STEPHANOPOULOS: We also heard from Congressman Boehner coming out of the meeting today that again a lot of that spending doesn’t even meet the same test you just talked about right now. Hundreds of millions of dollars to expand family planning services. How is that stimulus?

PELOSI: Well, the family planning services reduce cost. They reduce cost. The states are in terrible fiscal budget crises now and part of what we do for children’s health, education and some of those elements are to help the states meet their financial needs. One of those – one of the initiatives you mentioned, the contraception, will reduce costs to the states and to the federal government.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So no apologies for that?

PELOSI: No apologies. No. we have to deal with the consequences of the downturn in our economy.

I seem to recall a tiff starting in 1988 involving the Boston Herald, then owned by R Murdoch, being critical of Sen. Kennedy and the Kennedy slipping an amendment into legislation to force the sale of Murdoch holdings including a Boston TV station and the New York Post. Kennedy had bragged that this was a hit job on Murdoch and eventually the SCOTUS agreed, striking down the amendment because it targeted an individual with the specificity a “laser beam”, a practice specially prohibited by the US Constitution.

Obama’s signaling of personal attacks on Limbaugh will provide plenty of room to use the same defense against any legislation involving the reinstatement of the “Fairness Doctrine” as a method of pushing Limbaugh off the air.

Limbaugh 1 Obama 0

Bush’s willingness to accept — to be an enabler to — the bloated budgets of the Congress during the years it was controlled by Republicans was, in my opinion, his greatest blunder or oversight.

Agree, too. I always tell my liberal friends I didn’t particularly like Bush either, but for different reasons. IMHO he is the great liberator. Economics? Frightful.

What Exactly Are We Stimulating with Our Hundreds of Billions of Dollars?

Printer’s ink production?

1) Make our country more hospitable to business activity. Lower taxes, across the board, for everyone, most importantly for business.

2) Government then should step back, get out of the way.

3) Recovery will come.

Q) Why won’t this be done?

A) Because politicians can’t get credit for it.

So what to do?

Well thinking politicians are already giving millions to their campaign contributors, present and future; they will give it to banks that have proven to be corrupt and insolvent and those banks will in turn give the money back to the politicians in the form of preferentially low interest loans that don’t have to be repaid real soon, or artificially lending to phony construction companies.

How will the money eventually get to the people who will waste it on cars, TV sets, restaurants, furniture, theme parks, and clothing for their kids?

I have no idea.

Agreed. The other failure was that of Greenspan who should have seen where the easy money policy was leading us.