The Obfuscation Report

When Ronald Reagan started his "trickle-down" economics, it lead to some of the largest budget deficits in U.S. History. Republicans LOVE Ronald Reagan. It was up to George H.W. Bush to pass tax increases which lead to the Clinton Era of Balanced Budgets.

After the Clinton Era, George W. Bush inherited a budget surplus which the Republican Controlled Congress Quickly Turned Into The Largest Budget Deficits In U.S. History. Republicans Loved It. They passed huge tax cuts for the rich, which lead to even larger budget deficits. But nobody called it "Generational Theft."

Now that the Democratic Controlled Congress has passed a Stimulus Bill for the Ailing U.S. Economy, Republicans are calling it.... "Generational Theft."

It would be hilarious if it wasn't so fucking pathetic. Republican leaders are so starved for ideas that they're taking their cues from Michelle "I wish I was in an internment camp" Malkin and Rush "Hillbilly Heroin" Limbaugh.

GOP Leaders Taking Cues From Malkin On Stimulus, Call It ‘Generational Theft’

In early January, when President Obama first proposed his American Recovery and Reinvestment Plan, conservative columnist Michelle Malkin balked at the proposal’s name, writing that it should be called “The Generational Theft Act of 2009.” Malkin has been pushing her attempted re-branding ever since, repeating it over and over and over again.

Malkin’s views are apparently beginning to hold sway with Republicans in Congress. On January 29, Sen. Tom Coburn (R-OK) said of the proposed stimulus package, “This bill is a generational theft bill.” In a blog post yesterday for AmericaSpeakOn.org, a new conservative 501(c)4 group, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) used Malkin’s language as well:

The hundreds of billions of dollars Washington is borrowing to finance this pork-barrel monstrosity will come from our children and grandchildren. This is not “stimulus” – it’s generational theft.

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who has become a top critic of the recovery package in the Senate, also referred to it as “generational theft” on CBS’ Face The Nation yesterday. Watch it:

Malkin isn’t the only far right conservative pundit influencing the GOP these days. As ThinkProgress noted yesterday, congressional Republicans are embracing right-wing talker Rush Limbaugh as their “unofficial leader.” Some Republicans, like Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA), are following Limbaugh’s lead by referring to the stimulus as the “porkulus” bill.

Labels: Republican Hypocrits

US lawmaker injects ISP throttle into Obama rescue package
11th February 2009 00:43 GMT

US Senator Dianne Feinstein hopes to update President Barack Obama's $838bn economic stimulus package so that American ISPs can deter child pornography, copyright infringement, and other unlawful activity by way of "reasonable network management."

Clearly, a lobbyist whispering in Feinstein's ear has taken Comcast's now famous euphemism even further into the realm of nonsense.

According to Public Knowledge, Feinstein's network management amendment did not find a home in the stimulus bill that landed on the Senate floor. But lobbyists speaking with the Washington DC-based internet watchdog said that California's senior Senator is now hoping to insert this language via conference committee - a House-Senate pow-wow were bill disputes are resolved.

"This is the most backdoor of all the backdoor ways of doing things," Public Knowledge's Art Brodsky told The Reg. "Conference committees are notorious for being the most opaque of all legislative processes."

Obama's stimulus bill sets aside between $6bn and $9bn for expanding American broadband into rural areas, and Senator Feinstein hopes to (PDF) augment this Broadband Technology Opportunities Program so that it "allows for reasonable network management practices such as deterring unlawful activity, including child pornography and copyright infringement."

On one level, Obama's bill is an effort to boost the American economy. On another, it's an opportunity for lobbyists to make a mockery American government.

According to Public Knowledge, the Motion Picture Association of America is behind Feinstein's language. The MPAA doesn't like copyright infringement. And you can bet the child pornography bit was tossed in for added effect.

But the "network management" bit sounds like ISP speak.

As Art Brodsky and his colleagues pointed out, network management is used to manage networks - not filter content. Content filters are used to filter content. But American ISPs - particularly cable ISPs - will take any excuse they can find to throttle certain traffic.

And if they're using copyright infringement and child porn as excuses, they'll have to start sniffing packets. So, Feinstein's amendment would also destroy net privacy - if there's any out there.

Word from Public Knowledge is that Congressman Henry Waxman will back Feinstein's amendment when it turns up in conference committee. Representing a district near Hollywood, Waxman has long backed the MPAA and the Recording Ass. of America in their efforts to crack down on P2P file sharing.

February 7th, 2009 1:10 pm
598,000 Jobs Shed In Brutal January

Unemployment Hits 7.6% as Downturn Picks Up Steam

By Neil Irwin and Annys Shin / Washington Post

Conditions for the nation's workers deteriorated last month at an unrelenting pace, new data showed yesterday, adding urgency to the Obama administration's calls for aggressive action to curb job losses and bolster the economy.

The White House has been working on parallel tracks to arrest the economic free fall. While building support for a massive stimulus package, which cleared a crucial hurdle in the Senate last night, the administration has also been cobbling together a rescue plan for the financial system, which the Treasury Department is scheduled to unveil Monday.

Both efforts are designed to improve the nation's employment outlook, by directly creating jobs in the case of stimulus and, in the case of the financial rescue, by steadying the banks that would ordinarily lend to employers seeking to expand.

The need for progress on those fronts seemed more important than ever yesterday, as the Labor Department announced that conditions worsened more than expected last month. The nation's employers shed 598,000 jobs, the most since 1974, driving the unemployment rate to 7.6 percent from 7.2 percent. If the jobless rate keeps rising at the pace it has for the past two months, it will hit double digits in summer and reach its highest rate since the Great Depression by the fall.

Despite the grim data, the Dow Jones industrial average climbed 2.7 percent, or 217.52 points, on anticipation that the Senate would pass the economic stimulus package.

Since the recession began in December 2007, the nation has lost more jobs as a percentage of the labor force than it had at a comparable point in the early 1980s downturn, the worst recession of the post-World War II era. The number of unemployed Americans over the past year has risen by about 4.1 million, equivalent to the entire labor force of Virginia.

"It is almost set in stone now that this will be the worst job market we've seen in the postwar period," said Scott Anderson, a senior economist at Wells Fargo.

Companies in nearly every sector of the economy have cut jobs or announced that they would take other steps to save on costs, including freezing or reducing pay or eliminating contributions to employee retirement programs. Yesterday, Emerson Electric, a global manufacturing and technology company based in St. Louis, became the latest firm to disclose cutbacks, saying it would slash up to 14,000 jobs this year because of lower demand.

President Obama seized on yesterday's dismal news, as he has with other bleak data lately, to press for passage of the economic stimulus package.

"This is not some abstract debate," Obama said at the White House. "It is an urgent and growing crisis that can only be fully understood through the unseen stories that lie underneath each and every one of those 600,000 jobs that were lost this month."

The financial rescue package that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner plans to lay out next week would aim to save or create jobs by propping up banks and other troubled financial institutions, which in turn should make them able to lend money to businesses that seek to expand or consumers who wish to make purchases. The stimulus package, a mix of tax cuts and new spending, seeks to save or create jobs directly by encouraging retail sales and business investment.

Many of those jobs would probably be concentrated in the manufacturing industry. According to an estimate by economist Mark Zandi of Moody's Economy.com, who has been advising congressional Democrats, an earlier version of the stimulus similar to the package that passed the House of Representatives last month would generate 590,000 manufacturing jobs by the end of 2012. Last month alone, the nation lost 207,000 manufacturing jobs, the largest one-month decline since 1982. Most of those losses were concentrated in companies that make vehicles or related parts and machinery.

William Gaskin, president of the Precision Metalforming Association, a trade organization based in Independence, Ohio, that represents medium-size suppliers to manufacturers across a wide range of industries, said more than half of the group's 1,200 members have cut back their workers' hours or laid people off. Some have cut their workforce by close to half.

"In order to conserve cash, they're having to reduce hours," Gaskin said. "They are trying to work shorter hours to keep people for the rebound, but there comes a time when you've got to release people."

The construction industry, which has been losing jobs since the housing slump began in late 2005 and shed 111,000 jobs in January, would also probably benefit from the stimulus package. Based on the earlier House version of the bill, Moody's estimated that 803,000 construction jobs could be created by the end of 2012.

That would be welcome relief for an industry that has suffered with the slowdown in the building of schools, office towers, apartment buildings and shopping malls.

"Construction was slammed especially hard by the freezing of credit markets in mid-September," said Ken Simonson, chief economist for the Associated General Contractors of America in Arlington. "Developers weren't able to get funding. School districts that had planned to issue tax-exempt bonds [to finance building] discovered there was no market."

Retailers, still reeling from the worst holiday shopping season in decades, shed 45,000 jobs last month. Consumers have shown few signs of returning to stores and malls anytime soon, and analysts expect job losses to keep rising as retailers shrink, merge or go out of business. Moody's estimated that the stimulus, with its payroll tax cuts and other steps to put money in consumers' pockets, would create 752,000 retail jobs by the end of 2012.

"Everyone is battening down the hatches," retail analyst Patricia Edwards said. "There is this recognition that this time [consumers] are serious. They're really not going to spend."

Workers across demographic lines simply cannot afford to spend. While the national unemployment rate is 7.6 percent, the rate among select populations is far higher. The jobless rate among African Americans, for instance, is more than 12 percent; the rate among teenagers is about 21 percent.

Last month alone, a stunning 731,000 Americans stopped looking for work, dropping out of the labor force out of apparent frustration with their employment prospects.

"In the 30-page employment report," said Michael Feroli, a U.S. economist at J.P. Morgan Chase, "there is hardly a number that doesn't convey the brutal conditions in the current job market."

States' only option now is budget pain

Healthcare, parks, schools: Politicians' proposals to close budget gaps would hit where it hurts. Even zoo animals may not get a break.

By Ashley Powers and Richard Fausset / Los Angeles Times

Reporting from Atlanta and Las Vegas -- They have plundered reserves, enacted hiring freezes and engaged in all manner of budgetary voodoo to shield us from the pain.

But now state governments -- reeling from a historic free fall in tax revenue -- have run out of tricks. And Americans are about to feel it.

In some cases, they already have.

Nevada resident Margaret Frye-Jackman, 71, was diagnosed in August with ovarian cancer. She had two rounds of chemotherapy at University Medical Center, the only public hospital in the Las Vegas area.

Soon after, she and her daughter heard the news on TV: The hospital's outpatient oncology services were closing because of state Medicaid cuts. Treatment for Frye-Jackman and hundreds of other cancer patients was eliminated.

Luckily, Frye-Jackman's gynecological oncologist, Dr. Nick Spirtos, decided to open a tiny chemotherapy center in his office's empty storage room.

Today, he treats Frye-Jackman there, along with about 20 more cancer patients who were dumped by the hospital. Frye-Jackman's care is paid for with Medicare and supplemental insurance, but other patients can't cover the cost of full treatment. The doctor has considered putting donation boxes in the lobby.

"If this is what it's like in Nevada, with cancer stuff closing, is it like that everywhere?" said Frye-Jackman's daughter, Margaret Bakes, accompanying her mother to the doctor's recently. "Are all the other states closing stuff too?"

The answer, in at least 39 states, is "yes" -- or "soon." With personal, sales and corporate income tax revenue plummeting, state governments -- which recently trimmed their budgets to cover a cumulative $40.3-billion shortfall for the current fiscal year -- are now watching in horror as a $47.4-billion gap opens for 2009.

And for fiscal year 2010, they will face a $84.3-billion hole, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. The total shortfall through fiscal 2011 is estimated at $350 billion, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Unlike the federal government, nearly all states must balance their budgets. So legislatures either have to raise taxes, borrow money from dwindling rainy-day funds, or cut. The last option is becoming increasingly common.

"The easy budget fixes are long gone," Corina Eckl, fiscal program director for the National Conference of State Legislatures, said in a statement. "Only hard and unpopular options remain."

State lawmakers can expect some relief from the federal stimulus package -- but it is far from a cure-all. The version passed by the House of Representatives would cover only about 45% of the projected state deficits. A Senate version of the bill, which has yet to be approved, would, in its present form, offer even less relief.

The budget-cutting plans that have emerged from state capitols so far have a potential effect on almost everyone. Parks will close. Environmental programs will be scaled back. Bus and ferry routes will shut down, possibly sending more drivers onto clogged streets and highways. Schools may go without school nurses, and classes may become more crowded. Sick people who rely on state health programs may instead get sicker.

Washington state's predicament illustrates the brutal reality lawmakers are facing in the hardest-hit states. Washington's budget gap for 2010 will total 18.5% of its general fund, making it the sixth-worst situation in the nation. (Nevada is facing the most serious shortfall, with a 38% gap; California's 22% gap is the fourth-worst, behind Arizona at 28% and New York at 24%, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.)

The Evergreen State must close a $5.7-billion shortfall in the next two years. Raising taxes there, as in many other states, continues to be an unpalatable strategy for politicians: Democratic Gov. Chris Gregoire, amid a tough reelection bid last year, made a no-new-taxes pledge and appears to be sticking to it.

That leaves lawmakers in the Olympia statehouse slugging it out over what to cut.

The governor has proposed pay freezes and layoffs for teachers and other state employees, a $350-million reduction in funding for higher education, closure of 13 state parks, early release for low-risk prisoners, and a 42% reduction in the state's popular health insurance program for the working poor -- a program that provides last-resort coverage to 104,000 people.

The plan also would eliminate cash grants and health insurance for about 16,000 state residents who are temporarily disabled. The proposal wasn't some exaggerated public relations ploy to lure federal stimulus cash: In fact, it already factors in about $1 billion in federal aid. The reality has been sobering for a state that has prided itself on generously funded social programs.

"The cuts are incredible. They absolutely shred our healthcare system. I think you'll instantaneously see 60,000 more uninsured in our state," said Cassie Sauer, spokeswoman for the Washington State Hospital Assn. "They'll probably get sicker, and some of them will die."

Others across the nation are also coming to grips with disappearing services.

In Florida's Broward County, six to 10 drug-addicted women convicted of nonviolent crimes are stuck in jail and waiting to be admitted, along with their children, to a family drug recovery center whose budget has been slashed. They have been given probation contingent on admission to the center, but there's no room for them.

All 16 family slots at the Susan B. Anthony Recovery Center are full. Seven other slots were eliminated when the center lost $51,000 in funding. Ironically, the result could be a net financial loss to Florida. The center says it saves the state $3 for every dollar spent because it keeps women out of jail and their children out of foster care.

"You pay now, or you pay double later," Executive Director Marsha Currant said.

In the hamlet of Tubac, Ariz., residents are wondering whether state cuts will render it a ghost town. It's a community of 2,000 people and 120 artists' studios about 50 miles south of Tucson. The main lure for visitors, and their dollars, is Tubac Presidio State Historic Park, which preserves the remains of a 17th century Spanish settlement.

But after the Legislature lopped $1.6 billion off this year's budget, the state announced that the park could close as soon as this month.

"Tubac, like the rest of the state, is so dependent on tourism dollars," said Carol Cullen, executive director of the Chamber of Commerce. "To close it is crazy."

Arizona is expected to close eight state parks -- nearly a third of its total. Parks Director Ken Travous described the situation as "between brutal and absolute carnage."

In New York, the state's 76 zoos, aquariums and botanical gardens are bracing to lose all of their state funding next year, under a proposal by Democratic Gov. David Paterson. Those cuts, combined with a loss in the value of their endowments and fewer membership renewals, could result in reduced visiting hours, slashed educational programs, higher admission prices and deep employee layoffs.

Animals will pay the price, said Jon Dohlin, director of the New York Aquarium. Some won't be replaced when they die, and others could be sent to other facilities.

"I'm not going to look my walrus in the eye and tell him he's got to find somewhere else to work," Dohlin said.

At the aquarium Thursday, students from University Neighborhood High School in Manhattan had just finished a tour for science class. Officials from the Wildlife Conservation Society, which manages the aquarium and the Bronx Zoo, say educational programs could be among the first on the chopping block.

"Just to have these places as resources is important for anyone to come and learn," said science teacher Jaclyn Hoahing. "Our kids live in the city, and they don't get a chance to see wildlife around them."

In the foundering economy, officials in Muscogee County, Ga., should be thrilled that they are about to receive more than 28,000 new residents over the next two years -- the result of the Army moving a tank school from Ft. Knox, Ky., to Muscogee's Ft. Benning.

Instead, Muscogee officials are worried that they can't handle the flood of new public school students -- some 4,000 of them -- who are on the way. The school district already cut $2.8 million out of its budget this year in response to state funding reductions. The state reductions may be more than $5 million next year, when the first wave of students begins showing up.

School district officials are drafting a letter to the state asking for an exemption. "We are being squeezed from both ends," said Myles Caggins, the school district's chief of operations and facilities.

Budget trouble has even arrived in Alaska, where Republican Gov. Sarah Palin had been anticipating a comfortable surplus -- fueled by the summer's high oil prices -- of at least $5 billion.

No more.

With the double whammy of a declining economy and sharply lower oil prices, Palin announced last week that spending in the current fiscal year would have to be trimmed by $268.6 million to make up for a total shortfall of $1.65 billion.

Much of the savings Palin expects to realize is in delayed oil tax credits, not actual spending cuts. The remainder of the shortfall will have to come from additional cuts, or the state's estimated $7 billion in savings.

Palin is more ambitious than most governors these days. In her recent State of the State address, she announced she was resurrecting a long-dreamed-of plan to build a road across the wilderness from Fairbanks to Nome. Total cost: $2 billion.

Palin has not said where the money would come from.

February 7th, 2009 1:16 pm
7 U.S. states borrowing to pay jobless benefits

NEW YORK, Feb 6 (Reuters) - Seven U.S. states have been forced to borrow from the federal government to cover the rising cost of unemployment benefits, the National Conference of State Legislatures said on Friday.

Michigan already owes the government more than $1 billion, the bipartisan organization said in a statement.

The other states that have been forced to borrow are California, Ohio, New York, South Carolina, Indiana and Kentucky.

"Kentucky is in dire straits," said Brent Yonts, chair of the NCSL Labor and Economic Development Committee and representative for Kentucky.

"We've got to look at the whole system because the whole system is collapsing, just like everything else."

Kentucky's jobless rate stands at 7.8 percent, above the national average of 7.6 percent released in a government report earlier Friday.

Fourteen states have jobless rates that exceed 7.6 percent, with Michigan, Rhode Island and Puerto Rico showing rates higher than 10 percent.

"No one anticipated this type of increase that would put such a strain on state unemployment systems," said Diana Hinton Noel, a labor analyst for the NCSL.

States pay for jobless benefits by levying payroll taxes on employers. These are deposited into the federal Unemployment Trust Fund, which keeps separate accounts for each state, plus the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands.

Individual state accounts are fast dwindling as job losses shrink payroll tax revenue.

The Department of Labor earlier reported that 598,000 jobs were lost in January. More than 3.5 million jobs were lost in 2008 and more than 11 million Americans are unemployed.

____________________________________

GOP Sees Positives In Negative Stand
Leaders Seize On Spending Issue

By Alec MacGillis and Perry Bacon Jr.
Washington Post Staff Writers
Monday, February 9, 2009; A01

Three months after their Election Day drubbing, Republican leaders see glimmers of rebirth in the party's liberation from an unpopular president, its selection of its first African American chairman and, most of all, its stand against a stimulus package that they are increasingly confident will provide little economic jolt but will pay off politically for those who oppose it.

After giving the package zero votes in the House, and with their counterparts in the Senate likely to provide in a crucial procedural vote today only the handful of votes needed to avoid a filibuster, Republicans are relishing the opportunity to make a big statement. Rep. Pete Sessions (R-Tex.) suggested last week that the party is learning from the disruptive tactics of the Taliban, and the GOP these days does have the bravado of an insurgent band that has pulled together after a big defeat to carry off a quick, if not particularly damaging, raid on the powers that be.

"We're so far ahead of where we thought we'd be at this time," said Rep. Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.), one of several younger congressmen seeking to lead the party's renewal. "It's not a sign that we're back to where we need to be, but it's a sign that we're beginning to find our voice. We're standing on our core principles, and the core principle that suffered the most in recent years was fiscal conservatism and economic liberty. That was the tallest pole in our tent, and we took an ax to it, but now we're building it back."

The second-ranking House Republican, Rep. Eric Cantor (Va.), put it more bluntly. "What transpired . . . and will give us a shot in the arm going forward is that we are standing up on principle and just saying no," he said.

The fact that the stimulus legislation keeps moving forward nonetheless has done nothing to dim Republicans' satisfaction. Rather, they sense a tactical victory, particularly in the framing of their opposition to the plan as a clash with congressional Democrats instead of with President Obama, who remains far more popular with voters than does Congress.

Republicans are holding congressional Democrats responsible for the wasteful spending they say is in the stimulus package, even though most of the big-ticket items -- for renewable energy, health care and schools -- are ones that Obama wanted in the package to advance his long-term goals.

For a while, the president did not exactly resist this tack, leaving the impression that the bill is mainly a congressional creation, but he started to defend it more vigorously last week. It is a triangulation of sorts, with Republicans hoping to drive a wedge between congressional Democrats and Obama.

"The president has done a good job reaching out to Republicans, and he has said he wants to approach this crisis . . . on a bipartisan basis. That's good, and we're willing to work with him on that. But this bill is not the president's bipartisan plan," Sen. John Cornyn (R-Tex.) said yesterday on "Fox News Sunday."

Tom Davis, who retired from his Northern Virginia congressional seat last month, has long warned about the party's decline among moderate suburban voters. But with George W. Bush now off the national stage, Davis is upbeat about the party's prospects in its initial tests: the House seat in Upstate New York that had been held by Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D), and Virginia's gubernatorial race.

"There was such antipathy to Bush, and you take him out of it and a lot of the Democrats' energy evaporates. It doesn't change the poll numbers, but it changes the energy," he said. "That's why these elections are going to be different."

The flash of triumphalism -- fueled further by schadenfreude over the tax troubles of some of Obama's Cabinet nominees -- is not without risk. Voters hungering for a response to hard times may see the GOP's battle against the stimulus package as unsympathetic to their plight. And Obama may decide it is not worth reaching out to Republicans on future legislation.

The party is also likely to be less unified on the final vote on the stimulus package. Rep. Michael N. Castle (Del.), one of a dwindling number of moderate Republicans in the House, said he hopes the bill will improve enough in its final version so he can vote yes.

"I'm always concerned when the Republican Party takes a negative position on something that should be moving forward," he said. "I believe there could be a good stimulus package, and hopefully we've created enough doubt that they'll work it out in the Senate."

Democrats scoff at the Republicans' claim to regrouping, saying the declarations against big spending are undermined by the deficits that were run up under Bush and GOP congressional leadership. The stand against the stimulus appeared to be more rejectionist than the discovery of a new approach for moving forward, they said.

"That 'no' vote was a very tentative first move, and it remains to be seen what level of engagement and cooperation they're going to give the president," said Joel Johnson, who served as a policy adviser to President Bill Clinton. "It is much easier, when you're not sure what your strategy is, to revert to a 'no' strategy, and that's what they did."

The Republicans' bravado comes amid another sign of the depth of the party's plight: Data from Gallup show that the Democrats' edge in party identification is larger than it has been since 1983. The GOP's 178 House members, concentrated in the South, are its lowest total since 1993; it is clinging to the 41 Senate seats it needs to uphold a filibuster; it holds 21 governorships and has lost clout in state legislatures.

The solidarity against the stimulus package also glosses over a divide over comeback strategy. Many Republicans see this moment as equivalent to 1993, when the party handled a new Democratic president by resisting and capitalizing on any perceived overreach.

The party, these Republicans say, need only hold true to its small-government principles for a center-right electorate to gravitate back. That means rejecting the stimulus package and offering in its place an alternative package centered mostly on tax cuts, as House Republicans did last week.

It also means focusing the stimulus critique on relatively small slivers of the package that echo old culture wars, such as spending for contraceptives and for the National Endowment for the Arts. And it means rallying to Rush Limbaugh, who has put himself forward as a de facto party leader, penning an op-ed article in the Wall Street Journal and accepting the on-air apologies of Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-Ga.), who criticized the radio host and paid for it in a deluge of angry calls.

"If you get the principles right in the first place . . . the politics will take care of itself," said Rep. Jeb Hensarling (R-Tex.), a leader of the new conservative vanguard. "It comes down to basic principles -- who's better at preserving jobs, small business or the government? If you think it's small business, look to the Republicans."

Curly Haugland, a Republican National Committee member from North Dakota, said there is little need for ideas when the main task for the GOP will be fighting back Democratic ones. "We're going to have plenty to do just playing defense," he said. "These people [the Democrats] are going to be aggressively on the march."

Others argue that the past two elections represented a more fundamental turn against Reaganite assumptions that dominated for nearly three decades, and that the party has to develop an agenda that goes beyond tax-cutting to lay out a vision for government that, while smaller than what Democrats want, is active in its own right.

"They're talking too much about opposing," Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer said of the House Republicans. "They're talking too much about voting 'no' and not about how they're going to solve these issues. I'm proud the party took a stand on principles, but I also want to hear about how the Republican Party leaders intend to solve problems."

Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate, praised House leaders at their recent retreat in Hot Springs, Va., for their opposition to the stimulus, but he also urged them to present a health-care plan before the Democrats did.

The need to move forward was an argument for selecting Michael S. Steele as Republican National Committee chairman. The former Maryland lieutenant governor has good relations with more moderate members of the party, hails from the suburbs in a blue state, and puts a more diverse face on a party that has not had a single African American governor or member of Congress in six years, and is also lagging badly with Hispanic voters.

In his initial statements as party leader, however, Steele has stuck to tried-and-true themes, including invoking the GOP's 1994 victory as a model and praising House leaders for their stimulus vote. "The goose egg that you laid on the president's desk was just beautiful," he told them. "You and I know that in the history of mankind and womankind, government -- federal, state or local -- has never created one job. It's destroyed a lot of them."

Steele is also facing a distraction -- a federal inquiry into allegations that his 2006 Senate campaign paid a defunct company run by his sister for services that were never performed. The campaign's finance chairman made the allegations to federal prosecutors last year as he sought leniency during plea negotiations on unrelated fraud charges.

For now, the big question facing the Republican Party is how voters will perceive its stand against the stimulus package, a judgment that is likely to depend on how the package is perceived months from now. Republicans dismiss any worry that, in their rejection, they will be seen by voters as indirectly running against an economic recovery.

Given how small their numbers are, they noted, it will be difficult for them to actually block the bill. And their own constituents, they said, are becoming increasingly critical of the package.

"This thing is a dog and it doesn't hunt," Ryan said. "Everyone thinks Washington is just going back to pork-barrel spending. You can't walk down the street in Janesville, Wisconsin, without someone trashing it."

Poll: Obama Stimulus Effort Backed By Huge Majority

Even as the media continues to cast the stimulus saga as one of mounting pressure on President Barack Obama to deliver a bill that's become mired in partisan bickering, public opinion remains squarely behind the President's effort. As Obama embarks today on a mini-campaign to sell the stimulus, the numbers indicate that he may be preaching to the converted. Jake Tapper of ABC News provides the essential rundown:

Sixty-seven percent of the American people approve of how President Obama's handling his efforts to pass an economic stimulus bill, as opposed to 48% for Democrats in Congress and 31% for congressional Republicans.


In addition, the disapproval rating for Congressional Republicans remains a "staggeringly high" 58%. And the public continues to view the package as a matter of paramount concern. 51% of those polled consider the plan's passage to be "critically important," with "Only 16% say it is 'not that important.'"

What remains obscured by these numbers, however, is whether or not public sentiment lines up behind the various compromises wrought and cuts made by the coterie of "moderate" Senators. Here, the press has done a poor job elucidating what is precisely at stake. Senators Ben Nelson and Susan Collins have been allowed to skate by and issue fundamental falsehoods about what they have done to the bill. In a press release, the two Senators claim to have "funded education," and have ensured that the bill will contain "robust spending on infrastructure to create jobs, $87 billion in assistance for states, and assistance to schools, especially for special education and Pell grants." Yglesias begs to differ:

Would you ever in a million years have guessed from this rhetoric that the primary change Collins and Nelson made was to implement big reductions in aid to states and, especially, in funding for education? I think not. In their rhetoric, Collins and Nelson preserved vital education funding and state assistance while eliminating various metaphorical animal products. Meanwhile, actual changes Collins and Nelson made include:


* Elimination of $25 billion in flexible funding for state governments.
* Cut $7.5 billion in funding for "state incentive grants" to help states make progress toward NCLB goals.
* Eliminated $19.5 billion in construction aid for schools and colleges.
* Reduced new aid for the Head Start early childhood program by $1 billion.

Nowhere in their statement do Nelson and Collins make any effort to justify these decisions. Indeed, they don't even seem prepared to admit that they made these decisions.

And no one is holding Collins or Nelson to account, either. Nevertheless, the stage for these compromises -- and the attendant concerns that have since issued forth from economists like Paul Krugman, who believe that damage is being done to the bill's efficacy -- was set by President Obama himself, who sought out bipartisan input and support at the expense of his negotiating position. As Ryan Grim notes, Obama's "stimulus spending is one leg of a three-part approach" to stabilizing the economy, and if the stimulus bill shows any degree of efficacy, the President may elect to take a second pass. Whether the public will stand behind a rerun of this grueling period in the same buoying numbers is anybody's guess.