Quote of the Day

"It's more and more obvious that Glenn Beck has decided that becoming a male Ann Coulter is good for his ratings. So his show is now dedicated to saying increasingly outrageous things solely in an attempt to get liberals to denounce him and drive his ratings yet higher. Conclusion: it's time to start ignoring him, right?"

Kevin Drum

Stimulus Package Caution

Kevin Drum makes a poor defense for the stimulus package.

Still, isn't the bill just a hodgepodge of unrelated spending? Sure. What else could it be? There's no way to spend $800 billion on infrastructure over the next two years, so most of the money has to be spent on other stuff. But so what? Employing clerks or crossing guards or home care workers counts every bit as much as employing backhoe operators or engineers. Spending money on contraceptives does as much for the economy as spending money on rebar. An unemployment check gets spent on food the same way a paycheck does.

I don't argue that there is a sense of urgency. The economy is bad. I disagree with Jim Johnson on two points. The economy will be bad past 2009 and we don't need to spend right away. The Obama administration needs to best use this money to jump start the economy. They won't get another chance.

Obama has wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama intends to increase troops in the latter. Iraq has shown security improvements. However, it would be foolish to make predictions of the withdrawal date. The wars and deficit will cause the U.S. government to continue to borrow money. The alternative is unemployment continues until 2011.

David Gregory of Meet the Press told Lawrence Summers economists said the stimulus package would fail, because it wasn't big enough. Summers dodges the question.

GREGORY: So let’s talk about that, and that is the stimulus or the recovery plan that the president has proposed. In December, this is what you wrote: “In this crisis, doing too little poses a greater threat than doing too much.”

That was an op-ed piece you did. In that same piece, you said at that time that the economy was headed to a position where it was underperforming, where it was falling short of capacity to the tune of a trillion dollars. Now, there are other economists that I’ve spoken to say actually that’s optimistic, that it’s actually falling short to the order of $2 trillion.

So why a stimulus plan that’s only 825 billion?

SUMMERS: David, this is the largest stimulus plan in the country’s history. It’s the largest investment in the backbone of our economy since the interstate -- since the interstate highway system. It’s going to double renewable energy. And it is only one phase of the approach that the president is taking.

The president has made clear that there will be strong action to address the terrible problems in our housing sector, that he will be using additional funds for a substantial financial recovery plan to get the flow of credit going. This is one component of our strategy to bring about expansion. And the president has also made clear that going forward we’re going to be leaning forward and that he is prepared to do what is necessary.

GREGORY: It is big, even...

SUMMERS: And so we believe this -- we believe that this is a properly sized approach to move the economy forward. You know, economists from several private firms have now corroborated our incoming CEA chairman Christina Romer’s estimate that the plan will create...

Contraceptives (which I support) or sod for the National Mall will stimulate the economy. A stimulus package should do what it claims. The alternative is just just as bad. Future generations are gonna be paying the bill.

McCain's Message: Blame Obama

I agree with Kevin Drum: John McCain is getting really desperate if he expects people to believe that Barack Obama is singlehandedly responsible for current gasoline prices.

"Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?" the narrator asked. We then hear Barack Obama's name chanted repeatedly.

The Iraq war, energy companies rigging rates, years of bad policy or McCain's terms in the Senate have nothing to do with gas prices. It's all Obama's fault.

Update: PolitiFact rates the McCain ad as entirely false.

The main implication of the ad is that the ban on some offshore drilling — a ban that McCain has long opposed, more explicitly lately than in the past — has contributed to rising prices, and since Obama supports it, it is fair to blame him for it.

The last part is highly dubious. Obama has only been in the U.S. Senate since 2005, and the congressional moratorium prohibiting oil and gas leasing on most of the outer continental shelf dates to 1982.

Granted, Congress has renewed it every year since. But there was also a presidential order banning oil exploration off the coasts from 1990, when the first President Bush issued it, until July 14, 2008, when his son lifted it.

McCain needs to focus on more on what he is going to do for the country. McCain can't define a message when he keeps flip-flopping. This election is about voters that or for and against Obama. McCain was the Republican that ran the least incompetent campaign. No one will mistake him for the second-coming of Ronald Reagan.

Wingnut Contest

Kevin Drum is running a contest for the worst wingnut blog posts of all-time. Unsurprisingly, Glenn Reynolds is one of the nominees.

Reynolds disses Glenn Greenwald for attacking his post. Reynolds links to another post he wrote in defense of his views. He never linked to the Greenwald piece. It is an unwritten blog law to not attack another blogger's post and and link to it. Reynolds does this all the time. He really is that insecure.

This is the wingnuttery that Drum and Greenwald rightfully point out as terrible.

Yeah, there has been a lot of pro-war gloating. And I guess that Dawn Olsen's cautionary advice about gloating is appropriate. So maybe we shouldn't rub in just how wrong, and morally corrupt the antiwar case was. Maybe we should rise above the temptation to point out that claims of a "quagmire" were wrong -- again! -- how efforts at moral equivalence were obscenely wrong -- again! -- how the antiwar folks are still, far too often, trying to move the goalposts rather than admit their error -- again -- and how an awful lot of the very same people who spoke lugubriously about "civilian casualties" now seem almost disappointed that there weren't more -- again -- and how many people who spoke darkly about the Arab Street and citizens rising up against American "liberators" were proven wrong -- again -- as the liberators were seen as just that by the people they were liberating. And I suppose we shouldn't stress so much that the antiwar folks were really just defending the interests of French oil companies and Russian arms-deal creditors. It's probably a bad idea to keep rubbing that point in over and over again.

Nah.

My all-time favorite wingnut post is by John Hunderaker. I can never really get mad at Power Line. I find their wingnutery too damn funny. Unfortunately, comedy isn't Hinderaker's intenntion.

It must be very strange to be President Bush. A man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius, he can't get anyone to notice. He is like a great painter or musician who is ahead of his time, and who unveils one masterpiece after another to a reception that, when not bored, is hostile.

Reynolds and Power Line are the gift that keeps on giving to the Left. Thank the blogging Gods for Conservative lawyers.

Quote of the Day

Kevin Drum on the rumor that the New York Times is going to end TimesSelect. Only paid subscribers have been able to read the columnists online.

Can this be true? It would sure be nice to once again be able to mock Tom Friedman.....

Amen, brother.

Personally, I miss the unintentional comedy writing of John Tierney.