I know you might be getting tired of my obsession with the economic stimulus, but I can't help it. In any event, it seems to me that the Democrats are getting their act together. On CNN right now, David Axelrod, when asked by Wolf Blitzer "what was more important, bipartisanship or passing a bill," Axelrod said "this is not a process question," the issue is economic recovery.

Speaker Pelosi echoed that thought:

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi Friday dismissed calls for bipartisanship as “process” arguments extraneous to passing a stimulus bill — and warned Senate Democrats against slashing proposed increases to education spending.

And Leader Reid is also in the fray:

This is a shrewd move from Senate Majority Leader Reid:

Sen. Olympia Snowe (ME), one of the four Republicans considered genuinely open to cooperation with Democrats on a workable economic recovery bill, just released a statement saying she was approached by Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) to come up with a list of trims from the $275 billion-plus tax section of the stimulus[:]

I was approached this morning and asked to work directly with leadership to amend the tax section of the stimulus bill in order to develop compromise language that could pass the Senate. The total reductions sought by leadership will closely resemble the amount I recommended to the President during our meeting on Wednesday. This is a critical time for our nation.

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Raw Story calls attention to an interesting public appearance by Karl Rove:

Rove spoke Tuesday evening at Loyola Marymount University, a Jesuit institution in Los Angeles, as part of the school's "First Amendment Week." "One man loudly denounced Rove as a 'traitor' before he was escorted out," the Loyola Daily Breeze noted. "A woman held up a pair of handcuffs and said she would like to see Rove wearing them."

The Raw Story report suggests the existence of a conflict between Rove's insistence on Tuesday that he would not honor the House Judiciary Committee's subpoena (citing executive privilege) and his lawyer's statement that Rove was cooperating with a Special Counsel's investigation into the U.S. Attorney firings and the Siegelman prosecution. There is no conflict. [more ...]

Commenting on Atrios' point on the false idea of "centrism," Krugman writes:

[C]entrism is a pose rather than a philosophy. And to support that pose, the centrists are demanding $100 billion in cuts in the economic stimulus plan — not because they have any coherent argument saying that the plan is $100 billion too big, not because they can identify $100 billion of stuff that should not be done, but in order to be able to say that they forced Obama to move to the center.

As a self admitted Centrist poseur, this is what shocks me - that anyone thinks of "centrism" as anything but a pose. But then "post-partisanship" is just a schtick. But it harms policy if the person doing the schtick does not realize it. Now Obama is saying ALL the right things, and I am happy for it, but is the damage already done? Krugman asks:

My high dudgeon posting ends early today. I leave you in the capable hands of J, TChris and Ethan.

UPDATE - Krugman on Morning Joe:

This is an Open Thread.

At least one Beltway "bipartisan" BSer has woken up from the never-neverland where Beltway gasbags reside:

The Marine Corps’ 1st Division has a macho motto: “No Better Friend. No Worse Enemy.” President Barack Obama could use a little of that Clint Eastwood-style bravura now as he bargains with Republicans over the stimulus package and tries to establish momentum and credibility for his new administration.

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Devastating jobs numbers:

The country moved into its second year of uninterrupted job losses last month, with companies shedding another 598,000 jobs and the unemployment rate moving up to 7.6 percent, the Labor Department reported on Friday. . . . Employers in the United States have shed jobs every month since January 2008, for an aggregate decline in payroll employment of 3.1 million.

While the Beltway "bipartisan" BSers fiddle, anyone sentient and living in this world knows we need bold and substantial government intervention:

Mika Brzezinski of the entertainment network MSNBC just asked that question about the economic stimulus plan. These people live in another world. The Beltway "bipartisan" BSers do not get it. At all. Apparently, Paul Krugman was on Morning Joe today. I did not see it so I do not know if he told them:

It’s hard to exaggerate how much economic trouble we’re in. The crisis began with housing, but the implosion of the Bush-era housing bubble has set economic dominoes falling not just in the United States, but around the world. . . . [M]ost economic forecasts warn that in the absence of government action we’re headed for a deep, prolonged slump. . . . The Congressional Budget Office . . . recently warned that “absent a change in fiscal policy ... the shortfall in the nation’s output relative to potential levels will be the largest — in duration and depth — since the Depression of the 1930s.”

(Emphasis supplied.) There is no time for vacuous ignorant Beltway fiddling. The nation's economy is melting. That's the rush Mika.

Speaking for me only

I again associate myself with the views of the Nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman:

Would the Obama economic plan, if enacted, ensure that America won’t have its own lost decade? Not necessarily: a number of economists, myself included, think the plan falls short and should be substantially bigger. But the Obama plan would certainly improve our odds. And that’s why the efforts of Republicans to make the plan smaller and less effective — to turn it into little more than another round of Bush-style tax cuts — are so destructive.

So what should Mr. Obama do? Count me among those who think that the president made a big mistake in his initial approach, that his attempts to transcend partisanship ended up empowering politicians who take their marching orders from Rush Limbaugh. What matters now, however, is what he does next.

It’s time for Mr. Obama to go on the offensive. Above all, he must not shy away from pointing out that those who stand in the way of his plan, in the name of a discredited economic philosophy, are putting the nation’s future at risk. The American economy is on the edge of catastrophe, and much of the Republican Party is trying to push it over that edge.

(Emphasis supplied.) Speaking for me only

This is an interesting thought.

[The 1.8 million admirers who gathered on the Mall to hear President Obama's inaugural address] was probably the largest pro-government demonstration in U.S. history.

A pro-government demonstration. Think about that. Americans turning out to celebrate government as a force for good. I think Michael Kazin is correct when he writes:

That spirit is probably strong enough to withstand the news that some high-placed Obama appointees had failed to pay their taxes -- and may even be bolstered by the president's apology for "screwing up" the process.

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It's easy to understand why Baltimore disbanded its "Special Enforcement Team," a group of "elite" police officers who apparently considered themselves above the law. Their misconduct caused the city prosecutor's office "to dismiss more than 100 Circuit Court cases the officers had investigated in the previous two years." Now a civil rights suit has been filed by a man who "says a band of rogue cops held him at gunpoint in the street, stripped him and searched his rectum in front of about 30 onlookers."

The strip search victim isn't the only person whose civil rights were violated by the "elite" officers. [more...]

Is it realistic to expect Eric Holder to be a force for change in the criminal justice system?

For decades, the face of the criminal justice system in this country has been black and male: hundreds of thousands locked behind bars, arrested in disproportionate numbers and facing execution at rates far greater than those for the general population.

The Washington Post reports that many see Holder "as the best chance in decades to right what they consider unchecked racial injustice and insensitivity by federal officials." That's asking a lot from a former prosecutor who advocated mandatory minimum penalties for drug offenders, including marijuana distributors. Still, according to the Post story, Holder's friends say he became increasingly "concerned about young black men caught up in the criminal justice system" after he left office.

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