I understand the temptation to delete smaller projects the Republicans choose to pick on, but it was a mistake to assume they would stop telling half-truths. If projects were defensible, it would have been better to defend them. The Agriculture building for example isn't a waste of $44 million. Needed maintenance gets more expensive as it gets delayed, and that money would have employed a bunch of presumably now-unemployed people. The "resodding" project on the Capitol Mall got called that by people who wanted to make it look like a waste of $200 million. It actually involves working on the crumbling foundations of our national monuments before they slide off into the Potomac, worthwhile it itself, better when realizing there are unemployed people who could have gotten paid to do the work.

Here in Minneapolis, our parks got a lot of work from the WPA. Until major construction a few years ago, Minnehaha Park still had "W.P.A." written in the sidewalks. The city is just starting work on retaining walls along Minnehaha Creek that were built by the WPA and have stood for 70 years. Some waste!

And one warning, to those who thought the Republican Party was moribund: if they're coming this close to winning the first debate of the year when they're so clearly wrong, their ability to mislead short term for tactical purposes appears undiminished.

Despite the decrepit state of the Republican Party, the Palin/Limbaugh party is still effective at short term tactical misleading. As is normal, liberals are trying to address a problem, conservatives are focused only on framing the debate. So true, they still think only in terms of the permanent campaign that brought them to their reduced state, but they're still good at it. We need to reframe the debate.

For starters, people are thinking stimulus is a synonym for "infrastructure", and infrastructure means "roads". They don't think of fixing schools as infrastructure. Nor to they think of expanding broadband access as infrastructure.

They certainly don't think of non-infrastructural spending as stimulus. We have to do better explaining that any spending that causes work which requires hiring someone is stimulative. Not all spending is equal in terms of creating jobs short term and building something useful long term, but that's separate. The fact is everything in that bill will mean a job for somebody aside from the business tax cuts, the one part that won't help at all, and the one part Republicans want more of.

Let's also make sure we help people keep the stimulus and the bank bailout separate. I sense people are starting to think one is part of the other, which means big executive salaries and revelations of corporate crime could sink the stimulus.

All those compromises, gutting useful projects for useless tax cuts, and STILL almost every Republican voted to uphold the filibuster. I would call them economically illiterate Republicans, but I hate redundancies.

For the sake of the conservatives posting here, let me make it simple. The economy is stimulated when the government hires someone or avoids a layoff, thereby sticking paychecks in someone's hand. Tax cuts don't work when people won't spend the additional money. You have to, HAVE TO, get a paycheck to an otherwise unemployed person.

There was a time or two it seemed Obama had a sense of "do I really have to explain this?" Unfortunately he does. Even judging from some prior comments here, there are people who just don't get it. If Obama was too "professorial", I'll see if I can break it down even further. The point of the recovery bill is to get paychecks in people's hands. Whether a job is created or saved from a layoff amounts to the same thing. Getting a paycheck in the hands of an otherwise unemployed person is the best way to get them to spend again. Unemployed people don't spend if they can avoid it. Employed people spend more. The money they spend requires someone being employed to produce what the employed person is buying.

Not all government spending is equal. Bush ran up the debt dumping money on Iraq. He gave it to rich people. Bombs don't produce economic activity. Remodeling buildings does. Giving money to rich bankers to sock away in their overseas accounts doesn't produce economic activity. Fixing roads does. Republicans ran up the debt to no good purpose. This bill will add debt, but to do things we need to do, which will ultimately make the economy stronger, and thereby bring in more revenue to the government long term.

It just isn't that hard t understand unless someone doesn't want to understand it.

"Good thing you are at least pretty...oh wait...."

It could be fun to see what ill-informed patronizing twits have to say if the recovery bill works.

Actually, it probably won't be. If you haven't learned from the disaster already, I haven't much hope for you.

Last summer, a piece of information the right ignored was that the ships that set up drilling platforms had a global five-year backlog. Even assuming more ships can be rushed into production, it would be roughly four years before a lease granted today could have a functioning platform on it.

The right also ignored that ALL commodities had a bubble. It's where the big money went when the housing bubble burst. I can't recall hearing of a bubble that burst so fast.

At least now the same money is chasing federal bonds and the government can borrow very cheaply. Investors/speculators are accepting almost no interest in exchange for the safety. Bad for them, good for us.

Maybe the crisis was that bad. Maybe it wasn't. Something we've learned is that Bush's people were both incompetent and dishonest. Probably something had to be done, but TARP wasn't it. It looked so much like a money grab that I just can't believe it. I won't go as far as to say those figures in the story were wrong or made up, but count me still skeptical.