John Amato asked me to do a Photoshop of Bernanke as a snake after reading this. There's a larger version and the early drafts of the photoshop, here.

Open Thread below...

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(White House Chief of Staff and later Treasury Secretary James Baker with "friend" - coincidence? We think nope.)

Smoke and mirrors, sleight of hand, stratagems and feints - all those characterizations to sum up the Reagan Economics plan. In this interview, part of the CBS News Face The Nation series from August 15, 1982, White House Chief of Staff, later appointed Treasury Secretary James Baker is asked point blank about the wildly varying opinions on the economic state and on the deficit.

George Herman (CBS News): “When do you personally think the deficit may be below $100 billion?”.

James Baker: “Well George, the official figure is of course is what I gave you and I recognize there are differences of opinion with respect to that. I think the point is that . .is that these ballooning deficits that we see are the reason why it is very important that the Congress implement the budget resolution that’s before it and it’s very . . .this is the reason it’s very important that we have a tax bill and that tax bill pass the Congress. Now, it’s really not important when I personally think the deficit might be below $100 billion. In the first place, I’m not an economist, and I really don’t have any independent view of that. The important thing, I think is that we need to constantly keep our eye on the fact that deficits are a major problem in this country. And that the ever expanding size of these deficits keeps interests rates up. And the fact that interest rates are remaining too high is what prevents the recovery from taking place. So it’s very important, we think, that as an administration that we . .that we do some responsible surgery, if you will, on these deficits”.

I guess having knowledge of economics wasn't a prerequisite for being appointed Treasury Secretary in 1985, at least not in the Reagan White House. I think its' safe to say the world o' crap we're in right now didn't necessarily start on January 2001.

But memories tend to be selective and short.

That's why we're here.

Big Brass Blog: Rants...

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FiveThirtyEight Improving unemployment numbers makes the political case for a Jobs Bill stronger, not weaker

The Pump Handle: Sign of bad things to come from Obama's OMB: Sunstein hires staunch anti-regulatory economist

Facing South: The privatized war in Afghanistan

Southern Beale: Still embarrassed by my fellow Tennesseans

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Chris Matthews seems to think that bloggers don’t do any fact checking, and that we’re going to lose that if the newspaper industry goes out of business. While it’s true that beat reporters and those doing the footwork out there are sorely needed, to say that bloggers don’t fact check is just a cheap shot at the on line community that he and his ilk have such disdain for, probably because we’re the main ones fact checking the likes of him.

What Matthews fails to note here is why the industry is in such bad shape. The Economist lays out some of the problems in their article Who Killed the Newspaper.

Nobody should relish the demise of once-great titles. But the decline of newspapers will not be as harmful to society as some fear. Democracy, remember, has already survived the huge television-led decline in circulation since the 1950s. It has survived as readers have shunned papers and papers have shunned what was in stuffier times thought of as serious news. And it will surely survive the decline to come.

That is partly because a few titles that invest in the kind of investigative stories which often benefit society the most are in a good position to survive, as long as their owners do a competent job of adjusting to changing circumstances. Publications like the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal should be able to put up the price of their journalism to compensate for advertising revenues lost to the internet—especially as they cater to a more global readership. As with many industries, it is those in the middle—neither highbrow, nor entertainingly populist—that are likeliest to fall by the wayside.

The usefulness of the press goes much wider than investigating abuses or even spreading general news; it lies in holding governments to account—trying them in the court of public opinion. The internet has expanded this court. Anyone looking for information has never been better equipped. People no longer have to trust a handful of national papers or, worse, their local city paper. News-aggregation sites such as Google News draw together sources from around the world. The website of Britain's Guardian now has nearly half as many readers in America as it does at home.

In addition, a new force of “citizen” journalists and bloggers is itching to hold politicians to account. The web has opened the closed world of professional editors and reporters to anyone with a keyboard and an internet connection. Several companies have been chastened by amateur postings—of flames erupting from Dell's laptops or of cable-TV repairmen asleep on the sofa. Each blogger is capable of bias and slander, but, taken as a group, bloggers offer the searcher after truth boundless material to chew over. Of course, the internet panders to closed minds; but so has much of the press.

Ironically we see Bob Woodward saying journalism lives on after playing stenographer for the Bush crowd to get some books sold rather than reporting on what he found out. And he holds up Tina Brown’s operation at The Daily Beast as a business model for making money on line and some hope for journalism's future.

Just how different would this conversation have been with a completely different panel? The viewers might have learned something had it been our own Dave Neiwert and Susie Madrak who’ve worked in the newspaper industry and turned to blogging instead, and Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo and Eric Boehlert from Media Matters, who’s sites look more like the future of journalism to me.

When the fourth estate doesn't do its job, people are going to turn to other sources that will. Something that seems to completely elude Chris Matthews and his panel here.

Another thing Matthews fails to note is that most bloggers who use other people’s reporting link back to that material and allow their readers to evaluate their assertions for themselves. We are not just taking stenography from press releases or other people’s reporting. And when we get something wrong, there’s generally a swift retraction. Something you cannot say for too many in our “mainstream media” who tend to circle the wagons rather than admit mistakes. And while Joe Klein is claiming that his commenters “fact check” him, just how many of those comments does he actually read?

Transcript below the fold.

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(Health Care - as the rest of the world views us)

On January 29, 1956, NBC Radio, as part of their "New World" series ran a debate on the state of Healthcare in the world and asked the BBC to participate with their take on it. Representing all the interested parties were Aneurin Bevan, Member of Parliament and Labor Party Secretary for Health, Dr. Walter Elliot, Member of Parliament, E. A. Van Steenwyck, spokesman for Blue Cross and Milton Friedman, economist.

Right away, Bevan and Friedman jump into it. Friedman has a condescending tone that drives Bevan right up the wall and clearly there is no willingness on the U.S. to even consider a National Health plan.

Aneurin Bevan: “If you rely upon financial anxieties to keep people away, or to use your own words, ‘not to overuse the scarce services”, such anxieties do not exist for the rich. So they will have access to the services first of all. Is that equitable?

Milton Friedman : “Mister Bevan, I think you are confusing two very different problems. One, is the problem of the general distribution of income among people, which arises with the respect to food, clothes, housing and everything else. Medical care is a minor item . . .

Bevan: “A minor item??

Friedman: “Medical care accounts in your country as well as mine for no more than five percent of the total expenditure on consumption. It accounts in your country as in mine for less than the cost of tobacco plus alcohol”.

Walter Eliot: “Now wait a minute – I’m holding myself in with the greatest of difficulty. I was a doctor. I was on the gate. I compiled these waiting lists, and I can assure you that in a good many cases, people who urgently needed treatment weren’t getting it because there wasn’t a hospital accommodation there. Now, one of our difficulties was this very expansion of hospital accommodation. Do you think in America you can look after this enormously increased hospital accommodation which will admittedly be necessary . . .

Friedman: “We don’t rely on donations to run our hospitals. About 90 percent of all the money spent by our voluntary hospitals comes from patients.”

It more or less slides downhill from there. Needless to say, there is no compromise to be had in this debate, but it's interesting to hear just how enmeshed, even in 1956, the lobbies of big Insurance, Big Pharma and the AMA were with the question of Health for the U.S.

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Princess Sparkle Pony's Photo Blog: It's never too early to politicize a celebrity death

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TransGriot: 10 busted myths about the Canadian health care system.

Intrepid Liberal Journal: Living on only $2 a day – an interview with economist Jonathan Morduch.

Cab Drollery: Your money at play – outsourcing oversight. (What could possibly go wrong?)

The Bobblespeak Translations: Meet the Press with Sam Nunn and Fred Thompson, translated.

Guest post by Batocchio. Temporarily e-mail tips to batocchio9 AT yahoo DOT com.

Sometimes I wonder if reporters have any damned sense at all. The reason the unemployment rolls have dropped is simple - people (like me!) have tapped out their benefits:

June 18 (Bloomberg) -- The number of Americans receiving claims for unemployment benefits dropped for the first time since January, adding to evidence the job market is starting to thaw.

The number of people collecting unemployment insurance plunged by 148,000 in the week to June 6, the most since November 2001, to 6.69 million, the Labor Department said today in Washington. Initial claims rose by 3,000 to 608,000 in the week ended June 13, in line with forecasts.

The average number of claims over the last four weeks fell to the lowest level in four months, an indication that the U.S. economy is stabilizing after the worst recession in half a century. Even so, companies are likely to be slow to hire new employees, sending unemployment rates higher, analysts said.

“The labor market remains weak but it’s starting to stabilize,” said Maxwell Clarke, chief U.S. economist at IDEAglobal in New York. “An improvement in employment conditions and improvement in confidence go hand in hand with an improvement in consumer spending.”

the daily green: Swine flu, factory pig farms and the pandemic waiting to happen

Group News Blog: A Vietnam veteran reflects and writes: "It's easy to tell yourself that 'it's not my job or my business,' or, 'It's more important to move forward, this isn't the time for looking back.' I always have to look back.  Too much of what I see I don't like. We cannot afford to make our national memory like mine."

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