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- Details on the reconciled economic stimulus package are becoming available, and Elana Schor reports that the final text of the bill was left intentionally incomplete, allowing Harry Reid and Senate Democrats to upstage their House counterparts yesterday by announcing the existence of the reconciled bill before the details of education spending had been worked out. Meanwhile, both Gallup and Rasmussen find renewed support for the legislation, most likely due to Barack Obama's PR tour this week.
- In other stimulus news, it appears that protection for federal whistleblowers will not be in the final legislation; cable coverage of the stimulus during the last two weeks featured economists as guests five percent of the time; Lindsey Graham concludes that the spending is wasteful but thinks his home state ought to take the money anyway; Samuel Wurzelbacher, astonishingly, is still out there bringing his
folksy wisdomblathering ignorance to an investigation of the long-term effects of the stimulus; and RedState takes starving the beast to a whole new level, proposing a "stimulus" comprised of nothing but an "absolute, 100% Federal tax holiday" of an unspecified duration. - Yesterday the Senate confirmed William J. Lynn as deputy secretary of defense 93-4, while the Senate Intelligence Committee approved Leon Panetta to head the CIA and the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee approved Hilda Solis’ nomination for Labor Secretary. And Judd Gregg, whose nomination to commerce secretary never made much sense, has withdrawn himself from consideration, citing that "on issues such as the stimulus package and the Census there are irresolvable conflicts for me."
- Technology/new media watch: the Obama administration dispatches Jared Bernstein to talk to liberal bloggers about economic policy, while Virginia GOPers just can't quite figure out this Twitter thing, costing them control of the state senate.
- What Ben Smith fails to grasp in his article about how the left is "silent" on Social Security and Medicare, is that the Obama administration's policy on these two items is largely unknown, and thus can't be criticized or praised. Nor does the left expect, I assume, that a liberal president is going to gut the programs for fear of deficits, given his administration's clear commitment to deficit spending in the short term.
- Marc Ambinder makes a Herculean effort to understand the logic of George Will's assertion that John McCain's desire for bipartisanship was thwarted by the "recklessness" of House Democrats but just ends up even more confused. Of course, this is in a column that assumes the supply-side charlatans of the '80s were no worse than Keynesians, and concludes with the weird observation that "it was not FDR's initial burst of activity in 1933 that put the phrase'100 days' into the Western lexicon. It was Napoleon's frenetictrajectory in 1815 that began with his escape from Elba and ended nearthe Belgian village of Waterloo." So who, exactly, is Napoleon in this analogy?
--Mori Dinauer
