In that magikal world that is DailyKos, this means that these Republicans secretly believe the stimulus was a good thing.

If there’s one thing that unites the Republican Party it’s that the stimulus bill was a job-killing piece of legislation that was the worst thing in the whole entire world for the economy, right? Or maybe that’s just what unites them in public, because in private the Washington Times reports they’ve been working overtime to get their hands on job-creating stimulus cash.

Is anyone surprised that a DailyKos author sees conspiracy in this? Someone please tell Lewison that taxpayers live in Republican districts, too. 

Basic Economics

Lewison is missing (or purposely avoiding) the idea of opportunity cost. So, 50 jobs are “created” by stimulus funds, but how many were lost as a result of the of increased taxation and government inefficiency? It’s more than 50 because government is always inefficient; it costs time & money to gather taxes & redistribute them. Here’s a simple formula for Lewison’s review:

Stimulus Jobs Created – Jobs Lost From Taxation – Government Inefficiency = Total Jobs Created

Let’s give the Government the benefit of the doubt and say the government was mildly inefficient (choke!) so we only lost 1 job due to inefficiency. Since the stimulus money is really taxpayer money designated for job “creation” we can set the Jobs Lost From Taxation equal to 50.

50 – 50 –1 = NEGATIVE 1

Government created jobs ALWAYS cost MORE jobs than they create, even in the BEST case scenario!

The Republican lawmakers aren’t being hypocrites, they’re cutting their losses. They can’t unmake the law so at least they’re getting SOME money back for their beleaguered constituents.

Omissions

Lewison leaves out this enlightening part of the Times article:

Another House member who has scored high ACU rankings, Rep. Robert B. Aderholt, Alabama Republican, also voted against and criticized the stimulus.

“Rather than create jobs or stimulate the economy, this massive spending bill was a laundry list of programs that focused on states with big-city urban communities,” he wrote in the Oct. 4 edition of the Daily Mountain Eagle newspaper.

Three days later, Mr. Aderholt sent a letter to Mr. Vilsack on behalf of a foundation seeking stimulus money to expand broadband services in his district.

“Congressman Aderholt supported some of the ideas in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, but disagreed with much of it and that’s why he voted against it,” Aderholt spokesman D.J. Jordan said.

“Since the bill was passed and became law, the congressman wanted to help a local foundation receive some of the broadband money that otherwise would go to another state.” [emphasis mine]

So Lewison, out of ignorance or cynicism, condemns the Republican lawmakers who are trying to make the best of a bad situation that was hoisted on them by most Democrats and many fellow Republicans. 

Lewison concludes:

Kudos to the Washington Times for having done the leg work of filing the FOIA requests to expose these examples of Republican lawmakers talking out of both sides of their mouths, publicly lambasting the stimulus as a job-killing measure, but privately conceding that it actually created jobs. It’s hard to imagine a more effective way of demonstrating Republican hypocrisy on the question of whether the stimulus bill creates jobs, and Dems should remind them of it every waking day.

The Dems probably won’t do as Lewison recommends (except the electorally safe ones) because they know the truth, but I hope they do because it would allow Republicans to demonstrate to the public how the stimulus harmed the economy. But my question for Lewison is: if the stimulus was creating jobs, why do we have anemic jobs recovery far beyond what the stimulus propaganda predicted?

So, what’s the real story? You see, Schlesinger, a fanboy of Rahm’s, is angry, very angry, that Sarah Palin called for his hero’s resignation as Obama’s Chief of Staff. What’s scorned fanboy to do? Hold on to the wrath and unleash it a just the right moment, of course!

Enter Rush Limbaugh, determined to stir the puddin’:

LIMBAUGH: Our political correct society is acting like some giant insult’s taken place by calling a bunch of people who are retards, retards. I mean these people, these liberal activists are kooks. They are looney tunes. And I’m not going to apologize for it, I’m just quoting Emanuel. It’s in the news. I think their big news is he’s out there calling Obama’s number one supporters f’ing retards. So now there’s going to be a meeting. There’s going to be a retard summit at the White House. Much like the beer summit between Obama and Gates and that cop in Cambridge.

Yeah, OK, Rush is being an insensitive ass, as usual. He wrong to compare liberal activists to retards – it’s an indignity to retards. Seriously. “Retards” are usually loving, innocent people. Members of the hard left are usually bitter, nasty, hateful, crude, creepy, and generally extremely unpleasant to be around.

Sarah’s response to Rahm’s comments was vehement and personal, but why – what’s behind it all? 

How can anyone forget how Palin was treated by the “professional” press after she was announced as John McCain’s running mate? It was a mob mentality, Palin was outright abused by the press. Did Obama’s campaign do anything to dissuade the press from the hideous smears and maltreatment? Emanuel was Obama’s chief strategist and, considering his bully temperament, I suspect he actively encouraged the press to be horrible to Palin. We know that Emanuel, Time’s 2009 Person of the Year, has had an all-too-cozy relationship with the press. Remember Begala, Carville, and Stephanopoulos’ daily chats with Emanuel back in January 2009? Is there any question that he still “chats” with them on a regular basis?

We all know what’s going on. Emanuel is an ugly, blind partisan filled with Chicago-style ball-busting vulgarity. Is this really who the Democratic Party wants to be one office away from the President? Given Emanuel’s severe lack of grace on every front and on nearly every issue, selecting Emanuel for Chief of Staff not only shows poor judgment on Obama’s part; it shows political naiveté. Even lefty pundits have major reservations about Obama selecting him. It’s past time for Emanuel to go.

I totally agree that Palin should call out Limbaugh on his insensitivity – Limbaugh should apologize to the special needs community. But, Limbaugh isn’t a hyper-partisan public official with a history of inappropriate-for-a-public-officials vulgarity. Should he be fired? No. The now-defunct Air America radio hosts said much worse than Limbaugh, which probably lost them listeners and ultimately their jobs. The audience will ultimately judge whether Limbaugh is still worth listening to.

As for Schlesinger, the newly self-appointed Righteous Defender of Retards Everywhere, he’s a hypocrite. I see no blog entry of his condemning Emanuel’s private-made-public comments. Fanboy Schlesinger is just as bitterly partisan as his hero, Rahm Emanuel. He’s interested in helping his side maintain power, not doing what’s right for special needs people.

The Follow Friday phenomenon is a great thing, Twitter users staking their reputation on you and vice versa. It’s an honor to be tagged. When I first started on Twitter I returned every #FollowFriday, but then it started taking away from my Twitter experience. It became too tedious and disingenuous, so I stopped – probably to my detriment, but I just couldn’t do it.

Then, along came Twitter Lists. It slowly dawned on me that I could use it to permanently and continuously thank all those who honored me with a Follow Friday tag.

Now, every person who tags me for Follow Friday gets added to my Follow Friday list. Then, every Friday I tweet the link to the members of my list, making it much easier for potential followers to add them. 

I also watch my Follow Friday list as a stream of tweets, as Twitter intended. It’s great to be able to do that for a specific set of Twitter users. 

It’s not perfect. Because of my method, a Twitter user I recommend for Follow Friday will not see a reply from me. But, that’s why I’m writing this post – so I have a way to tell them that I’m not brushing them off and that I’m grateful for the Follow Friday nod.  

“Believe me, I know how big a lift this has been,” Obama said. “I see the polls. … I catch the occasional blog poster, cable clip that breathlessly declares what something means for a political party, without really talking about what it means for a country. 

“But I also know what happens once we get this done, once we sign this … bill into law: The American people will suddenly learn that this bill does things they like and doesn’t do things people have been trying to say it does. The worst fears will prove groundless.”

That man is such an snake-tongued politician. He’s telling them exactly what they want to hear. Obama knows the public will flip out and the Democrats will be slaughtered in the next election if this travesty passes. He’s hoping the heinous legislation will ’stick’ and the constitution will ultimately be subverted. Even an unqualified political blogger like me knows that.

Mr. Messiah-Complex sees himself has Our Savior and he’s therefore willing to sacrifice himself in the next election, if necessary. Since he’s their Dear Leader, he’s also willing to sacrifice individual Democrats for the “greater good.”  They sense their impending doom, but, like good little groupthinkers, they’re still committed to their suicide mission. This situation produced Rep. Earl Pomeroy’s statement that “he might as well retire if [the health care debate] drags on much longer.” Pomeroy isn’t even entertaining the option of NOT voting for the corrupt bill. For Democrats like Pomeroy, Obama is purposely perpetuating the strange myth that the public fury will ease off once the bill is passed.

The public does N-O-T take kindly to having it’s will thwarted on Health care. Recall the Clinton decision to govern from the left, with gays in the military, HillaryCare, and a tie vote tax increase in the face of a Bush-Perot vote of 57% to 43% for Clinton followed by Republican revolution of 1994? The public will only become further enraged when they find out what’s really in this DeathCare bill. It will make health care much worse, no socio-economic group will truly benefit from it, save one.

Make no mistake – this “health care” legislation is a major power grab for the Power Elite Class. They’re pushing the constitution to the limits, hoping it will break in their favor. It’s important to note this class crosses party lines. From Gallup:

20% of Republicans support this legislation? This legislation is so nakedly anti-liberty, so hostile to individual freedom that nobody who cares even a little about our constitutional democracy’s survival would ever support it. But, one out of every five Republicans do support it? 

I’d wager most of these are Colin Powell Republicans, members of the Power Elite Class. These are the weak-minded Machiavellian Princes interested in giving themselves more power over those unruly common citizens by suppressing bothersome inalienable rights under the auspices of “‘helping’ those less fortunate.” These are the people that want to take away your right not to buy something you don’t want.

In reviewing his campaign issues statement, he seems so center-right. But, as Obama has so skillfully taught America, politicians just tell you what you want to hear.

Brown is anything but a defender of liberty when it comes to health care. Brown has no problem with the unconstitutional government mandated purchase of health insurance present in RomneyCare & ObamaCare. From a Boston Globe profile:

Brown supported Massachusetts health care overhaul in 2006 and favors elements advanced in the congressional debate about a national overhaul. But he said he would oppose the bills now moving through Congress because they would help other states at the expense of Massachusetts.

His primary reason for opposing ObamaCare is that it’s it isn’t fair to Massachusetts?

Moreover, watch Neil Cavuto Challenge Brown for Supporting RomneyCare:

Brown totally avoided the question because he knows the truth would be damaging. Make no mistake, Brown is just another politician from Massachusetts. 

But, he is the best we can expect from blue-dominant Massachusetts.

Michael Gerson has lousy timing. In The Washington Post, in one of those now familiar elegies for old media, he writes:

And the whole system is based on a kind of intellectual theft. Internet aggregators (who link to news they don’t produce) and bloggers would have little to collect or comment upon without the costly enterprise of newsgathering and investigative reporting. The old-media dinosaurs remain the basis for the entire media food chain.

That’s laughably untrue in the Warmergate story. If you rely on the lavishly remunerated “climate correspondents” of the big newspapers and networks, you’ll know nothing about the Climate Research Unit scandals – just the business-as-usual drivel about Boston being underwater by 2011

Steyn’s point is that Climategate and stories like it prove the legacy media is not the basis for the entire media food chain.

I would add that Gerson is being an arrogant elitist snob. The truth the legacy media doesn’t want to face is that ANYBODY can be a journalist. The reign of the legacy media is coming to an end because they’ve compromised their journalistic principles. The moment the legacy media decided to stifle debate and convey only the liberal point of view is the moment they lost their legitimacy.

Then there’s another story on Patterico about the LA Times’ James Rainey’s weird assertion that the ACORN stings by O’Keefe and Giles were not journalism: 

The duo certainly has caused a stir — and raised questions about an organization that in the past had received substantial government funding — but, sorry folks, please don’t call this journalism.

AND

So what sort of creature does this make O’Keefe? I don’t disagree with his observation in a previous interview with The Times that he follows the mold of filmmaker Michael Moore, using confrontation to get at his version of the truth.

Can you believe this guy? If a non-media liberal had gone undercover with camera to expose illegal advice-giving at Catholic Charities, who received at least $17.8 Million in taxpayer money in 2003, would Rainey likewise condemn the individual as un-journalistic? Please.

The legacy media has clearly betrayed any pretense of objectivity in favor pro-liberal activist journalism. Embracing your bias and using your position to further your agenda is the signature maneuver of Postmodernism, which metastasized in journalistic circles in the 1990’s: From Philip Gold’s 1996 article Postmodern journalism offers the wrong end of the shtick:

Postmodernism” is a wondrous word. Everybody uses it; nobody’s sure what it means. Still, we know it when we see it. Academia’s gone postmodern. So have politics and culture. And now, journalism’s heading down the same dreary road.

Gold goes on:

The postmodernist shtick has four elements.

First, it denies the existence of objective reality, as opposed to saying that reality’s out there but we never can get fully at it. To the postmodernist, everything in the universe, from comic books to galaxies, is “text” to be “interpreted” by the “self-referent,” that is, people whose only frame of reference — dare we say, only reality — is themselves.

Second, postmodernism denies the existence of firm boundaries. Everything flows into, affects and becomes everything else. (“The personal is political”; “The planetary is personal”; “Insanity is just another lifestyle”; etc.)

Third, postmodernism denies the validity of standards — of truth, morality, excellence, competence. All are arbitrary at best and tyrannical at worst.

Finary, postmodernism views all human relationships as power struggles. Words are weapons, not carriers of truth or meaning.

Sounds a lot like our friends in the legacy media, no? Gold predicted the outcome we’re seeing today:

So what’s the answer? Thy tighter editorial control and the prompt stockading of any senior executive who claims that serious journalism inevitably must go the way of Hard Copy and pompous-pundit screamathons. Still, the ultimate fix must rest with the larger society. In the end, our civilization will junk postmodernism. Neither truth, boundaries nor standards can be denied forever, and life is more than power games. There already are signs that it’s happening, especially in the schools and universities where it began. So, in the short term, perhaps the interesting question is not “How will journalism escape from postmodernism?” but, “How will it cover the demise?”

Thirteen years later we know that the legacy media still desperately holds on to it’s postmodernist worldview and derides all others as non-journalists. The new media has provided the outlet for the anti-postmodernism backlash and the legacy media thusly treats the new media with extreme contempt. 

Journalism will survive the postmodernist legacy media because journalism is not dependent on any institution. Journalism belongs to those who are willing to seek the truth, find it, and tell it to those who want to hear it. And, nearly everyone wants to hear it.

Here ya go Technorati:

MWRYHJXMVD9E

For example, there’s this screen capture:

However, Fallows implication that this somehow indicates success on Obama’s part is embarrassingly easy to debunk.

Firstly, the article changed significantly since Fallows’ screen capture. This is what it says now:

BEIJING — The Chinese government announced Thursday that it had set a target to slow the growth of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, a day after the Obama administration set a provisional target for reducing United States emissions.

The Chinese offer, which focuses on energy efficiency, contrasts with the strategy of the United States and most other nations to reduce total emissions. China has resisted demands from American and European negotiators to adopt binding limits on its emissions, arguing that environmental concerns must be balanced with economic growth and that developed countries must first demonstrate a significant commitment to reducing their own emissions. [bold mine]

BEIJING — The Chinese government announced Thursday that it had set a target to slow the growth of its greenhouse gas emissions by 2020, a day after the Obama administration set a provisional target for reducing United States emissions.

The Chinese offer, which focuses on energy efficiency, contrasts with the strategy of the United States and most other nations to reduce total emissions. China has resisted demands from American and European negotiators to adopt binding limits on its emissions, arguing that environmental concerns must be balanced with economic growth and that developed countries must first demonstrate a significant commitment to reducing their own emissions.

LOL. Yeah, that’s REAL success for ya! China hasn’t jumped on the green bandwagon, it’s just promised to increase it’s efficiency which happens to coincide with reducing emissions. But, then there’s this:

It was unclear whether the timing of China’s announcement was coincidental, though the Chinese have been preparing an opening position ahead of international talks on climate change in Copenhagen next month. In the past, Beijing has tried to avoid looking as if it has been directly influenced by American decisions.

LOL again. So China was going to do this anyway and it had little or nothing to do with Obama’s useless trip. 

But, we’re not done yet. The Atlantic Wire box on Fallow’s blog had a link to this report: Environmentalists Fume Over China Emissions Pledge which says that while it’s technically a tactical “win” for Obama, it’s pathetic compared to what the commie-environmentalists want:

Treehugger’s Daniel Kessler laments the odd strategy. “[I]ts emissions will actually increase over time because its economy is expanding so rapidly. As the world’s Number 1 Polluter (but far down when it comes to per capita emissions), China’s goal is not enough,” he writes. “It should be noted, however, that China is making massive investments in renewable energy and increasing its standards for efficiency.”

The Chinese pseudo-communists see right through the commie-environmentalists. The communist Chinese will never murder their economy in the name of environmentalism, they will only reduce emissions when it’s to their advantage. How foolish our government must appear to them.

The other screen-captured headlines Fallows submits are of a similar nature. I guess even a Rhodes Scholar can’t eek out a good defense of Obama’s Asian Flop.

This is only the second time in its nearly ten-year history that the Dish has gone silent. The reason now is the same as the reason then. When dealing with a delusional fantasist like Sarah Palin, it takes time to absorb and make sense of the various competing narratives that she tells about her life. There are so many fabrications and delusions in the book, mixed in with facts, that just making sense of it – and comparing it with objective reality as we know it, and the subjective reality she has previously provided – is a bewildering task. She is a deeply disturbed person which makes this work of fiction and fact all the more challenging to read. And the fact that she is now the leader of the Republican party and a potential presidential candidate, makes this process of deconstruction an important civil responsibility. We take this seriously as we always have. We want to be fair to her, and to her family, and to the innocent people she has brought into the spotlight. And we are not reporters. We are merely analysts trying to make sense of evidence already in the public domain, evidence that points in all sorts of directions, only one of which can be true.

My God, the pot smoking/gay sex seeking Andew Sullivan went SILENT!  OMG - gasp! -  Stop the presses!

It’s just so…. shockingly childish. True to his narcissistic nature, Sullivan waxes dramatic that he is the Heroic (!) Stalwart against the Big Bad Evil Sarah Palin as though she’s some kind of grave threat to humanity’s existence. Though, I suppose many liberals do view her that way – they don’t cope well with the fact that she exists. She threatens their dark worldview.

Anyway, how amazing is it that Sullivan can say “we want to be fair to her, and to her family” and call her a “delusional fantasist” in the same paragraph? Excuse me for not believing Sullivan, he’s consistently been pretty horrible to Palin. 

I have no doubt who is suffering from mental instability.

Politico reports disturbing news from the financial front:

The Federal Reserve stands to gain substantial new authority under financial reform legislation, despite increasing skepticism from lawmakers in both parties over the central bank’s unchecked powers over the U.S. economy.

What nifty new powerz does the Fed get?

Under the final piece of the House reform package being assembled by Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank, the Fed would join seven other regulators to form an oversight council to police financial firms that threaten the stability of the banking system.

But the Fed is the only member that would be empowered to carry out the restrictions the council imposed on risky big companies — giving it more power than the other regulators, some policy experts say.

The Fed would also have the authority to perform on-site examinations of the targeted financial firms — able to barge into any of the “risky” firms and demand answers and documents, the most powerful tool at any regulator’s disposal.

Why is Barney slobbering more than usual over this piece of legislation?

Under the bill, those systemically risky firms could include entities the Fed doesn’t oversee under current law, including hedge funds, private equity firms and asset managers.

The real target is those dastardly rich people who ruined the economy with their evil profits. Of course, social crusaders Barney Frank & Co don’t want you to know that their dumb regulations designed to manipulate society (aka YOU) are the root cause of the financial crisis.