Austan Goolsbee: The Next President's Plan. Finally got to Obama's brief economic agenda today, following pieces from the McCain and Clinton camps the last two days, occasioning last night's post. This one was written by Austan Goolsbee, an economics professor at the University of Chicago serving as Obama's senior economic adviser. It's relatively straightforward and sane, starting with a housing program that would help "low- and middle-income borrowers" to obtain affordable, stable 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, and moving on to a few more issues, like some kind of "infrastructure plan" that would create much needed jobs doing much needed work. Last but not least is providing some real oversight on a financial system that's run amok.

William Greider: Hillary's Economic Plan. Evidently, Clinton's solution is to appoint "an emergency working group on foreclosures" including eminences like Robert Rubin and Alan Greenspan -- i.e., the people who got us into this mess. Conclusion: "There will be no surprises when she gets to the White House. Her long experience tells her to stick with her friends and make the same mistakes her husband made, all over again."

Andrew Leonard: Obama's Plan to Change the Economy. Some info from Obama's Cooper Union speech. Good line on McCain:

The comparison with Senator John McCain's speech on Tuesday could not be more stark. Obama's jibe -- that McCain's "plan . . . amounts to little more than watching this crisis happen," is not off the mark.

The link gets you to an earlier post: "John McCain's plan to ignore the economy."

Paul Krugman: The Age of the Anti-Cassandra. All of Krugman's recent columns are worth reading -- titles include "Betting the Bank," "The B Word," "Partying Like It's 1929," and "Taming the Beast." Good stuff on his blog too, but this one struck me as especially right:

Reading some of today's news, it suddenly struck me: we're living in the age of the anti-Cassandra.

Cassandra had the gift of prophecy -- she saw, correctly, what was coming -- but was under a curse: nobody would believe her.

Today, our public discourse is dominated by people who have been wrong about everything -- but are still, mysteriously, treated as men of wisdom, whose judgments should be believed. Those who were actually right about the major issues of the day can't get a word in edgewise.

What set me off was the matter of Alan Greenspan; as Dean Baker like to remind us, news analyses of the housing and financial crisis almost always draw exclusively on "experts" who first insisted that there wasn't a housing bubble, then insisted that the financial consequences of the bubble's bursting would remain "contained."

It's even worse, of course, on the matter of Iraq: just about every one of the panels convened to discuss the lessons of five disastrous years consisted solely of men and women who cheered the idiocy on.