Officials from both the Bush and Obama administrations have trumpeted how the government’s sweeping interventions to prop up the economy since 2008 helped avert a second Depression.

Now, two leading economists wielding complex quantitative models say that assertion can be empirically proved.

In a new paper, the economists argue that without the Wall Street bailout, the bank stress tests, the emergency lending and asset purchases by the Federal Reserve, and the Obama administration’s fiscal stimulus program, the nation’s gross domestic product would be about 6.5 percent lower this year.

In addition, there would be about 8.5 million fewer jobs, on top of the more than 8 million already lost; and the economy would be experiencing deflation, instead of low inflation.

Always on the wrong side of history, Republicans have spent the last two years pointing fingers and essentially accusing each other of being “socialists.”

For example, in February Sen. John McCain apologized for voting for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), claiming he was mislead. Then-South Caroline Republican gubernatorial candidates Nikki Haley and Gresham Barrett traded barbs, with Haley asking Barret to also apologize for backing the Stimulus Package and Barret noted Haley had cast two votes in favor of accepting $700 million in federal stimulus money last year.

The Tea Party has target Republicans who’ve supported federal efforts on the economy.

Yesterday The Hill reported House Democrats “plan a six-week messaging campaign” in which they’ll warn voters that putting Republicans back in power would mark a return to failed Bush administration policies.

“The strategy, coordinated with the White House and the Democrats’ campaign committees, is designed to put Republicans on defense by forcing them to explain where — and how — they would lead the country should they win control of Congress.”

That campaign kicks off this morning with The Republican Tea Party’s Contact on America which reveals what will happen if Republicans win back control of Congress in this fall’s elections. See the contract here. Get background and sources on each point here. And see the television commercial below.

A source of mild entertainment amid the financial carnage has been watching libertarians scurrying to explain how the global financial crisis is the result of too much government intervention rather than too little. One line of argument casts as villain the Community Reinvestment Act, which prevents banks from “redlining” minority neighborhoods as not creditworthy. Another theory blames Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for causing the trouble by subsidizing and securitizing mortgages with an implicit government guarantee. An alternative thesis is that past bailouts encouraged investors to behave recklessly in anticipation of a taxpayer rescue.

There are rebuttals to these claims and rejoinders to the rebuttals. But to summarize, the libertarian apologetics fall wildly short of providing any convincing explanation for what went wrong. The argument as a whole is reminiscent of wearying dorm-room debates that took place circa 1989 about whether the fall of the Soviet bloc demonstrated the failure of communism. Academic Marxists were never going to be convinced that anything that happened in the real world could invalidate their belief system. Utopians of the right, libertarians are just as convinced that their ideas have yet to be tried, and that they would work beautifully if we could only just have a do-over of human history. Like all true ideologues, they find a way to interpret mounting evidence of error as proof that they were right all along.

To which the rest of us can only respond, Haven’t you people done enough harm already?

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Josh Marshall points to this piece in the American Spectator opening a new front in the attack on Shirley Sherrod. It turns out, says Jeffrey Lord, whose bio lists him as “former Reagan White House political director”, that for all our thought that Sherrod was a victim of a smear, she’s actually a terrible liar after all. Her story about a relative being lynched by a white sheriff almost 70 years ago, Lord reveals, is a terrible lie.

This one’s really one for the history books under the subheading of right-wing #outragefail, as the young folks might put it. Lord starts off vaguely sympathetic and works up into a crescendo of high-dudgeon because Sherrod says her relative was lynched when in fact he was arrested by a sheriff and then beaten to death on the courthouse steps while allegedly resisting arrest even though he remained handcuffed through the fatal beating.

As Lord points out, the man in question, Bobby Hall, was not hanged but rather beaten to death. Needless to say, Lord goes through the whole article apparently blissfully ignorant that he doesn’t know the definition of the word ‘lynch’, which refers to extra-judicial killings but doesn’t necessarily refer to hanging.

If the underlying story weren’t so ugly and awful, Lord’s militant ignorance would be funny. And in fact, he makes such a fool of himself, that all the ugliness and awfulness aside, it’s still pretty funny. It would seem the new ‘civil rights movement’ of angry white people resisting the racial oppression of the folks who actually were the Civil Rights Movement is just fated to embarrassment after embarrassment. Which probably seems ironic for anyone not living on this planet.

Josh Marshall

Newt Gingrich — in what CNN calls “a major national security address” — will blast the Obama administration’s “willful blindness” to the threat of extremist Islam.

And then he’ll preach about the dangers of homosexuality to our children, promote tax breaks for the rich, and scream “socialism socialism socialism” until he’s curled in a fetal position drooling.

Please run, Newt. 2012 will be so much fun.

The Denver Post reports Republican U.S. Senate hopeful Ken Buck called Tea Partyers questioning the authenticity of President Barack Obama’s birth certificate “dumbasses.”

In a recording obtained by the newspaper Buck mutters “will you tell those dumbasses at the Tea Party to stop asking questions about birth certificates while I’m on the camera?”

President Obama and Democratic leaders in Congress are setting the stage for a high-stakes battle over taxes in the final weeks before the November congressional elections, betting that their plan to eliminate tax breaks for the wealthy will resonate with voters who have lost houses and jobs to what many see as an era of Wall Street greed.

Raising taxes is usually a perilous move. But Democrats, facing the potential loss of their majorities on Capitol Hill, believe that the strategy will both force Republicans to defend tax breaks for a tiny, wealthy minority and expose GOP hypocrisy on budget deficits.

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“As long as the tea partiers insist on “taking our country back,” I see that as hating the improvements America has made over time. They hate that their middle class lifestyles are dwindling, yet they support the failed conservative ideologies that eroded the middle class. I love this country. I don’t want to take the country back; I want to take it forward.” – Susan R. Kagan in a letter to the New Orleans Times-Picayune