Topping Congress’s agenda as it returns this week is a plan to “jump-start the economy and try to shorten the slowdown that many economists say has already begun to take hold.”

Today, Rep. Eric Cantor (VA), the chief deputy Republican whip in the House, unveiled his proposal to stimulate the economy. His legislation — the so-called Middle Class Job Protection Act — does nothing for the middle class. Instead, it reduces the corporate tax rate by 28 percent.

At a press conference today unveiling the stimulus proposal, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN) justified the conservative plan to give tax breaks to corporations — instead of working Americans — by arguing that people actually like working long hours:

I am so proud to be from the state of Minnesota. We’re the workingest state in the country, and the reason why we are, we have more people that are working longer hours, we have people that are working two jobs.

Bachmann’s version of the American Dream is apparently working two full-time jobs and struggling to get by.

Yesterday, the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office concluded that corporate tax cuts, such as the one proposed by Cantor, “may be less cost-effective in the short term” and less effective than a stimulus plan consisting of “tax rebates, extended unemployment benefits and a temporary increase in food stamps.”

Bachmann may be taking her cues from her bosom buddy President Bush, who on Feb. 4, 2005, told a divorced mother of three: “You work three jobs? … Uniquely American, isn’t it? I mean, that is fantastic that you’re doing that.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi recently launched an initiative to “Green the Capitol” by selling more locally grown food and requiring the purchase of carbon offsets. In a press conference today, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) vented:

You know, we’re buying carbon credits. It reminds me of the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages when you could buy indulgences. I like the food that we had before. I like real food, food that I can pronounce the name of!

Watch it:

Boehner, a notorious chain smoker, is probably just sore that he’s no longer allowed to light up in the Speaker’s Lobby.

Robert Farley wonders “why isn’t Mitt Romney being treated as the overwhelming frontrunner in the Republican race? He’s won two of the four contests so far, and placed second twice. Moreover, Michigan differs from the other three contests in that it’s inhabited by actual people, twice as many as the other three states combined. He’s also the leader in total money and trails only minor also-ran candidate Rudy Giuliani in cash on hand.”

All true. What’s more, as you’ll see in the chart overhead, he actually has a narrow majority in terms of delegates allocated. The Republican race is by no means over, but Romney unmistakably has the lead. What’s more, Romney seems to me to have the advantage of internal lines in the three-way Huckabee-McCain-Romney battle. McCain’s big hope was to knock Romney out of the race (or, more precisely, to have Mike Huckabee knock Romney out of the race) in order to become the establishment candidate with maverick cred. But having added a solid win in Michigan to his Wyoming pickup, Romney is a clearly a viable candidate for the establishment to back and McCain is back to being a guy who Republicans don’t really like.

I sometimes wonder why political ads are so rarely clever the way, you know, real ads are. Al Franken, naturally enough, is shaking things up:

I don’t really know anything about Franken’s opponent in the primary, so I’d hesitate to say anything substantive about the race but I feel like this kind of innovation is a good thing.

In his new Atlantic article called “After Iraq,” Jeffrey Goldberg recounts how in 2003, after an event on Kurdistan, neoconservative icon Norman Podhoretz, who is America’s foremost proponent of bombing Iran, asked him “What’s a Kurd, anyway?“:

Just before the “Mission Accomplished” phase of the war, I spoke about Kurd­istan to an audience that included Norman Podhoretz, the vicariously martial neoconservative who is now a Middle East adviser to Rudolph Giuliani. After the event, Podhoretz seemed authentically bewildered. “What’s a Kurd, anyway?” he asked me.

(HT: Brendan Nyhan)

Earlier this month, Newsday columnist and Fox News contributor James Pinkerton joined former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee’s presidential campaign as a “senior adviser” who “will work at the intersection of policy and strategic messaging.” Pinkerton, who worked in the White House under presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, says he “felt called” to to join Huckabee’s campaign.

While Pinkerton is considered by some to be a “top-tier rationalist,” he has some policy prescriptions that can only be considered extreme.

Three months before Pinkerton joined the campaign, he recorded an episode of Bloggingheads.tv with Mother Jones editor David Corn. During their conversation, Pinkerton declared that he would handle “American Muslims” by putting “a cop in front of every mosque” in America:

PINKERTON: You asked me what I would do about American Muslims. Answer is I’d put a cop in front of every mosque until I was completely satisfied nothing was going on there.

CORN: You’d put a cop in front of every mosque?

PINKERTON: That’s what I said. [...]

CORN: I mean, do you have any proof that every mosque deserves a cop in front of it?

PINKERTON: I said, I would put one in there just for safe keeping all the way around.

Invasive punitive treatment of a religious minority is not the only outrageous idea Pinkerton has put forth over the years. Here are a few more examples:

- In a 2005 column, Pinkerton advocated genocide in Iraq, writing that America can make “anti-American violence in Iraq end” by unleashing “the Shia Arab Muslims and the Kurds to finish the job, all the way to the bloody extreme.”

- On Fox News in June 2006, Pinkerton complained about people who feel the “military needs to be carefully restrained with legal rules and procedures,” exclaiming “I’d rather lose our civil liberties than lose the war.”

- In December 2006, Pinkerton argued that “proximity to Mexico is at least partly to blame” for corruption in Texas.

- In September 2007, Pinkerton warned in the American Conservative of “Muslimization,” concluding that “to keep the peace, we must separate our civilizations.”

As Corn writes on his CQ Politics blog, Pinkerton’s new role as a “senior adviser” to a top presidential candidate raises important questions. For instance, “is Pinkerton now advising Huckabee to call for police surveillance of every mosque in the nation?”

UPDATE: As a note, Pinkerton “resigned as a Fox News contributor and gave up” his column when he took the position with the Huckabee campaign.

Jon Chait, like me, is a Mitt Romney fan. The key bits:

Last year, The Boston Globe obtained his campaign strategy document laying out what it called “Primal Code for Brand Romney.” “Primal” is a perfect description for Romney’s view of the GOP base. He approaches conservatism not as a respectable ideology but as a series of (in Lionel Trilling’s famous phrase) irritable mental gestures. The strategy memo suggests he drive home the message “Hillary = France.” Romney has promised to “double Guantanamo” and demanded that Mike Huckabee apologize for criticizing President Bush’s foreign policy. This is like a Hollywood parody of a right-wing Republican–think “Bob Roberts,” or Tom Cruise’s character in Lions for Lambs–but more clever.

If Romney’s public sentiments were more intelligent than this, I’d fear he actually believed it. Giuliani’s conservatism, to offer up one contrast, is intelligent enough for me to think he genuinely buys into it but still dumb enough for me to fear for the future of our country if he manages to win the election. The mindless tribalism of Romney’s pandering is paradoxically reassuring. The form his pandering takes is a measure of the contempt in which he holds the electorate in general and Bush-era Republicans in particular. I share his sentiments completely.

Right. I don’t think one should delude oneself into thinking that Romney is a secret liberal or would become one in office, but he’s a careful, calculating guy. No furtive motions. Rudy Giuliani’s not as right-wing on some issues, but he’s bonkers on others. John McCain, as I’ve said, is flighty — he flip-flops for no good reason, takes up policy positions as a way to prosecute grudges, and loves war. Huckabee’s bonkers. In this GOP field, Romney would be the least-bad president.