The Campaign for America's Future, the people who bring you the Take Back America conference, Rick Perlstein's blog and more, have launched a snazzy new web 2.0 magazine/blog thing. It combines CAF's excellent research with a bunch of neat bloggers (Digby, Bill Scher, Perlstein and more) and user-generated content. It's still new and shiny, so go play with it. I should say that, while I am writing about this because I genuinely think you should check it out, I also have an ulterior motive since the "Big Con" section employs... me. My first post is on conservative "stimulus" plans and why they're actually nothing of the sort:
The Wall Street Journal wants... wait for it... tax cuts. This could be defensible, but the actual policies it proposes have very little to do with stimulus. The authors suggest “bonus depreciation” which is essentially a tax break on new buildings for corporations. It's not targeted (it certainly doesn't benefit the people hardest hit by a recession), it's not very timely (it would arrive in April at the earliest), and the editorial explicitly argues against making it temporary...Conservatives have become as good at hiding unpopular policies as teenage boys are at hiding porn, but they're running out of creativity and we're starting to learn to look under the mattress. If they want tax cuts for a smaller government let them make that argument. But if they claim a need for them as stimulus, don't be fooled. It's a lie.
--Sam Boyd
