Since December, you have read me rail often against The Deal. My objection was not, per se, to the tax cuts, but rather to the fact that the tax cuts would be "paid for" by spending cuts in the following months. The efficacy of government spending as opposed to tax cuts is beyond dispute. Trading spending for tax cuts is terrible policy if your are trying to stimulate the economy in a zero bound environment.

As in December with regard to The Deal, Ezra Klein tries to make lemonade from this lemon of a policy, this time citing Larry Summers' endorsing more tax cuts as fiscal stimulus (and, to be fair, arguing for no spending cuts, good luck with that now). As for The Deal, Klein treats the proposed tax cuts as effective fiscal stimulus with no spending cuts tradeoff:

This election will be won or lost by governance and the economy, not by candidates and campaigns. Another $200 billion in economic stimulus will mean a lot more to Obama’s reelection effort than $200 million in ads.

(Emphasis supplied.) To imagine that spending cuts will not be traded off for those tax cuts is simply absurd. Obama and Dems need to argue for something better than this.

Speaking for me only

Paul Krugman:

O.K., the obvious question: If Medicare is so much better than private insurance, why didn’t the Affordable Care Act simply extend Medicare to cover everyone? The answer, of course, was interest-group politics: realistically, given the insurance industry’s power, Medicare for all wasn’t going to pass, so advocates of universal coverage, myself included, were willing to settle for half a loaf. But the fact that it seemed politically necessary to accept a second-best solution for younger Americans is no reason to start dismantling the superior system we already have for those 65 and over.

Accepting this as true (and people like Jon Gruber and Ezra Klein who championed the Wyden-Bennett exchange reform would not accept this as true based on their writings at the time), how precisely does the "second best option" work? I'm simply not seeing it, and while Krugman keeps describing the exchanges as "the second best option" and "half a loaf," I do not understand his reasoning for expecting positive results from the exchanges. As I said at the time, any expansion of Medicaid for the less well off is a positive, and that is why I supported a positive vote for ACA. But the exchange/subsidies reform? No, that's not a "second best option" or "half a loaf." It will fail in my estimation.

Speaking for me only

All the people that was rooting on me to fail, at the end of the day they have to wake up tomorrow and have the same life that they had before they woke up today. They have the same personal problems they had today. I’m going to continue to live the way I want to live and continue to do the things that I want to do with me and my family and be happy with that. - LeBron James in post NBA Final loss press conference.

From a public relations perspective, there is no doubt that this was an idiotic thing for LeBron James to say. (Full disclosure, I invested on the Heat to win the NBA title at the beginning of the playoffs so his failure affected me personally.) But it does raise questions - as sports fans - why do we care so much? And does our caring about sports detract from the rest of our lives? On the flip.

Game 6 of the NBA Finals today. The fate of the free world LeBron James Legacy hangs in the balance. Not really.

Bob Bradley must go. Who is Bob Bradley you say? THE problem in the US Soccer team.

Obligatory video.

Open Thread.

Fazul Abdullah Mohammed, on the FBI's most wanted list for allegedly masterminding the 1998 U.S. Embassies bombing, has been killed in Somalia.

Is he really dead? He was buried before Somalian officials knew who he was, but when they realized from the documents that had been on his person, they exhumed him and did DNA testing.

The U.S. says the killing is a big blow to al Qaida in East Africa. Others say it won't have much impact, especially in Somalia:

J. Peter Pham, director of the Michael S. Ansari Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, said that Mohammed's death would have little impact operationally on the Islamist insurgency in Somalia, which is led by al Shabaab. "Even the foreign fighters present in Somalia are under Shabaab control, rather than the aegis of al Qaeda in east Africa," he said....Also, al Shabaab has its own ties al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula."

Rep. Anthony Weiner is taking a leave of absence from the House to seek treatment. Via Huffington Post,

Weiner's office put out a statement confirming those reports and announcing that he had requested a "short leave of absence from the House of Representatives so that he can get evaluated and map out a course of treatment to make himself well."

It's been a busy work day and I'm just getting online for the first time since this morning.

There's no verdict yet in the retrial of former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich.

After years of avoiding the Casey Anthony case for lack of interest, I actually listened to an hour of testimony on Headline News as I was driving home from the jail -- probably because some commenters here have expressed an interest and I know nothing about the case. [More..]

On Sarah Palin, I'm with Melissa McEwan:

Open Thread.

The World Bank? Blanket denials of that rumor, which never made much sense to me, but maybe it is a more influential gig than I imagine. Clinton has made it clear she will not be Secretary of State after 2012. So what then? I saw this interesting exchange between wonky bloggers E. Klein, M. Yglesias and J.Cohn. Yglesias' tweet:

Call me old-fashioned, but I think H. Clinton should consider another presidential run in 2016[.]

I do not know if she would be the best person to be President, but I remain convinced that she would be the best candidate (defined as the person with the best chance of winning) for President the Dems could offer. How soon will it be time for a Draft Hillary movement after 2012?

Speaking for me only

Matt Yglesias notes that according to a Marist poll, Anthony Weiner's constituency does not want him to resign. But, as andgarden pointed out the first day we were discussing this issue, Weiner's district could be eliminated in redistricting, rendering Weiner's reelection a moot issue. But what if Weiner does not go quietly in 2012 and instead decided to contest a newly drawn district that covers the old 9th? Nate Silver's discussion speculates about Weiner being challenged by a redistricted out Dem but does not consider the reverse:

Even a neighboring district is broken up to preserve the Ninth, though, that still would leave an unemployed Democrat who could challenge Mr. Weiner in a primary. [. . .] Mr. Weiner is unlikely to get a free pass, however the new boundaries are drawn.

Fair enough, but will Weiner give another Dem a free pass in a primary for a district that includes the old 9th? More . . .

Krugman:

[D]ebt relief for homeowners — which could have done a lot to promote overall economic recovery — has simply dropped off the agenda. The existing program for mortgage relief has been a bust, spending only a tiny fraction of the funds allocated, but there seems to be no interest in revamping and restarting the effort.

NYTimes article yesterday:

As the nation’s housing market continues to teeter, the Treasury Department on Thursday penalized three of the nation’s largest banks for subpar performance in administrating a government-sponsored program to modify mortgage loans for distressed homeowners. [. . .] Neil M. Barofsky, who resigned in March as special inspector general for the bank bailout, described the assessments and penalties as a “lost opportunity” to hold lenders more accountable. “It further reaffirms Treasury’s long-running toothless response to the servicers’ disregard of their contract with Treasury, and by extension, the American taxpayer,” Mr. Barofsky said in an e-mail.

[. . .] The administration predicted that three million to four million Americans would benefit, but so far, only 699,053 permanent modifications have been started. To date, Treasury has spent about $1.34 billion on HAMP.

(Emphasis supplied.) The good news is $48.7 billion is still available for an actual plan for the homeowner crisis. Now all we need is Obama to fire Geithner . . .

Speaking for me only

Yesterday I mentioned Radley Balko's new article at Reason on the number of wrongfully convicted Americans doing time.

Today I learned the entire July issue of Reason is devoted to Criminal Injustice and our country's over-reliance on prison and the failure of the war on drugs.

There's Prison Math, that asks what are the costs and benefits of leading the world in locking up human beings? Reason Editor Matt Welch writes The Ends Didn’t Justify the Means on our complicity in the devastating war on crime. Bruce Western writes Locked Up, Locked Out on the social costs of incarceration.

There's also an article on John Edwards, The Persecution of John Edwards, positing that "The only thing worse than Edwards’ ugly behavior is the government’s effort to put him in jail for it." [More...]