Ye Gods, have you seen this from Bruce Bartlett in the LA Times?

I know you two have gone round-and-round on other subjects, but how can any honest supply-sider who wanted permanent tax cuts in 2003 instead of temporary cuts say this?

Republicans respond that they had no choice; they didn't have the votes to enact permanent tax cuts, so it was temporary cuts or nothing. This is not true. They could have made them permanent, but that would have required bipartisanship and more political capital than Republicans were willing to spend. So they took the easy way out, figuring that Democrats wouldn't dare oppose extending the tax cuts when the time came, lest they be accused of favoring a vast tax increase.

Ah, yes, that salve of prissy good government types everywhere: "bipartisanship." He even concedes there were, "good elements to the tax cuts, such as the reduction in marginal tax rates." You're telling me Bartlett honestly thinks any of that would've survived a "bipartisan" deal, which by definition had to win the votes of tax-loving Republican squishes like Voinovich and Snowe, let alone Democrat votes? And if having Dick Cheney break a tie vote over a cacophony of protest and soft poll support isn't "spending political capital," what on earth is?

What the hell's happened to Bartlett?

The U.S. economy has, for many weeks, had Americans (and their politicians) talking recession: The economy grew only marginally, 0.6 percent, in the fourth quarter of 2007—and may have dipped into negative territory in the first quarter of 2008.

Or the chatter might be a false alarm. We were struck over the weekend by a punchy post from economic forecaster Donald Luskin on SmartMoney.com: "Economic Recovery Already Underway." His thesis: "What a difference a month makes! . . . Compared to the bleak expectations then, even just hanging in there would have been an upside surprise. But it's more than that. Things actually are getting better."

The wealth of up-tilting data Luskin cites won't silence the gloomiest Jeremiahs. But it plays havoc with their recent fun: predicting a second Great Depression.

In his daily contest against The New York Times, Murdoch appears poised to use his playbook from the 12-year showdown between his upstart Fox News and the entrenched CNN, formerly owned by Ted Turner. Murdoch marketed "fair and balanced" Fox as an alternative to what he deemed CNN's liberal bias. And certainly The Wall Street Journal's conservative leanings are a foil to the Times's liberal voice. But the Journal-vs.-Times war seems unlikely to get as personal as Murdoch vs. Turner (he neglected to take his lithium, Murdoch once said of the manic-depressive Turner; he's like Hitler, Turner said of Murdoch). Murdoch says he and New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. aren't friends, but there's no hostility between them, either. Sulzberger declined to comment for this article.

Things may not be hostile, but they are certainly feisty. For years, Murdoch has targeted Sulzberger for tabloid harassment. The Post regularly runs a "Sulzberger meter" alongside stories about negative developments at the rival publishing company, featuring a head shot of Sulzberger sporting a black eye. The Journal joined the fray last December, after Murdoch had clinched the Dow Jones deal, accusing his critics of "commercial" and "ideological" motives and blasting the Times for giving credence to concerns that Murdoch would turn the Journal into a mouthpiece for his own business and right-wing political interests. The Times, like numerous other media outlets, has been critical of Murdoch for allegedly using his media properties to pursue personal business and political ends—a contention that Murdoch vehemently rejects. "I've never, ever done that," he says angrily. "I challenge anyone to show that I did. My bloody papers won't even review Fox films favorably."

The Murdoch camp is particularly miffed about two back-to-back front-page investigative stories in the Times that endeavored to detail the history of Murdoch's conflicts of interest. Murdoch also contends that Sulzberger misled him about the tone and content of an upcoming Times editorial about him when the two men encountered each other at a party aboard Internet mogul Barry Diller's yacht to celebrate Murdoch's Dow Jones victory. The way Murdoch tells it, Sulzberger assured him that he needn't worry about the editorial, which would be running in the next day's paper. But when he opened the Times, Murdoch cringed. The editorial reprised an oft-repeated anecdote about the mogul's once booting the BBC from a Murdoch-owned satellite television service, Star TV. The accusation was that Murdoch had pulled the BBC's news service as a reprisal for stories it carried critical of the Chinese government; at the time, he was trying to curry favor with the Chinese to ease his entry into the exploding Asian market. In an interview, as he has previously, Murdoch contended the network was pulled for financial reasons, not for its China coverage. Murdoch fired off a letter to Sulzberger, the content of which still rankles the Times scion: "Dear Arthur, It was a pleasure to see you last night ... I don't know how many times I have to state that I didn't take off the BBC ... Let the battle begin!"

“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”

(Suffice it to say he is not one of the Hollywood types who weeps over innocents trapped behind bars.)

Turns out that there is more at stake than just a matter of good taste, or even having minimal respect for public figures. Turns out that those heads of Bush and Cheney portrayed on the UK cover are artworks, and that the artists were neither credited nor compensated by Krugman or his publisher. Would things have been different if the artists were represented by a union favored by the Democratic party?

StreetRec [the artists' group who created the heads] was surprised to find out about the book cover especially since it was so clearly a marketing move. The images on the cover of the book had not been re-done at all and were being used for profit however critical the book may have been. One member of StreetRec contacted the publishing company to discuss a possible honorarium or credit and asked for at least a few copies of the book for their files. If this book had been a not-for-profit venture, than it would have been another of the exciting re-printings of StreetRec’s work.

StreetRec weren’t the only people concerned with Krugman’s cover. Regardless of the books’ exclusion from the US market, right-wing journalist Donald Luskin at the National Review choose to highlight the cover images in his column as a way to discredit Krugman’s ideas. In a November 24, 2003 piece called “Running From Cover” at www.nationalreview.com, Luskin writes, “It took a simple picture for the New York Times to finally distance itself from America’s most dangerous liberal pundit…It’s a photomontage showing the face of President George W Bush with huge Frankenstein sutures across his mouth and brow, and the word ‘Enron’ stitched into his forehead. Vice President Dick Cheney’s face sports a Hitleresque mustache; the words “Got Oil?” are scrawled on his forehead. It is a hateful, shocking, and disturbing image.”

Even the Republican National Committee weighed in on this cover. Spokesperson Christine Iverson stated in the New York Times (“One Book, Two Very Different Covers,” Nov 23, 2003, Books p 2) that, “The fact that they are using a much different cover here in the United States is proof that his tactics are offensive to mainstream Americans.” The New York Times also attempted to distance themselves from it, spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis stated, “ . . .we were never even shown the cover.” And finally Krugman himself, in the same Times story said, “It is a marketing thing, not a statement…I should have taken a look at that and said ‘What are you doing marketing me as if I’m Michael Moore?’”

Certainly if Krugman only was to benefit from the images as a marketing device, perhaps the company could have done some research about who to attribute the art to. But, protest art and underground culture is constantly appropriated wholesale by the market. If he planned to reprint the original photos by Annie Leibowitz, certainly he would have paid for rights, but grassroots art functioning in public space is easy for corporations to use without fear of repercussion. Regardless, the images had reached higher places of power and controversy than any of the artists could have imagined.

The real impetus for the bill...was to help the SEIU organize employees of ManorCare, a nursing home chain owned by the Carlyle Group private equity firm. Kohlberg Kravis Roberts, another private equity outfit and owner of the Hospital Corporation of America, has also been a major target of Mr. Stern's campaign.

The SEIU wanted to ratchet up the pressure on Carlyle and others by cutting off two gigantic sources of private equity capital: the California Public Employees' Retirement System (Calpers) and the California State Teachers' Retirement System (Calstrs), which manage $240 billion and $167 billion of assets, respectively.

...a list of human rights violators that included Singapore and Abu Dhabi but not China raised eyebrows. It turned out that [SEIU head] Mr. Stern included Singapore and Abu Dhabi because they invest with Carlyle. China got a pass because its sovereign wealth fund invests with the Blackstone Group private equity firm, and the SEIU has negotiated janitorial agreements with Blackstone real-estate companies.

In other words, human rights were at best an afterthought for Mr. Stern, whose real goal was expanding his own political clout. Mr. Stern's campaign against private equity is typically expressed in moral terms on behalf of "working families," but in Mr. Stern's moral universe all is forgiven if you play ball with his union. And once this became clear he began losing political support.