The big new way for right-wingers to attack the stimulus bill has been to attack the STD prevention provisions, just as they were attacking the birth control provisions before. I think the idea is to exploit the fact that discussions of sex in public policy contexts can cause brief giggly impairment among people of a conservative disposition. By the time your right-leaning readers regain their mental faculties, they've already accepted your conclusion that the only legitimate role of government is to bomb Muslims and keep people from having sex.
In addition, some writers try to win over their audience by hating on single guys like me and the ladies who like us. Here's Mark Steyn: "If we have more STD prevention, it will be safer for loose women to go into bars and pick up feckless men, thus stimulating the critical beer and nuts and jukebox industries." The whole article is a pretty horrific piece of work. If I had the mockery chops of the folks at Pandagon or Sadly No or my former Cogitamus blogmates, I'd write some huge mocking takedown of the whole thing. But I think I'm just going to have to radio in for help on that score and do something I'm better at.
Which is: explaining how you stimulate the economy. The basic idea is to borrow a big stack of money at our current super-low interest rates and give it to people who will buy stuff and get the economy going again. Sometimes you do that by mailing everybody checks, also called a 'tax rebate'. Or you could find some kind of long-term project that will make America better off, and pay people money to do it. For example, you could hire engineers and construction workers to set up high-speed rail lines and improve our nation's transit infrastructure. Or you could hire a bunch of doctors and nurses to prevent diseases and improve public health in America. (This is the one conservatives are making fun of.) Both are good ideas that will make our lives better and save us money in the future, on gasoline and pharmaceuticals among other things, and we should do lots of each.
