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.”

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

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.

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.”

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

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

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

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.

Krugman’s take on Obama’s $50 billion infrastructure proposal: not enough and it won’t pass anyway.

Go read Timothy Noah on income inequality and check out the cool visuals he’s put together.

Best takeaway from today’s installment: “[I]ncome distribution in the United States is more unequal than in Guyana, Nicaragua, and Venezuela, and roughly on par with Uruguay, Argentina, and Ecuador.”

Seriously, go read.