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By James C. Hormel and Erin Martin
By Richard Shelton
$13.04
$23
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The New York Times / Susan Etheridge
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Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid announced Wednesday afternoon that congressional leaders have finally agreed on a $789 billion economic stimulus package, pushing the plan to a final House and Senate vote by Friday at the earliest.
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Wikimedia Commons
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The Senate passed its own version of the stimulus package Tuesday, slashing funding in areas that would most effectively stimulate the economy, such as aid to low-income Americans and states, while expanding tax cuts. The House and Senate bills must now be reconciled with one another.
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White House / Pete Souza
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By Eugene Robinson — Bipartisanship is a cute idea, but with 600,000 Americans losing their jobs in one month, there simply isn’t time to be nice.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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He has his opponents in Congress, but President Barack Obama is stressing the need to settle the stimulus issue—and fast. On Monday, in his first major news conference since assuming office, Obama warned of economic troubles ahead and presented the stimulus package as a possible way out.
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Here we have one of the unnamed senators whom New York Times columnist Paul Krugman collectively branded “proud centrist[s]” in his column Sunday, people who have put politics before the good of the country in whittling down the stimulus bill. What say you, Sen. Ben Nelson from Nebraska?
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bloomberg.com
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Note to all the senators who trotted out their best horse-trading tactics to create the latest, pared-down version of the stimulus bill: Paul Krugman does not approve of your centrist ways.
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radaronline.com
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A survey of stimulus coverage by Media Matters has found that watching TV news may actually shrink your brain. Well, that’s not fair, but it certainly won’t teach you much about stimulating the economy. That’s because the personalities that populate the airwaves—and not just Fox News—are given license to repeat untruths over and over again.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — It took less than three weeks for the real Barack Obama to come into view. He turns out to be both a conciliator and a fighter. Update
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Everyone’s a Captol Hill critic these days. Here we have a handful who might just know what they’re talking about when it comes to the stimulus debate: Arianna Huffington, Tony Blankley, Robert Scheer and Matt Miller do their darndest to sort out where the money should go.
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nytimes.com
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With little surprise but incredible effect, the U.S. unemployment rate rose to 7.6 percent in January, hitting its highest level since 1992. President Obama used the report to prod Congress to pass his economic stimulus package.
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AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite
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At long last, it looks like something resembling an agreement might happen soon among members of the Senate who had been previously having trouble finding any middle ground when it came to the proposed stimulus plan.
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By Joe Conason — Mythology is overshadowing history in the debate over Obama’s plan to stimulate the depressed economy. Excessive airtime is devoted to the prejudices of cable hosts and radio personalities who regurgitate ideas they barely understand.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Republicans have been winning the media wars over Obama’s central initiative. They have done so largely by defining the proposal by its least significant parts.
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President Barack Obama has made it a point to reach across the aisle in trying to gain Republicans’ support for his stimulus plan, but judging by the results of Tuesday’s Senate vote, partisanship is still afoot in the halls of Congress.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s outreach to Republicans is popular, but the coming week will test his resolve. Eventually, he’ll have to say “no” to the GOP, or lose what he’s fighting for.
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climatelawupdate.com
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Despite the lack of support for President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan among Republican Congress members last week, several GOP governors are supporting the package, although some, like South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford, are still putting up a fight.
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Will President Obama’s stimulus plan be a help or a hindrance to America’s economic future? The “Left, Right, & Center” panelists have their opinions, of course, on the subject, and they’re ready to go to battle—and sometimes even agree—on this week’s show.
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AP photo / Ron Edmonds
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Putting a point on how his administration’s labor policies differ from his predecessor’s, President Barack Obama on Friday signed three executive orders designed to support organized labor. Vice President Joe Biden followed up by saying “Welcome back to the White House” to labor representatives at the signing ceremony.
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By David Sirota — Intragovernmental squabbling probably makes the conflict-averse Obama uncomfortable. But the “make him do it” dynamic could finally bring the center of Washington’s political debate closer to the progressive center of American public opinion.
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By Eugene Robinson — Unbeknown to the House Republicans who voted unanimously against President Obama’s stimulus package, we are in the midst of a rare fundamental shift in American politics.
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By Joe Conason — How fortunate for Barack Obama that Rush Limbaugh, big radio personality and leader of the instinctual far right, has yet to retire to a sunny island with his bottles of pills.
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By Marie Cocco — After eight years of trickle-down tax cuts that pushed the prosperous up and left most everyday Americans sliding further down, the stimulus bill now moving swiftly through Congress is more than a reversal of political course. Let’s hope it’s not too late.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — President Obama’s visit with House and Senate Republicans this week was useful for setting a new tone and a refreshing break from the Bush administration’s habit of consulting almost no one. But it was a sideshow to the main battle over how to improve the economy, which is among Democrats.
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Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune —
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Flickr / hthg1983
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The vice president let it slip Sunday that the $700 billion TARP bailout bill could have a sequel. Also, Nancy Pelosi indicated that Congress might dole out more funds to financial institutions. Let’s see, that’s $700 billion on TARP, $850 billion for the still-pending stimulus package, plus the mysterious billions they’re tossing around at the Federal Reserve. ... Here’s hoping China doesn’t cut up our national credit card.
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Barack Obama is coming out of the gate with quite the to-do list, not the least part being his new economic recovery plan, which carries quite the price tag at about $1 trillion. What is he thinking? Here, Obama gives some details in his weekly online address.
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What’s it going to take to jump-start the economy? How does almost a trillion dollars sound? That’s the amount that President Barack Obama is considering for his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, which he introduced to the public in his weekly address on Saturday.
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By Marie Cocco — Remember this, President Obama: There are few Washington traditions as annoying as the cultish worship of bipartisanship, for it ignores the simple fact that sometimes one party gets things disastrously wrong.
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Flickr / jphilipg
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There will be negotiation, revision and capitulation, but the basic guts of the Democrats’ $825 billion stimulus package are out in the open. There’s billions for infrastructure, billions for schools and billions for you and me. House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) responded by saying “Oh. My. God,” which we’ll take to mean, “Praise Jesus! The Democrats have done it again.”
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By Ellen Goodman — What will happen if Michelle Obama makes the personal her political issue? What would a serious work-and-family policy look like?
Posted on Jan 14, 2009
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — One of the clearest signals President-elect Barack Obama has sent is his determination to learn from the Clinton years, and particularly from the former president’s failures on health care.
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By Joe Conason — As the government contemplates spending very large sums of money, it is reassuring to know that somebody still worries about waste. Or it would be reassuring, if only that somebody were not Mitch McConnell, the Senate minority leader.
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By Marie Cocco — Much of the business-tax package Obama contemplates fails his own test of cutting business taxes “where it makes sense and is going to work.”
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In this series of weekly addresses posted on Change.gov before news of the Bill Richardson scandal broke, the president-elect makes an appeal for an economic recovery strategy that would ideally prevent further job losses and spark a turnaround in Americans’ prospects as soon as possible.
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Flickr / FaceMePLS
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President-elect Obama is still working out the nuts and bolts of his recovery (fingers crossed) package, but Obama advisers have disclosed that at least one proposal would expand benefits and compensation to the unemployed. With the economic meltdown vaporizing more and more jobs, here’s hoping Congress gets it done before February.
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By David Sirota — If you’re like me, you sometimes find yourself speechless when confronted with abject insanity, such as conservatives’ newest talking point—the one designed to stop Congress from passing an economic stimulus package.
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White House / Paul Morse (altered)
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By Eugene Robinson — Having two presidents is starting to feel like having no president, and that’s the situation we’ll face until Inauguration Day. Heaven help us.
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youtube.com
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Congress is planning to give Barack Obama some serious motivation to jump right into the job on Inauguration Day, with two key lawmakers saying they plan to have a major economic stimulus package waiting for him on Jan. 20.
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By David Sirota — Bush reportedly suggested to Obama he might support an economic stimulus package and aid to struggling automakers if Democrats drop their opposition to a free-trade agreement with Colombia. Strange behavior? Yes and no.
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Flickr / Rain Rannu
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Instead of buying lots of new cheap things, people are busy stuffing what’s left of their money in mattresses. That has China, where the goodies come from, worried. The Chinese government has decided a stimulus is in order, to the tune of 4 trillion yuan (more than $550 billion).
Posted on Nov 9, 2008
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Federal Reserve
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Ben Bernanke doesn’t really care if you call it a recession or, in his words, “a very serious slowdown in the economy.” Whatever it is, the chairman of the Federal Reserve thinks a new stimulus package is needed to get those terrified Americans dipping into their mattresses and buying things again.
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blogs.trb.com
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Why is it that the U.S. economy is on a serious downswing? Could it be that we’re in the midst of a super-expensive war with little sign of scaling down in the near future that has jacked up oil prices to new heights and strained the federal budget? According to Bush, he’d have worked out our economic woes if it weren’t for those meddling congressional Democrats.
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boston.com
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President Bush announced that rebate checks will start winging their way to taxpayers as early as Monday, helpfully observing that Americans need a little help paying for necessities like groceries and gas during this economic “slowdown”—a slightly different story from his initial justification for this economic stimulus plan, and one that wasn’t lost on his critics.
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Both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama gave major economic policy speeches Thursday, outlining specific proposals and highlighting John McCain’s relative weakness on the subject. Obama called for a boost in regulation and an additional $30 billion in stimulus while Clinton proposed a job retraining program.
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Sometimes it’s useful to let a story’s own lead speak for itself. Take, for example, the doozy of a question that opens Sheryl Gay Stolberg’s New York Times article about Bush’s economic focus in Monday’s State of the Union address: “Will George W. Bush be remembered as the president who lost the economy while trying to win a war?”
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By David Sirota — Stimulus—you’ve probably heard this nebulous, scientific-sounding word this week. Every politician suddenly wants economic “stimulus,” and wants you to think this “stimulus” is unequivocally good.
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news.google.com
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House Democrats, Republicans and President Bush have tentatively agreed on the broad outlines of a $150-billion stimulus package. Most of that money will come in the form of payouts ranging between $300 and $1,200 for individuals and households.
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