TGIF

For Lex and Wobs and all you crazy cats.

With Dean Baker, against all economic "common sense"

Quoth the Lex Dexter Chair of Telling it Like It Isn't Not:

The basic story on the budget deficit is very simple: we badly need large budget deficits in the short-term. They are the only force that can sustain demand in the economy after the collapse of housing construction and the loss of the consumption that had been supported by $8 trillion in illusory housing bubble wealth.

In the longer term we will need to reduce our trade deficit to replace this demand, but this can only be brought about by a reduction in the value of the dollar against the currencies of our trading partners. If our budget experts had been capable of independent thinking before the crash, they would have pointed out the over-valued dollar as a main cause of imbalances in the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, most of them are still incapable of recognizing the obvious.

The other big oversight that the budget experts commit is the failure to recognize the positive role that moderate rates of inflation can play in our economic recovery.

What was I saying to Gabba about my penchant for uphill politico-ideological projects? Throw in a "fuck AIPAC, fuck small business" platform, and you're getting a sense of the entirely improbable path I'd like to see the Dems' socialist wing travel.

Rachel Maddow on ACORN: pt. 2 of 2, Essential Viewing

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There's a bit of grandiosity in imagining one's political identity of choice as being the object of an intensifying, highly-targeted liquidationist strategy. But there's also a real sense that after ACORN, right-wing attacks will move right along to the SEIU, and then the labor movement in general. Wobs and I, at least, have been talking about it for weeks -- and Nostradamus we're not.

Please watch this. Especially if you don't know from ACORN or the labor movement except from hatefuck you pick up on the airwaves and the occasional opaque cries of your blogger-chums. This is what "all this" means.

PS - As was inevitable, the (nonetheless estimable) Peter Dreier has gone ahead and said what goes without saying, having grafted the ACORN saga onto the "first they came for..." rubric.

Pat McCormick on Neil Cavuto Sep2009

Ballot Initiative emo, as promised!!!

OR tax warfare has made the news...FOX NEWS.

Rachel Maddow on ACORN: pt. 1 of 2

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

We at the OG are longtime critics of ACORN's critics (Dave3544 RIP), who never fail to betray their class agenda with weird, 2009-specific proportions of McCarthyite and Goldwaterist anti-anti-capitalist moralism (and jokes).

We at the OG know all this, but have neither the vocal cords, nor the GE sponsorship, nor the horse-sense of Rachel Maddow. I invite everybody -from the OGs to the aesthetes who read this blog- to consider Rachel's very unsung hero-ish, very sticking-neck-out-ish oppo research into the money-stakes and culture-frames underpinning the discourse known as ACORN. In this installment, we learn about the Rove/Justice Dept. -related tributaries from David Iglesias, a former US Attorney fired by DOJ in 2006 who has been outspoken early and often about the hatefuck/GOP tactic of marginalizing/indicting ACORN and stymieing their successes with voter registration/living wage campaigns.

Essential viewing, this anti-anti-Acorn stuff. Stick around for installment #2! It's coming as soon as GE gets it up on the interweb....

What's that, you ask? "Whither l'OG?!?!?!" Well, if my distinguished co-contributors don't get around to (distinctively) contributing, you can count on nothing more (/less) than ballot initiative emo, health care discussion pilfered from Ezra Klein, and sycophantic MSNBC plugs. ('Arts & [sic] culture' programming continues on pslllffpt.)

Beel Cleenton on Meet le Press, re: Health Care and Rightist Folks

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What he said.