Today's Stimulus Bill Nonsense

(And I also posted here on an unrelated local matter.)

So Senator John McCain tells the Democrats here that they need to “seriously negotiate” on the stimulus bill, huh (with “seriously negotiate” being Republican-ese for “larding up the bill with tax cuts as opposed to legitimate infrastructure spending”).

That’s way too damn funny coming from the guy who said he would suspend his presidential campaign last year “to focus on the economy,” as noted here (and we know how THAT turned out - I promised I wouldn’t call him John W. McBush any more after the election, but if he keeps this up, I may go back on that).

(Oh, and by the way, sorry about your home-state team’s Super Bowl loss yesterday, Senator, though they put up a fight, I must admit.)

And after Sen. Mr. Elaine Chao “mov(ed) the goalposts,” as noted here by TPM (i.e., he said a month ago that an “omnibus appropriations bill” would take the place of the stimulus bill currently being proposed, which is an act of political gamesmanship given what we currently face), he now states that, basically, he would filibuster the current stimulus bill (here).

(And isn't THIS precious...what a joke!)

Also, Our Man Arlen Specter said today on a local radio talk show that he, in so many words, would oppose the stimulus bill because he wanted funding for light rail from Scranton to New York City, which apparently isn’t included (yes, but the funding for that laudable project has already been approved, as noted here).

Venturing intro Crazyland, this tells us that Tennessee House Repug Zach Wamp and Dem (!) Lincoln Davis want stimulus funding to “ease the burden of Tennessee Valley Authority ratepayers for the $1 million-a-day cost of cleaning up more than 1 billion gallons of sludge and ash that spilled from a containment pond at the agency's Kingston plant in late December” (makes sense to me, though that state’s Repug Senator Bob “Let’s Kill The UAW” Corker opposes it, even though the project puts people to work cleaning up the site).

And over in South Carolina, Repug Senator Jim DeMint proposes a “plan” here blessed by the Heritage Foundation that could generate 1.3 million jobs, which is exactly half of what we lost in this country last year alone – it isn’t even close to a “break-even” proposition!

And hardly to be outdone, Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma says here that the stimulus bill is “generational theft,” which is particularly funny given that the infamous 109th Congress (of which Coburn was most definitely a part) helped ensure the largest unified budget deficits in our history as of 2005, as noted here (the blue bar chart speaks volumes about which president was fiscally prudent and which one lavished budget-busting tax cuts for his “base”).

And how are the Repug governors handling this? Well, as William Yardley of the New York Times told us here yesterday (in a column including excerpts from 12 “State of the State” gubernatorial addresses), Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue said…

Political mantras aside, cutting more than 10 percent from a budget cannot be achieved by simply cutting waste. While we have worked for six years to do more with less, at some point, in business or in government, it becomes less with less.

The job of budgeting is hard right now, but it’s not because the directions are complicated. Like families sitting around their kitchen tables all over Georgia, we are doing what is necessary to balance our checkbook. As I look within, I find something within the human constitution that bounces back, something within this collective American spirit that rebuilds.

Nice sounding words, but not a hint of bipartisanship in them of course; maybe Perdue could pray for a balanced budget, as he did here when his state suffered a drought brought on by his own bad planning.

And as far as Repug Governor Mitch Daniels of Indiana is concerned, he used his address to beat up the states of Ohio and Illinois (nice guy - yeah, we all know about Blago, but give me a break!)…

As recently as 2007, an essayist wrote: “More than any state I know of, Indiana suffers from a crippling inferiority complex. Hoosiers struggle desperately to prove to themselves and the world that they have a higher function than simply filling up the space between Cincinnati and Chicago.”

That’s Cincinnati, as in Ohio, with its $7 billion deficit and downgraded credit rating, begging Washington for a massive handout. That’s Chicago, as in Illinois, a perennial ethical embarrassment where the government is floating billions in suspect paper just to pay its back bills.

Across America tonight, there are dozens of states that would gladly change places with Indiana. We are fiscally steady; they are crawling to Congress for bailouts.

Yeah, well, Mitch didn’t do such a hot job when he ran Dubya’s OMB; as Wikipedia tells us here…

In 2002, Daniels helped discredit a report by Assistant to the President on Economic Policy Lawrence B. Lindsey estimating the cost of the Iraq War at between $100-$200 billion. Daniels called this estimate "very, very high" and stated that the costs would be between $50-$60 billion.[9] As of 2007, the cost of the invasion and occupation of Iraq has exceeded $400 billion, and the Congressional Budget Office in August 2007 estimated that appropriations would eventually reach $1 trillion or more.[10]

Oh, and let’s not forget Just Plain Folks Sarah Palin who, according to her speech, said that…

…when challenges may seem as high as Mount McKinley, and change as constant as the mighty Yukon flows, and political events send shockwaves through our foundation like the ’64 quake — what do Alaskans do? We climb Denali, we forge the river, we rebuild a stronger foundation on higher ground. When it matters most, lesser differences fall away. Just like family, Alaskans unite.

And they also band together to lobby for their share of the stimulus, apparently, based on this story, even though they’re awash in oil-related revenue, dontcha know.

(The Yardley story also quotes South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, who of course laments on and on about his state’s debt, saying “I told you so,” which really doesn’t do much good at this point – I got into Sanford’s own brand of money mismanagement here.)

As Frank Rich noted here yesterday in the New York Times, “The (Repug) party’s sole consistent ambition is to play petty politics to gum up the works.”

Were our economy not sinking like the proverbial stone, this would be funny. But more fool them for not realizing that this is no time for gamesmanship.