Oh yeah?

Or rather, Sez who? The President of the United States, speaking at the White House today, urged Congress to shut up and fork over the $900 billion (give or take) he wants to “stimulate” the economy. “Broadly speaking,” he said, “the package is the right size, it is the right scope, and it has the right priorities to create 3 to 4 million jobs, and to do it in a way that lays the groundwork for long-term growth.”

Does anybody believe that? There have already been so many pieces pointing out that, whatever else this proposed debt sandwich will do, neither growth nor job creation is on the menu. Why? Well, Charles Krauthammer has a blistering piece today that outlines some of the reasons to reject this “legislative abomination.”

It’s not just pages and pages of special-interest tax breaks, giveaways and protections, one of which would set off a ruinous Smoot-Hawley trade war. It’s not just the waste, such as the $88.6 million for new construction for Milwaukee Public Schools, which, reports the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, have shrinking enrollment, 15 vacant schools and, quite logically, no plans for new construction.

It’s the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus — and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress’ own budget office says won’t be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Really, though it’s just business as usual in Obamaland–beltway business as usual, which stimulates nothing except the usual special-interest pork-lined giveaways.

Noting the bump up in unemployment figures, Obama retired his “politics of hope, not politics of fear” trope and went in for some good old-fashioned fear-mongering. Unless you give me $900 billion now, today, you will “turn crisis into a catastrophe,” he warned–a catastrophe, moreover, from which we might never recover. Gee whiz! Today, the President said that “It is inexcusable and irresponsible for any of us to get bogged down in distraction, delay or politics as usual while millions of Americans are being put out of work.” But what is really “inexcusable and irresponsible” is trying, with unseemly haste, to sell the the Pelosi Placebo to the public as something that will stimulate anything beyond the appetite for more taxpayer-subsidized handouts.