Fair and Balanced? Nice to see Fox News show its true face

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1. Unfortunately, pundits like Hannity will never be irrelevant as long as they can rail against our mistakes and our deceit. Our side just handed them a bunch of goodies to engage their listeners and boost their ratings. Here are a few problems with the stimulus bill and the way it was handled:

   1) Transparency – our Dem Party leaders published the final bill on the night before it was voted on. That’s complete BS. It’s huge, would it have hurt to give the public a couple of days to read it? We’re talking about something our grandkids will still be paying for. Yes, the economic crisis is urgent, but this looks and feels like trickery and sneakiness, hiding details until it’s a done deal.

   2) It’s necessary, but it’s full of pork, plenty of which even the left wing shouldn’t support. A lot of the “hammer ready” projects will benefit men over women because construction is dominated by men.
   3) Some of the expenditures will support political initiaves that go against our Party’s values and goals, and may reflect big business’ influence over our elected officials. For instance, is the $650 million for the cable box conversion a reflection of the Telecom industry’s sudden switch last year from lobbying Repubs to lobbying Democrats?

   As time goes on, there will be many more pork items that can easily be criticized by the right wing. We need to be sure our side is doing this correctly, not cheating to get their own pet projects funded. We didn’t have time to even figure out what was in it, never mind suggest improvements. Worse, when our side cheats, when we’re easily painted as cheaters, we feed the GOP’s best strategy – the Policitics of Distraction. They don’t have to come up with good ideas or reasonable plans, they don’t have to take responsibility for failed BushCo policies, they just have to point fingers.

   They turned something that could have sailed through with 80 votes into a bloody knock-down, drag-out fight. Our opposition, a Party that should have been on it’s back wondering what hit them, created a dynamic unseen in Washington in a very long time – a conference committee that was scared to add to the size of a big, fast-tracked spending bill and caved to right wing demands for tax breaks for the rich. We even lost seven Democrat votes on the final bill. It faltered so badly that President Obama was forced to go back into campaign mode to save it.

   Hannity and his ilk will only be irrelevant when we stop giving them the kind of life support this stimulus package provided.