Masturbation masquerading as moderation

By Fester:

Andrew Sullivan is fetishizing center-right idiocy in the name of bipartisanship instead of effectiveness:

 the Senate does its job in good faith! And so we have what the Constitution hoped for: the emergence of lawmakers able and willing to hone and finesse legislation after a healthy debate. The sane center is at work here; and David Brooks shrewdly celebrates it here. My point would simply be: Obama's understanding of his constitutional role - not as party leader or omniscient messiah, but president - will allow a space for Congress to do its job. This is a messy process. But that's what American democracy is at its best: a horrible, dissonant, slow but ultimately effective mess.

This is not the Age of Krugman, Cantor and Rove. It is the Age of Collins, Nelson....

  Mark Zandi, an economist at Moody's and a flaming lefty who was one of Senator McCain's chief economic advisers during the 2008 campaign has an argument for the different multiplier impacts of different proposals.  The worse performing spending metrics (general aid to state governments) has higher impact and efficiency than the best tax policy changes (fully refundable tax credits and FICA holidays).  The reasoning is fairly simple, the government spending has much higher velocity of use. 

Right now the Collins-Nelson axis is seeking to chop out the more effective portions of the stimulus bill and replace those chunks with ineffecient tax cuts and pork distribution:

Total Reductions: $80 billion

Eliminations:

Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps

*****************************

Reductions:

Public Transit $3.4 billion, School Construction $60 billion

To hone is to sharpen,to improve.  That is not what is happening.  Let's take it through reconciliation in a couple of weeks because right now John Cole has summarized the negoations perfectly with his analogy:

I really don’t understand how bipartisanship is ever going to work when one of the parties is insane. Imagine trying to negotiate an agreement on dinner plans with your date, and you suggest Italian and she states her preference would be a meal of tire rims and anthrax. If you can figure out a way to split the difference there and find a meal you will both enjoy, you can probably figure out how bipartisanship is going to work the next few years.

Comments

[Russ Wellen]

It's a little hard for the average person to. . .

1. Understand why Republicans cling to tax cuts when such measures have repeatedly failed to work. Okay if they're opposed to the stimulus. But can't they come up with something other than tax cuts? Oh, I forgot. Lack of imagination is part of what makes a conservative a conservative.

2. Understand why Democrats continue to defer to Republicans to get things done when, during the last eight years, the Republicans almost never deferred to Democrats and got things done.