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- Yesterday, House Republicans -- along with 11 Democrats -- unanimously voted against the economic stimulus package despite President Obama's multiple outreach efforts. Yes, I know, shocking. Some reactions: Greg Sargent asks the question I was thinking about, namely when will Obama start using the bully pulpit against the Republicans? Nate Silver describes The Republican Death Spiral. House Minority Whip Eric Cantor takes to the pages of Politico to plead "[a]t a moment when the country needs our help, it would be a great mistake for the House GOP to turn inward and simply become the party of 'no.'" Court jester Mark Halperin blames Obama for failing to concede to Republicans on every issue in the name of "bipartisanship." Think Progress documents that no matter who's in charge in Washington, cable news always deems it necessary to have twice as many Republicans on TV as Democrats. And de facto GOP leader Rush Limbaugh comes up with his own stimulus plan (seriously) and suggests he and the president can work together to pass it.
- Then there's the Senate. Jim DeMint seems convinced that Senate Republicans will be able to replicate what their House counterparts accomplished, and describes the current stimulus bill as a "mugging." Meanwhile, Democrats are busy trying to win the support of Republican moderates with a series of advertisements targeted at their home state constituents.
- Barack Obama signed the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act into law today but the far more ambitious Paycheck Fairness Act could face a more precipitous challenge in Congress.
- Fair and Balanced: Politico publishes a companion piece to yesterday's ode to the "do-nothing" movement, looking at the more organized (if underplayed) effort to increase the size of the economic stimulus legislation.
- The Illinois State Senate voted unanimously to remove Gov. Rod Blagojevich from office, the first impeachment of a sitting governor in the state's history. Earlier Blagojevich had made an emotional plea for the legislative body to spare him.
- Tomorrow the RNC chooses a new chairman, and it looks like Chip Saltsman's enlightened opinion of Latinos is about as likely to win him that chair as his equally enlightened sense of humor about black folks.
- I'm telling you -- Karl Rove represents the decade's comedic zeitgeist. In his Wall St. Journal column, the jubilant former political strategist argues that the large number of people working in the White House -- compared to his time -- could politicize policy discussions and effect the quality of White House policy.
- Change you can believe in: Mike Griffin 86ed from NASA, replaced by interim director Christopher Scolese.
- One nice thing about having a president who reads newspapers every morning is that there's a good chance he'll get pissed off by what he reads in them from time to time. Like, say, learning about the mind-boggling huge bonuses Wall St. managers continue to receive even as they beg for money from the federal government: "[w]hen I saw an article today indicating that Wall Street bankers had given themselves $20 billion worth of bonuses -- the same amount of bonuses as they gave themselves in 2004 -- at a time when most of these institutions were teetering on collapse and they are asking for taxpayers to help sustain them, and when taxpayers find themselves in the difficult position that if they don't provide help that the entire system could come down on top of our heads -- that is the height of irresponsibility. It is shameful."
--Mori Dinauer
