A few weeks back, Glenn Beck suggested that we should put General David Petraeus in charge of oversight for the $700 billion TARP program:

Spencer Ackerman has some related thoughts about counterinsurgency and fiscal stimulus:

Clearly, we’re not facing an insurgent threat in the U.S. that requires COIN tools for remediation and so what I’m saying here is pretty silly and astrategic. But it’s always been weird to hear military officers moot suggestions for dealing with “root causes” of insurgencies by massive government jobs programs, increasing the capacity of the state and so forth, since if you ever suggested in the U.S. that people should deal with crime by, say, getting the goverment to give poor people jobs you’d be considered some sort of squish.

I don’t think it’s all that silly. Both a counterinsurgency and a systemic bank crisis are situation in which standard monetary policy interventions aren’t going to be sufficient to generate job growth. I’m sure Petraeus would have been happy to just have the Iraqi central bank cut interest rates and forget all about the jobs program if there were any chance of that actually working. But it wouldn’t work so we got a big jobs program. And of course there is some precedent — like with the Marshall Plan — of progressive leaders using popular military men to help build support for controversial-but-necessary emergency spending endeavors.

It seems to me that everyone needs to start spending a bit less time focused on McCain-Obama, and a bit more time on the close Senate races. For example, Georgia Senator Saxby Chambliss is up with a new ad trying to link Jim Martin to the congressional Democratic leadership and alleging, among other things, that congressional Democrats have “blocked every effort to regulate subprime lenders.”

This is just made-up nonsense. When the Fed proposed some lax regulations on subprime lenders, Chris Dodd called them inadequate and called for new legislation to put tighter regulations in place. Chuck Schumer offered a bill in March 2007 to regulate subprime lenders. In fact, exactly as you would think it’s conservatives who’ve been blocking regulation, not only opposing federal efforts to crack down on predatory lending, but using federal regulators like the Office of the Comptroller of Currency to prevent states from regulating subprime lenders.

The fact-checking prowess of the local media is often less than it ought to be, but Georgia voters and media outlets need to know that this attack is false.

UPDATE: Note that in April of this year, Chambliss voted to kill Dick Durbin’s amendment that would have allowed bankruptcy judges to help families facing home foreclosure.

Kevin Drum posted this chart earlier today and I think it tells you a lot of what you need to know about our current predicament. Wages for average people are, on some level, the real fundamentals of the economy. And simply put, they haven’t been growing. And yet there’s been all this production. And it’s not as if we’ve been operating as some kind of huge net exporter during this period. All that production’s getting consumed and then a bunch more production is getting consumed. Thanks to an increase in debt and to innovations in debt instruments.

It was typical to hear a little while ago that there couldn’t possibly be anything wrong with the economy because all these people own flat-screen televisions. Now I think we’re seeing that an economy that comes up with new ways to lend average people money is no substitute for an economy that comes up with new ways for average people to earn money.

Denmark is known for its good design, and Copenhagen is one of the world’s great bike commuting cities. At the same time, bike helmets are known for making you look idiotic. So what the world needs is some clever Danish designer to come up with some bike helmets that don’t suck. And here comes Yakkay to the rescue.

Thus far, they don’t seem to have any available in the US. Which is too bad. Also all these helmets seem to be for women. But still, progress!