Well, the good news is that tonight’s speech means we won’t have to deal with lying Lawrence O’Donnell.  The bad news is that unless you get Speed so you can watch Monster Truck Jam there’s just not a lot of alternate programming to pick and choose from.

Frankly, as bad a night of TV as I can remember.

• AMC– The Mummy
• Food– Chopped Champions (Playoff Premier)
• FX– Rescue Me (Season Finale)
• Turner Classic– A Fistful of Dollars, The Bridges of Madison County (Clint Eastwood night)
• Toon– Unnatural History (premier)
• USA– Burn Notice (repeat of the Season 3 Opener), Covert Affairs (premier)
• SciFi– Warehouse 13 (last week’s and new)
• ESPN– World Series of Poker (premier)
• ABC Family– Melissa & Joey
• Discovery– Swords: Life on the Line (premier)

Later-

• SciFi– Haven (repeat of this week’s)

Dave hosts Michael Douglas and Merle Haggard.  Michael will no doubt be whoring his sequel, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.  Jon and Stephen are in repeats until next Tuesday despite TV Guide’s lying listing (and Yahoo is worse than ever, almost unusable).

Alton does casseroles.  The Revenge Society is another Venture Brothers episode that really advances the story arc.  If you can stay up late enough I highly recommend it.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 Iraq hails sovereignty as U.S. ends combat mission

By Serena Chaudhry and Khalid al-Ansary, Reuters

Tue Aug 31, 12:43 pm ET

in Economics.

This is one of the untold tales of the mess we’re in. Contrary to what you may have heard, there’s very little that’s baffling about our problems – at least not if you knew basic, old-fashioned macroeconomics. In fact, someone who learned economics from the original 1948 edition of Samuelson’s textbook would feel pretty much at home in today’s world. If economists seem totally at sea, it’s because they have carefully unlearned the old wisdom. If policy has failed, it’s because policy makers chose not to believe their own models.

On the analytical front: many economists these days reject out of hand the Keynesian model, preferring to believe that a fall in supply rather than a fall in demand is what causes recessions. But there are clear implications of these rival approaches. If the slump reflects some kind of supply shock, the monetary and fiscal policies followed since the beginning of 2008 would have the effects predicted in a supply-constrained world: large expansion of the monetary base should have led to high inflation, large budget deficits should have driven interest rates way up. And as you may recall, a lot of people did make exactly that prediction. A Keynesian approach, on the other hand, said that inflation would fall and interest rates stay low as long as the economy remained depressed. Guess what happened?

On the policy front: there’s certainly a real debate over whether Obama could have gotten a bigger stimulus. What we do know, however, is that his top advisers did not frame the argument for a small stimulus compared with the projected slump purely in political terms. Instead, they argued that too big a plan would alarm the bond markets, and that anyway fiscal stimulus was only needed as an insurance policy. Neither of these arguments came from macroeconomic theory; they were doctrines invented on the fly. Samuelson 1948 would have said to provide a stimulus big enough to restore full employment – full stop.

No more prison documentaries.  Yahoo TV Listings is really bad at the moment, so a very short list.

I want you to know that I’ve been Captain of this ship for 22 years.

22 years, eh? If you were a man, you’d go in business for yourself. I know a fellow started only last year with just a canoe. Now he’s got more women than you could shake a stick at, if that’s your idea of a good time.

• Spike– Platoon
• AMC– For Love of the Game
• ESPN– Mets @ Braves
• FX– X-Men: The Last Stand
• History– Pawn Stars, American Pickers
• Oxygen– Miss Congeniality 2: Armed and Fabulous x 2
• TBS– Family Guy night
• Toon– Monday premiers- Adventure Time With Finn & Jake, Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack, Total Drama World Tour, and Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated
• Turner Classic– Monkey Business, Horse Feathers

Hey, what’s-a matter, you no understand English? You can’t come in here unless you say, “Swordfish.” Now I’ll give you one more guess.

…swordfish, swordfish… I think I got it. Is it “swordfish”?

Hah. That’s-a it. You guess it.

Pretty good, eh?

Later-

• AMC– Caddyshack
• FX– Lost In Space

Alton does whole fish.  Return to Malice.

Let me tell you a little story? I once knew a guy who could have been a great golfer, could have gone pro, all he needed was a little time and practice. Decided to go to college instead. Went for four years, did pretty well. At the end of his four years, his last semester he was kicked out… You know what for? He was night putting, just putting at night with the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Dean… You know who that guy was Danny?

No.

Take one good guess.

Bob Hope?

Ha ha… No, that guy was Mitch Comstein, my roommate. He was a good guy.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

48 Top Story Final.

1 UN climate panel ordered to make fundamental reforms

AFP

30 mins ago

Apparently I’m not the only one.

Beck Blasts Obama’s ‘Perversion Of The Gospel,’ While Evangelicals Blast Beck’s ‘False Gospel’

“Jesus Christ’s Church has universally rejected Mormonism’s Anti-Trinitarian theology and its claim that mortals may become God,” David Shedlock, an evangelical blogger, wrote on a FreedomWorks forum earlier this month. “Beck asks Christian leaders to ‘put differences aside,’ but Beck himself daily peppers his broadcasts with Mormon distinctives because he cannot keep his beliefs to himself.”

Report: Warnings about e-mails went unheeded in Bush White House

By Ed O’Keefe, Washington Post Staff Writer

Sunday, August 29, 2010; 8:06 PM

Top aides to President George W. Bush  seemed unconcerned amid multiple warnings as early as 2002 that the White House risked losing millions of e-mails that federal law required them to preserve, according to an extensive review of records set for release Monday.

The review, conducted by the nonprofit watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, follows a settlement reached last December between President Obama’s administration, CREW and the National Security Archive, a George Washington University research institute. The groups sued the Bush White House in 2007, alleging it violated federal law by not preserving millions of e-mails sent between 2003 and 2005.

The settlement resulted in the restoration of 94 days worth of e-mail and the release of documents detailing when the Bush White House learned of the missing e-mails and how it responded. The restored e-mails are part of the National Archives and Records Administration’s historic record of the Bush administration, but presidential historians and others seeking information in the coming decades about the major decisions of Bush’s presidency likely will be starved of key details, including messages sent between White House officials and drafts of final policy decisions, according to CREW.

(h/t Corrente)

Monday Business Edition

It’s slowly starting to dawn on Institutional Democrats that they’re going to lose big in November.  The consequences are very real.  Racist Radical Reagan Republicanism is a proven failure.  And Institutional Democrats?  They’re a failure too because they knew what to do and didn’t do it.

I’ll put my policy prescription right up front, the only thing that will save Democrats at this point is massive downsizing- Rahm Emanuel, David Axelrod, Gibbs, Geithner and Summers, Salazar and Duncan.  Do I want heads on pikes?  Figuratively, yes.  These highly paid strikeout kings and clubhouse malcontents have to go for the good of the team.

And if not I hope you’re happy with the crappy offices that come with minority status and one term Presidencies you corporatist whores.  Anyone who claims to care about “electoral victory” is a liar.

It’s Witch-Hunt Season

By PAUL KRUGMAN, The New York Times

Published: August 29, 2010

So what will happen if, as expected, Republicans win control of the House? We already know part of the answer: Politico reports that they’re gearing up for a repeat performance of the 1990s, with a “wave of committee investigations” – several of them over supposed scandals that we already know are completely phony. We can expect the G.O.P. to play chicken over the federal budget, too; I’d put even odds on a 1995-type government shutdown sometime over the next couple of years.

It will be an ugly scene, and it will be dangerous, too. The 1990s were a time of peace and prosperity; this is a time of neither. In particular, we’re still suffering the after-effects of the worst economic crisis since the 1930s, and we can’t afford to have a federal government paralyzed by an opposition with no interest in helping the president govern. But that’s what we’re likely to get.

If I were President Obama, I’d be doing all I could to head off this prospect, offering some major new initiatives on the economic front in particular, if only to shake up the political dynamic. But my guess is that the president will continue to play it safe, all the way into catastrophe.

Opposition Pay-offs

by Dave Anderson, 2010 August 29

The stimulus as passed in ARRA was necessary but insufficient.  It was too small at the topline number for the size of the output gap we actually faced (as the recession was deeper than the earlier data showed) and poorly designed with too much money going to AMT fixes and ineffective lump-sum tax-cuts.  The effective parts were pared back to please Sens. Collins, Snowe and Nelson.  And this was because the Republican Party realized they were the opposition and the job of the opposition is to oppose.  It also was because the Obama Administration likes to punch dirty fucking hippies, especially when they are right on the math and the political outcomes.

What Can Obama Really Do?

by Ian Welsh, 2010 August 29

The idea that Obama, or any President, is a powerless shrinking violet, helpless in the face of Congress is just an excuse.  Presidents have immense amounts of power: the question is whether or not they use that power, and if they do, what they use it for.

…

If Obama is not using that money and authority, the bottom line is it’s because he doesn’t want to.

Putting aside the question of what Obama could have accomplished already, if he wants to help everyday Americans, turn around Democratic approval ratings in time for the midterm elections, and leave behind him a legacy of achievement, he can still do it. If he wants to.

The Two Stories of This Terrible Economy, Yet Obama and the Dems Won’t Tell Theirs

Robert Reich, Friday, August 27, 2010

If Obama and the Democrats would connect these dots they’d have a story that would make Americans’ hair stand on end. We’re in this mess because of big business and Wall Street. Government is needed to get us out of it.

…

So why haven’t Obama and the Dems succeeded yet? Big business and Wall Street have used their money and political clout to stop government from doing as much as needs to be done.

The story is clear, and it has the virtue of being the truth. Why won’t Obama and the Democrats tell it? Is it because big business and Wall Street have the money and political clout even to prevent the story from being told?

Policy Options Dwindle as Economic Fears Grow

By PETER S. GOODMAN, The New York Times

Published: August 28, 2010

“There are many ways in which you can see us almost surely being in a Japan-style malaise,” said the Nobel-laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz, who has accused the Obama administration of underestimating the dangers weighing on the economy. “It’s just really hard to see what will bring us out.”

Japan’s years of pain were made worse by deflation – falling prices – an affliction that assailed the United States during the Great Depression and may be gathering force again. While falling prices can be good news for people in need of cars, housing and other wares, a sustained, broad drop discourages businesses from investing and hiring. Less work and lower wages translates into less spending power, which reinforces a predilection against hiring and investing – a downward spiral.

Deflation is both symptom and cause of an economy whose basic functioning has stalled. It reflects too many goods and services in the marketplace with not enough people able to buy them.

Banks’ Self-Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis

by Jake Bernstein  and Jesse Eisinger, ProPublica

Aug. 26, 10:09 p.m.

Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

More Business News below.

TV Guide Network is broadcasting Weeds?!  “A pot-dealing suburban widow (Mary-Louise Parker) deals with her 15-year-old son and his girlfriend, who want to have sex, and a competing pusher”?

Curb Your Enthusiasm, it still doesn’t make up for your suck at being A TV GUIDE!  Assholes.

Oh, and there are Emmys and Throwball (Steelers @ Broncos) if you care about such things.

• AMC– Pearl Harbor (another crap history movie like Midway and Battle of the Bulge), Rubicon, Mad Men (premiers)
• CNBC– Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (real history about our real thieving capitalist class)
• ESPN– BoSox @ Devil Rays
• ABC Family– The Princess Diaries, Miss Congeniality
• FX– 27 Dresses
• Nick– Back to the Future Part III
• SciFi– Supernova (Parts 1 & 2, if you don’t get enough doom and gloom from Discovery Channel)
• TBS– School of Rock
• Turner Classic– Henry Fonda night, Young Mr. Lincoln, 12 Angry Men
• TNT– Disturbia x 2 (not Alfred Hitchcock)
• Discovery– Man v. Wild (repeat), Last Day of the Dinosaurs, Bad Universe: Asteroid Strike (premiers)
• Food– Challenge, Truck Race, Iron Chef America (all premiers)
• History– New Ice Road Truckers, Swamp People
• Toon– Delocated (premier), Childrens Hospital

Marty, the future isn’t written. It can be changed, you know that. Anyone can make their future whatever they want it to be. I can’t let this one little photograph determine my entire destiny. I have to live my life according to what I believe is right in my heart.

Later-

Later.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

46 Story Final.

1 Pakistan on ‘war footing’ to save city

by Hasan Mansoor and Emmanuel Duparcq, AFP

Sun Aug 29, 1:16 pm ET