Suppose S&P knew it had some sub-prime skeletons which it wanted to protect from any investigation. The Downgrade did that since now any investigation could be characterized as Obama's revenge.

What sort of skeletons?

Consider the initial period of minimal payments in sub-prime loans..

Best case the dems will only pick up two seats. They needed 3.

Worst case there could be no change

As of 1 40 edt the democrats were only able to unseat two of the 6 republican senators they were challenging. A third repub was in a tight race but will probably survive..

Next week two democrats will undergo a recall vote.so it's possible that the apparent gain of two seats tonight could be offset.  

Some Congressional Republicans are just backward rejecting modern economics on the same basis they reject Darwin and climate science. Others are cynical, desiring the worse possible economy as an aid to recapturing the White House and Senate in 2012. Still others simply do not believe that government action can ever be a force for good……………………………..

The US suffers with an increasingly third-world level of infrastructure, third-tier education system and enormous gaps in the preparedness of its workforce….

The debt- limit   "deal" was/is much ado about  nothing. (just a little phrase I thought up, do you like it?) The only tangible result is, there's a new limit in place and it will be increased again before next year's election without the requirement for yet another rain dance.

None of the items agreed are laws, just vague expressions of intention which bind nobody. And if they are at some point embodied in legislation , the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. What any US Congress votes to do  can be voted to undo by the next Congress.

There were 6 primaries for democrats who are hoping to oust that same number of Reps in a Recall election in August. The Reps ran faux dems against them.. In five cases the real dem got over 65% of the vote. In the sixth it was closer.

Can Wisconsin dagbloggers provide more info?

As the results themselves demonstrate Republicans can and did cross over to vote in this"democratic" primary.

The Huffington Post carries a report from which I extracted the above

Larry Summers today at Brad Delong

 The truth is that the expected impact of the deal over a 10-year period will not be its most important aspect except in the context of the current media cycle.... Agreements reached now are subject to revision, potentially radical revision following next year’s election.

Whis is further to my two days old blog  You can be the first on your block.

NPR did a long segment tonight of All Things Consdered on this 14th Amendment fix for the debt limit crisis. If you didn't hear it you can go to the NPR.

To recap here in a couple of sentences : In the post Civil War period the Southern Politicians rejoining the Senate were annoyed that the South's tax revenues would be used to  honor the Union debts as they matured.

who knows there is no debt limit problem.  According to  Bruce Bartlett Via Brad Delong

Over at Brad Delong's he was dispairing about Obama's  economic comments at todays press conference.

Not so much his readers - or me-.

Zach said...

and  Brad DeLong’s does a daily summary , Here are a few ....

:

Peter Diamond unqualifed to be a Federal Reserve Governor: Peter Diamond: "Last October, I won the Nobel Prize in economics for my work on unemployment and the labor market. But I am unqualified to serve on the board of the Federal Reserve — at least according to the Republican senators who have blocked my nomination.

Indeed in 2007 the chief executives of the Too Big to Fail  Banks made on an average $26 million.

     Joe Nocera , today's Times

And they paid 35% income tax on most of that

             Flavius, dagblog 2 days ago.

Just for fun here's some of the 1960  tax rate brackets They started at

0        to     $4000       20%, Then continued

For my sins reading  Tyler Cowen  today brought to mind Marianne Moore's hankering for an Imaginary Garden with real toads in  it.

Cowen (no he's not a toad, real or imaginary. Flavius does not do insults. That's  the next office) imagines a driverless auto. Or a lot of them doing various imaginary  good things. One unfortunately has an imaginary accident and kills an imaginary child. I'll  drop imaginary from here on because it's getting tedious ( I know , I know that never stopped me before). 

Anyway following this accident the

The top tax rate since 1945 has been 

Years                 %                  On income

                         Rate                 Over              President_

______            ________         _______            ________

48-49                82                      400,000            Truman        

 50-63               91                      400,000             Ike/JFK

 64                    77                     400,000             JFK/ LBJ

.out of Obama's Middle East initiative .

Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at UCLA. wrote, among other books, “Palestine Inside Out: An everyday Occupation

 This is a bad time to be an economist. If you were fresh from the womb and had no past opinions to defend……………………………… it might be a fine time to be an economist……………………………….. But for the rest of us--looking back at our……… pronouncements of the past 15 years  it is a bad time to be economist? 

Four years ago we economists were writing learned papers about…………………. how ……….(we) had finally learned…..to control…if not completely eliminate the business cycle 

It boiled down to the inevitable  but innocuous statement that we don't support the IDF being stationed on the Jordan

Inevitable because endorsing  that position would have been= to publically washing our hands of the situation. Which was/is  politically , and geopolitically, unacceptable: Jewish American voters don't want us to do that,The Saudis ,ditto. Ergo we won't.

This was started as a comment to Richard Day's excellent blog but I've decided to post it separately

Several  comments ,the first specific to this situation. The others  I've made here repeatedly.