not sure how much more a lefty can take

[David Morris]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/26/obama-liquidates-himself/

Obama Liquidates Himself

A spending freeze? That’s the brilliant response of the Obama team to
their first serious political setback?

It’s appalling on every level.

It’s bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still
suffering from mass unemployment. Jonathan Zasloff writes that Obama
seems to have decided to fire Tim Geithner and replace him with “the
rotting corpse of Andrew Mellon” (Mellon was Herbert Hoover’s Treasury
Secretary, who according to Hoover told him to “liquidate the workers,
liquidate the farmers, purge the rottenness”.)

It’s bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the
essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change
instead.

And it’s a betrayal of everything Obama’s supporters thought they were
working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the
Republican world-view — and more specifically, he has embraced the
policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes,
“I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy.”

Now, I still cling to a fantasy: maybe, just possibly, Obama is going
to tie his spending freeze to something that would actually help the
economy, like an employment tax credit. (No, trivial tax breaks don’t
count). There has, however, been no hint of anything like that in the
reports so far. Right now, this looks like pure disaster.