“You wonder why we’ve got a bunch of Occupy Wall Street people wandering around the country?” asked Gainor not so rhetorically. “They’ve been indoctrinated for years by this kind of stuff.”

Yes, that’s right, Fox Business just devoted seven minutes of precious airtime to a critique that not only connected “The Matrix” to “The Muppets” (and “Cars 2″! and “Syriana”!), but also reminded us that oil is a good thing because we need it to fuel our ambulances; and threw in a slam at Occupy Wall Street, for good measure. This is a level of brilliance that has heretofore not been regularly associated with this network. But really, I can’t tell you how glad I am that someone has finally had the balls to put a stop to this calcified “let’s put on a show to save something precious from the nasty job creator” plot nonsense. It may be one of Hollywood’s oldest tropes, but that doesn’t make it right.

I know some of my readers might actually believe that Texas oil money is largely responsible for destroying the climate of poor old Mother Earth and transforming the U.S. political system into a dysfunctional train wreck. Tut tut. What better evidence do we need to prove that long before Kermit and Miss Piggy turned to the dark side of dialectical materialism, your impressionable little minds were being warped against the free market by “Gilligan’s Island” and Bugs Bunny?

Even the most enlightened are not immune! When the Fox segment turned to Andrea Tantaros to discuss the long slide of “Sesame Street” into socialist propaganda, Tantaros lamented herself straight into the self-reeducation camp.

“Why can’t liberals leave little kids alone? Why does there have to be a political message. I thought ‘Sesame Street’ was supposed to be about sharing and being nice to people …”

Is she even listening to herself?! Sharing is COMMUNIST. That is what Karl Marx was all about! And bottom line, that’s all the Occupy Wall Street protesters want. What part of “redistribution of wealth” does Tantaros not understand?

Clearly, the Children’s Television Workshop has been insinuating itself into the hearts and minds of our nation’s youth from day one. Maybe, just maybe, they’ve become a little more obvious about it in recent years. But isn’t that the kind of thing you’d expect when a vast economic catastrophe that just happens to occur during the the administration of President Tex Richman leaves millions of people unemployed and exacerbates income inequality to its worst point in a century?

Whoops, it looks like the Muppets have gotten to me, too. Insert maniacal laughter here.

Less than a year later, however, judging by multiple Google searches, references to the intersection between regulatory uncertainty, healthcare reform and the labor market have plummeted. There’s a very obvious reason for that: The private sector has added over a million jobs over the last six months while the unemployment rate has fallen steadily.

And yet nothing fundamental has changed on the regulatory front; if anything, the future of healthcare reform, which is facing both a Supreme Court ruling and a presidential election, has never been more uncertain. Not only do we have no real clue as to which political party holds the upper hand in the race for the White House, but with each day that passes, there’s less and less certainty as to who the Republican nominee will be. Leading GOP candidates have promised to repeal both healthcare reform and Dodd-Frank; if one were inclined to hold fire and keep a low profile, now would seem to be the time.

So what’s changed? The first possibility that jumps out is that those who argued that the real problem with the economy was a lack of demand, instead of the socialist overkill of Obama’s new laws, were right. Even when job growth was at its nadir, those critics argued, surveys routinely demonstrated that the No. 1 concern cited by business owners was dissatisfaction with poor sales. Yes, business owners also complained about regulations and taxes, but they always complain about regulations and taxes. On the issue of complaints by small business owners, Larry Mishel, president of the Economic Policy Institute, produced a compelling chart proving that by far the biggest difference between Obama’s tenure and that of the previous three decades’ worth of presidents was a sharp rise in concern about low sales.

If there was uncertainty, it had to do with doubt about the current state of the economy  and not the future implementation of healthcare reform. Generally speaking, if business owners see sustained demand for their products, they can usually be counted on to ramp up production in the present, no matter how warily they view the future. And even as job growth flat-lined, there were other indications that demand was the real constraining factor. Businesses continued to invest in equipment and software upgrades, signaling that they were preparing for a better future even as they saw no need to increase staff in the present. More to the point, the average hours worked by existing employees barely budged, a sign that employers felt no pressure to squeeze more labor out of their existing workforce.

Last July, Steven Horwitz, chairman of the Department of Economics at St. Lawrence University in New York, cited the Heritage Institute’s report as “pretty good evidence that ‘Obamacare’ has been a job killer.” I asked him whether the recent good news on jobs contradicted the thesis.

His guess, he said, was that “factors other than regulatory uncertainty have moved in positive ways leading to more job creation even though the uncertainty remains.”

“At some point in time, recovery will happen as resources get reallocated away from the mistakes of the pre-2007 boom and find their currently most productive uses. The regulatory environment might well have (and maybe still) made that process slower than it would have been, but eventually it will happen. Given the fluidity of the presidential race, I’m doubtful that uncertainty has been reduced any real amount, so my quick observation is that we are seeing the recovery pick up some speed as it eventually would. The argument was never that we’d be stuck with 9 or 10 percent employment forever, just longer than we needed to be thanks to the uncertainty.”

It is definitely true that the economy was bound to eventually recover. (It also stands to reason that a particularly devastating economic shock would precipitate a longer-than-usual recovery.) But what’s interesting about Horwitz’s argument is how it is reminiscent, in an inverse kind of way, to the pro-stimulus rationale we’re used to hearing from the White House. Without the stimulus, we have been told incessantly, the economy would have performed even worse than it actually did.

But we’ll never know if the White House is correct on the stimulus, or Horwitz is correct about the effects of uncertainty, because there’s no way for us to test their arguments. We can’t go back in time and rerun the experiment, this time without the stimulus, and without healthcare reform, to see what would happen. All we can say with authority is that the labor market has had its ups and downs and ups, all while the level of “uncertainty” about future regulation seems more or less consistent.

But even that observation opens up a can of worms. In 2011, the labor market’s worst performing months coincided almost perfectly with multiple Republican efforts to bring government to a halt in a series of budget showdowns. What’s more likely to cause uncertainty about the future: the gradual phased-in implementation of laws passed by Congress, or the prospect that the federal government will not be functioning next week?

Indeed, as EPI’s Larry Mishel, author of a strong attack on the regulatory uncertainty thesis, told me, if you took the argument to its logical conclusion, you would have to concede that “democracy is bad for economic growth.”

After all, what could be more uncertain than the prospects for economic policy in a country where the opposition party is campaigning on a platform predicated on repealing all the major accomplishments of the incumbent? It’s a wonder that there’s any economic activity in the United States at all.

If the consensus reporting from Capitol Hill is correct, sometime in the next two days, Republicans and Democrats will agree on a deal that keeps the payroll tax cut in place, extends unemployment benefits (albeit with a gradual reduction in the length of benefits put into place) and, once again, protects doctors from a cut in their Medicare reimbursement rate. The unemployment benefits and the so-called doc fix will purportedly be paid for by a combination of wireless spectrum sales, tweaks to how much the federal government contributes to federal worker pensions, and cash carved out of the health reform deal.

The politics of this are a lot easier to figure out than the economics. Simply put: It’s a win for Obama. The White House avoids putting the brakes on economic growth by preventing an imminent tax hike and keeping the safety net more or less intact for unemployed workers. In the run-up to an election that may be largely decided by the performance of the economy over the summer, that’s huge. If Republicans, as some have suggested, wanted to tank the economy to ensure new occupants in the White House, this is not the way to go about it.

And as a bonus, at least for the moment, the White House has also managed to avoid another game of budget showdown chicken. That said, the House has yet to vote, and over the past two years we’ve  witnessed several occasions in which recalcitrant conservative representatives have torpedoed deals that were supposedly set in place. On the other hand, it’s possible that the negative political consequences of the 10 percent approval rating currently “enjoyed” by House Republicans is beginning to sink in.

Economically, the deal doesn’t do anything to additionally stimulate the economy, it merely keeps in place measures that have already been enacted. The maximum length of eligibility for unemployment benefits will gradually contract, a process that will cause hardship for workers who drop through the safety net. But macroeconomically speaking, the effect isn’t going to be that huge. Nor will the offsets that pay for the unemployment extensions and the doc fix add up to much in the way of contractionary austerity, though it certainly won’t be pleasant for federal workers who may end having to contribute more to their own pensions.

All in all, it’s kind of a wash. The White House avoids sabotaging the economy, the Republicans avoid making themselves any more unpopular than they already are. It’s a sign of just how dysfunctional Washington has been over the last couple of years that the absence of drama seems like a masterful political stroke by Obama. Maybe, as James Fallows suggests, he really is learning how to be president.

Not only does the foreclosure deal add up to peanuts compared to the $350 billion tobacco settlement, but it also pales before the size of the problem that it is theoretically supposed to address. The amount of negative equity held by Americans in their homes is currently calculated at around $700 billion. As a result of the foreclosure settlement around 750,000 Americans who lost their homes to foreclosure will receive checks of around $2,000 and another million homeowners will see the size of their outstanding loans reduced by an estimated average of around $20,000. Sure, any additional stimulus will be sorely appreciated in today’s demand-constrained U.S. economy, but a $2,000 check isn’t going to make up for a foreclosed home, and it is silly to think the banks will feel more than a slight pinch. The banks have already reserved enough capital to cover the checks that they are going to have to cut (around $5 billion). Compared to the damage caused to American families by both the financial crisis and the rush to foreclosure, the banks are getting off easy.

Obama may be technically correct to say that the settlement “will deliver some measure of justice for some families who have been victims of abusive practices,” but it’s wrong to treat the news as any kind of real payback for bank misdeeds. It’s just nibbling around the margins.

So is it a sellout — “another raw demonstration of who wields power in America,” as Naked Capitalism’s Yves Smith, — undoubtedly the harshest critic of the Obama administration on housing policy and bank reform — argues? That’s a little harder to say, and a lot depends on the future course of events.

Some defenders of the settlement are arguing that the size of the deal is smaller than it might otherwise be because the government has retained the right to sue the banks for a wide variety of mortgage-related bad behavior stretching beyond the fraudulent processing of foreclosure paperwork at the heart of this deal. In particular, the states attorneys general of New York and California can continue their own separate investigations. As Felix Salmon writes, “other big-money lawsuits over securitization can and almost certainly will still be brought — which means that the big banks all still have significant litigation risk hanging over their heads.” As if to punctuate this point, on Wednesday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that federal regulators plan to sue some of the largest banks on charges of fraud related to the dodgy securitization of mortgages in 2007 and 2008.

The proof of this theory will only come when we see how hard the Obama administration and states like California go after the banks in the future. Given the track record of this administration, that may be doubtful. (Although, it may be worth noting that at least one conservative critic of the settlement, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, bases his critique precisely on the fact that banks still can’t put the whole crisis behind them. The administration can’t leave well enough alone, complains Holtz-Eakin, or “resist the political temptation to rouse its base with finger-pointing and lawsuits.”)

A more interesting question to consider, however, is how the housing relief contained in this settlement fits into other administration housing policy efforts currently in the works.

First off, government negotiators are still working on roping another nine mortgage providers into the deal, which could raise the overall settlement total from $26 billion to around $40 billion. In March, the rejiggered HARP refinance program will kick in, presumably allowing hundreds of thousands of homeowners to refinance at currently rock bottom mortgage rates. There is also strong pressure coming from the Federal Reserve and the White House to convert currently unoccupied foreclosed homes owned by the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac into rental properties, a step that would remove excess inventory from the housing market.

Each individual nibble here is unlikely to make a profound difference, but taken together, all these initiatives add up to the most concerted effort the Obama administration has taken to date to bring relief to the housing sector. It’s also worth noting that it’s all happening without any help whatsoever from Congress. The approach does not address the desire for punishment that so many would like to see meted out upon the banks, but it will likely help spur additional economic growth. At a point when the economy already seems to have solid momentum toward recovery, every extra bit of help is gravy.

President George W. Bush cut taxes for almost everyone who paid income taxes. Romney would make the Bush tax cuts permanent. But that’s only a first step.

He would also raise taxes on poor families with children at home and those going to college.

Romney does this by reducing benefits from the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit and by ending the American Opportunity tax credit for college education.

To be fair to Romney, when the candidate made his comment on not caring about the poor, he did it in the context of noting that there is a “safety net” for the poor, and if it was broken, he would “fix it.” But it’s a little difficult to square the idea of fixing a broken safety net with the plan to eliminate tax breaks that benefit poor families with children who aspire to a college education. (Not to mention the little problem of figuring out how to pay for that safety net, while at the same time committing to making permanent budget-busting tax cuts.)

Romney’s tax plan appears tailor-made for an Obama attack team to rip to shreds. Of course, judging by the results from the primary and caucus contests so far, poor people don’t seem very inclined to vote for Romney, so maybe he figures he’s got nothing to lose.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve got nothing against Jeremy Lin. He was a high school phenom in Palo Alto, Calif., and I know some Asian American kids out here in Berkeley who worship the ground he walks on. Lin didn’t make the NBA because he’s freakishly tall, like the 7-foot-4 Yao Ming (Lin is “only” 6″3′). He’s there because he can play ball, because he has a wicked fast first step when he drives to the basket, and he knows how to deliver the rock to the big guys (a skill a surprising number of “legitimate” NBA guards show little interest in mastering). He’s a triumph of will over genetic endowment, a fact that makes him inspiring to an entire generation of Californian kids restless with their model minority shackles.

But you can like Lin, and you can root for him, and yet still find his instantaneous, Tim Tebow-like ascent (in more ways than one!) to pop-cultural phenom — LINSANITY! — to be more than a little disorienting. Jeremy Lin is the latest example of how our socially-mediated, always-on world can churn any data point, any outrage, any act of heroism or moment of despair into a full-scale world-wide frenzy in less time than it took me to write this sentence.

We’ve seen this before. The same forces — social media, digital publishing tools, smartphone ubiquity — that are giving us Linsanity just blitzkrieged the Susan G. Komen Race for the Cure Foundation. They torpedoed Hollywood’s attempt to force SOPA and PIPA through Congress and blew up Bank of America’s plan to charge a $5 fee for debit card use. They fueled the Occupy Wall Street movement, magnified every Tebow prostration before God into a worldwide religious orgy and are ever-more ready to pounce on any misstep by a Mitt Romney or a Newt Gingrich and explode it into an instant political crisis.

And the crazy thing is, we’re figuring this out as it goes along — and giving the phenomenon more power. As we understand this new world, and submerge ourselves in it, we are beginning to take our cues from it.

Just want every one to know that I wrote about #linsanity this morning long before it became “hip” this afternoon: bit.ly/Apjdq4

— Jon (@viewmyseats) February 8, 2012

The mainstream media now seems to be adapting its coverage of events on the basis of whether something blows up in social media as much as it does from the perceived newsworthiness of the event itself. It’s startling, but also natural: When you see a fire start to blaze, you run to cover to it. And so Linsanity breeds more Linsanity.

You want highlights? Here’s a distilled package of nine minutes of Lin’s exploits from his 28-point explosion on Monday night. You want a tribute video with an original rap soundtrack on top of some T.I. beats?  Someone is recommending it to you on Facebook or Twitter right now. You want analysis, pro or con? Plug “Jeremy Lin” into Google News and say goodbye to the rest of your day.

You want vaguely disconcerting racially tinged jokes playing on Asian, black, and white stereotypes? Twitter’s going crazy:

Jeremy Lin is a huge pickup for the Knicks. Not only is he scoring a ton of points but he is also tutoring his teammates children in math.

— The Bill Walton Trip (@NotBillWalton) February 7, 2012

“We know that Lin has been playing along, but honestly, fellow Knicks, stop bowing to him after a great play.” nymag.com/daily/sports/2…

— Angry Asian Man (@angryasianman) February 8, 2012

Lots of sterile white folks offer to adopt Jeremy Lin, concerned with the all black family he is currently with.

— The Fake ESPN (@TheFakeESPN) February 7, 2012

On Monday, the social media world was also getting worked up about Michigan Republican Senate hopeful Pete Hoekstra’s racist Super Bowl ad, featuring a Chinese woman (labeled “yellowgirl” in the HTML code for the Web version) gloating over all the jobs her country was taking from the U.S. Once thrown into the 24/7 crazy cultural mashup perpetual motion machine, it didn’t take long before anger about that ad ran head on into Jeremy Lin pride. I have seen tweets urging Jeremy Lin to run for the Republican nomination for the Michigan senate seat, tweets warning that the only American jobs in danger from Asians are those belonging to New York Knick starting point guards, and even a tweet riffing off Kobe Bryant’s self-identification as “black mamba” — Jeremy Lin is suddenly  the “yellow mamba.”

It’s a tricky, tricky world. We get pissed off when we learn that an HTML jockey has labeled a Chinese woman “yellowgirl” but we grin when see Lin dubbed “yellow mamba.” Or maybe not; maybe we get mad at both. The tweet-stream moves too fast too tell for sure. It’s just one non-stop improv jazz riff frenzy.

The craziest thing is, from his record so far we know absolutely nothing about Lin’s staying power as a potential long-term starting NBA point guard. Lin won a state championship as a senior high school and broke all kinds of Ivy League records at Harvard, but he wasn’t drafted by a single NBA team, sat on the bench last year as a rookie for the Golden State Warriors, was cut by both Golden State and Houston before this season, and was playing in the NBA’s developmental league just two months ago. He’s had two great games against two bad teams, and once the league figures him out, he could easily become old news as quickly as he became the news. Or he might tear his ACL next week, be out for the season, and never manage a full comeback. His incredible domination of the basketball world right now tells us nothing about his future.

But one thing we do know for sure: There will be something to replace him, sooner rather than later. We’re strapped to a new kind of rollercoaster — the only thing we can be certain of is that our passions will be constantly roiled by whatever new outrage or delight seethes our way via our new information channels. You know that the Susan G. Komen foundation is reeling from their contact with this world. And you’ve got to guess Jeremy Lin is having a strange week.

Who’s next?