Kudos to a well written response vtseng!

So many people are so quick to judge. This President has inherited the reigns of this country when it is at it's Worst! He has only been in office for about a month and a half and already people are criticizing and crying about his budget. The simple fact is, in order to dig out from the complete Nightmare Mess the Bush Administration left us in, money will have to be spent in order to bring money back to this country. Stop all of the pissing and moaning about the stimulus package and face the facts! We now have a President with Extraordinary Intelligence, conscience, caring and forethought. Give him a Chance to do his job!! I'd like to see Any One Of You who are so critical of him take on the work that he is facing! He is not perfect,but neither are any of us and he is a Hell of a lot better than what we have had for the last eight years. How quickly we forget.. I would rather have a President who is accused of "timid liberalism" in office than a neocon fanatic who never once looked at this country as a whole.

The economic illiteracy of this article blows me away. The author goes straight from socialism to monetarism without even mentioning Keynes, his theory, and his place in American political life.

So illiterate, so very illiterate....

The Democratic Party should be seen as the political equivalent of a battered spouse or battered domestic partner. The Dems have been ground down so long by the wildly successful Republican hate-mongering machine that they lost the ability to act boldly. Their hearts are in the right place, but it will take a while -- and much understanding and support from the liberal/progressive punditry, let me add -- for them to regain the courage needed to fully engage the real power -- corporate America.

The current solutions seem tepid and vague because the root of our problems has not been properly defined. If we don't have time or money to do things right, how in hell will we find time and money to re-fix our fixes?

It is imperative to clearly acknowledge the obvious etiology of our current crises, no matter whose toes we step are bruised. ALL of our current problems are largely the result of prioritizing the wants of the well-connected few over the needs of the rest of us. Our economic, environmental, foreign policy, and health care challenges all stem from the undue power that money allocates to the very rich.

Obama's decision to put Wall Street insiders in charge of our economic well-being is indeed disastrous. But he can share the blame with many. Most Congressional members would like nothing more than to become a permanent part of the elite and powerful class. At best, they are shell-shocked, with Repubs and Dems alike operating in ass-covering mode. This is not the best state of mind for clear-headed evaluation and action. More to the point is that the moral and intellectual fiber that we need does not exist among our current leadership at this time. Until all our representatives become more afraid of what citizens will do than what special interests might do, we will see no progress. I am afraid to ponder the measures that might have to be taken. How low will we be forced to go?

But Keynes is the cause of all of our problems. Not because he was wrong, as every liberal and neo-con would have you believe, but because every economist who achieved power in this country in the last 4 decades has at some point felt compelled to prove him wrong, just so they could be the one who did it and regardless of the consequences for the rest of us.

And now we have Bernanke, the dimmest bulb in the box, trying to do the same. Scary, scary shit.

Living here in the great White North it is disappointing to social-democratic Canadians like me that Obama does not have the political juice or oomph to push for a single-payer, publicly funded univeral health care system. Even here we are under pressure to allow entry of private for-profit providers as a way to ease the shortages in the publicly provided part of the system; but if this happens we are assured that all Canadians will have access to this private part, because we will be able to use our health cards for those services, so that the public health care system will in effect be funding the private part. Since our health care system is already riddled with a for-profit segment anyway, in dentistry, optometry, diagnostic procedures, and now even certain surgeries that are in short supply, and since various European countries have a public private mix and are touted as better models to emulate, this creeping private sector intrusion is unstoppable. But wait!...this neo-liberalism might not be so bad after all. As many Americans might know, we have a $10 billion (U.S.) a year marijuana industry in British Columbia mostly, and it is completely private. With growing pressure here to actualy legalize weed (for the tax revenue our greedy governments absolutely need if nothing else) we will be entering into a public-private partnership in all aspects of the pot industry; from regulated production, distribution to marketing and drug-abuse counselling it will be a publi-private mix, with government leveraging the many-decades institutional knowledge built up within the privately controlled marijuana industry, rather than trying to supplant it. Surely, even mellow ole Ike, or zonked out FDR, would have shied away from a completely publicly run, top-down, pot industry. Providing medical marijuana, or just doobies for your next party, is too serious an endeavour to leave to bumbling government bureaucrats. Maybe flying a B-1 bomber can be a top-down government operation but flying high on 'special brownies' requires the sure touch of the for-profit private entrepreneur and his irreplaceable knowhow of what's what in THC lore. Uh-uh, the neo-liberal thrust to private-public partnerships in the mind-altering sphere of life is the way to go.