We’ve done hiring tax credits, we’ve done “16 small business tax cuts,” we’ve done a number of measures over the past two years aimed at getting businesses to hire, most of which made the cost of hiring cheaper. These have not worked appreciably. The payroll tax cut in question may (or may not) be better than nothing, and their macroeconomic impact would depend on size.

New Sheriff Al Neinhuis of Hernando County, Florida is actually saving the county more than a million and a half dollars just this year, compared to what CCA would have charged to operate the facility. And he’ll do it better.

• Oh goody: yet another war.
• Run, Rudy - run!
• Rick Scott should take a drug test.
• Or, we could just end it.
• Republicans and their love for the Constitution.

The center-right nature of their plan helps move the Overton window of the debate on both health care and the deficit dramatically to the right. By choosing groups that would exclude the most obvious health care cost-cutting option available, the one that has proven an unqualified success at efficiently delivering health care coverage to the industrialized world, Peterson never risked accidentally proving that the progressive goal of “Medicare for all” also just happens to be the best deficit reduction plan available. And of course by submitting any plan at all, these organizations allow Peterson to pretend “even liberals” embrace the decidedly non-Keyesian notion that now is the right time to worry about long-term deficits.

Overall, it appears Peterson spent his money well.

We amuse the rest of the world, we’re like a clown to them.

Cage The Elephant — In One Ear.

Let’s pick who’s crazier: Bachmann or Palin, Today in news only marginally less stupid than pictures of somebody’s junk.

Electronic Frontier Foundation has a report on the terms of service Wall Street Journal and al Jazeera offer leakers using their WikiLeaks competitor sites. I had already heard that WSJ offered almost no technical security (which EFF describes), but it turns out neither offer much in the way of confidentiality guarantees.

Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke gave a speech yesterday to the International Monetary Conference in Atlanta, GA. Only one speech. Yet looking around the Toobz at the various headlines at news sites on this speech, it must have been an all things to all people speech as I’ve found at least four different perspectives presented, some of them directly contradictory.

In spite of his concession that the banksters’ “massive corporate frauds … weaken the financial system and victimize investors, homeowners, and ultimately taxpayers,” Mueller seems to think that a hapless teenager framed by the FBI represents a bigger threat to our country than Goldman Sachs crashing our entire economy.