With all the controversy stirred by Michael Hastings' Rolling Stone article about the role of Army psychological operations units in hosting congressmembers (i.e. trying to manipulate them) I noticed Sen. Al Franken among the "targets." This prompts me to recount relate an episode from the 2008 senate race.

During the campaign, the constant refrain on Iraq from then-incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman was that he took his cues from the commanders on the ground. In June 2008, Al decided to call Coleman out for getting backwards the vital question of who's actually in charge. In a conference call covered by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune's politics blog, Franken pointed out that

in our country ... the generals on the ground execute policy to the best of their considerable ability.

The ultimate deciders for questions of the nation's wars are, of course, the people's elected leaders. Civics book stuff, basically. I'm sure Al is hardly alone in grasping the difference between, on the one hand, respect for the military advice of service members and appreciation for their dedication, and on the other, the sober responsibility for deciding what missions they will be given. This just seemed like a good moment to revisit the underlying principles of policy making.

You can't fight something with nothing. But as long as Democrats refuse to talk about the almost unprecedented buildup of income, wealth, and power at the top - and the refusal of the super-rich to pay their fair share of the nation's bills - Republicans will convince people it's all about government and unions.

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Rolling Stone's Michael Hastings is a consistent home run hitter. First, he profiled the culture of disdain that General Stanley McChrystal and his command staff had for their civilian leadership partners -- ending McChrystal's storied military career.

Now, Hastings has something right out of bad fiction. Lt. General William Caldwell, who is reportedly one of President Obama's favorites, actually hatched and deployed a plan to use psy-ops against US Senators and Congressmen. Unbelievable, and illegal.

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The Internet should have no borders. So did Secretary of State Clinton in effect declare in a major speech on February 15. This is the most dramatic and far-reaching linkage of information technology and statecraft in history. It is an extension, and a fulfillment, of the original vision of the Internet as a force for eradicating poverty and spreading democracy.

Since the salad days of the Clinton Administration, when as the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission I witnessed the commercial big bang of the Internet, the power of this seamless, global common medium has steadily grown. Now in the Tahrir Square Revolution and the other uprisings across the Middle East, the Internet has revealed itself as a powerful platform for the expression of fundamental rights. To paraphrase Chou en-lai's answer to a question about the significance of the French Revolution, it is too soon to say exactly how the Internet will further democracy Egypt or any country. But it is certain that the United States is strongly suggesting that Egypt and any other autocratic country should use the Internet to help their people find a way to democracy.

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We now have even more evidence that inept policies from Washington are causing enormous suffering across the country. It is not quite the line that the right-wingers are pushing. The new evidence is that the stimulus worked and was in fact more effective than had been predicted.

The new evidence comes in the form of a study by two Dartmouth professors, James Feyrer and Bruce Sacerdote. Past estimates of the impact of the stimulus on jobs and the economy relied on simply plugging the tax breaks and spending into standard macro models and reporting the predicted effect. In this sense, the impact of the stimulus was actually built into the model. However this new study directly measures the impact of stimulus spending on employment across states, comparing the number of jobs created to the amount of spending.

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Wisconsin is in a showdown. Washington is headed for a government shutdown.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker won't budge. He insists on delivering a knockout blow to public unions in his state (except for those, like the police, who supported his election).

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Bill Maher just can't help himself. He hates Muslims and he will use every opportunity he has to express his feelings. Lucky for him, he has HBO. (Video at this site).

In this latest case, he is talking about Muslim misogyny. His point is that he cannot celebrate democratic revolutions in Muslim countries because Muslims are misogynists.

I won't bother rebutting Maher's points because his guests pretty much tear him to shreds. What interests me is watching the hate just erupt from his guy. It's so clearly genuine, which, I think, distinguishes Maher from one or two of the prominent right-wing bigots who seem to be faking it for ratings.

Maher is not faking. He's a hater. Ugly stuff.

One of the items on cut list for House Republicans is the National Science Foundation (NSF). They want to cut $150 million, or 2.2 percent, from its 2010 budget for the current fiscal year.

This should be a place where progressives can find common ground with Republicans. Virtually no economists could see the $8 trillion housing bubble whose collapse wrecked the economy. Recognizing the bubble required nothing more than knowledge of the basic arithmetic that most of us learned in the third grade. There was no excuse for someone who does economics for a living to have failed to see the bubble and recognize its danger.

This is a profession that is hopelessly corrupt and incapable of change. In fact, in the wake of the economic disaster brought about by incompetent economists the Fed paid for a study that concluded:

"The state-of-the-art tools of economic science were not capable of predicting with any degree of certainty the collapse of U.S. house prices that started in 2006."

The NSF spent $99 million funding economics and related research last year. Let the Wall Street banks pay for this tripe. Progressives should join hands with the Tea Party folks and zero out the NSF funding for economics. (We should go after the Fed's funding for economic research also.)

The Republican strategy is to split the vast middle and working class - pitting unionized workers against non-unionized, public-sector workers against non-public, older workers within sight of Medicare and Social Security against younger workers who don't believe these programs will be there for them, and the poor against the working middle class.

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Peter Orszag, now a new vice-chairman of global banking at Citigroup and former US Office of Management and Budget under Barack Obama, has written a provocative and (with all due respect Peter) wrong-headed Financial Times oped proposing that the way to promote savings among America's low-income workers is to attach the prospect of winning millions to them scurrying away a few dollars here and there -- sort of a lottery ticket that goes into their savings rather than into state coffers to help subsidize education or to the profits of the local milk and cigarette stand.

At the New America Foundation, I have colleagues who are most likely the world's leading experts on generating savings among the underclass, or "banking the unbanked" as New America's Reid Cramer or Ray Boshara would say. But suggesting that America's savings problem be solved by establishing an Eva Peron style lottery incentivizing those with little to save doesn't understand the dynamics at play in the American economy today.

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The Obama administration is clearly desperate to avoid vetoing the United Nations Security Council Resolution condemning illegal Israel settlements. And it's not hard to see why.

Given the turbulence in the Middle East, and the universal and strong opposition in the Arab and Muslim world to U.S. shilly-shallying on settlements, the last thing the administration wants to do is veto a resolution condemning them. That is especially true with this resolution, sponsored by 122 nations, and which embodies long-stated U.S. policies.

But the administration has rejected that course.

The reason is obvious. AIPAC would go ballistic, along with its House and Senate (mostly House) cutouts. Then the calls would start coming in from AIPAC-connected donors who would warn that they will not support the President's re-election if he does not veto. And Prime Minister Netanyahu would do to President Obama what he did to former President Clinton - work with the Republicans (his favorite is former Speaker Newt Gingrich) to bring Obama down.

What's an administration to do? It doesn't want to veto but it is afraid not to.

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U.S. GDP in March of 2008 was $14.546 Trillion and non farm employment was 137.841 million. Today, non-farm employment is 130.229 million and total GDP is $15.010 Trillion. So essentially we have $500 billion more output from almost 8 million fewer workers. For years analysts scoffed that the Digital Revolution wasn't really delivering the giant productivity gains the utopians had promised. But it occurs to me that the financial crisis of 2008 caused firms to make some very hard decisions to cut back the marginally productive workers in areas like sales, marketing and administration. What they obviously found was that one star salesman with the right digital tools could do the work of two average performers. As the New York Times noted last fall, this drastic downsizing was usually in the ranks of older workers.

Of the 14.9 million unemployed, more than 2.2 million are 55 or older. Nearly half of them have been unemployed six months or longer, according to the Labor Department. The unemployment rate in the group -- 7.3 percent -- is at a record, more than double what it was at the beginning of the latest recession.

This is why I'm not sure that those 8 million lost jobs will ever come back. The President can jawbone America's CEO's all he wants about hiring more workers, but that won't make them restore a bunch of marginally productive 50-year-olds to their payrolls. They would rather hire young tech savvy kids at entry level salaries, if they hire at all. This dilemma raises two questions that need to be answered. First, with no jobs but increasing health care costs, should we revisit the idea of lowering Medicare eligibility to 55? Second, how can we create a public-private initiative to put these 50 year olds to work in mentoring and training our younger generation?

My proposal to raise the marginal tax to 70 percent on incomes over $15 million, to 60 percent on incomes between $5 million and $15 million, and to 50 percent on incomes between $500,000 and $5 million, has generated considerable debate. Some progressives think it's pie-in-the-sky. Here, for example, is Andrew Leonard, a staff writer for Salon:

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I'd like you to join me in a thought experiment. I'm going to pinpoint what I consider the central falacy of the ultra-conservative foreign policy argument / critique. See if you agree that this theme -- blind spot, I'd say -- runs through a big proportion of what the hard-right says about the stance the United States should take internationally.

As TPM's own David Kurtz and Greg Scoblete over at RealClearWorld Compass blog have both noted, the Obama-botched-Egypt meme rests on an inflated notion of US leverage. An impulse that always assumes an American president can make world events come out the way he wants. Actually David's post flags a comment President Obama made in his news conference, pushing back against that idea of American omnipotence.

My own hypothesis about administration critics adds one key element: moral clarity (aka 'resolve' or 'certitude'). Sound familiar? The critics love to talk about the president's supposed lack of principles, but let's talk about what self-absorbed self-righteousness gets you in the real world -- i.e. what can really be accomplished through moral clarity. In other words, I don't think the partisan foreign policy divide is about America's international objectives or our moral values; sensible Democrats and Republicans largely agree about those. I think it's really a debate about persuasion and pressure versus bluff and bluster.

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Is President Obama stupid, or does he think you are stupid? That's what we have to ask when listening to the president and his minions promote his farkakte budget principles. In this case, the devil is not in the details, but in the background music. The principles used to support the president's proposals are concessions to reaction and to know-nothingism. They will empower future Republican efforts to destroy the welfare state.

The foremost example of the new liberal know-nothingism is the idea that the national government of the United State is like a family. A family has to balance its budget, so too must the USG. Of course, families do not balance their budgets. They borrow to finance home ownership, automobiles, and higher education.

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