[rtpoe]

I think one of the key things with the Stimulus Package is not the details, but rather that it gets put through in the first place.

If you sit around and nitpick over the details, you're never going to get it done. How do you *know* which parts will actually work? You don't. And given the complexity of the plan, you may never know. And the longer the delay, the worse things get.

That's the crux of the matter. Our economy is heavily "faith-based", in that much of it is based on the expectation of what the future will bring. If we believe that there will be a working stimulus plan, then we can plan accordingly. If there's not going to be one, different plans must be made - as the economy worsens.

Sure, it's not perfect. But anything is better than nothing.

[TheZookie007]

Preaching to the choir, rtpoe -- tell that to idiots like Lyndsey Graham

Meanwhile, as always, when you hear something on cable TV, ask yourself "Cui bono?" (who benefits?) and consider the source. Case in point: pharma lobbyist Betsy McCaughey lies through her teeth about the details of the medical portion of the stimulus bill:

YouTube: "Fox, CNN Spread Rightwing LIE 2-12-09"

[notty]

I think it will take more than the mere existence of a stimulus bill to restore confidence in the economy. The bill has to produce results, tangible improvements the average person can see and benefit from.

If we must pony up $800 billion, then we should spend it as follows:

$500 billion distributed among the states
$200 billion for infrastructure
$50 billion in educational grants
$50 billion in subsidies for solar, wind, and geothermal energy for homeowners
$0 in riders, pork barrel spending, and other assorted bullshit

Oh well. Time will tell...

[gOOber]

 

Quote:
 I think it will take more than the mere existence of a stimulus bill to restore confidence in the economy. The bill has to produce results, tangible improvements the average person can see and benefit from.
 

[TheZookie007]

Quote:
The Huffiington Post: "Dems Fed Up With McCain: 'Angry Old Defeated Candidate'"

Democrats are growing increasingly frustrated with the brash political attacks Sen. John McCain has launched against Barack Obama in the weeks since the new president took office. No one expected the Arizona Republican to be a legislative ally for this administration. But it was widely assumed that Obama's overtures to McCain in the weeks after the election would dull some of the hard feelings between the two. Now, they are realizing, it has not.

"He is bitter and really angry," Bob Shrum said of McCain in an interview on Friday. "He is angry at the press, which he thinks is unfair. He is angry at Obama and angry at the voters. He has gone from being an angry old candidate to being an angry old defeated candidate."

Indeed, during the debate over the economic stimulus package it was McCain, as often as Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who spearheaded the opposition. The Arizona Republican denounced the proposal as pure pork on the Senate floor and introduced an alternative measure comprised nearly entirely of tax cuts.

On Sunday, McCain wouldn't let the fight die, even with the legislation through Congress. Appearing on CNN, he described the $787 billion measure as "generational theft" and said that the bill's authors should "start over now and sit down together."

Meanwhile, appearing on ABC's This Week, Sen. Lindsey Graham -- McCain's chief ally in the Senate -- said of the process by which the stimulus was forged: "If this is going to be bipartisanship, the country is screwed."

That two Republicans Senators who consider themselves prudent compromisers would forcefully condemn the president's top legislative priority is noteworthy in and of itself. That it comes after President Obama made overt gestures of reconciliation to both McCain and Graham raises questions as to just how long it will take for this era of post-partisanship to arrive.

Not to mention that, as other observers pointed out, McCain isn't being entirely consistent.

"During the Senate debate, 36 of the Senate Republicans voted for an alternative that would have cut taxes over the next decade by $2.5 trillion, [and] reduced the top marginal race to 25 percent," said the Atlantic's Ron Brownstein on Meet the Press. "For John McCain -- who voted for that alternative of a $2.5 trillion tax cut over the next decade -- to talk about generational theft, I mean, pot meet kettle."

(emphasis mine)

See what I mean about being obstructionist merely for the sake of being obstructionist? Even the guys at Saturday Night Live agree with me on that All the more reason why the 2008 version of McCain would not have been the best choice to lead this country.

[TheZookie007]

Quote:
NY Times Op-Ed: "They Sure Showed That Obama"

...Less than a month into Obama’s term, we don’t (and can’t) know how he’ll fare as president. The compromised stimulus package, while hardly garbage, may well be inadequate. Timothy Geithner’s uninspiring and opaque stab at a bank rescue is at best a place holder and at worst a rearrangement of the deck chairs on the TARP-Titanic, where he served as Hank Paulson’s first mate.

But we do know this much. Just as in the presidential campaign, Obama has once again outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition. The same crowd that said he was a wimpy hope-monger who could never beat Hillary or get white votes was played for fools again....

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” [David Axelrod] says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal. Because Republicans are isolated in that parallel universe and believe all the noise in its echo chamber, they are now as out of touch with reality as the “inevitable” Clinton campaign was before it got clobbered in Iowa. The G.O.P. doesn’t recognize that it emerged from the stimulus battle even worse off than when it started. That obliviousness gives the president the opening to win more ambitious policy victories than last week’s. Having checked the box on attempted bipartisanship, Obama can now move in for the kill....

At least some media hands are chagrined. After the stimulus prevailed, [Joe] Scarborough speculated on MSNBC that “perhaps we’ve overanalyzed it, we don’t know what we’re talking about.” But the Republicans are busy high-fiving themselves and celebrating “victory.” Even in defeat, they are still echoing the 24/7 cable mantra about the stimulus’s unpopularity. This self-congratulatory mood is summed up by a Wall Street Journal columnist who wrote that “the House Republicans’ zero votes for the Obama presidency’s stimulus ‘package’ is looking like the luckiest thing to happen to the G.O.P.’s political fortunes since Ronald Reagan switched parties.” There hasn’t been this much delusional giddiness in these ranks since Monica Lewinsky promised a surefire Republican sweep in the 1998 midterms.

Not all Republicans are so clueless, whether in Congress or beyond. Charlie Crist, the moderate Florida governor who appeared with the president in his Fort Myers, Fla., town-hall meeting last week, has Obama-like approval ratings in the 70s. Naturally, the party’s hard-liners in Washington loathe him. Their idea of a good public face for the G.O.P. is a sound-bite dispenser like the new chairman, Michael Steele, a former Maryland lieutenant governor. Steele’s argument against the stimulus package is that “in the history of mankind” no “federal, state or local” government has ever “created one job.” As it happens, among the millions of jobs created by the government are the federal investigators now pursuing Steele for alleged financial improprieties in his failed 2006 Senate campaign.

This G.O.P., a largely white Southern male party with talking points instead of ideas and talking heads instead of leaders, is not unlike those “zombie banks” that we’re being asked to bail out. It is in too much denial to acknowledge its own insolvency and toxic assets. Given the mess the country is in, it would be helpful to have an adult opposition that could pull its weight, but that’s not the hand America has been dealt.

As Judd Gregg flakes out and Lindsey Graham throws made-for-YouTube hissy fits on the Senate floor, Obama should stay focused on the big picture in governing as he did in campaigning. That’s the steady course he upheld when much of the political establishment was either second-guessing or ridiculing it, and there’s no reason to change it now. The stimulus victory showed that even as president Obama can ambush Washington’s conventional wisdom as if he were still an insurgent.

But, as he said in Fort Myers last week, he will ultimately be judged by his results. If the economy isn’t turned around, he told the crowd, then “you’ll have a new president.” The stimulus bill is only a first step on that arduous path. The biggest mistake he can make now is to be too timid. This country wants a New Deal, including on energy and health care, not a New Deal lite. Far from depleting Obama’s clout, the stimulus battle instead reaffirmed that he has the political capital to pursue the agenda of change he campaigned on....

[pedonbio]

Ya know, Zookie, McCain doesn't do the "Get offa my lawn" thing nearly so well as Clint Eastwood.

[TheZookie007]

True, true.

AP: "How the economic stimulus plan could affect you"

AP: "The recovery plan: A national jolt to economy"

[BarnacleBill]

 

Quote:
 $0 in riders, pork barrel spending, and other assorted bullshit

 

But notty, I'm one of the silent majority referred to by Senator Schumer who "doesn't care about the tiny, porky amendments!"

As long as we can succeed in jump starting this fucker!


and for the record, I AM ONCE AGAIN impressed by Obama more than I express because he actually mentioned the possibility of "firing teacher who underperform".

This sea change (for a Democrat, i.e. controlled by teachers' unions, to utter such blasphemy) may be even bigger than American electing a black President!

Yay obama!

[TheZookie007]

Agreed. There's nothing wrong with the teacher's unions that firing of the truly incompetent members of them wouldn't fix. The number one priority of a nation in crisis is to overhaul our educational system, since a nation rises and falls on the strength of it. The easiest way to destroy a country without firing a shot is to mess up its educational system.

[TheZookie007]

Quote:
Huffington Post: "Howard Kurtz: Fox News Should 'Apologize For Using Partisan Propaganda'"

A week ago, Fox News tried to pass off a memo from the Senate Republican Communications Center as their own reporting. Unfortunately for the network, they didn't even check the talking points for typos before throwing them on the air. FNC apologized for the mistake -- but not for reprinting a Republican press release and calling it journalism. On Sunday's edition of CNN's "State Of The Union," Howard Kurtz noted the oversight. "You shouldn't be apologizing" for the typo, Kurtz says. "You should be apologizing for using partisan propaganda."...

[TheZookie007]

The next time any fucking Republican starts blathering to me about "generational theft":

Quote:
"Shrink-Wrapped Thieves"

From the "why are we listening to them?" files:

Quote:
The reconstruction effort, intended to improve services and convince Iraqis of American good will, largely managed to do neither. The wider investigation raises the question of whether American corruption was a primary factor in damaging an effort whose failures have been ascribed to poor planning and unforeseen violence.

The investigations, which are being conducted by the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction, the Justice Department, the Army’s Criminal Investigation Command and other federal agencies, cover a period when millions of dollars in cash, often in stacks of shrink-wrapped bricks of $100 bills, were dispensed from a loosely guarded safe in the basement of one of Saddam Hussein’s former palaces.

Former American officials describe payments to local contractors from huge sums of cash dumped onto tables and stuffed into sacks as if it were Halloween candy.

Think about that. The people who are now keening over "reckless spending" are the same ones who blindly sent pallet-loads of shrink wrapped hundred dollar bills to a war zone and didn't bother to keep any records. Now we find out that much of it found its way into the pockets of the people who were dispensing it. Gosh, what a surprise.

I don't know if you can find a better example of straight up GOP corruption than this. They invaded a country for no reason, looted the treasury and then handed out the money to all their friends in conservative movement, their contributors in the military industrial complex --- and even the active duty military itself, apparently. It was a huckuva scam. And yet, Barney Frank is the only elected Democrat I've heard make this case. Even now, the Iraq war is so sacred that the Democrats are still afraid to use the fact that the Republicans basically stole three trillion to discredit their phony arguments about the profligacy of the stimulus.

That's the beauty of the hissy fit. All their shrieking over the years about "supporting the troops" and "General Betrayus" made them immune from criticism about their looting of the treasury on that debacle in Iraq. Now that their fiscal mismanagement has brought the country to its knees and the only way to prevent a catastrophe is to have the federal government spend money to stimulate the economy and help the taxpayers keep roofs over their heads and food on the tables, they are staging a full-fledged tantrum over spending.

I don't want to hear anyone say even one more time that this is an ideological argument about fiscal responsibility. They wouldn't even allow anyone to ask what the price tag was for their Iraq debacle lest they be called out for treason. And, as predicted, it turns out they spent (and lost!) vast sums of of money. If this is a matter of sincere differences rather than opportunistic partisan obstructionism, then the difference it's about priorities, not ideology. Less face it, both parties will spend money on imperial ambitions (although only one really knows how to turn a profit at it.) Where they fundamentally differ is that the Republicans refuse to spend money to help the American people when they really need it.

And then you have the chairman of the RNC coming on to Fox News Channel and saying this:

Quote:
Yeah, no, Glenn. I’m not gonna, look, I’m not going to soft pedal this with you. I’m not going to try to blow smoke either. The reality of it is, you are absolutely right. You have absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions at this point. So, yeah, it’s going to be an uphill climb.

Final quote for now comes from Ann Pettifor:

Quote:
Sachs's analysis is overwhelmingly shared by mainstream economists. And by Republicans. These have been whipping voters into a frenzy with talk of 'generational theft.' Future generations, they argue, will be paying for this fiscal stimulus for decades to come. That is simply not true, as I will show below.

Meantime, these points are truly rich coming from the Republicans. Readers no doubt know that during the Bush-Cheney years the US national debt doubled from $5,700bn in 2001 to $10,700bn today. Others may recollect that Mr. Cheney said in 2001: "Reagan proved that deficits don't matter."

So let's not hear any more from Republicans about deficits mattering or about 'generational theft.'...

[3deroticer]

SNL got it right in this parody!

http://videocafe.crooksandliars.com/heat...eachment-attack

[notty]

Quote:
You have absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions at this point.

The GOP has been a parade of morons for the last 30 years. It's really quite sad how far the Republican Party has drifted from the noble ideals it was founded upon. It has become the party of the swindlers, the liars, the evangelicals, the rednecks, and the plain old ignorant fools.

Well, it won't be when I'm running things. I'm turning back the clock.  

[rtpoe]

With luck, Theodore Roosevelt will be forced to come back from the grave and beat some sense into his successors in the Republican Party.