It's only a minor irritation that Barak Obama might well take to the public airwaves tonight to promote his so-called stimulus package, therefore depriving me of what is typically my favorite night of television viewing, but what really makes it bad is that if he does so, he will in effect preempt what is generally good fiction for poorly-conceived outright fantasy.
He could at least arrange to have a horror music score with nerve-raking crescendos timed at just the right parts of his speech. We could all use the comic relief.
Besides, according to Gallup, a majority of Americans are all sufficiently terrified of the potential consequences of not passing the stimulus. However, note that this is only fifty-one percent, leveraged against a forty-eight percent approval rating for Congressional Democrats versus a meager thirty-plus percent approval for Congressional Republicans. The only thing likely keeping this thing afloat is Obama's own relatively high popularity ratings-a solid 67 percent. Translation-he is still riding high off the fumes of his victory and hopes to make the most of it while he still has a chance to pay off his constituents and supporters-known in Newspeak as "save the economy before it is too late".
Although most Republicans have held firm against this obvious and blatant misuse of taxpayers money-including, surprisingly, John McCain-there are a handful of GOP Senators willing to go along with the scam-three of them in the Senate, to be precise, including Arlen Specter (Pennsylvania) and Susan Collins (Maine).
Obama has also managed to bring on board none other than Florida Governor Charlie Crist, who seems to be looking toward a run for the US Senate in 2010 to replace Senator Mel Martinez.
In the meantime, several House Republicans have been the recipients of several automated calls urging their cooperation.
The calls are set to run against GOP Reps. Bill Cassidy (La.), John Fleming (La.), Brett Guthrie (Ky.), Leonard Lance (N.J.), Christopher Lee (N.Y.) and Blaine Luetkemeyer (Mo.), in addition to Rooney.
The calls come as a new Gallup Poll shows 51 percent of Americans say a stimulus plan is "critically important" and a week after the DCCC launched radio ads targeting 28 Republican members who voted against the package. The radio ads will end their run tomorrow. All seven freshmen targeted by the phone calls also had radio ads run against them.
An example of one such ad aimed at the constituents of a GOP Congressman is as follows-
"Did you know Congressman Tom Rooney voted against economic recovery that would immediately create and save nearly 330,000 Florida jobs?" asks a call targeting the freshman Florida Republican.
"Times are tough. Tell Congressman Rooney to put families before politics," the caller intones.
In the meantime, in the hurry to push this monster spending bill through, put on the back burner has been the plan of Treasury Secretary Geitner to utilize the 700 billion dollar stimulus bill from last year (what is left of it) to shore up those banks affected by bad mortgages. Many seem to think this news, once it is officially announced, will result in an upswing in the stock market, which of course would take a lot of the wind out of the sails of those pushing Obama's plan. His announcement, nevertheless, has been put off until Wednesday, at the earliest, in order to buy more time for Obama's plan to gain sufficient support to insure passage, preferably with at least some semblance of bi-partisanship.
Where to begin? It is just beyond my comprehension that public servants should be so vile, or that so many of the American public could be so servile. Is this truly the level to which we have descended? Evidently, the American public who hold out such great hope for this package have neglected to consider one important fact-just because somebody says it's so, doesn't make it true.
Even if the stimulus bill would work, under the current set of circumstances, there is so much that could happen that could render it totally useless within a matter of weeks, if not days. What if there was yet another major flare-up in the Middle East that caused the price of oil to once more skyrocket near the one hundred forty dollar-per-barrel range, or more. Much more? What if there were another major terrorist attack, especially on American soil? What if yet another major corporation went belly-up? Or two, or three? What if the stars colluded to the extent that all of these things happened over a relatively short period of time? Can we take it all back? Of course not.
The most maddening thing is, according to the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office, it might all be unnecessary to begin with-even on the highly unlikely chance it could work-for the simple fact they have projected that the current recession will finally end, on its own, during the early part of the second half of this year.
So now we see yet another potential reason for this rush to implementation of a bad, ill-advised piece of legislation that just aims to throw yet more good money after bad. If the CBO's prediction holds true, then Obama and the Congressional Democratic majority can claim at least a degree of credit for the improvement. The problem is, of course, the stimulus package might actually make matters worse. In that case, they need as many Republicans as possible to help share the blame. Of course the many that refuse to support the bill will be blamed anyway.
As for the Democrats, they will continue to confuse, manipulate, obfuscate, and outright lie their way through the next two years, while average Americans will just hope, perhaps beyond all reasonable hope, that things will work out and that, indeed, the recession will end by the start of the second half of this year, as the CBO predicts.
After all, Americans will have lost a whopping three billion jobs, just from the beginning of this year until the beginning of the second half of this same year.
We just can't take much more of this.
Hat Tip to-Lee at Digital Nicotine
2 comments:
This is what is actually said.
Ren, no matter who is for or against the bailout, they all have one thing in common. Nobody seems to entertain the notion that all it would take is one major event to knock everything down to the dust. That is just as true if the stimulus worked as if it didn't, or if there was or was not a stimulus. The only difference is with the stimulus, that is just 800 more billion dollars down the drain, all for nothing. Then what will they do, if there is another terrorist attack, another major war in the Middle East resulting in sky-high oil prices, another natural disaster on the order of Katrina, or worse, etc.
That to me is more than ample reason to just leave this shit alone and let it work itself out, or at least to act very judiciously in how the money is appropriated.
And let's face it, without the economic woes we have now, there would not be one dime's worth of difference in the current stimulus bill as it would be under better circumstances compared to now. The only difference would be the given reason for it. There might not be quite as much in the way of tax incentives. Then again, it might even be the same in that regard. I would guess though there would be a heavier swing toward the spending side of the equation.
The only thing I know you wouldn't hear would be the warnings of dire catastrophe if it were not enacted. It would be the exact same stimulus bill proposed under better circumstances and promoted with different reasoning.
It was like under Bush. Every situation, no matter how dire or how relatively benign, was call for yet another tax cut. It didn't matter what the situation was, a tax cut was the answer. It's the same thing here, only with less emphasis on tax cuts and more on spending.
It's just another aspect of modern American partisan politics, and it's not going to change anytime soon, if ever.
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