This diary grew out of a comment I made to another's diary, yesterday:

It's already a Depression...it's just that GOP...

...is leading the MSM and the Dems off of a cliff under which they'll be able to attempt to lay claim to the false meme that "Bush had us in a Recession, but Obama took us into a Depression."

Nothing could be farther from the truth here, by the way. But, since when did the TRUTH have any bearing on the Republican's campaign tactics?

There's more...

by Zach Carter, Media Consortium MediaWire blogger

The gurus at the National Bureau of Economic Research have finally acknowledged the obvious: the U.S. economy is in a recession, and has been since December 2007. With Wall Street still on life support and unemployment statistics reaching levels unseen since the heyday of Ronald Reagan, the news was far from shocking, as Truthdig's Ear to the Ground notes, but still enough to help push the Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 700 points on Monday.

More frightening than the belated use of the r-word-- Kevin Drum of Mother Jones called the December start-date all the way back in February in a piece for the Washington Monthly-- is the fact that drastic government action to right the nation's faltering economic ship does not appear to be working. The current crisis has delivered a blow not just to investors and homeowners, but to the work of economist Milton Friedman, a thinker regarded with an almost sacred status in conservative circles. Over at Salon.com, Andrew Leonard highlights a New York Times column by economist Paul Krugman on how Friedman's monetarist economic theory has taken a hit over the past year. Friedman's doctrine calls for restricting government relief in times of economic strain to the arena of monetary policy--that is, central banks should increase the supply of money in the economy, but governments should not directly undertake spending initiatives to boost demand.

There's more...