The Wall Street Journal "reports:"

[T]op lawmakers struggl[ed] to bring the price of the two-year package down to $800 billion. That would be well below the $838.2 billion plan approved Tuesday by the Senate on a 61-37 vote, but would reflect pressure from influential moderates in the Senate to hold down costs.

(Emphasis supplied.) This is false reporting by the Wall Street Journal. The "Senate moderates" (read Nelson, Collins, Specter and Snowe) were perfectly willing not to cut the costs of the biggest pieces of pork proposed in the Senate bill. These came from Republican Senators Charles Grassley of Iowa (with his insistence on the inclusion of the Alternative Minimum Tax fix at a cost of $70 billion) and Johnny Issakson of Georgia (with his insistence at the inclusion of a home buying tax credit of $15,000 at a cost of $35 billion). Ironically, neither Senator actually voted for the stimulus package.

More . . .

"Give it away, give it away now."

Has anyone even bothered to read the House and Senate stimulus bills? The Wall St. Journal has a chart with the differences between the two. (Note: $=1000s.) They read like a Joe Biden crime bill. Pure pork and what on earth are they doing in a stimulus bill to help the economy and struggling Americans?

Every one of these needs to get tossed from this bill. No wonder we're going broke. Even the first one, which is laudable, doesn't belong in a stimulus bill.

• Funds for office supervising humane confinement of federal detainees.
  House $0
  Senate $100,000
• Justice spending oversight.
  House $2,000
  Senate $2,000
• Extra FBI agents to focus on crimes against children.
  House $0
  Senate $50,000
• Construction at US Marshals Service
  House $0
  Senate $100,000
• Extra hires to target mortgage fraud.
  House $0
  Senate $75,000
• Construction at FBI
  House $0
  Senate $300,000

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A few days ago I wrote about the call by marijuana reform advocates to boycott Kellogg's cereal for having canceled Michael Phelps' sponsorship deal.

The New York Times reports on the impact of boycott.

In one sign of the campaign's impact, the Phelps saga took precedence over the tainted peanut butter outbreak in the recorded reply on Kellogg's consumer hot line Tuesday.

''If you would like to share your comments regarding our relationship with Michael Phelps, please press one to speak to a representative,'' said the recording. ''If you're calling about the recent peanut butter recall, please press two now.''

[More...]

Wall St. doesn't think much of the stimulus plan. The Dow fell 382 points.

Yesterday's decline deepened as investors -- who had bid up the price of stocks last week in anticipation of this week's announcement -- cashed in their gains and sold, traders and analysts said.

Geithner's presser hurt as well:[More....]

Bloomberg:

“The House bill will create more jobs and a stronger economy than the Senate bill,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, who was a campaign adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Zandi estimates that the $838 billion Senate package would create about 625,000 fewer jobs than the $819 billion House version over the next two years.

(Emphasis supplied.) 625,000 less jobs costing $20B more? Time to trim the fat, fry the bacon, and milk the sacred cows out of the Beltway "bipartisan" BSers Senate bill.

Speaking for me only

AP:

President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan has passed the Senate and is on its way to difficult House-Senate negotiations. Just three Republicans helped pass the plan on a 61-37 vote and they're already signaling they'll play hardball to preserve more than $108 billion in spending cuts made last week in Senate dealmaking. Obama wants to restore cuts in funds for school construction jobs and help for cash-starved states.

(Emphasis supplied.) I like that the story says Obama wants to restore the state aid and school construction money. He should also press for removal of the AMT fix from the stimulus bill and other unstimulative tax cuts. By doing so, he can actually significantly reduce the cost of the bill while increasing its stimulative power.

Speaking for me only

Everyone likes Mark Blumenthal. Even me. But I take strong exception to his accepting Andrew Sullivan's false characterizations of the critiques from some of us of President Obama on the stimulus package. Blumenthal quotes Sully as follows:

As Andrew Sullivan summarizes this morning . . . Paul Krugman, who wants a partisan war on the GOP . . .

Sullivan has years of attacks on Krugman (all of them completely wrong) under his belt. He is not to be trusted when he discusses Krugman. Not surprisingly, he misstates Krugman's argument. Krugman is engaged in a policy debate on the stimulus package. Something Sullivan can not do, as a self proclaimed conservative Obama supporter. He has a problem now - he is a "conservative" but he really can not argue policy here as conservatism is a bankrupt ideology -especially in this moment. So he turns it into a discussion of "partisan war," in the finest traditions of David Broder. Unfortunately, Blumenthal gets taken in by this game. More . . .

Geithner is going to announce his TARP II plan today. Reports are pretty bad so far.

This is an Open Thread.

If Ben Nelson really wanted to "trim the fat, fr[y] the bacon and milk[] the sacred cows," why didn't he remove the alternative Minimum Tax "fix" from the stimulus package? Let's be clear - the Senate stimulus bill costs MORE than the House bill and does much less to stimulate job creation. As a NYTimes editorial points out:

Nearly $70 billion of the Senate bill is spent on providing a one-year reprieve from the alternative minimum tax. It . . . is a measure that passes easily each year on its own. A fair deal would be to take A.M.T. relief out of the package — contingent on a promise from Mr. Obama to champion a separate relief bill as soon as possible.

The first Media person to ask why the non-stimulative AMT fix is in the stimulus package will win respect as a competent journalist. UPDATE - Even Fred Hiatt's WaPo agrees:

[S]ince AMT relief was probably already factored into household plans for this year anyway, it's hard to see how this belongs in an economic stimulus bill.

Speaking for me only

Via Krugman, CAP explains in basic terms why the House stimulus bill is superior to the Senate stimulus bill:

The Senate compromise recovery and reinvestment legislation provides for 12 to 15 percent fewer jobs created or saved than the House-passed Recovery and Reinvestment Act despite costing slightly more. The House-passed legislation creates or saves between 430,000 and 538,000 more jobs than the Senate compromise.

The Senate bill costs more and does less. It is indefensible. The House bill needs to prevail in the coming House-Senate conference. See also the NYTimes editorial on the subject.

Speaking for me only

President Barack Obama has invited (and been accepted) Florida Republican Governor Charlie Crist to join him at a Florida stimulus event tomorrow:

Statements from the President and Gov. Crist about tomorrow's event are included below.

"I look forward to traveling to Ft. Meyers tomorrow to talk to Floridians about how we get our nation's economy back on track. Gov. Crist and I have seen firsthand the toll that this economic crisis has taken on the American people, and we agree that we can't allow politics to get in the way of urgent relief for the millions of families and small businesses that need it," said President Barack Obama.

[MORE . . .

Ezra Klein points to conservative Ross Douthat pointing out the utter irrationality of the Senate stimulus bill's "centrism" schtick":

[W]hat Nelson, Collins, Specter and Co. have done isn't a new kind of politics. It's the definition of politics as usual. And in this particular case, there's a reasonable argument that it's actively pernicious - that if you can't shrink the stimulus package much more substantially than the centrists have done, you shouldn't shrink it at all. There's a case to be made for a stimulus that's radically different than the one we have now; there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's like the one we have now, but a great deal smaller and more targeted; and there's a case to be made for a stimulus that's absolutely gargantuan. But thanks to the centrists, we're getting the cheapskate version of the gargantuan version:

[More...]