Sometimes it seems like the system is rigged and the rich just keep getting richer – it seems that way for a reason, it’s true.

It is an honor and a pleasure to have Paul Krugman at the Lake this afternoon for a conversation on End This Depression Now! Dedicated “To the unemployed, who deserve better,” the book is a condemnation of the policies and mind-set that have produced the worst economic depression since the 1930s. And unlike the Great Depression, which contemporaries did not understand, we know what to do; the current depression is entirely self-inflicted. The broken homes and ruined lives are not attributable to acts of God or the inscrutable logic of the market, but are the direct consequence of public decisions that have amplified the inherent risk of private credit by deregulating financial operations and the attempt to balance the budget when aggregate private demand is collapsing. The central message is that none of this suffering is necessary, and none of it is justified.

Gosh, where would anyone get that idea?

Looks like Ted Leonsis, the billionaire who owns the Washington Wizards, got his fee-fees hurt when the president said all those mean things about rich people having to pay more taxes.

On Friday, Hugh Hewitt provided a useful reminder of just how far right the right has swung by attacking cap-and-trade and the EPA — both conceived by Republicans — as sinister socialist plots. As if on cue, Greg Mankiw offers this bit of radical advice to President Obama.

What a dreary, socialist nightmare B. Hussein Obamastalin has turned America into.