While the economy probably seems fine for the millionaires in Congress and the millionaires they hang out with at expensive fundraisers, lower income Americans are struggling.

After pausing for a day to placate another bleating billionaire, President Obama stepped to the first microphone Thursday to announce that Leon Panetta would soon sit where Bob Gates now sits, and that David Patraeus would sit in Panetta’s old chair, and that John Allen would grab King David’s throne, and so on and so forth until someone pulled the needle off the record. At which point we were told that the president had re-tooled his national security team for the challenges that lie ahead.

But if that sounds less like re-tooling and more like rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic, well, that’s because it should.

The statement here is that reduced government spending causes slower growth. Well, we know that the 2011 budget cuts spending in the next two quarters. And we know that all Republicans and not a few Democrats want to attach some major spending cuts to the debt limit vote, which needs to take place in the next couple months. So there no doubt that we will see lower federal spending as far as the eye can see. And Austan Goolsbee is saying here that reductions of government spending at the federal level slow down the economy, given the state it’s in right now.

Articles by Phil Stewart and Mark Hosenball at Reuters and Walter Pincus at the Washington Post finally, now that he has been formally nominated by President Obama, point out the difficulties David Petraeus will face as he becomes the next Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Taken together, the two articles clearly paint Petraeus as a highly politicized military man intent on becoming president who now must take on the role of a traditionally civilian agency tasked with providing neutral analysis. Most importantly, Stewart and Hosenball point out that a key portion of that analysis will cover the progress of military strategy set in motion in Afghanistan by Petraeus himself. Pincus quotes CIA veteran John Gannon asking the key question of whether Petraeus will be able to avoid self-promotion when providing that analysis.

Scott Walker’s team must be getting worried about their legal strategy in the case of the anti-union bill. Because now, there’s open talk about going back to the drawing board and putting the provisions into another piece of legislation, in this case the budget bill for this fiscal year.

It’s simply not fair to require that journalists not tell stories that are already out there in the public sphere. That turns them, once and for all, into stenographers. That’s not what our country needs from presidential press coverage.

• Krugman: the intimidated Fed.
• The Royal Wedding guest list.
• But…guns don’t kill people.
• The Reality Show Guy: very presidential!
• All aboard the crazy train.

I thought the last Belgian Royal Wedding was better.

Five For Fighting — 100 Years.

Why won’t Crazy Allen answer Ms. Nicole’s question? Why won’t he invite everyone he represents to ask him a question? It’s not like they are going to pretend to kill him just to get him to answer. They wouldn’t do that, they want him to tell the truth, not make up a lie just to get them to stop.