Damn he is good! I particularly like the part about cable chatter! And this “Doh!” moment was priceless…
“So then you get the argument, well, this is not a stimulus bill, this is a spending bill. What do you think a stimulus is? That’s the whole point. No, seriously. That’s the point.”
If only the Congressional Dems could emulate him and be actually effective in fighting the Republibans. As the insurgents Republibans use their guerrilla ambush and delay tactics, every hour of delay equals more jobs lost, and our economy getting sucked down a spiral of unemployment…leading to less consumer spending…leading to more job losses…
600,000 jobs gone in one month. And the states are already running out of unemployment benefit funds.
The Republiban response to 600,000 newly unemployed American citizens?
LINDSEY GRAHAM (R-SC): We do not need any more news conferences. What we need is getting more than 16 people in a room. We need to slow down, take a timeout, and get it right.ROGER WICKER (R-MS): As Thomas Jefferson reminded Americans in his day – and I quote – “Delay is preferable to error.” Let’s not rush into doing this the wrong way.
JOHN ENSIGN (R-NV): So we need to act much more responsibly than this bill acts. It’s still time. There is no hurry.
TOM COBURN (R-OK): There’s no reason for us to hurry up, number one. There’s no reason for us not to look at every area of this bill and make sure the american people know about it.
Yet as Krugman says…
A not-so-funny thing happened on the way to economic recovery. Over the last two weeks, what should have been a deadly serious debate about how to save an economy in desperate straits turned, instead, into hackneyed political theater, with Republicans spouting all the old clichés about wasteful government spending and the wonders of tax cuts.
The Republban are weakening and thus ultimately destroying the stimulus bill….and then they will blame the failure of the stimulus on Obama. Insurgency indeed. They are waging asymmetrical War on America, or in their case ass-ymmetrical war.
[T]hese aren’t just statistics. This is not a game. This is not a contest for who’s in power and who’s up and who’s down. These are your constituents. These are families you know and you care about. […]We’re not moving quickly because we’re trying to jamb something down people’s throats. We’re moving quickly because we’re told that if we don’t move quickly, that the economy is going keep on getting worse, and we’ll have another 2 or 3 or 4 million jobs loss this year.
I’d love to be leisurely about this. … We’re not doing this because we think this is a lark. We’re doing this because people are counting on us.
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Maybe we should hire him? 😉
last night. I saw it only on C-span. Yet this morning, they did air McCain’s blathering speech live & keep showing clips of it today.
It could be coincidence, or there could be actual proof that they’re showing republicans talking about the stimulus 2:1 to the Democrats speaking.
It could all be a coincidence, or it could be something else: (from Chris Bowers at Open Left):
I’m not surprised, but I’m getting angry. IMHO, it’s time we started calling, e-mailing & posting blog comments to the program managers and on air personalities of the networks named in the Bradblog link; citing the statistics of Republican to Dems (51 to 24) and asking them why they are so apparently anti-stimulus and so biased in chosing their interviewees?
Now that’s worth a trillion-dollar price tag! All those Blackwater and Halliburton jobs! Let’s see, who can we attack next? Africa! They’re defenseless!
And prisons! We can hire half of the working class to guard the other half! None of this namby-pamby socialist crap about limiting executive bonuses to a stingy half a million!
The liberals just don’t understand. It’s not that we’re against spending the country into a hole (God knows, we’ve done it at a breathtaking rate the last eight years). You just have to spend it on the right class of people. The poor need the healthy sting of hunger to move them along. But we aristocrats, we need our accustomed enticements to continue leading, otherwise civilization as we know it will go right down the toilet.
Who’s with me? Anyone?
Glad to see Obama getting “tough” in the right way.
I’m willing to give this time. I’m not freaking out…yet. If Obama can pull this off, I’m all for it – I don’t think we should go scorched earth on the Republicans because that’s not who I think we want to be. We should do it the right way. And while that may mean being patient, it doesn’t mean being soft.
Digby: “I noticed in passing that David Gergen is nearly in tears that Obama has betrayed the promise of bipartisanship tonight. He’s heartbroken that Obama decided that it was more important to save the economy than kiss GOP hems and bow and scrape before the villagers. No word on the parade of GOP jackasses who’ve been all over TV laying down the law that the only stimulus they can possibly sign on to is one that would have been written by Dick Armey and Newt Gingrich.”
This is 1:00:02 minutes long — if you listen to just 5 or 6 minutes of it, it’s worth it. Sorry, I can’t bring the video to you — could not find any embed coding and I don’t have a “script” for it handy!
Rep. Dennis Kucinich Explains Our Current Economic Situation
It’s time to quit caving in to try to get two GOP votes and tell the Republicans that if they want to filibuster on this bill, while the whole country watches and our economy gets worse every day, they should feel free. Let people see who they really are and what they stand for. Time to call their bluff.
want to slow down now that the money actually might go to ordinary people, when they couldn’t step over themselves fast enough to give 700 bill. to the banks.
Oh, by the way, what happened to that money?
& petty politics. TPM’s Day in 100 seconds vids do a good job of splicing the talking heads’ sound bites together. Yesterday’s was particularly good on the subject of the stimulus plan and the republibans.