Gosh — preachers who have no problem railing about marriage equality and racial issues suddenly fall mute when they ponder preaching about the current economic mess. Can you say “Veal Pen Preacher”? Sure you can . . .

Add in a duplicitous visiting scholar from the Heritage Foundation who thinks Jesus preached predatory capitalism as the way of salvation, and you’ve got a nasty combination.

Whatever your thoughts on religion, that combination is truly toxic.

Jonathan Chait is a typical Beltway-minded Very Serious Thinker, which means that in his crafting of an apologia for yet another cave-in by Obama to corporate America’s well-heeled (and campaign-contributing) titans, he likes to a) assume that Obama’s most prominent lefty critics have no idea how politics works in America when in fact they understand it better than he ever will, and b) play fast and loose with the truth.

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.

Yves Smith set off a firestorm in her criticism of several progressive groups that have joined forces with Pete Peterson to whip up deficit hysteria. There are three issues that need to be addressed.

Michelangelo Signorelli has the goods on GLAAD President Jarrett Barrios, who sent a letter to the FCC on behalf of the organization supporting the merger of TMoblie and AT&T — written by their big donor, AT&T:

I’m surprised that my post, “Bribes Work: How Peterson, the Enemy of Social Security, Bought the Roosevelt Name” has created a bit of a firestorm within what passes for the left wing political blogosphere. It has elicited responses from Andy Rich of the Roosevelt Institute, Roosevelt Institute fellow Mike Konczal, as well as two groups only mentioned in passing in the piece, the Economic Policy Institute and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

Member funding gives FDL the freedom to say and do what we believe instead of what we’re told.

The notion that Democrats lost the 2010 midterms because liberals weren’t clapping loudly enough isn’t supported by the evidence. Democrats lost because they lost independents by 15 points, and independents don’t care what liberals think.

The problem for the public option wasn’t that the president didn’t fight hard enough for it. It’s failure to make it into the law was the result of President Obama actively fighting hard against it, while lying about this support.

Bad News is a collection of essays edited by our guest today, Anya Schiffrin. It features chapters by Ms. Schiffrin, as well as by Nobel Laureate Joe Stiglitz, Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman, HuffPo Business Editor Peter Goodman, and others in the field from both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.

The book examines the financial press’s version of the Veal Pen, or what Stiglitz calls “cognitive capture.” Just like the political reporters inside the Beltway have become slaves to access, Financial and economic journalists are just as dependent on their sources in industry and government for information and feel the need to keep those sources happy to avoid being cut off from the information flow that is the lifeblood of their production model.