I read this morning that Bushco is going to ask for the second half of the $700Bn allocated to TARP. This when they can't account for the first half. There must still be some bankers in danger of losing their private jets.
For my part, I'd rather see the rest of the TARP money pay for hiring people to pick up the litter along our roads and highways. At least we'd see some tangible results.

I grimace when I see polls like this. Better we should poll people on whether Cheney needs more heart surgery. At least I wouldn't care if they were right or wrong, or whether anyone acted accordingly.

As for Bush and a request for more TARP money, someone needs to show him the IG report from yesterday. More on it at TPMM.

53-36 is a "narrow majority"?

And what is up with not liking support to the states? That is the quickest way to get money into the system.

I've honestly been wondering if the whole point of Obama's plan was to come out with something strong, but not too strong. That way, conservatives won't like it but can't howl loud enough to get non-conservatives to listen, but that Congress would want to step in and make the thing bigger. After all, it wouldn't do to have him come out with something big and then have Congress shrink it. It'd be better if he let Congress do their job by expanding it. After all, this is Congress's job, not the president's.

I've never understood why we've allowed the president to become the Prime Congressman, but he is still supposed to be in a different branch of government; a branch that isn't supposed to be passing legislation or spending bills. And if he is going to do this kind of thing, it'd be better that they're seen adding to his plan, not pruning it back. I'm not sure why folks have taken Obama's plan to be a problem, as he's not the one who'll be passing the thing, and it'd be best if we let the Congressional Dems spruce it up on their own.

Will there be any interim job numbers before the February numbers come out? Everything we've read over the past two days says that January is going to be another blowout month in terms of job losses. Congress will be haggling over a measly $445 million stimulus spending package at the end of the first week of February when the new jobs report shows unemployment above 9%. Very bad.

Interestingly enough, spending on infrastructure was the single most popular aspect of a stimulus package, regardless of party or ideology.

I think that everyone on both sides of the aisle can agree that having bridges collapse into the Mississippi during rush hour is a bad thing, so I'm not too surprised by that.

I'm also wondering if the $775 billion price tag is partly psychological since it's about $25 billion more than the bailout of the banks. Sort of like, "Look, we can bail out the entire frickin' country for only a little more than it took to fix the banking system. Don't you want to regulate them so they can't fuck up like that again?"

Everybody loves free money, but if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Ask them how they like paying their share of the $600 billion we will be paying in interest on the debt, to among other lenders the Chinese so they can make nuclear submarines, and the response might be different. Sometimes you load the polls with questions that only have one answer. I forget the poll jargon they use for that.