Rep. Allen West (R) praises President Obama’s (alleged) willingness to join Republicans in slashing Social Security and Medicare.

As GOP moves in an increasingly radical direction it’s posed a growing challenge for members of the House looking to get ahead of the curve on the Crazy. In a new effort, Rep. Paul Broun (R-GA) is now proposing lowering the debt ceiling.

Pelosi: We won’t support a debt limit bill with Medicare or Social Security cuts.

Many Dems support big Social Security cut as long as it’s not called a “cut”.

There’s no getting around today’s job report being just really bleak. 18,000 jobs is nothing against the need to add roughly 10 times that number just for the economy to produce enough jobs to keep up with population growth. (The rate itself rose to 9.2%) And it brings the country perilous close to going back to net jobs contraction. We are living with the consequences of inadequate government action in early 2009, poor policy choices and a basic misdiagnosis of the scale of the crisis the country faced. But then, we know that. Perhaps the starkest thing to contemplate is that these numbers raise the odds of new policy choices — sucking still more demand out of the economy in the form of sharp spending cuts — most likely to steepen the economy’s descent.

Apple is denying censoring politically-themed emails through its mobileme email service.

Obama to address today’s weak jobs report at 10:35 AM eastern. Watch it live here.

A new study by the international business school INSEAD rates the US 7th in the world in “innovation”, behind Switzerland, Sweden, Singapore, Hong Kong, Finland and Denmark.

The last flight of a US space shuttle is scheduled to begin in under an hour.

Speaker John Boehner tells reporters on Capitol Hill that failing to raise the debt ceiling poses a grave risk to the economy and could push unemployment even higher.

It does make you wonder why he’s threatening not to do it unless he gets exactly what he wants in the debt negotiations.