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Sunday, we'll comment on the grim news that Virginia is facing another $1.5 billion budget shortfall, leaving Gov. Tim Kaine to make the fourth round of cuts to the state's general fund since September. The general fund supports the state's core services: education; health, including mental health; and public safety. Virginians should keep in mind, during this year's election campaigns, that these already reduced services are what are at stake when candidates talk about reducing government or avoiding new transportation taxes by tapping into general fund revenue streams.

Bruce Bartlett, a leading conservative economist, has a great piece in The Daily Beast in which he lays out an incredibly strong case that Bush's stewardship of the economy was a disaster that laid the foundation for the current mess and that until conservatives "once again hold Republicans to the same standard they hold Democrats, they will have no credibility and deserve no respect."

Among the strongest section was comparing the performance of the Bush economy to the Clinton economy. In short, there is no comparison:

• Between the fourth quarter of 1992 and the fourth quarter of 2000, real GDP grew 34.7 percent. Between the fourth quarter of 2000 and the fourth quarter of 2008, it grew 15.9 percent, less than half as much.

• Between the fourth quarter of 1992 and the fourth quarter of 2000, real gross private domestic investment almost doubled. By the fourth quarter of 2008, real investment was 6.5 percent lower than it was when Bush was elected.

• Between December 1992 and December 2000, payroll employment increased by more than 23 million jobs, an increase of 21.1 percent. Between December 2000 and December 2008, it rose by a little more than 2.5 million, an increase of 1.9 percent. In short, about 10 percent as many jobs were created on Bush’s watch as were created on Clinton’s.

• During the Bush years, conservative economists often dismissed the dismal performance of the economy by pointing to a rising stock market. But the stock market was lackluster during the Bush years, especially compared to the previous eight. Between December 1992 and December 2000, the S&P 500 Index more than doubled. Between December 2000 and December 2008, it fell 34 percent. People would have been better off putting all their investments into cash under a mattress the day Bush took office.

• Finally, conservatives have an absurdly unjustified view that Republicans have a better record on federal finances. It is well-known that Clinton left office with a budget surplus and Bush left with the largest deficit in history. Less well-known is Clinton’s cutting of spending on his watch, reducing federal outlays from 22.1 percent of GDP to 18.4 percent of GDP. Bush, by contrast, increased spending to 20.9 percent of GDP. Clinton abolished a federal entitlement program, Welfare, for the first time in American history, while Bush established a new one for prescription drugs.

President Obama half-heartedly backtracked after signaling he'd accept health care reform without even a public option to compete against profit-driven insurers. Saying he still favors a public option, though, hardly reassures. In an editorial to run later in the week, we'll say the president needs to show stronger leadership on reform that is critical to the well-being of this and future generations of ordinary Americans.

Rep. Rick Boucher in Virginia's Fightin' 9th, who had a critical role in shaping the House climate change bill, has taken heat from some environmentalists, who argue it doesn't do enough to lower carbon emissions, and opponents who argue it goes too far and will damage the economy by hurting industry, including the coal companies in Boucher's own district. The natural gas industry comes down on the side of the environmentalists.

Natural gas has lower carbon emissions than coal. Lobbyists argue that the way to lower greenhouse gases quickly is to encourage manufacturers to switch from coal to natural gas as their energy source - and the House bill won't do that, thanks in large part to Boucher's efforts.

TheHill.com reports:

"The House bill requires businesses to lower their greenhouse gas emissions by 17 percent by 2020 from 2005 levels. The alliance contends that actual emission reductions could be put off for a decade or more because the bill allows companies to purchase carbon offsets to help meet those targets. Offsets are projects that absorb carbon dioxide in the air and serve as a counterbalance to emissions at the smokestack.

"[America’s Natural Gas Alliance President and CEO Rod] Lowman also said the House bill gives away too many credits that cover a company’s emissions. Supporters say the approach protects against sharp rises in energy prices because of the carbon cap, but Lowman said it could keep the carbon costs so low that utilities and other emitters will have little incentive to switch to less polluting fuel sources."

This should be reassuring to conservatives who accuse the longtime congressman of putting a liberal cause ahead of his district's economic interests. As if.

A story posted this week at doubleX.com starts with the premise that women are more likely than men to be whistleblowers when they see misdeeds in the corporate world, then sets out to explain why. The piece notes that Enron whistleblower Sherron Watkins, who at the time dismissed the notion that women were more ethical than men, "became convinced whistle-blowing was one of the few types of 'risk' that come more naturally to women after meeting Judy Rosener, a management professor at the University of California at Irvine. ... While academic studies in fields ranging from management to neuroscience had linked maleness and male hormones to an increased propensity for risk, Rosener draws a distinction between the types of risk one takes with encouragement from an audience, and the types of risk one takes in spite of the disapproval of the audience. Watkins calls these 'arena risk' and 'moral risk.' "

Guess which kind appeals to men. Uh-huh. Think "Gladiator."

Author Maureen Tkacik writes, "In addition, when women see wrongdoing, they try to fix it within their own organizations. Men, by contrast, tend to alert the media — even though women whistleblowers are the ones more often portrayed as opportunistic 'media darlings' chasing Erin Brokovichian adulation. "Virtually every time a woman blows the whistle, she sees something amiss, investigates it, and sends a detailed memo right to the very top of the organization," says Kurt Eichenwald, the former New York Times reporter who wrote the Enron saga Conspiracy of Fools. “In twenty years of covering corporate fraud I have seen maybe one male take the same approach.”

Maybe another reason so few women manage to crack the glass ceiling.

Typically in mid-July, the White House releases revised budget numbers.  It takes a look at the economy, income tax returns and all the other factors that affect how much the federal government has to spend and updates its forecasts from earlier in the year.

The Obama administration isn't typical, it seems.  It has announced it will delay release of the revised figures until mid-August.

Why?  The White House isn't saying much, but it's easy to speculate.  The economy remains stalled, and the numbers can't be good. Once the bad news breaks, it could make passing health care reform and climate change bills more difficult.  Better, they must have concluded, to wait until Congress starts its long August recess.

Granted, releasing bad news in August has long been a long tradition in Washington. August is like the Friday afternoon news conference for the entire year.  Too bad Obama feels the need to pull the same old stunt.  Give us the bad news, Mr. President, the nation can take it.

Thursday, we'll write that yet more requests for electric rate increases warn of harder times ahead for Appalachian Power customers. The utility's request for two more increases in charges got in line Wednesday behind two earlier, unrelated requests, all of which follow a base rate increase that the state granted less than a year ago. For the poor, all of this means that a flood of federal stimulus dollars for weatherization could not come at a more opportune time for Southwest Virginians. The region is suffering the first effects of the end of an era of cheap, carbon-based energy. People will have to conserve electricity as never before to avoid paying significantly more, or being left in the cold.

Investment adviser Bernard Madoff went from jail to a federal prison in Butner, N.C., today to begin serving a 150-year sentence for his decades-long, multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme - perhaps the largest in history. If the 71-year-old earns early release for good behavior, his projected release date is Nov. 14, 2139. His is a life sentence that hardly seems long enough.

TheHill.com reports that President Obama is vowing to veto any defense bill that funds more Lockheed Martin F-22 fighter jets, hugely expensive, high-maintenance aircraft that, The Washington Post reported last week, now cost more than $44,000 an hour to fly.

Counter to the norm, it seems, the fleet gets more expensive to maintain as it matures. The Post explains: "The aircraft's radar-absorbing metallic skin is the principal cause of its maintenance troubles, with unexpected shortcomings - such as vulnerability to rain and other abrasion - challenging Air Force and contractor technicians since the mid-1990s, according to Pentagon officials, internal documents and a former engineer." Recently, more than 30 hours of maintenance have been required for every hour an F-22 is in the sky. Critics of the program say the high cost of the fighter, designed for winning dogfights with advanced Soviet jets that Russia is still trying to develop, is leaving the Air Force unable to modernize adequately outside the one, outdated niche the F-22 is meant to fill.

Still, Obama faces a tough political challenge in trying to cap F-22s at the 187 Congress already has funded. The Post reports:

"Pierre Sprey, a key designer in the 1970s and 1980s of the F-16 and A-10 warplanes, said that from the beginning, the Air Force designed it [the F-22] to be 'too big to fail, that is, to be cancellation-proof.'

"Lockheed farmed out more than 1,000 subcontracts to vendors in more than 40 states, and Sprey - now a prominent critic of the plane - said that by the time skeptics 'could point out the failed tests, the combat flaws, and the exploding costs, most congressmen were already defending their subcontractors' ' revenues."

In a recession, does that kind of defense industry manipulation, having created a far-flung government jobs program, fall under waste, fraud or abuse in the litany of unnecessary government spending?

Former Labor Secretary Robert Reich thinks people are being overly optimistic if they see any signs of lasting economic recovery.

In a post at Talking Point Memo's TPM Cafe, Reich says this won't be a V-shaped recovery, or even a U-shaped recovery with a long time spent at the bottom.

When will the economy recovery begin? Reich says:

My prediction, then? Not a V, not a U. But an X. This economy can't get back on track because the track we were on for years -- featuring flat or declining median wages, mounting consumer debt, and widening insecurity, not to mention increasing carbon in the atmosphere -- simply cannot be sustained.

The X marks a brand new track -- a new economy. What will it look like? Nobody knows. All we know is the current economy can't "recover" because it can't go back to where it was before the crash. So instead of asking when the recovery will start, we should be asking when and how the new economy will begin. More on this to come.