"Cantor Scores Perfect on Stimulus Test"

 

That's their headline.  Craig Crawford must be on vacation or something, this seems so slanted to make the R's look good, one might suspect the hand of moderation is missing.

Anyone who thinks the Republicans gained anything by this obstructionism, in the face of overwhelming public support for Obama, is playing with a short deck.

Obama was masterful in his approach to the Republican good-old-boys on The Hill.  He played their game to reach out to them, and they stabbed him, and the public in the back.

If this is supposed to represent Republicans displaying party unity, they had best look forward to a big split in their ranks, especially when Palin peels off her fundamentalist wing, who are probably the only Republicans who supported this act of bad faith.

The R's have been played like a fiddle, and Cantor was the bow Obama used to play them.

Why?  Because henceforth, throughout his term, every time someone tries to say the Democratic majority is bullying the minority R's, you will hear this common refrain; Obama tried.

Had just a few Republicans voted for the bill, there might be some reasonable doubt left in the public psyche as to their pernicious intent.  But the fact they conspired to make it unanimous is just proof they are more concerned about playing bitter politics than making good laws or saving the country from depression.

2010 just got a lot more interesting, by at least a couple dozen seats, and while the R's and their media advocates revel in their strange Cantor-led "victory" (didn't they ultimately lose anyway?) their house of cards is falling down around them. 

As a fiscal conservative (my kids call me scotchy) I have always been skeptical of bridges to nowhere, primarily because too often they benefit only a small group of interests, rather than the public at large.

But in this bailout era, MOST of what we typically call "pork" can quite reasonably also be called "economic stimulus" because even the bridge to nowhere would have created jobs, at least in remote Alaska.

There is a WPA project very near to us here in central Kansas, erected on an imposing plateau of ancient rock that juts up from the prairie like a table in an empty auditorium. Atop this landmark, WPA workers constructed dozens of concrete and native stone picnic table ledges, so people can look out over the vast prairie from on high, as they munch chips and bbq.  In the middle of it all, the WPA people built a medievel looking stone "castle" .  Since this hilltop is considered one of the possible sites he visited, and because they found a piece of Spanish chain mail armor here,  it is called Coronado Heights.

It has a world-class view, the kind that photographers dream of.  (Be sure to slick the photos for an enlargement.)

This is STILL, to this day, one of the premier tourist attractions in Kansas, drawing tourists, mountain bikers (yes, right here on the prairie, a world-class mountain-biking site) photographers and sightseers of every stripe.

I guess my point is, what seems like pork to a New Yorker equals jobs to a Kansan, and the benefits can be both immediate and enduring; immediate in that jobs are created, enduring, like The Heights, in that the results continue to provide recreation and tourism attractions even now, 80 years later.

One man's pork is another man's job security.

Its time to think bigger,  past our old models. Infrastructure rebuilding isn't pork and it is time to get serious about infrastructure.  Just because it's not in your back yard doesn't mean someone won't benefit from it.

Iowa lets local school systems put up their own wind turbines,  that might be a good first step in the plan, to provide solar panels, wind turbines and other alternatives.

They could also have a class to teach students how those systems are installed and how they work.  That's another job-creating project, it adds a "Green Teacher" to our school systems, whose job is to maintain the energy system and teach students how to do the same, giving them access to an occupation that will only flourish over thenext decade, and even longer.... 

 

This comment was posted by halfsad yesterday in response to Elana's article about mass transit getting the short end of the stimulus shaft, and I found it as concise and complete as one might ever need.

So I'm sending it to Brownback, Roberts and Moran (hey, you gotta do the best with the tools you're stuck with) and I would encourage every TPMer to do the same, only use your own tools...

Here's the letter;  send it to your friends, too; until We, The People, raise some hell, this won't get traction. There are too many special interests in whose interest is NOT to improve mass transit, and they still pull most of the strings in DC. 

Make some noise!