Jon Stewart dusts off his Glenn Beck impersonation to mockingly follow the (direct) money trail of Newcorp’s $1 million donation to the GOP.

Thanks to Jon Stewart and The Daily Show staff for watching the Fox Propaganda Network (a.k.a. Fox News) so we do not have to. 

These days, Fox News is of course feverishly spreading “Ground Zero Mosque” hysteria.  Thankfully, Jon Stewart is here to point out the absurdity of the nonsense being spewed by Fox.  Watching Stewart cut Fox News to pieces, as only Stewart can, is truly a pleasure.

The fact that Christina Romer is resigning does not come as a shock. For quite some time, it has been clear that the Rubin disciples — Larry Summers and Timothy Geitner — hold the real power on the president’s economic team. Apparently, Romer felt that she did not have enough direct access to the president.

Reid Wilson reports on the reason behind Romer’s departure.

“She has been frustrated,” a source with insight into the WH economics team said. “She doesn’t feel that she has a direct line to the president. She would be giving different advice than Larry Summers [director of the National Economic Council], who does have a direct line to the president.”

“She is ostensibly the chief economic adviser, but she doesn’t seem to be playing that role,” the source said. The WH has been pounded for its faulty forecast that unemployment would not top 8% after its economic stimulus proposal passed.

Instead, the jobless rate is 9.5%, after exceeding 10% last year. It was “a horribly inaccurate forecast,” said Bert Ely, a banking consultant. “You have to wonder why Summers isn’t the one that should be taking the fall. But Larry is a pretty good bureaucratic infighter.”

Make no mistake: Obama’s decision to rely upon Summers’ advice over Romer’s has proven to be disastrous. The country remains crippled by unemployment, with no end in sight. Production remains significantly below capacity — a direct result of the insufficient stimulus package.

Recall that when the Obama administration was holding internal discussions to formulate a stimulus plan, Romer advocated for significantly more government spending — in excess of $1.2 trillion.

Romer had run simulations of the effects of stimulus packages of varying sizes: six hundred billion dollars, eight hundred billion dollars, and $1.2 trillion. The best estimate for the output gap was some two trillion dollars over 2009 and 2010. Because of the multiplier effect, filling that gap didn’t require two trillion dollars of government spending, but Romer’s analysis, deeply informed by her work on the Depression, suggested that the package should probably be more than $1.2 trillion. The memo to Obama, however, detailed only two packages: a five-hundred-and-fifty-billion-dollar stimulus and an eight-hundred-and-ninety-billion-dollar stimulus. Summers did not include Romer’s $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was “an insurance package against catastrophic failure.”

Obama’s defenders like to claim that the White House pushed for the largest stimulus package that was feasible, given the political environment. Would Congress have passed a larger bill — something akin to the $1.2 trillion package Romer was pushing for? We do not know, because the Obama administration never tried. The political team (i.e. Rahm Emmanuel) valued an early legislative ‘win’ over smart policy.

To make matters worse, the administration inexplicably acted as if the $787 billion bill was indeed the cure to the economy’s ailments. Huge mistake. Now that the stimulus bill championed by the White House has proven to be much too small, the administration has lost credibility, and voters are not happy.

Taking everything into account, it is understandable why Romer is fleeing.

While this video is a few months old, it is must-see.  So if you missed it the first time around, watch Rachel Maddow expose Fox News for selectively editing the infamous California Acorn videos to produce misleading reports.

 The very fact that Fox News’ manufactured version of events was accepted as truth by the mainstream media is unsettling, to say the least.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

We will see how it plays out.

Mitch McConnell

Via Paul Krugman, Mitch McConnell made the following statement in support of Jon Kyl:

 [T]here’s no evidence whatsoever that the Bush tax cuts actually diminished revenue. They increased revenue, because of the vibrancy of these tax cuts in the economy. So I think what Senator Kyl was expressing was the view of virtually every Republican on that subject.

So, according to McConnell, tax cuts are completely self-financing.  If anyone has doubts about the ideology of today’s Republican Party, look no further than McConnell’s endorsement of voodoo economics.

How blatantly false is McConnell’s assertion that the Bush tax cuts increased revenue?  Let’s turn to Bush’s own Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers , Gregory Mankiw.  From Mankiw’s blog:

I used the phrase “charlatans and cranks” in the first edition of my principles textbook to describe some of the economic advisers to Ronald Reagan, who told him that broad-based income tax cuts would have such large supply-side effects that the tax cuts would raise tax revenue. I did not find such a claim credible, based on the available evidence. I never have, and I still don’t.

Let’s recap: Mankiw not only declares that the claim of self-financing tax cuts is false; he calls people pushing the fallacy “charlatans and cranks.”  Clearly, those charlatans and cranks include Mitch McConnell.

In his column for yesterday’s New York Times, Frank Rich notes that Obama has never apologized for nor explained a statement he made in April that “oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills.”

As you may have guessed, Obama’s made the comments in the wake of his March 30 announcement of plans to expand offshore drilling. Of course, Obama’s decision to expand offshore drilling was heavily criticized — and rightfully so — by environmentalists and proponents of clean energy.

During a Q&A session given on April 2, Pres. Obama responded to a questioner’s concerns about drilling. Here is, what I believe to be, the most telling part of Obama’s response:

Now, here’s the last thing I’ll say about drilling, though, because what you have is, you have some environmentalists who just said, don’t drill anywhere; and then you’ve got some of my friends on the Republican side who were saying, well, this is a nice first step but it’s not enough — you should open up everything.

I don’t agree with the notion that we shouldn’t do anything. It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.

Don’t worry, oil rigs are technologically advanced.

The first paragraph is a classic example of what frustrates liberals most about Obama: his infatuation with positioning himself in the ‘post-partisan’ center (as if such a thing really exists).

Obama carefuly crafted his response so it would seem like he is taking the sensible middle ground.  In the Obama narrative, you have the extreme environmentalists on the left who oppose drilling, and his “Republican friends” on the right who want to drill everywhere.

By coming out in favor of expanding offshore drilling, Obama adopted a Republican position and gave a poke in the eye to those radical environmentalists on the left.  One could reasonably suspect that the move was nothing more than a calculated attempt to drift to the political ‘center.’

Portraying the role of the pragmatic centrist, President Obama publicly assured us that the concerns of those anti-drilling environmentalists were without merit, because “It turns out, by the way, that oil rigs today generally don’t cause spills. They are technologically very advanced.”

Well, Mr. President, it turns out those environmentalists that you tried to disassociate yourself from weren’t so radical after all.

GOP Congressman Joe Barton publicly apologizing to BP for what Barton termed a government “shakedown” — i.e. the $20 billion escrow fund for damages — was a ridiculous (and teling) spectacle. Thankfully, we had Jon Stewart to put Barton in his place, as only Stewart can.

Via Media Matters, Fox News blowhard Glenn Beck recently compared a cap and trade system to limit carbon emissions to the September 11 terrorist attacks.

Beck proclaimed:

“It’s 9/11 all over again except we didn’t have the collapsing buildings.”

You stay classy, Glenn Beck.