Paul Benedict Arnold Krugman?

Oh my, Paul Krugman appears to have defected to the troglodytes with a superficial swipe at Modern Monetary Theory.

Fortunately, the ever-vigilant Bill Mitchell is ready to reply chapter and verse.

The question is, since Krugman himself says the argument is not really topical right now, is why he has a bee in his bonnet to make this point now?

Politico

More evidence that Politico is moving toward a pronounced right-wing bias. Talking Point Memo's Josh Marshall drew attention to this story:

There's a feature piece in Politico today that perfectly captures the assumptions most national political reporters, especially at certain publications, bring to the core questions of budgetary politics. The gist of the piece is that 'we' all agree that the message of the 2010 election was that the public has decided that government is too big and wants dramatic budget cuts. But now it seems like the governors who are really going whole hog on this -- overwhelming Republicans -- are getting really unpopular. Ergo, the public isn't really ready for the "grown-up conversation" about budgets that it seemed they might be.

The actual piece by Alexander Burns is even more mind-boggingly obtuse than you would think from this critique:

It was supposed to be one of the clearest messages of the 2010 elections: Voters were finally fed up with government spending.

It felt like the usual rules had changed, and that Americans were worried enough about the size of government to support a new era of belt-tightening. They wanted leaders to make the tough choices – and would stick by the ones who did.

Now, a new wave of polling has challenged that consensus, raising serious questions about whether voters really are yearning for a grown-up conversation about the cost of government — or would simply rather keep punting the problem down the road, just like in the past.

Almost every governor who’s tried to deliver a take-your-medicine message has paid a price. And widespread polling data suggests a chasm between what Americans say they want and the price they’re prepared to pay to get there.

How convoluted can a logic get?

Let's start from a much more reasonable premise. Americans in the mid-term elections were concerned about unemployment and were unhappy with what a Democratic administration and Congress were able to achieve to reduce joblessness. So many Democrats stayed home and many others voted for Republicans.

When these Republicans got to office, they used this "mandate" to pursue a blindly ideological path of austerity designed to sabotage the role of government. People definitely don't want that and the polls reflect this fact.

As for Politico, I'm beginning to suspect that it's being groomed for sale and Murdoch is one of the prospective buyers.

Exposing Christie

This front-page story exposing the lies behind Chris Christie's "straight talk" is why I switched my daily subscription to the NY Times from Washington Post:
Christie’s Talk Is Blunt, but Not Always Straight

Christie's apparent sincerity and plain truth-speaking shtick are simply deceptive courtroom practices transferred to the political arena. This is the point I was making in my earlier blog on Straight Talk.

Maybe Christie fooled juries with it and he certainly has snowed most of MSM, but his lies are too big to escape notice forever.