A CHANGE OF PLANS may be in order.

EUGENE ROBINSON: “Extend the tax cuts for the richest Americans - in fact, make them permanent. Doing so would increase the deficit by $700 billion over the next decade, but this doesn't matter.”

Yeah, why give them the $700 billion? They’ll just waste it jet-setting it around the globe. Never mind that someone has to build those corporate jets - and fuel them, and fly them, and maintain them, and ....

THERE GOES THE NEIGHBORHOOD: Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson joins Pulitzer board.

SARAH PALIN’S MEANEST CRITICS: The conservative elite. Colbert I. King would have been on to something if he’d just replaced the single word “conservative” with the phrase “self-appointed establishment.” The rest of his opinion piece is true of both political establishments, and is the reason many of them soon will be gone.

SAVE OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY by challenging him on the left.

The basic platform for such a candidate is clear:

Unequivocally call for an immediate end to the presence of U.S. troops, advisers and private U.S.-based security firms in Afghanistan, Iraq and Pakistan, and replace the "war on terror" with a Global Marshall Plan that roots homeland security in a strategy of generosity and concern for the well-being of everyone on the planet.

Domestically, call for a massive jobs program; a freeze on mortgage foreclosures; a national bank that would offer interest-free loans to those seeking to create or expand small businesses; immediate implementation of the parts of the Obama health-care plan that would benefit ordinary citizens and build support for a health plan for all citizens; dramatically lower prices for drugs that treat critical diseases such as AIDS and cancer; a strong tax on carbon emissions; and immediate prosecution of those government employees involved in torture or cover-ups to justify the invasion of Iraq.

This candidate should push for the media to provide free and equal time to all major candidates for national office as well as for constitutional amendments requiring only public financing in elections and, separately, for corporations to prove every five years to a jury of ordinary citizens that they have a satisfactory history of environmental responsibility ....

And who should the challenger be?

Public officials who would make excellent candidates ... include Sens. Russ Feingold, Bernie Sanders, Barbara Mikulski or Al Franken; Reps. Joe Sestak, Maxine Waters, Raul Grijalva, Alan Grayson (!), Barbara Lee, Dennis Kucinich, Lois Capps, Jim Moran and Lynn Woolsey.... Why not Rachel Maddow, Bill Moyers, ...?

Are progressives totally divorced from reality?

NEW-OLD CALIFORNIA GOVERNOR JERRY BROWN

[C]an Brown ... finally shed the old caricature of "Governor Moonbeam" and become the landmark philosopher-statesman he once promised that he would be, but was not, three decades ago? [I]f he can't, he'll be remembered as just another tax-and-spend California ideologue like hyper-partisan Rep. Nancy Pelosi or fossilized Sen. Barbara Boxer -- perpetually fiddling away in office while the redistributive state [goes] up in flames.

My bet is on flames. Read it all.

HOLD THE BROWNIES! Obama set to sign bill limiting school bake sales.

Do nannies have limits?

JANUARY 20, 2013