President Obama is getting some ribbing today for telegraphing that he’s going to release his ‘jobs plan’ in September. What took so long? The country has been in the grip of historic, catastrophic levels of unemployment for going on three years. All good points. And count me among those who wish he would have come forward with something like this in 2010 rather than 2011. But let’s get real. The President’s mistake is not coming forward with a plan when he — quite rightly — believed that the Congress would refuse to do anything to help create jobs — because of ideology and a desire to see President Obama defeated. Read More

People are rightly arrested by the image of a top presidential candidate calling the Fed Chair a traitor. But as Brian Beutler explains, what’s even more telling is why Perry’s calling him that. Not, apparently, because he has zealous beliefs in hard money like Ron Paul. It’s because it would make it harder for him to become President.

If you get beyond the Banana Republic nature of Rick Perry calling the Fed Chair a traitor, you see that this is dangerous ground for Mitt Romney. Romney, who’s generally been supportive of Bernanke’s chairmanship, won’t be able to follow Perry into Paul-like Fed-bashing territory.

Here’s key context on the impact of Rick Perry’s entry into the GOP primary contest.

The key thing in my book is that Romney, so far, has been able to leverage the weak GOP field to spin up an inevitability narrative, mainly by ignoring the other candidates and focusing his attacks on President Obama. Perry knocks that whole house down.

Last week, we compiled a list of all the prominent and elected Republicans who dismissed default by the U.S. government as not that big of a deal — a shocking stance that Standard & Poor’s says contributed to its downgrade of U.S. debt.

We asked for help from TPM readers in fleshing out the list and keeping it from vanishing down the memory hole– and you delivered. Here’s the updated and expanded list.

Thanks for your help.

I guess this is going to be a pretty interesting election. Rick Perry is now saying that any more emergency efforts by Ben Bernanke to resuscitate the economy would be “almost treasonous.” Watch.

In recent years Gov. Rick Perry has said that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, that states should have the right to leave the system and even that he believes Social Security is unconstitutional.

Today he walked those comments back. A bit.

Perry asked in Cedar Rapids whether President Obama loves America. Perry responds, “You need to ask him.”

This remember is a governor who two years ago was wondering whether life under Obama might get so bad that he’d need to have his state secede from the United States.

That’s no ordinary bus President Obama is driving through the Midwest on. It’s the Secret Service’s new $1.1 million armed presidential ultra-bus. Maybe kind of like the one in Stripes.

Last week we put together a list of all the members of Congress who said that a default on US debt probably wouldn’t be such a big deal, until even coming up to the edge of default led to a downgrade of the United States. We had a good list. But we asked you for other examples. And you came through in a big way. So here’s the new revised and updated list. It’s a long one. Take a look.