The “investigation” started exactly one YEAR ago tomorrow. Since then, we’ve heard deadlines of April and Memorial Day and Labor Day to now, where Tom Miller’s spokesman is saying that they’re “hoping that we can do this by year end.” The remaining AGs hammering out this settlement remind me of the Japanese soldiers holed up in mountain redoubts in the 1950s still fighting World WAr II because nobody told them it ended.

I naively thought Obama’s offering to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid would put an end to the “liberals are being unfair to Obama” genre, but Jonathan Chait (heh-indeeded by John Cole) published another one in the New York Times magazine today.

It’s full of problems, but I want to focus on this one — because it’s so obviously wrong.

There were no guests to represent the victims of this deal, and there will be tens of millions of them. CNN invited no one who could explain or argue what a terrible deal this would be for the nation. The nation’s economy, the elderly, the poor and the unrepresented are about to take a serious drubbing, but thank the gods both Democrats and Republicans, Congress and the President will willingly administer the beatings and continue them until morale improves.

I have to chuckle at the lipstick that the Senate Appropriations Committee put on their pig of a budget deal for 2011.

President Obama’s re-election is going to hinge on the top issue with voters, and that is jobs and the economy. Seven hundred thousand jobs can easily be the difference between Obama winning a close election thanks to a steadily recovering economy with official unemployment dropping to 7.9 percent by November 2012, and Obama losing because the economy seems to have effectively stalled with unemployment at 8.4 percent.

Paul Krugman came to the conclusion that the Obama-McConnell tax deal could end up hurting President Obama’s 2012 re-election bid by reducing growth rates in the critical months leading up to the election.

Former OMB Director Peter Orszag gives us an absurd argument for why we should extend Bush tax cuts for the richest two percent of Americans for another two years but end the Bush tax cuts for everyone by 2013. To get there, Orszag has to ignore both economics and fairness and use logic and political arguments only when convenient.

Over the next few weeks, we will learn what the Obama Administration intends to do in response to the economy not recovering as promised with the 2009 stimulus. Today’s developments on that front are profoundly disappointing.

Mark Zandi today is the perfect Washington chameleon. He is happy to change his colors to fit in with the team that currently is paying his bills while he continues to shill for the rich.

Too often we’ve seen the White House grab for a compromise they can tout because it has “bipartisan support.” While I don’t think Zandi’s proposal actually has that in Congress – Republicans want permanent tax cuts, not temporary ones – it’s good that, so far, the Administration wants no part of the deal.