Hello again.

You know, I apologize. I really do. I've been inexcusable. Forgive me.

Watching Congress go back and forth on the stimulus bill is completely engrossing, but I'm really not enjoying myself. I'm a liberal, so my position on this isn't really the discussion here, but I'm totally appalled by the fighting and bullshitting and generally idiotic displays over this. Fox News, which is bullshit anyway, has taken to asking the experts from the Heritage Foundation and assembling panels of conservatives masquerading as economists for round table discussions about how awful the stimulus bill is. Or, as I like to call them, Republican circle jerks. Occasionally, Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly will make stuff up, like they do.

I don't mean to imply that the stimulus bill is perfect, because it isn't, but I'm not upset about it. We have a big-ass problem that requires a correspondingly big-ass solution which is going to have a big-ass price tag. Despite the assertions of the GOP, the market isn't going to correct itself. We already let it go wild and our economy melted, and rather spectacularly at that.

I guess that what I'm trying to remark upon is not so much the economy, which probably doesn't require any further editorial, but the jarring divide that this whole issue has created. Politics are always partisan; this is par for the course, but the utter disregard for what the American people so clearly indicated on November 4th gives me a raging case of indigestion.

Americans do not trust Republicans to run the economy. About sixty squillion assorted polls plus a hell of an election agree. Yet the Republicans are totally unwilling to work with the popularly elected Democratic officials, insisting that the GOP, by dint of supposedly being good with money, could salvage it. We voted for Democrats because Republicans did a terrible job. This is very simple.

The newly anointed RNC chairman/token, Michael Steele, confirmed it rather handily for me before he rambled off into his awkward attempt to be urban and awesome, a feat which no Republican will ever be able to achieve. America has no reason whatsoever to trust the Republicans. After eight years of totally irresponsible spending and dishonest accounting, they're all too willing to bitch about spending money when a Democrat creates an aforementioned big-ass solution to a big-ass problem. So fiscal conservatism only matters when conservatives don't have fiscal authority.

Interesting.