Did you wake up this morning from your summer slumber to discover that Democrats are about to get shellacked in the midterms, that unemployment is proving intractable, that the economy is verging on a double dip recession, and that all the political class can seem to stay focused on, at least rhetorically, is deficit reduction?

Missing the beach yet? It gets better.

The big agenda item for Congress between now and the election is whether to extend the Bush tax cuts, set to expire at year’s end. We can’t afford more government spending to rescue the economy and put the jobless back to work, but we can afford starving the government of revenue by extending those massive Bush era tax cuts. Even Peter Orszag agrees.

Brian Beutler takes a look at the main options under consideration for how to handle the Bush tax cuts.

How did Sen. Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) wind up 30 points down in her bid for re-election?

The trend graph for the Congressional Generic Ballot for 2010. As you can see, it moves along with the Republicans having a consistent but not dramatic advantage until about mid-summer. And then the red line just starts taking off … Read More

Obama: Special interests “talk about me like a dog.” Watch.

In today’s speech, Obama takes a clear shot at House Republicans and issues a warning shot to the deficit commission on Social Security: “To those who may still run for office planning to privatize Social Security, let me be clear: as long as I’m President, I’ll fight every effort to take the retirement savings of a generation of Americans and hand it over to Wall Street. Not on my watch.”

The President departed from his prepared remarks in Milwaukee to address how he’s treated by the powerful interests in DC: “They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks … but it’s true.” Video soon.

Late Update: Watch the video.

We’ve posted the text of the Labor Day speech President Obama is about to give in Milwaukee.

Speaker-in-waiting John Boehner (R-OH): “If we’ve learned anything from the past 18 months, it’s that we can’t spend our way to prosperity.”

Following anti-American protests in Kabul over the planned burning of the Koran by that obscure Protestant church in Florida, Gen. David Petraeus says the desecration of the Koran “could endanger troops and it could endanger the overall effort.”

He’s been hoarding his campaign cash for the stretch run against gazillionaire Meg Whitman, and now Jerry Brown is starting to spend it. But this first TV ad makes me wonder. Shouldn’t Brown avoid sepia tone? And do Californians really want a return to the 1970s? Take a look.