by David Safier If you read a series of tweets Al Melvin wrote Tuesday, you “learn” that Abe Lincoln was a conservative Republican in today’s (read: Melvin’s) mold. The problem is, the quotes Melvin uses are bogus. Advertisement AZCentral ran a great Fact Check on the quotes. They come from two booklets written in 1916 … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: The Supreme Court of the United States is almost done with its term. Next Monday may be the last batch of decisions announced by the Court. Among them are two appeals regarding Arizona's Citizens Clean Elections law. I am a bit surprised by this. I thought this would be a quick decision … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: I previously posted that "Marshall Home™ is no longer a candidate for office and will mercifully disappear from this blog." Unfortunately, I was wrong. "Vexatious litigant" Marshall Home™ has filed a Notice of Appeal from the order dismissing his petiton challenge against Jonathan Rothschild and, oddly, a Notice of Claim against the … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: It seems all the media villagers were engaged in creative headline writing this morning to focus on the federal deficit rather than focus on what is important to the American people — job creation. "Mr. Boehner, where are the jobs?" The AP’s headline reads, “CBO: Debt crisis looms absent major policy changes.” … Read more

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

Remember the old TV ad for E.F. Hutton? "When E.F. Hutton speaks, people listen." Not so much today.

Bill Gross is the manager director of PIMCO, which makes him one of the most important bond traders in the world, if not the most important. When he speaks, the banksters of Wall Street and their paid-for politicians in Washington damn well better listen.

Ezra Klein writes in Bill Gross: Deficit reduction can — and should — wait:

[H]is exit from the Treasury market a few months ago, plus his intense and very public concern over the deficit, has attracted a lot of concern. “Keep that in mind when you hear people arguing about austerity,” wrote Megan McArdle. “People like Bill Gross are the ones we ultimately need to convince, because they’re the ones whose defection will precipitate a crisis. And he’s not buying either supply-side claims that tax hikes will cause disaster, or the super-Keynesian argument that we can’t cut spending because the economy will contract so fast that we’ll actually end up with a bigger deficit.”

Or so we thought.

But in an unusual mid-month note to his investors, Gross hammered the “anti-Keynesians” in both parties who believe “that fiscal conservatism equates to job growth.” The truth, he says, is just the opposite. “Fiscal balance alone will not likely produce 20 million jobs over the next decade. The move towards it, in fact, if implemented too quickly, could stultify economic growth.”

Gross goes on to spend some time mocking the “ivory tower theorem” that deficit reduction will convince consumers to spend more now because they’ll worry less about taxes and service cuts later. “I know of no family,” he writes, “who, after watching the Republican candidates’ debate in New Hampshire, went out the next day and bought themselves a flat screen under the assumption that their Medicare entitlements would be cut in future years and the U.S. budget balanced.” That theory belongs “in the trash bin of theses and research aimed more towards academics than a practical remedy to America’s job crisis.”

So what should we do? “Government must temporarily assume a bigger, not a smaller, role in this economy, if only because other countries are dominating job creation with kick-start policies that eventually dominate global markets.” But what about the deficit? “Deficits are important, but their immediate reduction can wait for a stronger economy and lower unemployment. Jobs are today’s and tomorrow’s immediate problem.”

Gross goes on to offer some ideas for how the government can goose job growth, both in the short term and the long term. Some of them I find convincing, some of them I don’t. But his overall point is well-taken, and more subtle than some commentators are giving it credit for: Politicians have increasingly been pretending that deficit reduction slices, dices and blends. Don’t believe them. Cutting deficits tends to destroy jobs. And though the deficit matters in the long run, we need to survive the short run first.

Gross’s credentials as a deficit hawk are unimpeachable, but he’s arguing here that, to be a deficit hawk over the long term, you need to be jobs-focused now, as no economy with 9 percent unemployment is going to achieve the growth necessary to get its deficit under control. And he’s right.

Will the banksters of Wall Street, their paid-for politicians in Washington, and their media villager echo chamber listen? Or is the economic policy debate going to be controlled by the deficit peacocks pushing austerity measures to stifle the nascent recovery and to kill jobs to create the economic conditions Tea-Publicans believe they need for their political calculations in 2012?

Posted by AzBlueMeanie: The "Koch Brothers Exposed" campaign released this video featuring Senator Sanders connecting the dots between the Koch brothers, "think tanks" they fund like the Cato Institute, and the common beltway pundit attacks on Social Security. H/T Bernie Sanders outs the Koch Brothers' "Echo Chamber" on Social Security | Crooks and Liars. And … Read more