I saw this comment at the Krugman blog:

JH SF
The “Rolling Stones” presidency.

You can’t always get what you want from Obama but sometimes you get what you need.

Multidimensional chess-notice Obama has forged an electoral coalition that now allows “liberals” to deal from a position of strength-or at least a stronger position than they have had in 40 years.

Notice how he segmented off the Senate Democrats with the chained CPI issue so he could use that as leverage against the republicans to make a deal that AVOIDS cutting Social Programs.

Brilliant. It appears rather Machiavellian.

Could any “wingnut” be more delusional? “It must be very strange to be President Bush Obama. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius…”

access to mental health services remains spotty, its funding and beneficiary requirements subject to the whims of governments attempting to balance their bloated budgets.

I just want to note that “even the liberal” Think Progress is carrying Pete Peterson’s water while making an otherwise valid point. Most non-military, non-swat team budgets are hardly “bloated,” you jerks.

I’m really sick of the whole thing about making generalizations about generations. The people who got the best deal on SS were the first people who got it. The whole tax and trust fund deal is totally unnecessary and was instituted out of political expediency by FDR. He didn’t want the right to attack it as a welfare program, so he set it up as an “insurance” program. The “baby boomers” I feel have not received their just due. On the whole they are much more interesting than the vastly overrated “greatest generation.” Just my opinion, and maybe it stems from a tendency to admire, in a way, older sibs more than parents. The GG’s I know are fine people, but they didn’t do anything all that special. They just went with the program. If you had anything going for you at all in the immediate postwar decades, you could do all right and most of them did.

Fair enough. It was good talking you, Dearie. I’m gonna check out now. G’night.

Poor little rich boys. Hard to feel sorry for them, but I think in way they must have suffered from neglect in their formative years. I think of the story about Romney getting the state trooper uniform from his father. What a thoughtless deed that was for a father.

Yeah, exactly. The Yailie “sportsmanship” thing can’t be taken too far. One got the sense that he was a little squeamish about doing the things he had to do to make his “team” win. But he always did them. It was the hesitation before that gave him his “wimp factor.” W., on the other hand, loved winning rigged games, unfair fights, the flattery of sycophants, etc.

Lying to congress or stealing an election is one thing, but senior would have zero respect for someone who would cheat at golf or horseshoes.

3. The failure of Erskine Bowles to stake out a Democratic position on the long-run budget for Obama to start negotiating from.

Brad,
maybe you could elaborate a bit on what you mean here. You mean Bowles of Simpson and Bowles deficit reduction committee? Wasn’t this Pres. Obama’s pet committee with no legal authority, i.e, not authorized by congress? How, then, could Erskine Bowles’ “failure” be more important than the insufficient stimulus?

The Reagan Administration prosecuted hundreds of crooked S&L executives and nationalized their sleazy operations

I wouldn’t give Reagan too much credit for that. As Bill Black (The Best Way to Rob a Bank is to Own one) tells it, Reagan actually opposed prosecutions and tried to block them, but the civil service was stronger then and a few people (including Black) stood their ground, making it politically impossible for the Reaganites to sweep the thing under the rug as would have been their preference.

I find something infuriating about the idea that “deficit reduction” is the big selling point of the health care law. How about are our premiums going to be less? Will meds be cheaper? Is government using its power to end price gouging? No, of course not. The good news is the government will be “off my back” (providing less service) but will be retained as leg breaker/bill collector for the medical cartel. And deficit reduction, assuming this is the actual result, benefits me how?

To echo Selise’s point, Dean Baker had a pretty good debunking of Clintonomics today.

If the country has a trade deficit, then it absolutely must have negative national savings. (This is an accounting identity, it has to be true.) Negative national savings means that we must have either large government budget deficits or very low private savings, as was the case at the peak of the housing bubble, when the savings rate hit zero.

The phrasing “Clinton left us a surplus and Bush blew a hole in the deficit” has become sort of a stock in trade in the progressive media. Unfortunately, it has little substantive meaning and only tends to reinforce widely circulated fallacies about money. A budget surplus is not like a piggy bank that someone could blow a hole in and have the money fall out. The government “saving” its own money makes no more sense than Newcastle importing coal.

When we say that “the sun rises” every schoolgirl knows that it is only a manner of speaking and that the apparent motion of the sun is due to the earth’s rotation. Unfortunately, most people don’t know the basic facts about money so it would be better if we could avoid phrases that reinforce the common shibboleths.