Krugman has the blues.

The stimpack:

So what do we have to counter this scary prospect? We have the Obama stimulus plan, which aims to create 3 ½ million jobs by late next year. That’s much better than nothing, but it’s not remotely enough.

The a

dministration:

Do you remember the administration’s plan to sharply reduce the rate of foreclosures, or its plan to get the banks lending again by taking toxic assets off their balance sheets? Neither do I.

"So many" economists: Read more…

A sailor -- from Houston -- is found dead at his California Navy base. He was out to his friends. Rawstory asks: Did DADT get him killed? Obama says he wants Congress to change the DADT law rather than doing it by (readily reversible?) executive fiat. But Barney Frank says the Dems don't have enough votes. WTF?

Democrats in Congress — including openly gay Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) — say their party doesn’t currently have enough votes to overturn the law. Public opinion polls show that a vast majority of Americans believe gays should be allowed to serve openly in the military.

(PS My kid's up on crutches & doing fine. The other kid and his new kitten -- the one who hid in the fan shroud of his truck and broke a leg and got her head gashed being flung out by the fan -- is here for a visit. Read more…

You'll never guess...

THE ANSWER LIES IN THE WORLD OF WEYMOUTH! Weymouth was going to stage a soiree. To manufacture consent?

THE ANSWER LIES IN THE WORLD OF WEYMOUTH: By complete happenstance, Lally Weymouth’s first salon was going to be about health care. Read more…

July, 30th, 2009, Washington, DC, Lobby and Rally

Celebrate Medicare’s 44th Birthday by showing Congress and President Obama the people, unions, doctors, nurses, seniors, faith groups, and Americans of every stripe support a single-payer system.

As President Obama says, “We must build on what works and leave out what doesn’t.” Medicare has
successfully provided care to seniors and people with disabilities for almost half a century. Medicare is a truly American-made system that other health care systems around the world have since been modeled after. With little over 3% administrative overhead, we must look to this American solution to our health care crisis. Read more…

Online WSJ:

Business is back on Wall Street. If the good times continue to roll [!!!], lofty pay packages may be set for a comeback as well.

Based on analysts' earnings forecasts for 2009, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. is on track to pay out as much as $20 billion this year, or about $700,000 per employee. That would be nearly double the firm's $363,000 average last year, and slightly higher than the $661,000 for the average Goldman employee in fiscal 2007, according to analyst estimates reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Yay! Read more…

Yves -- be still, my beating heart! -- buys in.

Terminological addendum: It's not "The Big Fail." It's "The Big FAIL." Because the FAIL is BIG. (And there's that subliminal pun on "capital"... ) Read more…

"Shared responsibility payments...."

Love the Orwellian language! That's the fifteen trillion dollars we're all on the hook for to bail out the banksters, right? No? Read more…

Oops, sorry. I mean excrementalist. My bad.

Obama:

“Let me also address an illegitimate concern that's being put forward by those who are claiming that a public option is somehow a Trojan horse for a single-payer system," Obama said.

And if not, in what direction do they envision public option evolving?

Well? Read more…

It's not only the financial markets and the food chain that are contaminated. Check this out:

Tomato plants have been removed from stores in half a dozen states as a destructive and infectious plant disease makes its earliest and most widespread appearance ever in the eastern United States.

Late blight — the same disease that caused the Irish Potato Famine in the 1840s — occurs sporadically in the Northeast, but this year's outbreak is more severe for two reasons: infected plants have been widely distributed by big-box retail stores and rainy weather has hastened the spores' airborne spread.

The disease, which is not harmful to humans, is extremely contagious and experts say it most likely spread on garden center shelves to plants not involved in the initial infection. It also can spread once plants reach their final destination, putting tomato and potato plants in both home gardens and commercial fields at risk.

Meg McGrath, professor of plant pathology at Cornell University, calls late blight "worse than the Bubonic Plague for plants."

"People need to realize this is probably one of the worst diseases we have in the vegetable world," she said. "It's certain death for a tomato plant."

Tomato plants have been removed from Home Depot, Wal-Mart, Lowe's and Kmart stores in all six New England states, plus New York. Late blight also has been identified in all other East Coast states except Georgia, as well as Alabama, West Virginia and Ohio, McGrath said.

Here's a suggestion: Read more…

Digby asks a reasonable question:

For those who are worried about the health care reform that's being hashed out in congress right now because you believe that single payer is the only answer, I would just ask if you think that France, Holland and Germany should change their systems? They all offer universal coverage, their statistics are far superior to ours and their people would probably kill you before they'd let you change them. And none of them have what we think of as strict "single payer" plans. Read more…

Current: explains why the proposal stinks and why HR 676 is better.

part 3 [yeah, i skipped it]
part 2
part 1 Read more…

$25,000 to kick Fred Hiatt in the nads. It's foolproof! Read more…

Go read Edward Harrison at Yves place. Just awful. Read more…

Ezra Klein:

Given the composition of the exchanges that HELP is contemplating, CBO estimates that by 2019, they will have 27 million Americans enrolled. That's not all that many. And the public plan will be one of the many options on the exchanges. So imagine that a bit more than half enter the public plan -- which I'd suggest is optimistic. That's 15 million or so people in the plan. That's not a small number, but nor is it a number likely to lead to real changes in the health-care system.

But wait! There's more!

Another way of saying this is that today's CBO score is low in part because we've made some of the policy worse. Read more…

"?" since the sourcing is a tweet:

Karen Tumulty was on a press call with the HELP committee to hear about Kennedy's bill, and she just posted a tweet with the following...

Senate HELP bill: If u hate ur employer's coverage, u have to keep it, unless it costs 12.5% of ur salary. No public plan 4 u.

Looks like you were right ML - anyone above a certain income level is f*cked with this new reform bill. It's Mass-Care all over again :(

Means testing == welfare. Read more…

On the editorial woes of Boston Magazine, not this:

Rosenbaum said Lipson frequently pushed him to be irreverent, “going after poor people, Democrats, the handicapped, minorities,’’ he said. “He’s to the right of Attila the Hun. At least he was. I haven’t spoken to him since the day he fired me.’’

But this:

Platt said he has a plan for reinvigorating Boston magazine: There are 250 influential people who compose any city’s power structure, he said, and the key is to write vivid stories about them.

That's a very interesting data point to people who like to organize bus tours, for example. Read more…

HCAN't triumphalism; nobody understand the numbers. Par for the course.

During the primaries, many lamented how self-identified "progressives" were willing to use false charges of racism, misogyny, and every tool that the right developed in the 1990s to smear both Clintons (along with some new and special smears of their own), to elect a candidate they deemed "progressive," much like themselves. But that's all blood under the bridge, right? I've gotten over it. And personally, I never liked the "progressive" label much anyhow, because I didn't see that the word had an answer to the question "Progress in what direction?"* Now, of course, we're getting better answers.

It never occurred to me that there might be a problem with "progressivism" in itself. But now Robert Johnson of New Deal 2.0 raises the issue. Now that we're in the midst of The Big Fail, is progressivism a FAIL, too? Johnson takes off from Taibbi's article, and puts it in context:

In Matt Taibbi’s vivid and provocative new article in Rolling Stone, “The Great American Bubble Machine,” the man absolutely screams.

Taibbi’s rage is filling an emotional void. It is a reaction to what is missing after this profound speculative episode that the IMF suggests will cost over $4 trillion in losses on balance sheets and untold trillions in lost output. It is fury over a crisis that is, by any measure, the most profoundly damaging episode since the 1930s (and the Bank for International Settlements Annual Report released this week strongly suggests that the burden on stockholders is far from over)....

There is an age-old tension that emerges in situations like this. You can feel it yourself. We know things are not right but do not exactly know why. Finance is complex. Since the progressive era, trust in “experts” has often been suggested as the best way for society to handle such complex phenomena. We are encouraged to delegate to the likes of leading academics, the Federal Reserve, the Treasury Secretary, and financiers themselves to keep an eye on the public interest. Public officials are explicitly employed to undertake this task on behalf of society. Those in the private sector often appeal to experts, encouraging public. deference to their superior knowledge. Experts are thought to be the custodians of the nation’s health. ...

The problem now is that the experts and leaders from finance [and not only finance] have failed us miserably. They have let us down and we know it. We do not trust in the system. [That is the problem, not confidence.] No one thinks the Federal Reserve did a bang-up job in the years preceding this crisis. The failure is much more profound in the private sector, yet for the most part that failure goes unacknowledged. Even with losses and bailouts, we have to fight over bonus payments to those who feel entitled, despite the cost they have imposed on their stockholders and, more importantly, society. Read more…

Again. Read more…

Democratic chairman backs single-payer health care

HELENA — The head of the Montana Democratic Party, also a candidate for Congress, is coming out in favor of universal health coverage at a time when the issue is becoming increasingly difficult for senior Montana U.S. Sen. Max Baucus.

Dennis McDonald, who hopes to topple U.S. Rep. Denny Rehberg in 2010, said the current proposals in Washington, D.C., are far too complicated.

One of the problems with our discourse today is that we don't have a name for the financial and economic crisis that we've been in since, like, forever. I've toyed with several ideas, but today, I'm rather taken with The Big FAIL.

Because there's so, so much right now that's exhibiting an utter lack of win, don't you agree? Read more…

John Kay has a lucid and level-headed article in the Guardian about the bankster's current FAIL, and how to prevent it from happening again. For the FAIL, I'll single out two points:

Conflicts of interest  Read more…