The April 6, 2009 Newsweek Magazine featured Paul Krugman on its cover with this bold-faced black headline "Obama is Wrong!"

The feature story by Evan Thomas left no doubt about Paul Krugman's background qualifying him to speak out on what is happening now to the U.S. economy.  Thomas explained:

"Paul Krugman has all the credentials of a ranking member of the East Coast liberal establishment:  A column in the New York Times, a professorship at Princeton, a Nobel Prize in Economics."

"In his twice a week column and his blog, conscience of a liberal, he criticizes the Obamaites for trying to prop up a financial system that he regards as essentially a dead man walking.  In conversation, he portrays Tim Geithner and other top officials as, in effect, tools of Wall Street.

A Seattle Times September 2 article on election 08 and the Republican Convention contained the headline:

WITH EYE ON STORM, DELEGATES SOLIDLY BACK PALIN

NOMINEE ANNOUNCES PREGNANCY OF HER 17 YEAR OLD DAUGHTER

The Seattle Times News Service story written from St. Paul contained the following:

There's a battle waging today in America that will decide the future of the Middle Class.

On one side are those like Thomas Jefferson who believe that a free people can govern themselves and have the right to organize their government to create a strong middle class - which will, in turn, keep the government democratic. On the other side are those like Thomas Hobbes who believe that only a small elite can and should govern and that the people should be willing to pay the price of poverty in exchange for security.

I think we should demand that Congress pass a simple law, requiring all Congressional members and staffers to switch from whatever health insurance coverage they have now, to Medicare. And, they should all have to enroll in the drug prescription program seniors have been forced into. After all, what's good enough for seniors should be good enough for them, right? Given a report now being circulated by familiesusa.org, it looks like the Republican medicare drug benefit has, as many would have guessed, provided the highest benefits to the drug companies, who have now RAISED their prices on the top 20 drugs seniors take.

While the VA is allowed to negotiate for best prices with the drug companies, the Medicare prescription legislation passed by Congress FORBIDS such negotiation. Is it any wonder that of the top 20 drugs taken by seniors, the costs have gone up this year and are astronomically higher than the prices the VA negotiated?

Here's a portion of the report from familiesusa.org:

The recent failure in the Senate to repeal the estate tax stands as a rare victory for sane fiscal policy.  The NYT editorialized about the event under the heading "What Passes for Good News."

In fact, the Senate vote came alarming close to ending a tax on inheritances of the richest half-a-percent of households, with a majority of Senators (57--but they needed 60 for a repeal) supporting a measure which would have cost the treasury $800 billion over 10 years at a time of ballooning budget deficits and war.

Of course, the politics of the repeal were the focus of most analyses--would the White House be adhered to or get rebuffed on an issue dear to them--but the economics of the tax cut are deeply revealing of the fundamental flaw of economic policy today.

And that flaw is this: we have, over the past three decades, shifted from we're-in-this-together (WITT) economics to you're-on-your-own (YOYO) economics.

With their focus solidly on the gay marriage amendment and estate tax repeal, the conservative movement is busy rearranging deck chairs on...well, not quite the Titanic, but on a rotting ship of state.

Here's a test: name one economic policy, other than tax cuts, associated with outgoing Treasury Secretary John Snow.

Give up?

Now think about this: what is the economic policy of the Bush administration? What about the Congress? What about the Democrats?

The diary below was originally posted earlier today in the Intrepid Liberal Journal.

The conservative shift in American politics undermined the economic security of working people. Increasingly, individuals are absorbing more risks, working longer hours and earning less. Meanwhile, corporations and government benefit from less accountability to tax payers, consumers and employees. Renowned economist Jared Bernstein proposes in his new book, All Together Now: Common Sense For A Fair Economy, (Berrett-Koehler Publishers, Inc.) that we're ensnared in a "YOYO economy". The acronym YOYO means, "You're On Your Own." Bernstein's book illustrates how the "YOYOists" have schemed to transfer the burden of economic risk onto individuals and their families.

Republicans were quick to jump on reports that a majority of those who signed up for the GOP Medicare plan were satisfied with it.

I guess they had to take advantage of the positive press before the Medicare apocalypse rears its ugly head.

The problem, affectionately dubbed the Medicare Drug Plan "Doughnut Hole", is a critical flaw in the plan's structure.

"once patients spend $2,250 on drugs, their coverage ends, and they must pay for their medicine themselves. Their benefits resume only after they shell out $5,100 -- a $2,850 gap. Although policymakers were aware of the doughnut hole when they passed the law, many seniors are stunned." Many will "stumble into the gap in late summer or early fall -- just before the November elections. This could be bad news for Republicans, who pushed the Medicare drug law."

More dramatically, the issue will be a media darling in pre-election months -- regardless of how many individuals are actually affected.

Strategically, the issue could be used to target specific congressional candidates, for example, in Connecticut, Nancy Johnson, an architect of the Medicare prescription drug plan, could be in trouble if seniors decide it isn't working.

This from Harold Meyerson at the WaPo.

Incompetence is not one of the seven deadly sins, and it's hardly the worst attribute that can be ascribed to George W. Bush. But it is this president's defining attribute. Historians, looking back at the hash that his administration has made of his war in Iraq, his response to Hurricane Katrina and his Medicare drug plan, will have to grapple with how one president could so cosmically botch so many big things -- particularly when most of them were the president's own initiatives.

Pretty much says it all.

GOP Deals In Congress Prompt Call For Change
Big Decisions Made Without Democrats

By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 24, 2006; A01

House and Senate GOP negotiators, meeting behind closed doors last month to complete a major budget-cutting bill, agreed on a change to Senate-passed Medicare legislation that would have saved the health insurance industry $22 billion over the next decade, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

The Senate version would have targeted private HMOs participating in Medicare by changing the formula that governs their reimbursement, lowering payments $26 billion over the next decade. But after lobbying by the health insurance industry, the final version made a critical change that had the effect of eliminating all but $4 billion of the projected savings, according to CBO and other health policy experts.

I want this bloated, back-room-hatched piece of godawful legislation hung around every GOP incumbent's neck between now and November 2006. Every campaign stop, every radio show, every "meet and greet" by a GOP incumbent, I want some citizen to stand up and say: You actually supported that heap of useless, life-threatening, budget-busting, insurance-company-pandering obscenity of a program? Even I - news junkie that I am - can't keep up with every new nightmare revelation coming up about it. One day, the states say they have to step in during the transition period and pay for prescriptions, the next day the feds are telling the insurance companies should eat the costs, tomorrow ... who knows? The UN will be told to step in and eat it, is my guess.

In the days before GPS, a ship approaching a rocky coast had to be careful.  Navigating toward safe harbor, especially on a dark foggy night, brought with it a very real chance of destruction.  No matter how powerful, graceful, or well-designed the vessel, it could be in a moment rendered into little more than flotsam strewn across the beach.

If the ordinary problems were not enough, ships had to also face a more devious opponent: wreckers.  For centuries, maritime salvage laws gave complete ownership of a wreck to those who discovered it.  The incentive generated by these rules brought the unscrupulous out on foggy nights to try and fool wayward ships.  They would start lights, sometimes several, or order to deceive ships into thinking they were spotting lighthouses, movements of carriages along a seaside road, or other ships in a harbor.  By this means, wreakers lured hundreds of vessels onto the rocks, killed any surviving crew, and made off with the contents of the wrecks.

Forgive me the extended metaphor, and I'm sure many of you can already guess where I'm going with us.  If the ships are legislation, the Republicans are determined to provide the fog in which they can lose their way.  And they're building up the rocks on which legislation can founder.   And they're setting the false lights.