see how this situation is resolved without a major crisis of some kind. Mr. Simpson may or may not get the blood bath he craves this April, but there will be blood sooner or later. And we can only hope that the nation that emerges from that blood bath is still one we recognize.

Swell.

Context, from Mitch McConnell:

In the latest post-victory peroration by Republican honchos, Kentucky's Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader, outlined on Thursday morning his vision of the way forward for the GOP before a friendly audience at the conservative Heritage Foundation. To save you some time, here's the five-word synopsis: President Obama's agenda must die.

Loyal opposition? Not so much.

Get a job

Not to go all Krugman on your ass, but when the dude's right, he's righteous:

Now the centrists have shaved off $86 billion in spending — much of it among the most effective and most needed parts of the plan. In particular, aid to state governments, which are in desperate straits, is both fast — because it prevents spending cuts rather than having to start up new projects — and effective, because it would in fact be spent; plus state and local governments are cutting back on essentials, so the social value of this spending would be high. But in the name of mighty centrism, $40 billion of that aid has been cut out.

My first cut says that the changes to the Senate bill will ensure that we have at least 600,000 fewer Americans employed over the next two years.

Booyah. Here's a bit from the CBO report he mentions in the article:

As the possibility of another round of fiscal stimulus is debated, it is not a surprise that employment effects of stimulus have emerged as a key measuring stick. According to CBO’s estimates, with enactment of H.R. 1, the number of jobs would be between 0.8 million and 2.1 million higher at the end of this year, 1.2 million to 3.6 million higher at the end of next year, and 0.7 million to 2.1 million higher at the end of 2011 than under current law.

Hope your job isn't one McCaskill, Nelson, and the centrists pissed down the drain.

i tell you once more before i get off the floor

In the interest of encouraging writers here to do some "Quick Hits", here's my first of the day.

Eamon Javers of Politico, on MSNBC today, repeating the Right-wing Zombie lie that Roosevelt didn't end the depression, that job loss in '37 was as bad as in '30. The MSNBC talking bouffant, of course, agreed.

Idiots. Too stupid to live, too dumb to die.

Krugman explains:

Mad cow is good for you! Government is bad!

The Republicans say so.

Paul Krugman of the New York Times explains: (my bold)

Lately, however, there always seems to be at least one food-safety crisis in the headlines — tainted spinach, poisonous peanut butter and, currently, the attack of the killer tomatoes. The declining credibility of U.S. food regulation has even led to a foreign-policy crisis: there have been mass demonstrations in South Korea protesting the pro-American prime minister’s decision to allow imports of U.S. beef, banned after mad cow disease was detected in 2003.

How did America find itself back in The Jungle?

It started with ideology. Hard-core American conservatives have long idealized the Gilded Age, regarding everything that followed — not just the New Deal, but even the Progressive Era — as a great diversion from the true path of capitalism.

Thus, when Grover Norquist, the anti-tax advocate, was asked about his ultimate goal, he replied that he wanted a restoration of the way America was “up until Teddy Roosevelt, when the socialists took over. The income tax, the death tax, regulation, all that.”

The late Milton Friedman agreed, calling for the abolition of the Food and Drug Administration. It was unnecessary, he argued: private companies would avoid taking risks with public health to safeguard their reputations and to avoid damaging class-action lawsuits. (Friedman, unlike almost every other conservative I can think of, viewed lawyers as the guardians of free-market capitalism.)

Such hard-core opponents of regulation were once part of the political fringe, but with the rise of modern movement conservatism they moved into the corridors of power. They never had enough votes to abolish the F.D.A. or eliminate meat inspections, but they could and did set about making the agencies charged with ensuring food safety ineffective.

So every e-coli drenched spinach leaf and every tomato seething with salmonella comes directly from a government run by Republicans. Take a look at a government run by those who hate governing. It doesn't, can't, won't work. Which is what they intended all along.

Paul Krugman ends his article:

The moral of this story is that failure to regulate effectively isn’t just bad for consumers, it’s bad for business.

And in the case of food, what we need to do now — for the sake of both our health and our export markets — is to go back to the way it was after Teddy Roosevelt, when the Socialists took over. It’s time to get back to the business of ensuring that American food is safe.

Just an interesting aside... weren't the Republicans just a moment ago embracing the legacy of Teddy?

Continuing where he left off in his economic talk last week in Brooklyn and foreshadowing his major speech tomorrow on the topic tomorrow in Pittsburgh, McCain said “there is a role for government” in improving the economy. “There always is.”

“I am a Teddy Roosevelt Republican,” he reminded.

crossposted at Rants from the Rookery