IOUSA paints a grim picture of America’s financial future: Basically we are drowning in a sea of debt, a crisis of unprecedented dimensions that will leave America at the mercy of foreign governments and potential political upheaval. Cited as causes: Unpaid debts, imbalanced trade, living beyond our means as individuals and as a country, and expanding government without a way to pay for it.

My entirely uninformed opinion is that what we’re going to see is our perceived economy and wealth shrinking to something close to its true size. That process in itself won’t be pretty, but we can make it a less painful one. The question is whether Americans will take their attention away from chicks in bikinis, celebrity gossip, and other meaningless tripe long enough to make those decisions.

Here it is, another glorious President’s day, and wouldn’t you know it world leaders are exchanging presents. And Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez has sent one President Obama’s way:

President Hugo Chávez handily won a referendum on Sunday that will end presidential term limits, allowing him to run for re-election indefinitely and injecting fresh vibrancy into his socialist-inspired revolution.

It’s starting to dawn on conservatives that their party just screwed itself into political irrelevance. While they’ve conned Village pundits into reporting how clever Eric Cantor was pretending he’s Newt Gingrich in 1993, NRO now realizes that “No, nothing” is not a credible economic recovery policy in 2009.

Joe Conason has a new piece out in Salon that is enough to cause sane heads to explode. Noting that, like math, bringing accountability is hard Conason biliously opines that Obama ought to pardon Bush/Cheney miscreants and establish a truth and reconciliation commission. This is a half baked idea, at best.

The call for prosecutions for Bush Administration lawbreaking is being studiously ignored. In today’s action, we have Deputy Press Secretary Reid Cherlin dutifully trying to stuff the cat back into the bag.

The wingnuts are quickly replacing black helicopers, fluoridated water and the Trilateral Commission with the Employee Free Choice Act as the biggest threat to American freedom. Feel the panic:

The legislation is the big payback to unions who showered Barack Obama and Democrats with campaign cash this past election season.

Or it could just be a part of his plan to restore the economy and strengthen the middle class.

President Barack Obama,

It is difficult to know what the so-called moderate Senators were thinking. Do they have special insight into this crisis? Do they have their own forecasters, with deep understanding and good track records in these matters? Do they have their own models? Do they have, in other words, any ground for believing that less than $800 billion, spread over two years, will be enough to bring the economy back? If so, they weren’t saying so, so far as I could tell.

Can we stop casting this as vengeance? Can we stop painting people who believe that something terrible was lost during the last eight years, something moral and decent and good at the core of the American soul, as little more than “angry” and “vindictive?” And can we stop assuming that there is something magnanimous about a “bipartisanship” that exists only when both sides agree to walk into the next room and pretend that the pile of wreckage we leave behind, the one that nobody wants to look,  isn’t still on fire? 

Can anyone make sense of this? Blair, Petraeus and Holbrooke need to get their stories straight.