Despite a bipartisan effort...

there are some flickering signs that the tide may be turning, perhaps in response to just how nonsensical the conversation got earlier this week. For instance, in tomorrow's Post, business columnist Steven Pearlstein devotes an entire column to the fact most of Republicans on Capitol Hill don't even seem to grasp how a Stimulus Bill is supposed to work or even more basic stuff about demand, recession economics or even how jobs come into existence. As in, it's not a Stimulus Bill, it's a spending bill.

Tactfully, Pearlstein doesn't say explicitly for most of the article that it's Republicans he's talking about. You have infer that from the names of the members he dings. But toward the end of the piece he can't seem to help cutting to the chase ...

Quote:

what's striking is that supposedly intelligent people are horrified at the thought that, during a deep recession, government might try to help the economy by buying up-to-date equipment for the people who protect us from epidemics and infectious diseases, by hiring people to repair environmental damage on federal lands and by contracting with private companies to make federal buildings more energy-efficient.

What really irks so many Republicans, of course, is that all the stimulus money isn't being used to cut individual and business taxes, their cure-all for economic ailments, even though all the credible evidence is that tax cuts are only about half as stimulative as direct government spending.

It really does approach flat earth territory.

When you step back from the immediacy of the moment and consider just what nonsense these guys are spouting and what games they're playing while the country is legitimately in danger, it's breathtaking.

Today I had one briefing, and that was at the Club for Growth, I spoke to Andy Roth. Now yesterday, I talked to the Heritage Foundation. I actually had the chance to talk to the Cato Institute as well, I guess you could call it a briefing, it was more of an interview. But all these bipartisan, or if you will neutral, think tanks are pretty much saying the same things.

Nimh, they aren't pressing it. I don't know where you picked that up.

At a House Democrats retreat in Virginia, Obama said [..] that speedy passage of the bill was essential.

"We're not moving quickly because we're trying to jam something down people's throats," he said. "We're moving quickly because if we don't, the economy's going to keep getting worse."

Obama rejected calls for more tax cuts and significant slashing of the bill's cost, and said complaints the package was a spending bill rather than a stimulus bill were off base.

"What do you think a stimulus bill is?" he said. "That's the point."

The plan, which supporters hope will help turn around a crumbling economy that seemingly spawns more bad news every day, includes tax cuts, money for transportation and infrastructure projects and aid to states to keep workers on their payrolls among its many provisions.

The more Obama talks like this, the more it sounds as if he is BEGGING for ANYTHING to pass.

Obama has to realize that the present bill will not be effective and must get the shitheads in Congress to pull the pork out and actually pass a spending plan that stimulates the economy.

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

The Fierce Urgency of Pork
By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, February 6, 2009; A17

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."
-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

The Daschle affair was more serious because his offense involved more than taxes. As Michael Kinsley once observed, in Washington the real scandal isn't what's illegal, but what's legal. Not paying taxes is one thing. But what made this case intolerable was the perfectly legal dealings that amassed Daschle $5.2 million in just two years.

He'd been getting $1 million per year from a law firm. But he's not a lawyer, nor a registered lobbyist. You don't get paid this kind of money to instruct partners on the Senate markup process. You get it for picking up the phone and peddling influence.

At least Tim Geithner, the tax-challenged Treasury secretary, had been working for years as a humble international civil servant earning non-stratospheric wages. Daschle, who had made another cool million a year (plus chauffeur and Caddy) for unspecified services to a pal's private equity firm, represented everything Obama said he'd come to Washington to upend.

And yet more damaging to Obama's image than all the hypocrisies in the appointment process is his signature bill: the stimulus package. He inexplicably delegated the writing to Nancy Pelosi and the barons of the House. The product, which inevitably carries Obama's name, was not just bad, not just flawed, but a legislative abomination.

It's not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It's not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

The Age of Obama begins with perhaps the greatest frenzy of old-politics influence peddling ever seen in Washington. By the time the stimulus bill reached the Senate, reports the Wall Street Journal, pharmaceutical and high-tech companies were lobbying furiously for a new plan to repatriate overseas profits that would yield major tax savings. California wine growers and Florida citrus producers were fighting to change a single phrase in one provision. Substituting "planted" for "ready to market" would mean a windfall garnered from a new "bonus depreciation" incentive.

After Obama's miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell -- and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/05/AR2009020502766_pf.html

The Democratic Plan that came out of the House of Rep. is a disaster and every objective observer agrees there is too much spending that is not directly tied to jobs and growth in that plan.

For you to suggest otherwise and call the Republicans "disloyal" in their opposition makes me think you are willing to accept anything Ding Bat Pelosi puts in front of you.

Passing a piece of crap bill for the sake opf meeting some artificial deadline is a dangerous. This Govt has to get it right and it is our job as citizens to hold these Congressmen directly responsible for correcting a problem they all helped create.

I know you are not objective. You are just a partisan chump.

I provided you with a direct answer to your direct question, yet you ignore my direct question to you. So let's try again.

Why are you so willing to accept the Bill as it stands out of the House without question?

it's a measly 1% of the bill right? The republicans want to pass 99% of this bill, but the Democrats are holding out on this 1%.

Is it worth spending $6 billion to make federal buildings more green? Maybe - but what in God's name does that have to do with saving our economic bacon?

Nothing - it has to do with furthering the social goals that Obama outlined in his campaign.

Woiyo9 wrote:

Is it worth spending $6 billion to make federal buildings more green? Maybe - but what in God's name does that have to do with saving our economic bacon?

Nothing - it has to do with furthering the social goals that Obama outlined in his campaign.

Are you really that dim? How will it save your economic bacon? By creating jobs, hello. By requiring US products.

That money would have been spent on contracting builders to make those buildings green and buying the materials needed for that. How is that not stimulus? It’s stimulus pur sang!

Seriously " in terms of providing the needed stimulus, how is it different from improving a piece of electricity grid, or filling potholes in roads? And it’ll even save the taxpayer money in the long run too (greener buildings consume less energy).