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In 2003, when the deficit was $377 billion, Rep. Barney Frank said Bush's dividend tax cut would have "negative long-term effects on the deficit," and that deficits "are over the long term a negative for the economy."

But just the other day, as the deficit has reached $455 billion and could go to $800 billion next year, Frank said: "I think at this point there needs to be a focus on an immediate increase in spending, and I think this is a time when deficit fear has to take a second seat."

An even more notable switcheroo is New York Times columnist, Democratic mouthpiece and freshly minted Nobel laureate Paul Krugman. In column after column from 2001-2003 he denounced the Bush tax cuts for leading to "skyrocketing budget deficits."

About-face! A week and a half ago Krugman wrote: "What we need right now is more government spending. . . . Now is not the time to worry about the deficit."

But let's not be too hard on Frank, Krugman and their ilk. They are giddily anticipating a President Obama and expanded Democratic majorities in Congress. For the first time in almost three decades a liberal wish list of government spending can finally be enacted. Why let a little thing like the deficit get in the way?

Liberals say new spending is necessary for the economy. "This is a time for a very important kind of dose of Keynesianism," says Frank. Krugman thinks "temporary" spending is good "to fight a recession."

Don't believe it. Government can only spend what it drains from the job-producing private sector. And "temporary" government spending is like a unicorn — it doesn't exist.

Ultimately, higher deficits will lead to higher taxes. According to Frank, "Later on, there should be tax increases . . . there are a lot of very rich people out there we can tax at a point down the road and recover some of this money."

Joe Biden says he's going to take pensions away from CEOs. You think that's great, huh? Well, they're coming for your 401(k) next. Congressional Democrats want to end their tax deductibility, take it away, and control it.

WSJ: Eyeing Your Pension -- Are 401(k)s Safe from Congressional Democrats?

Market drops on fear of Obama presidency. The markets and businesses live in reality, not the fantasy world of Obama as The One.

The very GOP moderates who said we had to pick McCain and dump conservatism -- guys like Scott McClellan, Colin Powell, William Weld, etc. -- jumped ship to Obama. Good riddance! Stay with the Democrats.

Charles Krauthammer Nails It: Why I'm voting for McCain

Media spins innocent Lieberman quote to humiliate Palin

Light at the end of the housing tunnel?

Frank: Agree to stimulus now or watch us throw money away later

John McCain has apparently decided to make the divided-government argument in the final ten days.  This could be Exhibit A.  Without a check on a Democratic Congress in the White House, Frank and his allies will run wild on spending, creating massive new entitlements and government works programs, pulling capital out of the markets to fund it.  Instead of having a chance at reforming Social Security and especially Medicare, they’ll busily create an even bigger economic disaster.

Republicans need to defiantly answer Frank’s extortion by running this threat in ads for the next 10 days in every close Congressional race.  They need to ask voters whether they want to put government in the hands of people who want to take even more of their money to make government even bigger than it is now.  If nothing else, it prepares the ground for 2010 and the next midterms.

Update: How will they pay for it all?  Frank suggests a 25% reduction in defense spending — while we’re at war.

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.) said Democrats will push for a stimulus package after the November election, and called for a package reducing defense spending by 25 percent while saying Congress will "eventually" raise taxes.

If Republicans continue to resist, said Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., Democrats are likely to rejoin the issue in January, when they expect party standard bearer Barack Obama to take the oath of office as president.

"There's no question the House will pass ... a much bigger (stimulus plan) than we passed before," Frank said of a postelection lame duck session. "If enough Republicans in the Senate decide to filibuster it ... then we'll just wait until January."

Krauthammer’s endorsement

Charles Krauthammer hasn’t been the happiest of conservatives in this race, but he still understands the vital interests at stake in the election.  Unlike some other conservatives who have decided to issue endorsements out of spite, Krauthammer backs the man who has annoyed him at several points in this election.  He also reminds people that the Presidency isn’t a beauty or popularity contest — or at least it shouldn’t be:

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.? A man who’s been cramming on these issues for the past year, who’s never had to make an executive decision affecting so much as a city, let alone the world? A foreign policy novice instinctively inclined to the flabbiest, most vaporous multilateralism (e.g., the Berlin Wall came down because of “a world that stands as one”), and who refers to the most deliberate act of war since Pearl Harbor as “the tragedy of 9/11,” a term more appropriate for a bus accident?

Or do you want a man who is the most prepared, most knowledgeable, most serious foreign policy thinker in the United States Senate? A man who not only has the best instincts but has the honor and the courage to, yes, put country first, as when he carried the lonely fight for the surge that turned Iraq from catastrophic defeat into achievable strategic victory?

Krauthammer scoffs at the notion, floated by both Colin Powell and Christopher Buckley, that people should vote for Obama because of McCain’s campaigning:

Nor will I countenance the “dirty campaign” pretense. The double standard here is stunning. Obama ran a scurrilous Spanish-language ad falsely associating McCain with anti-Hispanic slurs. Another ad falsely claimed that McCain supports “cutting Social Security benefits in half.” And for months Democrats insisted that McCain sought 100 years of war in Iraq.

McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

There has been a huge double standard in the “offensive campaigning” reporting, and Krauthammer doesn’t mention the worst of it.  Barack Obama and his campaign surrogates have openly called McCain, the RNC, and Republicans racists for opposing him.  These statements were blatant, explicit, made repeatedly, and utterly false. With the exception of one time each by the Washington Post and ABC News (on their blogs), the media did nothing to expose this tactic by Obama and his campaign employed on these occasions

Krauthammer calls Obama’s foreign-policy instincts “flabby”, but we can apply that to the thinking of other conservatives who have endorsed Obama.  Ken Adelman followed Christopher Buckley in engaging in little more than wishing on a birthday candle that Obama will become more conservative once he wins the election.  Neither of them gave any evidence to believe that Obama would do so.  Instead of treating this election as a choice between a centrist and a hard-Left ideologue, Adelman and Buckley indulged in spite over their distaste for McCain and wound up making fools of themselves.

Video: Rush on polling

Rush Limbaugh spoke to the Fox & Friends hosts this morning to discuss polling and the state of the race.  Rush argues that pollsters want to shape opinion rather than measuring it, especially media-sponsored polls.  Why?  To produce a steady drumbeat of pessimism for Republicans:

Transcript via TV Eyes:

STEVE DOOCY: let’s ask rush limbaugh. he’s out there somewhere in t.v. land.

RUSH LIMBAUGH: in the sunny climate of florida, good to be with you.

KILMEADE: congratulations on the 20 years a lot of people are saying the distance senator mccain is from senator obama is the same thing al gore was from governor bush at the time. do you see a lot of similarities there?

LIMBAUGH: i heard you talking about the polls just a minute ago with chris wallace. you know me. i have a more cynical view of people than the drive-by media. the drive-by media do these polls and whether it is a presidential poll or an opinion of the american people on anything, we all know these polls are used to shape opinion, not reflect it, but now we’re getting to the point where in all these pollsters have their credibility to be concerned about and they want to be right at the end of the day, and i think that’s why with a couple of exceptions you’re seeing a lot of polls tighten now, because the race is tight. it’s not over. nationally, of course, is one thing. you do have the battleground states to be concerned about. it’s not looking bad for mccain out there. i don’t think this is anywhere near over. there is an onslaught in the media to make it seem like this has been long ago over. i think the purpose of that is to suppress and depress republicans and their vote turnout.

CARLSON: so you talk about shaping voters’ minds and that’s something we were discussing earlier, what the polls actually do, because who wants to go out and vote for a loser, right?

LIMBAUGH: precisely. it’s — the media coverage of obama in this campaign, this is the most irresponsible journalistic exhibition i have seen in my life. i’m 57 years old. they’ve always been liberal and they’ve always been biased but i have never seen them in the tank like this, and i think the purpose of that, they’re doing two things. they know there is a new media out there and there is a competition and they are trying to show themselves they can still move public opinion and get the country they want. now they’re not even hiding the bias. they’re profoundly in the tank, and the purpose is, i think, to really depress people into thinking this is over, that mccain has no prayer.

DOOCY: when you talk about shaping opinion, historically, newspapers do it on the opinion page, well, today in the pages of “”the new york times”" the old gray lady, she is endorsing barack obama, the same day a poll comes out from the times where they have got barack obama up by 13 points. we have talked to pollsters that say you can effectively drive a poll toward the answer you want, the result you want, you think “”the new york times”" is doing something like that here?

LIMBAUGH: two things about the times. it’s classic that yesterday standard & poor’s officially proclaimed “”the new york times”" as junk on the day they endorsed the messiah, the lord barack obama the most merciful. number two, why is “”the new york times”" junk? why is their advertising revenue down? why is their pages down, their circulation down? it’s because they’re no longer “”the new york times”". they are the public relations department for the public relations department of the barack obama campaign and the democratic party.

KILMEADE: if john mccain was to have two themes in the final 11 days, what would they be?

LIMBAUGH: this is about the economy right now, guys. people do not care about the ancillary things about obama. it’s sad. i wish we could make them care about wright and william ayers. i think obama is the radical in this group. i think obama moved to chicago and found those people. he didn’t arrive as a waif and these people found him. he is a radical and he has a lot of bitterness about race in this country, but this is about the economy, and the thing that really frustrates me, you guys, is this economy is directly traceable to the democrat party. they can find a republican that is responsible for this, they would have strung him up and had him in congressional hearings for the last two months. this fannie mae and freddie mac thing is directly traceable to bill clinton and barney frank. mccain will not criticize democrats because he is afraid it will make independents mad. that’s maddening. the idea that independents get mad at partisanship on the republican side and defect to the most partisan, mean-spirited extremist democratic party in my lifetime is just absurd. if he can’t tie the democrats to this economic mass, because right now bush is being blamed for it, that means the republicans and it is a sitting duck, you guys. he could have done this a month ago, six weeks ago, but he just for some reason doesn’t want to go. he wants to go pop list and blame wall street greed, which is what obama’s doing, so big difference.

CARLSON: mccain gave an interview yesterday where he did pretty much president bush and try to distance himself. finally, during the third debate, he turned to barack obama and said i am not george bush. if you wanted to run against him, you should have run four years ago.

LIMBAUGH: gretchen, you keep mentioning things that frustrate me. there is no reason to run around yesterday and talk about how, you know, the bush administration goofed things up. that’s just agreeing with obama. obama is the opponent here, not george w. bush. mccain’s problem is consistency. when he finally named dodd and barney frank at one of these cam aign appearances in waukesha, wisconsin, everyone thought he was on message, and the next day he is dissing bush. he hasn’t been consistent. he has to get consistent. we can drag him across the finish line, guys. we can do this.

KILMEADE: rush, let’s go back to the new york times who has a big article about acorn. yeah, we told you we registered 1.3 million but that was exaggerated, closer to a half a million. it sounds like spin coming out of the new york times to explain, hey, a lot of people have been worried about voter fraud. don’t worry about it.

LIMBAUGH: of course they’re going to say don’t worry about democrat vote are fraud and they’re going to try to downplay this, but i think, look, my reaction to this is why does obama have cheat? if this is in the bag, why does he have to spend any more ad money? why does he have to go to the battleground states? if this is in the bag, why does this stuff have to happen? it is no, sir what it appears to be. there is a false reality being presented and people have got to get a grip.

DOOCY: congratulations on 20 years, rush.

LIMBAUGH: thanks, guys.

KILMEADE: rush limbaugh, thank you very much for joining us.

Rush nails two points solidly in this interview. First, McCain needs to abandon the Ayers line of attack right now, not because it’s somehow out of bounds, but because right now people just don’t care.  He has ten days to make his message resonate, and he has to speak to voter concerns.  Thankfully, that’s exactly what McCain has done, with ads on Joe the Plumber and hammering Obama on his tax-and-spend proclivities.  He’s also been given a gift from Joe the Gaffemaster on national security, and both McCain and Palin have made that a strong theme in the closing days.

On polls and pessimism, Rush is dead on target.  Those of us who watched the Star Tribune’s MinnPoll noticed this same dynamic every race.  It would run heavily towards the Democrats until the last two iterations, when suddenly the race “tightened”.  That’s why the Times and CBS (and others) publish polls with ridiculous gaps of 14 and 16 points in party identification — because most people won’t check the samples or the methodology.  They want to create a story line that generates pessimism in Republicans and depress turnout, which then makes the polls a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Without exception, polls “tighten” in the final days of an election.  Is that a true indication of voter loyalty transitioning — or just an attempt by pollsters to get their last polls close enough to claim better accuracy afterwards?

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"Coverage of McCain has been heavily unfavorable — and has become more so over time," says a Pew Research Center Project for Excellence in Journalism study that looked at newspapers and cable news shows from the end of the conventions to the last presidential debate. Coverage of Obama, naturally, was much more positive than negative or neutral. His ratio of favorable stories to overall stories was more than 2 1/2 times as large as McCain's.

The second most unfavorable coverage went not to McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, but to Obama's, Joe Biden. "Limited coverage" of the Delaware senator "was far more negative than Palin's, and nearly as negative as McCain's." The small sample size makes any conclusion irrelevant, though.

The study called Biden "nearly the invisible man" because he's been largely ignored. In our view, his frequent gaffes should earn him extended negative coverage, but he's gotten a pass. Scornful reporting is reserved for Republicans such as Palin, who got bad press in 39% of the stories about her. Only 28% were positive, a third neutral.

Despite the one-sided coverage in favor of their party, some Democrats won't be happy until they have shut down any opposition and shredded the First Amendment. Among them is Sen. Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico, who shares his party's eagerness to reinstate the clearly unconstitutional Fairness Doctrine. This is the Federal Communications Commission rule that once required broadcasters to give equal time to all sides on public issues.

"My thought is that radio and media generally should have a higher calling than just to reflect a particular point of view," Bingaman recently told an Albuquerque radio station, apparently forgetting that the rule of law and America's foundational documents are our guiding principles, not what he thinks.

Should Obama be elected and the Democrats gain large majorities in both congressional chambers, we expect the Fairness Doctrine, scrapped in 1987, to be resurrected.

To paraphrase a note from one of our contributors: Who knew the Democrats were closet totalitarians? We'll all know, however, when constitutionally guaranteed free speech is snuffed out.

Can one imagine "Saturday Night Live" doing weekly send-ups of Michelle Obama and her "I've never been proud" of my country, this "just downright mean" America, using a black comedienne to mimic and mock her voice and accent?

"Saturday Night Live" would be facing hate-crime charges.

As usual, Biskupic relies almost entirely on political labels—“moving the Supreme Court to the right”, “liberal wing” and “conservative wing”, “ultraconservative”, “split on social policy issues”—that obscure from the reader the grand divide between those justices on the “liberal wing” who seek to recast their preferred policies in the guise of constitutional rights and those on the “conservative wing” who recognize that the Constitution largely leaves issues to the democratic processes to be decided by the people’s representatives in the state legislatures and in Congress.

Moreover, Biskupic misuses her political labels.  She tells us that “conservative justices have a slight edge”   and that Justice Kennedy is “conservative but sometimes forms a majority with the liberals.”  “Sometimes”?  Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Lawrence v. Texas, Boumediene, Rasul, Hamdan, Lee v. Weisman, the various Eighth Amendment/death penalty cases, to name just a few off the top of my head. 

Biskupic also risibly states that if “Democrats make significant headway in the Senate,” Obama “might have the leeway to push through a relatively liberal nominee.”  I doubt very much that anyone whom Obama nominates will be only “relatively liberal” (except to those who consider Justice Kennedy a conservative).  More importantly, it will likely be very easy for Obama to get a hard-left nominee confirmed.