Krugman is descending into the depths of historical revisionism. Although, in fairness, it would be hard to be a full-on Hillary supporter without that crutch. I did a "spit-take" when I read that line blaming financial deregulation solely on Phil Gramm. Rubin didn't just help set up the destruction of the economy - he went on to enrich himself, thanks directly to the consolidation made possible by killing Glass-Steagall. Pretty ugly.

Yeah, Phil Gramm was the architect of the economic collapse of 2008 - this is true. Also true that while he was "Butch Cassidy", Clinton economic guru Robert Rubin was "The Sundance Kid" of the financial deregulation disaster. Hillary was/is clueless on economic issues and is likely to take her cues from the same godawful people Billl -,who it is acknowledged by the campaign will be her chief advisor - did.

Finally a pro-Sanders column by Krugman, whether he knows it or not...

And Hillary will wish all they did was laugh at her... The notion that Hillary can "get things done" working with this congress is the biggest delusion of the entire campaign - bigger than Trump's "Wall paid for by Mexico." Neither will happen, even if hell freezes over, but the most pathetic thing about the Hillary delusion is that otherwise intelligent people are pushing that idiocy. In fact, Sanders has more of a record of working with Republicans than Hillary - although if he were in the Oval Office, that would stop and he knows it. Why he's pushing for a "grassroots revolution" to change and pressure congress rather than making stupid promises about how he's such a mensch he can "get things done" via an Oval Office magic wand - "rolling up his sleeves" and working with the nutjobs - who happen to hate Hillary even more than they hate him. Vote for Clinton if that's your preference, but don't assume the rest of us are fools or haven't been watching the game being played. If she "gets things done" with this congress, it will be stuff that Democrats should oppose and will regret - like way too much of Bill's "working with a GOP congress."

Geithner seems to have deliberately ignored the victims of the financial crisis in favor of "foaming the runways" for the banks. His tenure at Treasury was a disgrace. Holder also was absolutely terrible in not pursuing criminal prosecutions. He wrote a memo as an assistant AG during the original Clinton administration suggesting tepid stuff like "settlements" were better than criminal prosecutions, because "jobs." Actually, breaking up the banks would aside from the obvious rationale, also bring back more jobs lost to consolidation. And "settlements" only penalize shareholders, who are generally oblivious to the machinations of insiders (if they had known what was going on during the mortgage fraud mania, they would have sold their stock!)

Kids yes. Active surrogates, not so much.

As long as Lloyd Blankfein is comfortable supporting Hillary - after paying her large sums to make celebrity appearances at Goldman Sachs (I doubt the speeches themselves amounted to much) - I know all I need to know about Hillary and Wall Street. She will go as far as she needs to in context of current Democratic politics to maintain Dodd Frank and make a few adjustments, but no farther. This isn't a mystery - and it's not about "payoffs." It's who she and Bill are and have been for as long as I've been aware of their existence. The Obama adminsitration also has a poor record re Wall Street, and just in terms of their executive branch powers - Geithner could have cared less about the victims of the mortgage meltdown losing their homes. Holder wrote the "book" (actually a memo) on not prosecuting corporations criminally but using "settlements" that only penalize shareholders and do little to rein in the actual culprits. This isn't controversial, if one has even limited knowledge of the aftermath and consequences of the economic crisis.

An African-American NYC congressman unfortunately decided to drink from the gutter yesterday on MSNBC and suggest, in response to the question about Hillary's not offering up her speeches to Goldman Sachs, that maybe Sanders had said things in speeches he's given praising Castro that he might not want released. To hear a "liberal" go this route was discouraging, but sadly not terribly surprising.

But Clinton - aka "Annie Oakley" in '08 - also won the majority of white Dems in the South. There is no question that Clinton is capturing the more conservative Dem vote - even among older African-Americans, who are a unique combination of "liberal" and "conservative" - or perhaps better put "cautious and traditional" - depending on the issues (see Prop 8 banning gay marriage in CA, which won 7 0f 10 black votes, even as Obama took the state in '08.) The older black electorate is also pretty locked into their transactional political leadership, who had to be dragged kicking and screaming into supporting Obama in '08. The old-school pols seek access to the presumed winner above all, for obvious reasons. Sensible but not visionary or aspirational leadership in the best tradition of MLK. This isn't controversial or a big deal. Just happens to be so. It's kind of creepy for whites who claim to be oh-so-liberal to be immune to discussing how race plays into voting patterns honestly - basically hiding behind generic "black voters" to rationalize their own biases, shut down discussion and try to brand others as implicitly racist using their own implicit racism and overt opportunism as the excuse.

He's been very much part of the DSCC fundraising machinery - and been attacked for it by the Clinton camp as a hypocrite because a lot of "big money" donors show up for the kind of DSCC fundraising Sanders participates in. But he doesn't personally have the network the Clintons have among big donors and is focusing his current campaign's own efforts on the primary. Of course Hillary is able to distribute more, which likely drives a lot of the endorsement patterns - can't be too close to the Clintons if you are a traditional Dem pol. IMHO where we will see the difference is in how he uses this growing network to build organization for the future, having drawn in a lot of new energy.

"Somehow electing just the right person as President will cause Paul Ryan, Mitch McConnell, and the Koch Brothers to run up the white flag and say we will do whatever you ask. Gobsmacking." Actually that's Hillary's line. "Getting things done" because "experience." Sanders is very clear that electing a new face to the Oval Office isn't going to cut it. Thus his "political revolution" - which means that Democrats need to get off their duffs in ways we have yet to see. And that's after Obama's "social movement" strategy - which disappeared as an independent force once he made it safely into the White House. OFA was neutered and folded into the party establishment. And lost any steam it might have had while the Tea Party took over the "activist" space. Big mistake. Bernie won't let that happen to his network, even assuming he doesn't get the nomination. Sanders has a vision and a strategy, Hillary has a personal ambition.

He's fine when he sticks to Keynes. I'm guessing he'll walk back his comfort with Dodd Frank as "not too hot, not too cold, but just right" once he's no longer freaking out about Hillary's remarkably flawed candidacy (again.)

Yeah - he forgot that "air quotes" don't translate into print, so he fell for the Clinton campaign's carefully laid "bait." His comments were totally in context of the Clinton campaign's "disqualify" strategy and her slick "I'm taking it to the edge so you can't hang it on me" comments to Morning Joke. Hillary and her strategists are slick and disingenuous, Bernie is blunt and brusque. What else is new. Sort of like the difference in their relationships to dangerous critters like Lloyd Blankfein. Bernie tells them to go to hell. Hillary takes their money and claims it means nothing that she has their support.

Sanders kids are on his "professional" lawn.

Also "been there done that" with those radicals Carter in '80, Mondale in 84, Dukakis in '88, Gore in 2000 and Kerry in '04. Some Dems lose, generally because they have run less than superb campaigns and made rookie mistakes. That includes Gore, who could have averted the Florida/Nader disaster had he run an even marginally better campaign. Hillary, the favorite of establishment Dems - who have a less than stellar track record for bringing people out in mid-terms and in state races - has higher negatives than any candidate in my memory (other than Trump.) Why she is considered such a great choice or a "shoo in" is beyond my comprehension. But then I'm still trying to figure out why Debbie Wasserman Schultz - a friend of payday lenders and her GOP Florida congressional colleagues when they run against Dems - is in charge of the DNC.

Your problem if you "been there, done that." Had Nader run in the Dem primary in 2000, he could have had a positive impact. I don't support third parties in the general election. Sorry to hear you had that "Nader problem." But don't hang it on Sanders.

"wonks are the help" Ouch!

That was actually embarrassing for Barney because he has trouble dealing with counterargument and tends to just rant and denigrate whoever he is speaking "at." He had a similar episode about a week ago, also on Hayes, where he doesn't seem to have any ability to demonstrate grace or due respect - which I've often enjoyed when he is countering some crazy Republican, but I'm starting to recognize as a personality flaw. He's got an inflated opinion of himself. Krugman seems like he has a tendency to "go there" as well. Reminiscent of when he called Obama supporters "a cult" when the Prez took on Hillary. Did that numerous times, just like he can't stop himself from using "Bernie Bros."

Comments on Krugman's contribution to the Clinton Campaign closed as I was writing this, so I'll post it here: What we are now hearing from PK and the doddering Barney Frank (if his near-meltdown on Chris Hayes, debating - or shouting at - Robert Reich is any indication), is that Too Big To Fail doesn't exist. It's only about capital requirements. Capital requirements are critical, but it's crackpot to dismiss the notion that players in the financial system that are clearly "too big to fail" can't find ways to threaten the economic system in the future, in their quest for profits. If Frank believes that his very modest, watered-down-by-lobbyists bill, dependent as much on the integrity of regulators as the SEC et al for "teeth", erases the risk of "too big to fail" I've got a bridge to sell Barney. Smart Guys like Krugman and Frank didn't see the meltdown coming. They won't see the next one if these behemoths have their way. Glass Steagall isn't enough, but it served the country well for decades and was destroyed by the Clinton administration, in tandem with the vulture Phil Gramm. When Lloyd Blankfein is no longer comfortable supporting Hillary Clinton I'll believe that she has cut ties to Wall Street. "Robert Rubin Democrats" aren't Democrats IMHO - they are stealth Republicans and Bernie is the only candidate who we could trust to drive these money-changers from the political "temple", as opposed to letting them influence the administration as Clinton inevitably will.

Unfortunately as evidence of the "problem with Democrats," on ABC's This Week the 2 reporters, Chrystia Freeland and even Ron Brownstein, were better able to articulate a coherent liberal agenda on the budget battles - and why it matters - than the two high-profile Democrats on the program, David Plouffe and Donna Brazile. Freeland made the case that someone needs to pushback on the "cut spending now" hysterics and point to the failed austerity strategy in the UK, among others. Transcript of the comments here: http://titanicsailsatdawn.blogspot.com/2011/04/you-know-youre-in-trouble... This is one of those "you know you're in trouble when..." moments - Democrats need to, at the least, begin to communicate a sensible message rather than accept the terms of debate the GOP tries to impose. That's a losing battle...

David Brooks has Paul Ryan "grasping reality with both hands" in today's column (perhaps the worst he's ever written, but I can't prove that.) I thought DeLong had that trademarked.

Only slightly off-topic, 4 Missouri state senators have succeeded in cutting 34,000 people off of unemployment benefits... http://titanicsailsatdawn.blogspot.com/2011/04/this-is-insane.html No apparent limits to the pathologies.

Your objections to policies may well have merit, but your initial assertion is nutty - utterly dogmatic and disconnecced from reality.

It was part of the Steven Colbert Christmas Special last year - Toby K was a guest and did that bit, which was obviously written and produced by Colbert's team. TK did it as a goof and knew he was parodying himself. I give him credit for that.

Clay - I honestly don't believe you have a clue regarding Christianity. This comment is ridiculous, at best. Of course, you are welcome to add my disdain to the steaming pile of victimhood that "Christianist" cranks wallow in.