The President held an undisclosed meeting with liberal economists before a press conference where he blamed the “sanctimonious” left for their purity in the tax debate. The meeting included Paul Krugman, Joseph Stiglitz, Jeffrey Sachs, Alan Blinder and Robert Reich. It sounds pretty fascinating.

Krugman did not respond to a request to discuss the meeting, but he did write an op-ed today that at least came close to a response. The op-ed, much like the snippet above, talked about the enduring quality of free market fundamentalism, and that the reason these zombie ideas stay in the discourse is that people like the President try to accommodate them instead of refuting them.

That, as much as the skeptical comments from true experts like Philip Mudd and Charles Allen included in the story, really lays the stark inefficiency of this entire network: Less then .1% of the Suspicious Activity Reports have resulted in any real investigation, and just 5% of those investigations–a teeny fraction of the total–have resulted in any arrest.

So I hope no one actually believes this effort is an effective means to root out terrorism, however that gets defined.

It’s a slow news day, so I might as well join the chorus in talking about Haley Barbour’s revisionist history. He claims that Yazoo City, Mississippi, his hometown, was an island of indifference amid a sea of racial intolerance in the Deep South.

If, as Robert Kuttner says, Obama is negotiating a a “grand bargain” with the Republicans that includes cuts to Social Security benefits, the GOP is running a successful trap for him once again. White House strategist apparently believe that this will “give Obama ‘credit’ for getting serious about deficit reduction.’”

On “60 Minutes” last night, wingnut favorite Chris Christie sat down with Steve Kroft and wagged his finger at people who work for a living.

The tax deal has already placed the future of Social Security at serious risk. If President Obama does not clearly stand up for the program, the Republicans will use the debt ceiling legislation as an opportunity to privatize Social Security.

More Taliban attacks in northern Afghanistan. The south gets the attention and the resources, the north and west deteriorate, and the east — the area most centrally important to the stated al-Qaeda-centric objectives of the war — is in a state of drift, as best I can tell.

Robert Kuttner articulated a growing rumor that’s been floating around in liberal circles, something that the Obama Administration has actually telegraphed since the beginning of the Presidential term.

Bill Richardson, the utility diplomat on the Democratic bench, has secured a deal with North Korea to allow nuclear inspectors back in their Yongbon nuclear facility. They also agreed to allow fuel rods to ship to an outside country, probably South Korea, for enrichment. And, the US will receive some remains from Korean War-era soldiers.

Based in part on the FBI’s own manufactured “terrorist attack” DC’s commuters will experience the job of random searches.

Who needs real terrorist threats when the FBI can invent their own?