"My Kingdom for a Horse....."

The current stimulus package making it's torturous way through both houses of Congress is like the saying..... what do you get when you ask a committee to put together a horse? A camel.

Nothing wrong with a camel, but the country needs a horse to start pulling us out of the economic ditch.

Paul Krugman's asks today in "The Destructive Center" (NY Times) .... "What do you call someone who eliminates hundreds of thousands of American jobs, deprives millions of adequate health care and nutrition, undermines schools, but offers a $15,000 bonus to affluent people who flip their houses?

"A proud centrist. For that is what the senators who ended up calling the tune on the stimulus bill just accomplished."

The centrists in the Senate just created a camel, and President Obama seems unable, or unwilling, to fix it.

Krugman opines, "One of the best features of the original plan was aid to cash-strapped state governments, which would have provided a quick boost to the economy while preserving essential services. But the centrists insisted on a $40 billion cut in that spending.

"The original plan also included badly needed spending on school construction; $16 billion of that spending was cut. It included aid to the unemployed, especially help in maintaining health care — cut. Food stamps — cut. All in all, more than $80 billion was cut from the plan, with the great bulk of those cuts falling on precisely the measures that would do the most to reduce the depth and pain of this slump.

"On the other hand, the centrists were apparently just fine with one of the worst provisions in the Senate bill, a tax credit for home buyers. Dean Baker of the Center for Economic Policy Research calls this the 'flip your house to your brother' provision: it will cost a lot of money while doing nothing to help the economy.

"All in all, the centrists’ insistence on comforting the comfortable while afflicting the afflicted will, if reflected in the final bill, lead to substantially lower employment and substantially more suffering."

It was Obama who lifted the flap so the "lower taxes" camel could poke it's nose into his change-we-can-believe-in tent. We are in this economic mess because the GOP rich-get-richer trickle-up policies cost trillions and didn't work.... and according Pulitzer-winning economist Krugman and many others, this camel of a bill isn't the economic horse we need now.

MSNBC's Chuck Todd puts a fine point on this today in his "First Read" posting.... many ask just "how the Obama White House and the Democratic committees allowed themselves to get worked over by the Republicans.... how did a Republican Party that had turned a budget surplus into a projected trillion-dollar deficit get away with becoming paragons of fiscal responsibility? "

Krugman points out, "After all, many people expected Mr. Obama to come out with a really strong stimulus plan, reflecting both the economy’s dire straits and his own electoral mandate.
Instead, however, he offered a plan that was clearly both too small and too heavily reliant on tax cuts.

"Why? Because he wanted the plan to have broad bipartisan support, and believed that it would. Not long ago administration strategists were talking about getting 80 or more votes in the Senate."

There's a lesson for Obama here. His high-minded attempt to build a bipartisanship tent ran into the "loyal" opposition's ideological take-no-prisoners stone wall.

Has Obama learned this lesson?

Evidently not. This weekend he was busy trying to saddle this unwieldy stimulus camel.... "Democrats and Republicans came together in the Senate and responded appropriately to the urgency this moment demands, the scale and scope of this plan is right,” he declared on Saturday.

As Krugman laments.... "No, they didn’t, and no, it isn’t."

Hillary: A Doppelganger or a Cuckoo?

Doppelganger: A ghostly counterpart of a living person. Cuckoo bird: Lays egg in another bird's nest, and when the cuckoo hatches it takes over the nest.

Thomas Friedman is pondering today in "Madam Secretary?" (NYTimes)

"My question: Is Obama considering Mrs. Clinton for this job in order to get her off his back or as a prelude to protecting her back?"

"That backing is the most important requirement for a secretary of state to be effective. Frankly, Obama could appoint his dear mother-in-law as secretary of state, and if he let the world know she was his envoy, she would be more effective than any ex-ambassador who had no relationship with the president.

"Our current president never cared about this, so neither of his secretaries of state were particularly effective. Rather than having Colin Powell’s back, President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld delighted in stabbing Powell in the back, particularly when he was on the road.

"But being close to the president is not enough. Condoleezza Rice had a close relationship with Bush, but Bush had no coherent worldview to animate her diplomacy, so all her travels added up to less than the sum of their miles...

"Foreign leaders can spot daylight between a president and a secretary of state from 1,000 miles away. They know when they’re talking to the secretary of state alone and when they are talking through the secretary of state to the president.....

"My question is whether a President Obama and a Secretary of State Clinton, given all that has gone down between them and their staffs, can have that kind of relationship, particularly with Mrs. Clinton always thinking four to eight years ahead, and the possibility that she may run again for the presidency. I just don’t know."

And don't forget just vain Bill. Bill Clinton famously said during his 1992 presidential campaign that with him you get "two for the price of one." But it's 2008, and Maureen Dowd opines that getting Hillary for Secretary of State means getting "Two for the Price of Two." (NY Times)

Dowd thinks the grumpy hubby will come around if Hillary becomes the Mistress of Foggy Bottom. "At least Bill has the satisfaction of seeing that he has roiled the previously serene and joyous Obamaland. It may be Obama’s very willingness to take the albatross of Bill from around Hillary’s neck and sling it around his own that impresses Bill.

"Obama is overlooking all his cherished dictums against drama and leaking and his lofty vetting standards to try and create a situation where the country can benefit from the talent of the Clintons while curbing their cheesy excesses, like their endless cash flow from foreigners."

But, there is a deep unease with many counting on real change, unconvinced that regardless of their current public posture of support for the Obama White House, the Billary will do only what is best for Billary.

And shadowing about the world as Obama's Doppelganger may not fit into Billary's long-term ambitions.

As Chuck Todd points out today in "First Read".... "HillaryLand seems to be making a concerted effort to start tamping down speculation about the secretary of state job. Reports from the New York Times and Politico are sparking the debate about whether she's 100% ready to make the leap from the Senate and 100% ready to give up politics for a while (at least while at State)...

"Today's Wall Street Journal and the AP confirm that the Obama folks are letting it be known that Bill Clinton is fully cooperating with the vet. So while the Hillary folks use the Times/Politico to signal reluctance, others are using the WSJ/AP to suggest that the momentum is still building for the Clinton appointment to happen."

And that is pure chaotic Clinton conundrum-making style.... fogging the question of a closet-cuckoo Hillary in Obama's cabinet nest in Shakespearean "to be, or not to be" fashion.

Hopefully, not.

Palin: The Real Bridge to Nowhere

GOP political pundits are polite on camera about the astonishing pick of 18-month Alaska governor Sarah Palin as the heart-beat-away Veep choice of 72-year-old GOP presidential candidate John McCain.

The real opinion of the GOP spinners surfaced yesterday when Reagan's speechwriter Peggy Noonan, and McCain's former campaign chief Mike Murphy gave their off-camera (but recorded) judgment of the selection of Palin to NBC's Chuck Todd.... here's what they really think. (YouTube)

The transcript:
Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor work. Engler, Whitman, Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. And these guys, this is all like how you want to (inaudible) this race. You know, just run it up. And it's not gonna work.

Noonan: It's over.

Murphy: Still, McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

Todd: Don't you think the Palin pick was insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too (inaudible)

Noonan: I saw Kay this morning.

Murphy: They're all bummed out.

Todd: I mean, is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

Noonan: The most qualified? No. I think they went for this, excuse me, political bullshit about narratives and (inaudible) the picture.

Murphy: I totally agree.

Noonan: Every time the Republicans do that because that's not where they live and it's not what they're good at and they blow it.

Murphy: You know what's really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism and this is cynical.

Todd: And as you called it, gimmicky.

And there you have it. From GOP insiders. McCain's first big decision.... B.S.

The real... unvetted?.... record of McCain's Trojan horse selection is being unmasked daily. Palin's actions as mayor and governor fly in the face of her touted bio as a corruption-fighter and earmark spurner... as a gun-totin', supercharged hockey mom in go-go boots who can leap over her dearth of foreign policy experience in a single operative-managed bound.

What Palin is, is the religious right's dream come true. She is anti-choice, even in the case of rape and incest.... an extreme too radical for even Cindy McCain. She justifies the war in Iraq as "a task that is from God." And, claims it is "God's will" that the U.S. government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants in Alaska. (NY Times)

Palin promotes intellectual design.... creationism.... and wants it taught in public schools. One of her first acts as mayor was to try to ban books in the city library that she deemed inappropriate.

Oh yes, and as mayor of tiny Wasilla, Palin raised the sales tax to build a hockey rink (her kids play) and "gathered up $27 million is subsidies from Washington, $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts."

She was for the earmarked bridge to nowhere before she was against it.... although as Alaska's governor she kept the millions anyway.

If you ever doubted that a McCain presidency would be a continuation of the extreme and failed policies of the neo-con right wing loonies propelling George W. Bush, McCain's selection of Palin put all doubt to rest.

Evidently the McCainites think they'll snag Hillaryites with the selection of Smokin' Sarah.... that they'll cast aside their hard-won feminist gains in favor of A WOMAN!

And, McCain's handlers hope the nation will forget his Hillary-bashing misogynist jokes like the one with which McCain regaled his audience at a GOP Senate fundraiser in 1998... "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." (Salon)

Sis-boom for McCain and women!

The only thing ugly here is the GOP's arrogant assumption that all the jobless, bankrupted, ignored and fast-disappearing middle class will vote for more of the same with McCain and his Trophy Vice.

That would be the bridge to nowhere.