Dean Baker

Here’s something I bet you thought you’d never see at the perilously liberal Huffington Post.

In a Dean Baker article published Tuesday with the astonishing title “There Is No Santa Claus and Bill Clinton Was Not an Economic Savior,” the second sentence read, “Just as little kids have to come to grips with the fact that there is no Santa Claus, it is necessary for millions of liberals, including many who think of themselves as highly knowledgeable about economic matters, to realize that President Clinton's policies sent the economy seriously off course.”

CNBC's Joe Kernen on Monday called New York Times columnist Paul Krugman a communist.

Kernen expressed the same sentiments for economist and Huffington Post contributor Dean Baker (video follows with transcript and commentary):

One of the Left's most esteemed economists, the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research's Dean Baker, claimed Monday the "Second Great Depression," the term given to what many believed the country was heading for if drastic government action wasn't taken in the fall of 2008, was all a fiction created by Wall Street to get bailed out.

In Baker's view published at the unashamedly liberal Huffington Post, the Federal Reserve could have solved all the problems that ailed us at the time, and had some of America's largest banks been allowed to fail, their financial loss would have been "our" gain as their money was magically redistributed to Main Street.

Potentially most hysterical is that Baker never once mentioned how this all occurred weeks before Election Day, and never once mentioned Barack Obama who not only hyped the collapse to seal his ascendancy to the White House, but also continually reminds Americans to this day that his efforts averted the "Second Great Depression":

It's hard to imagine an economist being provocative, but Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, has managed to do so.

In his June 28 New York Times op-ed, Krugman argued that since governments around the world aren't willing to double-down on Keynesian policies meant to stimulate the global economy, the United States and the rest of the world are facing a third depression. But on CNBC's June 28 "The Kudlow Report," host Larry Kudlow asked if Krugman's premise were true, how come none of the measures being applied, which Krugman advocates more of, have failed to have any effect on the current economy.

"Steve Forbes, I want to focus this, coming out of G-20," Kudlow said. "Paul Krugman's remarkable op-ed today in The New York Times - he says, we are already in the early stages of a depression. He calls it the third depression in U.S. history. He says that it's primarily a failure of policy. But, Steve, the so-called spending cuts or tax increases or deficit reduction hasn't happened yet. In the last two years, we've had gargantuan spending and ultra-easy money which is what Professor Krugman has been advocating the whole time. And he still thinks we're in a depression. So I need to ask you, maybe his policies are what threaten the depression."

The left wing seems to know no bounds in its efforts to ideologically cleanse CNN of any seemingly rational point-of-view when it comes to the issues of the day.

Although liberal were successful in their effort to rid the network of Lou Dobbs, some elements are now hung up on also eliminating recently hired contributor Erick Erickson from CNN's programming.

And now a liberal group called Campaign for America's Future (CAF) is attacking CNN for planning to air a documentary called "I.O.U.S.A.: Solutions," suggesting the network is "fanning the flames of deficit hysteria." The group's co-director Roger Hickey is demanding CNN impose a "Fairness Doctrine" on itself.

"This weekend, CNN is giving four hours of free airtime to the leading propagandist fanning the flames of deficit hysteria, Pete Peterson, along with his lackeys," Hickey wrote in an e-mail sent to supporters and also posted on the Huffington Post. "[A]nd if they do go ahead with this programming, tell them to provide balance to Pete Peterson's deficit hysteria. Give equal time to defenders of Social Security, Medicare and public investment."

It reads like an anti-landlord piece from the Great Depression, but left-wing economist Dean Baker is actually trying to force people to become landlords.

Baker wrote an August 20 piece on Commondreams.org urging Congress to eliminate foreclosures and let homeowners live in those houses indefinitely.

You read that right (or left), Baker says the heck with the 5th Amendment protection against being "deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." If someone borrowed too much or won't pay the mortgage, that's OK with Baker, the co-director of the left-wing economic think tank the Center for Economic and Policy Research.