In news destined to make conservatives revolt (or retch), a movement has been started to draft Paul Krugman as a successor to Tim Geithner as Treasury secretary.
A petition begun by the actor Danny Glover at Signon.org had nearly 225,652 supporters as of Tuesday morning. The group's goal is to reach 250,000 signatures.
"We urge you to nominate Paul Krugman for Treasury Secretary," the group's statement reads. "Krugman will protect Social Security and Medicare from benefit cuts, promote policies to create jobs, and help defeat the austerity dogma in Washington and around the world."
Krugman, the Nobel Prize-winning Princeton economist and controversial liberal columnist for The New York Times, most recently made waves on Monday by joining calls for the U.S. to mint a $1 trillion platinum coin as a way around another debt ceiling fight.
"It's easy to make sententious remarks to the effect that we shouldn't look for gimmicks, we should sit down like serious people and deal with our problems realistically," Krugman wrote in typical bombastic prose. "That may sound reasonable—if you've been living in a cave for the past four years. Given the realities of our political situation, and in particular the mixture of ruthlessness and craziness that now characterizes House Republicans, it's just ridiculous—far more ridiculous than the notion of the coin."
