Florida Senate candidate Gov. Charlie Crist has gone wobbly on his support for the Obama stimulus package, as noted sharply here by Think Progress. Most revealing, he told CNN on November 4th: “I didn’t endorse it, I didn’t even have a vote on the darn thing.”

But when I interviewed Crist this spring for my piece The GOP Jihad, here’s what he told me he’d have done had he had a darn vote:

Rolling Stone: Just a final question: Had you been in the Senate, would you have voted with the other Republicans for the stimulus package?

Crist: Absolutely.

In the wake of today’s Justice Department decision to bring accused 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed to New York to stand trial in a criminal court, I interviewed former congressman Tom Andrews, director of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo. Andrews argued that the KSM decision is a vital step toward final closure of the Cuba based prison, and that Obama’s harshest critics — who were silent when the previous president brought 195 terror suspects to justice in the United States — are practicing the worst kind of partisan fearmongering.

RS.com What have you made of the outcry from folks like Joe Lieberman and Rudy Giuliani?
TA The right-wing attack machine is out in full force as predicted. One: They are going to hope that the same tactic that got us into Iraq is going to keep us at Guantanamo, and that is fear. Two: They are going to count on ignorance. That Americans are simply unaware of the fact that we’ve had 195 convictions of suspected terrorists in U.S. courts since 2001. The terrorists who bombed the World Trade Center in 1993 were tried and convicted in U.S. courts and are now locked away in a federal supermax prison. The harshest critics — the ones who are braying the loudest that the sky is going to fall and Americans are all in danger — were totally silent when terrorist suspects were brought to trial in the United States by the Bush administration. You heard no outcry from Senator McConnell or Senator Lieberman when Bush did it. That’s the very definition of hypocrisy.

RollingStone.com Where does this decision put us in the broader scope of being able to close Guantanamo?
Tom Andrews This gets us a step closer. But there are still many steps to take. The attorney general today indicated that he was doubtful that the administration would meet the self-appointed deadline of the 22nd of January. But the fact that the president has committed himself to closing the facility, and bringing KSM to trail is, I think, an indication that the glass is half full.

RS.com Why have you been so vocal that KSM and his co-conspirators be tried in criminal court?
TA It’s important that we do not elevate these mass murderers into warriors and martyrs, which is exactly what they want. It’s also not in our interest to denigrate our system of criminal justice—the very bedrock of this country. If you are accused, you get to know what you know what you are accused of, you get to face your accusers, and you get to defend yourself in court, and then you face a trial and a conviction. This is who we are as a system. The Taliban? You can get a trial and a beheading in a few hours. That’s not our system of justice. But the Guantanamo Bay prison facility has made a mockery of that. It has put a great stain on this country.

RS.com What does this decision signal about the kind of case that Holder & Co. were able to build against KSM — not withstanding the damage that waterboarding him 183 times did the integrity the judicial process.
TA Well, it’s a good question. And the attorney general today said that he was very, very confident that will get a conviction with what they have. They said they have information that has not become public up to this point. This is another reason why Guantanamo Bay has been such a problem. The abuses that occurred there under the Bush/Cheney administration has been making prosecution that much harder. Not only did they create a major recruiting tool for Al Queda and for Jihadists world-wide, they made it harder to prosecute and put away terrorists. So, it is a double-whammy on our system of justice and an asset—a double asset—for the very people who need to be behind bars forever.

Today marks a decade since the repeal of Glass-Steagall Act, the Depression-era safeguard that prohibited the commingling of commercial and investment banks. The deregulation gave rise to all-in-one financial behemoths like Citi, ushered in the too-big-to-fail era, and nearly toppled the global financial system.

The hubris expressed during the signing ceremony at the Old Executive Office Building ten years ago today will make you throw up in your mouth a little.

Take it away, President Clinton:

I think you should all be exceedingly proud of yourselves… today what we are doing is modernizing the financial services industry, tearing down these antiquated laws and granting banks significant new authority. This will save consumers billions of dollars a year through enhanced competition.

Hit it Phil Gramm:

In the 1930s, at the trough of the Depression, when Glass-Steagall became law, it was believed that government was the answer. It was believed that stability and growth came from government overriding the functioning of free markets. We are here today to repeal Glass-Steagall because we have learned that government is not the answer. We have learned that freedom and competition are the answers. We have learned that we promote economic growth, and we promote stability, by having competition and freedom. I am proud to be here because this is an important bill. It is a deregulatory bill. I believe that that is the wave of the future. And I am awfully proud to have been part of making it a reality. (Applause.)

It’s easy to lampoon the vile likes of the former Texas senator, who continues to profiteer from his deregulation as a Vice Chairman of UBS. But what’s more galling is how many of the key players in this debacle are still shaping policy today.

Start at the top with then Treasury secretary, now Obama economics czar Larry Summers, who boldly declared that the deregulation would “benefit American consumers, business, and the national economy for many years to come.”

Other men and women who also got shout outs that day include:

Gary Gensler, then a treasury undersecretary, today the head of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Gene Sperling, then head of Clinton’s National Economics Council, now a senior counselor to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

and

Linda Robertson, another assistant Treasury secretary, (she’d briefly become an Enron lobbyist) who is now a senior adviser to the Federal Reserve trying to sell congress on Obama’s proposal to give the Fed massive new powers.

Heckofa job guys. Heckofa job.

Florida voters will soon be able to choose among Democratic, Republican and Tea Party candidates.

Health care reform passes the House.

Here’s the roll call.

Here’s President Obama’s statement:

Tonight, in an historic vote, the House of Representatives passed a bill that would finally make real the promise of quality, affordable health care for the American people.

Thanks to the hard work of the House, we are just two steps away from achieving health insurance reform in America. Now the United States Senate must follow suit and pass its version of the legislation. I am absolutely confident it will, and I look forward to signing comprehensive health insurance reform into law by the end of the year.

Rolling Stone: What are the stakes, politically, if Democrats fail to get a bill to Obama’s desk?

Rep. John Dingell: It will hurt us seriously. If you look at the 1994 election, we lost because our folks stayed home. If we give people an inducement to stay home in 2010, we can lose again.

Read the rest of Rollingstone.com’s exclusive interview with The “Dean” Of Health Care Reform.

More people are out of work than at anytime in the last quarter-century and those who are still employed created a jaw-dropping 9.5% surge in productivity in the last quarter. This is the essence of a jobless recovery.

The economics blogger Brad DeLong had a great post yesterday that I hope he’ll forgive me quoting at length:

Back in the 1930s there was a Polish Marxist economist, Michel Kalecki, who argued that recessions were functional for the ruling class and for capitalism because they created excess supply of labor, forced workers to work harder to keep their jobs, and so produced a rise in the rate of relative surplus-value.

For thirty years, ever since I got into this business, I have been mocking Michel Kalecki. I have been pointing out that recessions see a much sharper fall in profits than in wages. I have been saying that the pace of work slows in recessions–that employers are more concerned with keeping valuable employees in their value chains than using a temporary high level of unemployment to squeeze greater work effort out of their workers.

I don’t think that I can mock Michel Kalecki any more, ever again.

Video clips at Ustream