Thursday Night Links

* ‘Michele Bachmann Pledges to Destroy Economy in First Ad.’

* Rortybomb: Why is the Obama Team Embracing Hooverism?

* Chuck Grassley endorses the constitutional option on the debt ceiling.

* Where was David Foster Wallace going with The Pale King? Two thoughts in the L.A. Times.

* Paradigm shift? All My Children and One Life to Live will survive as Internet shows.

* And the Chicago Tribune is very proud to announce that it tells the truth about climate change 75% of the time. Well done, sirs. Well done.

Saturday Links!

* Krugman: “This is actually a fairly familiar thing from my years as a pundit: the surest way to get branded as not Serious is to figure things out too soon.” Of course this morning he couldn’t resist the opportunity to remind us all he was right about Obama, too.

* Ezra Klein and Steve Benen capture well just how infuriatingly irrational the Republicans are being. Of course, it was obvious from the start that this is what they were planning, so Obama really has no one to blame but himself.

* Good Obama news now: The Department of Justice has filed a brief arguing that DOMA is unconstitutional.

* The Nation reports (shock of shocks) John Lennon was not a closet Republican when he died.

* And io9 has a piece on Robert Kirkman’s next comic project, which focuses on time-travel. These desperate bids for my attention have to stop…

You’re Screwing Everything Up

UPDATE: Leaving aside some room for hope that this is more gimmick than policy, Krugman’s headline says it all: “Obama Liquidates Himself.” Biden’s economic advisor tried to justify the announcement on Maddow last night; video here.

Obama is trying to pivot out of the Scott Brown disaster by embracing Hoovernomics: a three-year aggregate spending freeze that is arguably worse than the across-the-board freeze McCain supported, and Obama campaigned against, in 2008. At least McCain’s version would have frozen the military budget too; this version only cuts the federal spending people actually need. As I tweeted, the only way promising a spending freeze makes sense is if it’s what the House Blue Dogs need to pass health care—and really only then if they all know it’s a lie. If this is intended to be real policy, it’s moronic, and potentially disastrous. 1937 already happened once. The only upside is that the promise barely means anything.

What the hell are these people thinking?

More Michele Bachmann Alternate Universe Woes

More information is coming out about the alternate universe Michele Bachmann comes from: it turns out that in Bachmann’s timeline it was FDR’s Hoot-Smalley tariffs that turned an otherwise run-of-the-mill recession into the Great Depression.

Now, of course, in our universe this was called the Smoot-Hawley Act and it was signed into law in 1929 by Republican President Herbert Hoover. Moreover, here on Earth-1 FDR didn’t even take office until 1933, at which time the Depression was almost four years old.

We’ve got to find some way to send Bachmann back home.

President Lex

Again with the Comics takes a brief look back at the fourth-worst president in American history, President Lex Luthor.