Money for the friend in need

President Obama gets it. Yesterday, he was in Florida making the case for the stimulus package (which enjoys wide public support, even if the chattering class doesn't understand that), where he was joined by Republican Governor Charlie Crist.

And this morning, the Wall Street Journal has this to say in an article on how the Administration seeks to restore stimulus spending cut out of the Senate bill for schools, health insurance and computerizing health records (for which the President already made the case in his press conference on Monday night):

To make room for added spending, the White House, joined by House Democratic leaders, is pressing to scale back certain Senate-passed tax breaks, including measures intended to boost auto and home sales. [Emphasis mine.]

I've been a bit of a broken record on the inanity of those provisions. Good to know I'm not alone.

Meanwhile, over at the Daily Dish, Andy Sullivan points to this quote by Christian Brose, Condoleezza Rice's former speechwriter and policy guru, disingenuously attempting to attack President Obama over his vision of our goal in Afghanistan as prevention of it again becoming a terrorist haven as compared to the neocon goal of turning Afghanistan into a representative democracy:

Furthermore, we should not allow resources to determine strategy, as this study suggests, which was one interpretation I heard for the administration's recent statements walking back U.S. goals: The economy's bad, and we have to do what we can. This gets it backwards. We should determine the optimal outcome we are confident we can accomplish, and then pay for it. After all, we still have a GDP of, what, $12 trillion? If our conception of strategic success is achievable, let's not hide behind tightening budgets.

Which sounds to me a lot like the argument that the GOP needs to listen to with respect to the stimulus bill. The optimal outcome is to put Americans back to work and get the economy back on track, which requires a swift and powerful kick-start from Uncle Sam. Let's not hide behind artificial numbers (which are then hampered by artifical calculations of tax costs which don't belong in a stimulus package in the first instance). Do they want the stimulus to succeed? Maybe that's the real debate.