Somehow New York Times columnist Paul Krugman seems a terrible subject for a song.

Yet, Loudon Wainwright III, who admits to being a Times fan, performed "The Krugman Blues" in New York's Madison Square Park a few weeks ago:

I read the New York Times, that's where I get the news. Paul Krugman's on the Op Ed page, that's where I get the blues.  

In Wainwright's view, given the current state of the economy, "I guess that I identify with that pissed off look on [Krugman's] face" (video embedded below the fold):

"Politicians of both parties stray. The Democrats actually seem to punish their strayers more harshly."

So said -- with a straight face no less! -- the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman on Sunday's "This Week."

Even more laughable, for at least the third time in so many days, former Clinton advisor, and current "This Week" host, George Stephanopoulos agreed.

Make sure there isn't any food or drink in your mouth before you proceed (video available here, relevant section at 18:10):

Friday's column by New York Times alleged economics columnist Paul Krugman, "The Big Hate," is a quintessential example of his modus operandi: Parrot the left-wing blog argument of the day in slightly varnished form in the august pages of the nation's most influential newspaper.

The text box works as a topic sentence: "The conservative establishment and right-wing extremism." He warned that right-wingers might be readying a terrorist attack like Oklahoma City, and that people like Rush Limbaugh would be at least partly to blame.

Krugman's thesis: Remember that notorious report issued by the Dept. of Homeland Security that vaguely tarred anyone active in conservative causes like abortion or immigration as potential extremists? Well, it's now been vindicated by the actions of two "right-wing" gunmen, the murderers of abortionist George Tiller and Holocaust Museum guard Stephen Tyrone Johns.

It's hard to find an upside to the continuous drumbeat of bad economic news. But on April 7, MSNBC host and Obama cheerleader Rachel Maddow felt compelled to try.

"There is a silver lining here, maybe," Maddow said. "As horrible as the jobs numbers are and as pessimistic as executives across the country appear to be - Americans broadly speaking are actually sort of increasingly optimistic these days."

Maddow cited a New York Times/CBS poll that indicated more Americans think the United States is heading in the right direction, the number who think the economy is getting worse has decreased and more are thinking the bank bailout will help "all Americans" - all of this occurring since President Barack Obama was sworn in back in January.

Just a few short months ago, New York Times' liberal economics columnist Paul Krugman had high hopes for new President Obama and urged him to act like "Franklin Delano" Roosevelt.

But even the billions of dollars in government spending to fix the financial crisis, efforts to limit executive compensation and the recent ouster of General Motors CEO haven't pacified Krugman.

According to Newsweek's cover story for April 6, "Paul Krugman has emerged as Obama's toughest liberal critic." Evan Thomas' story glorified Krugman and asked "why the establishment worries that he may be right."

Thomas kindly described Krugman as "an unusual mix, at once nervous, shy, sweet and fiercely sure of himself." He also pinpointed Krugman's ideology as that of a "European Social Democrat."

Talk about unintended consequences. All this populist anger ginned up by congressional Democrats, the media and the Obama administration is going to hinder the Treasury Department's strategy to rescue the banking system.

Paul Krugman, the liberal New York Times columnist and winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics explained to Bloomberg News on March 24 that this is just what is happening.

According to Krugman, the backlash caused by bailed-out American International Group (AIG)  compensation debacle and efforts by Congress to limit other expenditures - private jets, office redecorations, salaries, etc. - is causing otherwise healthy financial institutions to shy away from accepting and keeping Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) money from the federal government.

Mark March 21, 2009, as the day pigs flew and hell froze over: the shamelessly liberal New York Times columnist Paul Krugman actually criticized the Obama administration.

I kid you not.

Unfortunately, he did so at his blog at the New York Times website, which means far fewer people will see his critique than if it had been published in print.

But as it seems foolish to look a gift horse in the mouth on such an auspicious occasion, let us be thankful for small mercies (h/t Hot Air headlines):

How often do you see someone on television deride media darlings Al Gore and Paul Krugman in virtually the same sentence?

Not often, right?

Well, on Monday's "Situation Room," CNN contributor Alex Castellanos deliciously did exactly that, and actually evoked some nervous laughter from studio members (video available here, partial transcript follows):

Don't like the notion of Wall Street employees receiving bonuses? Shoot the messenger - as Adam Green at The Huffington Post has done.

In a Feb. 2 post on The Huffington Post, Green said it was bad form for CNBC "Street Signs" host Erin Burnett to even think about considering the other side of the anti-Wall Street bonus argument, since some Wall Street banks received TARP funds, courtesy of the taxpayer.

"There are, though - well, how should we say this - the taxpayer money is not being used to pay the bonuses," Burnett explained on NBC's Feb. 1 "Meet the Press." "I think people could understand if you work for a company - right? If the three of us worked for a company, your guests, and I lost $10 billion but Steve [Forbes] over there, he made a billion dollars. So overall the company actually loses money, but Steve went and did his very darndest for that company and he made money. So should he be paid for his work? That's essentially what we're talking about here."

At the same time NBC's Brian Williams and Andrea Mitchell were drinking and snacking at a D.C. event hosted by Fox News honoring Brit Hume’s career on Thursday night, Keith Olbermann was busy insulting and demeaning him.

Olbermann couldn’t stand the idea that anyone would claim that the New Deal failed to end the Depression: "Also, did you know everybody now agrees the New Deal failed, everybody. Apparently, Brit Hume held a vote. It was unanimous, FDR sucked, ahead in Worst Persons." Hume came in third in that night's Worst Person in the World contest:

The bronze to Brit Hume of Fox Noise, now in the rewriting history department over there. "Everybody agrees, I think, on both sides of the spectrum now that the New Deal failed. The debate is over why it failed." Sure. Everybody, except the most recent Nobel Prize laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, who just wrote that the New Deal`s long term achievements remain the bedrock of our nation`s economic stability, and except for probably a majority of economists, economic professors. But Brit Hume agrees with Brit Hume. That will show that damn Roosevelt.

Nobel laureate on arcane trade matters, former Enron adviser, and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman is at it again.

In his latest Times column ("The Obama Gap"), he chides President-elect Barack Obama for not being ambitious enough in his stimulus plan, and, heaven forbid, for including tax cuts in the mix. He complains that Obama is only committing to much less than half of what's necessary.

Brace yourself:

Has Paul Krugman become print's version of Keith Olbermann?

After you read his column published by the New York Times Friday in which he called Republicans "a party of whiners" that forty years ago "decided, in effect, to make itself the party of racial backlash," there may be little doubt.

Readers are advised to strap themselves in tightly, for Krugman appears to have woken up New Year's day with a vicious hangover, and the target of his disaffection was anyone with an "R" next to his or her name (emphasis added):

On Sunday’s Face the Nation on CBS, fill-in host Chip Reid discussed the economic crisis with left-wing economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, wondering: "I know you've been arguing for a more progressive government for a long time and obviously at difficult times like this, I don't want to suggest that a recession is a good thing. But if looking back at this five years, or some number of years, from now, can you envision a country that is better off because of how it responded to this recession?"

In response, Krugman explained: "Well, if you believe, as I do, that we need a stronger social safety net, that we need universal healthcare, then the revelation of just how vulnerable we are when things go wrong is going to help." Krugman went on to praise the New Deal: "We came out of the New Deal, we came out of the 1930s, as a better country, a middle class country, where we had been in the Gilded Age. We came out as a country that took better care of its citizens."

The proposed automaker bailout has a big stamp on it that says "union-built," but the news media hasn't noticed.

Over the past month, accusations have been flying against several Southern senators who oppose a $14 billion bailout for the beleaguered big three automakers and support the the alternative of Chapter 11 bankruptcy. These senators, critics say, are representing the interests of foreign automakers that donate heavily to their campaigns. But what has been largely ignored is the other side of the equation - the influence of the United Auto Workers (UAW) on the members of Congress that voted for the bailout. 

According to campaign finance data from the Center for Responsive Politics Web site OpenSecrets.org, when broken down by how members of Congress voted, for the 2008 election cycle the UAW gave more than eight times as much in campaign cash to members that voted for the bailout than those that voted against it -- $1.14 million to proponents versus just $136,500 that voted against it.

As Americans across the fruited plain worry about their jobs and how they're going to make ends meet during the current recession, Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman showed Sunday morning just how separated from reality and the common man he actually is.

Appearing on ABC's "This Week," the New York Times columnist said that he wasn't worried about how expensive president-elect Barack Obama's economic rescue plan might get, but instead that the problem will be "finding enough stuff to spend on."

How'd you like to have that problem this holiday season?

With total disregard for what Americans are going through, and an almost unthinkable ignorance of the government's current budget, Krugman responded to host George Stephanopoulos's question about whether he's sticking to the $600 billion economic recovery spending projection he offered on the program a month ago:

How about Sean Hannity as editor of the New York Times op-ed page?  Maybe O'Reilly and Cavuto in place of Dowd and Krugman as Times columnists?  It might not be as far-fetched as it sounds.  At least, not if Michael Wolff is right.  The Vanity Fair media maven, appearing on CNBC this afternoon, not only said that Rupert Murdoch wants the Gray Lady, but predicted he would get her.  [H/t Gat.]

View video here [via CNBC].

MICHAEL WOLFF: I think that everybody is looking at [the NYT] and waiting for it to kind of go over a brink, to run out of cash, which they're in the process of doing. Or to find itself in a situation where actually, and this is really the key thing, they go looking for a buyer.

A bit later, Wolff, author of a book on Murdoch, mentioned his name as a likely buyer . . .

If print is becoming journalism's dying backwater, Paul Krugman isn't showing it.

In a Dec. 6 interview in Stockholm, Sweden, the Nobel Prize-winning New York Times columnist told the ironically named Adam Smith, editor-in-chief of Nobelprize.org, that he found himself more effective in his role at the Times lately He said he was more influential in shaping policy as a journalist than he would be in a high-ranking position on the Obama economic team.

"I like to think I'm a good analyst," Krugman said. "But, I don't think I'm a good bureaucrat of any kind. I might think differently if I wasn't at the Times, but as it is I have a mouthpiece, people are listening. I probably can have as much influence, as say on the shape of this upcoming economic stimulus package from where I am as I could if I were, you know, the third-ranking member of the Obama economics team - something like that, so I think it's probably as good of position as any."

Doesn't it amaze you when some liberal media member actually claims that raising taxes is good for the economy, and uses the Clinton Era to prove his or her specious point?

Such transpired Tuesday afternoon when CNBC's Trish Regan invited liberal columnist David Sirota on to discuss president-elect Barack Obama's plans to get the economy rolling again.

True to the liberal motif, Sirota spoke fiscal and economic non sequiturs that only the deluded and/or uneducated could possibly agree with (video embedded right):

The Associated Press can't even get it right in a three-paragraph item about a White House ceremonial event.

In a story Monday afternoon about President Bush's meeting with two Nobel Prize-winning scientists and Nobel Economics winner Paul Krugman, the unbylined AP writer claimed that Krugman opposed the government's financial bailout. Evidence abounds that this is not only not the case, but that Krugman wants the bailouts to be bigger, and to involve more direct government ownership.

Here are the first and third paragraphs from the story (link probably will not work after about a week):

Three 2008 Nobel laureates from the United States lined up with President George W. Bush on Monday for an Oval Office photograph to mark their achievements.

..... The third laureate at the White House was Paul Krugman of New York, who won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for his work on international trade patterns. Krugman, a frequent critic of the Bush administration who opposed the recent $700 billion financial bailout, is a Princeton University professor and New York Times columnist.

Since Krugman's supposed opposition may become folklore shortly, it's best to take a cruise through Krugman's blog posts to show that the claim is terribly outdated and currently flat-out wrong:

Paul Krugman has been making the rounds of the network morning shows, urging the government to "go big" in spending to revive the economy.  His only concern is that Obama might not be planning to spend enough.  Heck, even FDR wasn't a big enough spender in his book.  View Krugman's weekend GMA appearance in which he says that here, the episode in which, as discussed here, Krugman of all people had to talk Kate Snow down from her fantasy of Obama "forcing" the Bush administration to adopt his policies.

None of the network shows had anyone on to debate Krugman.  But the Early Show did invite Jim Rogers in today to give very much the other side.  The legendary investor's take: let the banks fail.  The massive bailout underway will put our country in hock for decades.  Almost 20 years later, Japan has still been unable to get out of the hole it dug when it, like the US now, decided certain institutions were too big to fail.

On Monday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Maggie Rodriguez asked liberal economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman about Barack Obama’s proposed stimulus package: "What about the $500 billion economic stimulus plan that President-elect Obama is planning? Do you think it's realistic to get that done in two years?" Not only was Krugman in favor of the plan, but he argued: "I'm actually worried that this plan may be too small... I'm still worrying that they're going to be a little bit short, because you just have to put all your notions of what is prudent aside. Being cautious is actually a very foolish thing right now."

Rodriguez’s discussion with Krugman was preceded by a fawning report by correspondent Dean Reynolds on Obama’s economic plan: "Well, the incoming administration is making it abundantly clear that it plans an active multi-billion dollar approach to kick-starting the economy. As one top economic adviser to Barack Obama put it, the era of dithering is over." Reynolds continued by declaring: "...with the actions taken so far to stem the tide proving to be totally ineffective, the incoming administration is setting the table for a long struggle to make things right."

In an MSM eager for the advent of the Age of Obama, Kate Snow may have taken the cake.  The weekend GMA co-host almost sounded as if she were calling for some kind of coup d'etat, musing whether Obama should be urgently "forcing" change before he takes office. How over the top was Snow?  She had to be talked down from her fin de regime fantasy but none other than . . . Paul Krugman.

ABC reporter John Hendren set the tone for the notion that time is dangerously a-wasting.

JOHN HENDREN: As with Hoover and FDR, the ideological gap between Bush and Obama could be too broad to bridge, leaving us with two more months of costly economic drift.

A little later, interviewing Krugman, Snow made her startling suggstion.

It appears being bestowed a Nobel Prize for economics doesn't improve one's economic acumen, for in the course of roughly 60 seconds Sunday, Paul Krugman said Franklin D. Roosevelt's decision to raise taxes in 1937 deepened the Depression, but it's okay to raise taxes 70-plus years later when the economy is in trouble.

Interesting contradiction, wouldn't you agree?

What precipitated this bizarre, almost instantaneous economic flipflop on Sunday's "This Week" was ABC's George Will bringing up a little history by stating that net investment was negative throughout most of the 1930s because of the uncertainties about the economy and government's activist role during that period.

Nobel Laureate Krugman took issue with this premise (video embedded below the fold, relevant section at 6:57): 

The Nobel hasn't conferred any classiness on Paul Krugman.  Dancing on the GOP's grave this morning in his NYT column, the newly-minted laureate impugns the party of Lincoln as "a haven for racists and reactionaries."

According to Krugman [file photo], tomorrow's election will purge the Republican congressional delegation of some of its more moderate members, leaving it even more "extreme."

The only evidence Krugman adduces in support of his Republican-are-racists slur is that GOP Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia "observing large-scale early voting by African-Americans, warns his supporters that 'the other folks are voting.'”  Where's the racism, given that 90+% of African-Americans are expected to vote for Obama and presumably for Chambliss's Dem opponent?

View video after the jump of Joe Scarborough on today's Morning Joe ripping Krugman as a "shrill, silly, partisan cartoon-character" who takes his cues from the left-wing kookasphere.

I'm guessing that Paul Krugman and David Brooks don't hang out that much together.  So when both turn up on the New York Times op-ed page this morning with columns calling for massive government spending, I'm assuming they came to their conclusions independently.  My working hypothesis: if Krugman and Brooks agree on something this important, they must be wrong.

Here's Krugman's prescription, which comes in response to news that consumer spending has dropped sharply [emphasis added throughout]:

[W]hat the economy needs now is something to take the place of retrenching consumers. That means a major fiscal stimulus. And this time the stimulus should take the form of actual government spending rather than rebate checks that consumers probably wouldn’t spend.

Let’s hope, then, that Congress gets to work on a package to rescue the economy as soon as the election is behind us.

From Brooks:

On Tuesday’s CBS Early Show, co-host Harry Smith talked to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani and asked about negative attacks in the campaign: "Alright, one of the things that's happened in the McCain campaign over the last couple of days is the personal attacks seem to have at least subsided or quieted down a little bit. Do you think, in the long run, this might actually have been a fatal wound to the McCain-Palin campaign?" Giuliani responded: "I think there's a tendency on the media to blame it more on John McCain and Sarah Palin than on Barack Obama and his campaign but, to me, it's -- you know it's been coming from both sides." To that, Smith sarcastically replied: "Yeah, it's got to be the media's fault." Giuliani laughed and added: "Don't be defensive, Harry."

This is the not the first time Smith has denied Giuliani’s charges of media bias. On September 12, Giuliani criticized the media for attacking Sarah Palin’s experience but not applying similar scrutiny to Barack Obama: "The whole issue of whether she knows world affairs or not, these are questions that were never asked of Barack Obama, never asked of him to this day." Smith angrily denied any such bias: "That's not true. That's not true...That's not true. That is absolutely not true...That is absolutely not true. Those -- all those questions have been asked over the last 19 months." However, Smith himself conducted eight interviews with Obama and only asked two foreign policy questions of the inexperienced Senator.

On what should be the crowning day of his professional career, one hopes for his sake that Paul Krugman wasn't watching Morning Joe.  For news of his economics Nobel was met by the crew with ridicule that even Mika Brzezinski couldn't resist.  Andrea Mitchell tried to uphold the Krugman honor, but—as seen in the screencap—even she couldn't suppress a smile at the award's arrant absurdity.

Joe Scarborough piqued Mika's curiosity with his teasing of the news, while guest Jim Cramer saw the award as confirmation that America is well on the way to socialism.

View video here.