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[caniff]

[ontheway]

[Ya-ta Boy]

FINAL STIMULUS BILL PASSES

WASHINGTON � In a major victory for President Barack Obama, Democrats muscled a huge, $787 billion stimulus bill through Congress late Friday night in hopes of combating the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. Republican opposition was nearly unanimous.

After lobbying energetically for the bill, Obama is expected to sign it within a few days, less than a month after taking office...

The Senate approved the measure 60-38 with three GOP moderates providing crucial support _ the only members of their party to back it. Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown of Ohio cast the decisive vote after flying aboard a government plane from Ohio, where he was mourning his mother's death.

Hours earlier, the House vote was 246-183, with all Republicans opposed to the package of tax cuts and federal spending that Obama has made the centerpiece of his plan for economic recovery.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/13/houses-passes-stimulus-no_n_166793.html


This was interesting: Specter: Republicans Support Stimulus, Don't Want 'Fingerprints' On It

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA), who broke with his party to support President Obama's stimulus package last week, said before the final vote Friday that more of his colleagues would have joined were they not afraid of the political consequences.
"When I came back to the cloak room after coming to the agreement a week ago today," said Specter, "one of my colleagues said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' My Republican colleague said, 'Arlen, I'm proud of you.' I said, 'Are you going to vote with me?' And he said, 'No, I might have a primary.' And I said, 'Well, you know very well I'm going to have a primary.'"...

"I think there are a lot of people in the Republican caucus who are glad to see this action taken without their fingerprints, without their participation," he said.

Specter was asked, How many of your colleagues?

"I think a sizable number," he said. "I think a good part of the caucus agrees with the person I quoted, but I wouldn't want to begin to speculate on numbers."

Being the 60th and deciding vote isn't easy for a centrist who will likely face a more conservative primary challenger and then a more liberal general election opponent.

"I'd feel less uncomfortable about being the sixty-first and even better about being the sixty-seventh, but I'll take 'em one at a time," he said.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/13/specter-republicans-suppo_n_166875.html

I guess no profiles in courage candidates in that bunch. I can't really blame them. I doubt I'd want to lose my safe seat in Congress and have to go looking for a job in this economy either.

What does this mean for bipartisanship? Not much it seems:

White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel, in an interview with reporters, conceded that President Obama lost control of the stimulus debate by focusing too much on bipartisan outreach. The Wall Street Journal reports:

Mr. Emanuel owned up to one mistake: message. What he called the outside game slipped away from the White House last week, when the president and others stressed bipartisanship rather than job creation as they moved toward passing the measure. White House officials allowed an insatiable desire in Washington for bipartisanship to cloud the economic message a point coming clear in a study being conducted on what went wrong and what went right with the package, he said.
According to Emanuel, the White House "lost" control of the message for four days. He suggested that the president decided to change his tone after the House vote, when not a single Republican voted for the bill.

According to the WSJ Emanuel added that "Washington should have learned something about Mr. Obama as well, with the shift from bipartisan overtures to outright mockery of his opposition."

When the president spoke to House Democrats at a February 5th retreat in Williamsburg, Virginia, he'd moved from courting Republican support to attacking them as obstructionists who clung to ""false theories of the past."

The top aide argued that despite the missteps, the final stimulus bill is "close to about 90%" of what they had wanted.

He also promised that the president will not stop reaching out to the GOP.
"The President's always going to reach out to people in both parties. I mean we have these upcoming summits, one on fiscal reform, and another one on health care. There's gonna be Republican participation, and that will never change."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/13/rahm-obama-lost-control-o_n_166692.html

[mises]

This is interesting:

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/1acf059e-fa39-11dd-9daa-000077b07658.html?nclick_check=1

[ontheway]

Another 800 billion down the drain.

The Government has spent trillions on this crisis so far ... $4 trillion ... some say $9 trillion ...

So stupid.

And just to show how stupid it is ...

If you were worried about people's jobs, let's use the $4 trillion number, you could give each of 4 million unemployed Americans $1 million. Just make them millionaires and let them retire. They could spend money and stimulate the economy and create jobs for the rest with the spending by the new millionaires. Wipe out unemployment overnight and put all that cash into circulation.

Yes, this would be a bad plan, but it would be better than what Obama is doing.



Now we just have to wait and see whether the depression will drag on longer, mabye 4 to 6 years, because of this stupid stimulus plan, or whether it's actually big enough to cause Weimar style hyperinflation and total collapse.

[Ya-ta Boy]

[mises]

[Ya-ta Boy]

This is kind of an interesting development:

GOP lawmakers tout projects in the stimulus bill they opposed

WASHINGTON � Rep. John Mica was gushing after the House of Representatives voted Friday to pass the big stimulus plan.

"I applaud President Obama's recognition that high-speed rail should be part of America's future," the Florida Republican beamed in a press release.

Yet Mica had just joined every other GOP House member in voting against the $787.2 billion economic recovery plan...

But Mica wasn't alone in touting what he saw as the bill's virtues. Rep. Don Young, R-Alaska, also had nice things to say in a press release.

Young boasted that he "won a victory for the Alaska Native contracting program and other Alaska small business owners last night in H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act."

One provision would have made it harder for minority businesses to win contracts, and Young explained that he "worked with members on the other side of the aisle to make the case for these programs, and was able to get the provision pulled from the bill."

Yet later in the day Young � who recently told McClatchy that he would've included earmarks, or local projects, in the bill if it had been permitted � issued another statement blasting the overall measure.

"This bill was not a stimulus bill. It was a vehicle for pet projects, and that's wrong," he protested.

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/62181.html

[ontheway]

"Earmarks" does not mean the same thing as "local projects" nor does it mean the same thing as "pork" in legislation.

So, it is quite possible to have a bill that does not allow "earmarks" to still be full of pork and other pet projects. Such "pork" and "pet projects" may or may not be local projects, regional projects, national projects, international projects, or just self serving pelf for special interests.

With earmarks, there is a certain line item for some department, and the Congressional leadership allows members, individually, to designate certain amounts of that already established amount to be "earmarked" for certain projects. This is done secretly unless the member chooses to reveal his or her earmarks. A member can make earmarks even while opposing the line item. "Earmarks" are designations of planned existing spending and do not necessarily constitute additional spending.

With the typical "pork" and "pet projects" the member must arrange to have his or her special pet project added as a an actual line item and they must actually advocate for this as additional spending.


Of course, the Democrats won the election, so their pork is what dominates the recent Obama/Kleptocratic spending bill. They got to reward their consitituencies with their own pork and the Republicans were unable to reward their constituencies with their own pork so they voted against the bill. It's the same dance, just a different tune.


Since this bill will not only NOT help the economy, but actually make it worse, it's the equavalent of throwing one last wild party while the Titanic sinks and not even lowering the life boats.

"Hey, guys, let's just get drunk, pass out, and maybe, when we come to, it'll all be better. If not, we'll be dead anyway, so who cares."


Unfortunately, although it is impossible for this Ponzi Economics scheme to actually help the economy, we are all forced to participate in this final, bacchanal of financial debauchery. No government should be allowed to devastate its citizens with such a program of financial rape.


And, to really understand just how stupid these Ponzi economists are, the truth is that in the long run we will not be dead, as most of us, and our descendants will still be alive, just impoverished and forced to rebuild after a long economic disaster, the Ponzi Nuclear Winter, that has now begun.

[Ya-ta Boy]

Frank Rich has a nice piece in the NYT. I've been wondering how the general public thought about things, in particular how Congress was performing. This is what he reports:

"In any event, the final score was unambiguous. The stimulus package arrived with the price tag and on roughly the schedule Obama had set for it. The president�s job approval percentage now ranges from the mid 60s (Gallup, Pew) to mid 70s (CNN) � not bad for a guy who won the presidency with 52.9 percent of the vote. While 48 percent of Americans told CBS, Gallup and Pew that they approve of Congressional Democrats, only 31 (Gallup), 32 (CBS) and 34 (Pew) percent could say the same of their G.O.P. counterparts."

And that in spite of this was also interesting:

"The stimulus opponents, egged on by all the media murmurings about Obama �losing control,� also thought they had a sure thing. Their TV advantage added to their complacency. As the liberal blog ThinkProgress reported, G.O.P. members of Congress wildly outnumbered Democrats as guests on all cable news networks, not just Fox News, in the three days of intense debate about the House stimulus bill. They started pounding in their slogans relentlessly."

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/opinion/15rich.html?_r=2

[Chamchiman]

"That's a pretty big package, even for a black man."

- Bill Maher

[Ya-ta Boy]

I read the following report on housing and rentals and had this thought: I'll bet I know at least one group of people who are jumping up and down with joy at the passing of the stimulus bill--construction workers.

"Hallier, 40, knows from experience. His $600 million Panorama Towers complex was a tremendous success at its inception three years ago. The first of his four planned residential skyscrapers sold out in six months; the second, which opened in 2007, sold out in 12 weeks. As the third tower neared completion last fall, Hallier had sold 92% of its units. Then the recession hit, and only half the units ended up closing. Hallier says it will take years to break even, and plans for the fourth tower have been delayed indefinitely."

From: America's Emptiest Cities

http://realestate.yahoo.com/promo/americas-emptiest-cities.html

[ontheway]

Dow Jones Industrial Average(DJI: ^DJI)
Index Value: 7,610.83
Trade Time: 11:06AM ET
Change: 239.58 (3.05%)
Prev Close: 7,850.41
Open: 7,845.63
Day's Range: 7,560.33 - 7,970.84
52wk Range:



Just as I predicted above.

The market is voting. Obama's plan has failed. When we get below DOW 7,000 there will be real panic.


PONZI ECONOMICS - the fascist-socialist, fiat money system of the Federal Reserve, Wilson, FDR, Nixon, GWBush and Obama (among others) has failed.

The party is over.

Everyone better wake up. The worst is yet to come.

(Yata, you better go stake out a nice spot under a nice bridge.)

[mithridates]

Looks like there's $8 billion there for high-speed rail. Where do you (Americans) think this should be spent? KTX was supposed to cost $5 billion, ended up at around $15 billion I think, and China's proposed route from Beijing to Shanghai (over 1000 km I believe) is projected at $30 billion or so. Think $8 billion (plus an extra $1 billion a year apparently) could do something like Chicago - Detroit plus, oh let's say...Baltimore and Philadelphia? I have no idea which places need high-speed rail the most though so I want to hear from those who know.

[asylum seeker]