what matthew yglesias said. the "debate" on the stimulus bill has been pretty disappointing. with one side claiming we must pass something immediately or else the sky will fall without doing a very good job explaining why that something is so important, another side simply declaring that anything they don't like is "not stimulating", and a third group which is really doing the same thing as the second group, only they're pretending that what they want is a sensible compromise between the first and second group.
the whole thing is pretty mind-numbing, especially since i basically think the first group is right. it's just frustrating to see them completely unable to articulate their position in a forceful way. you'd think with the world economy collapsing around us they'd be able to find some example of why we need this kind of stimulus bill.
on the other hand, the haggling over the stimulus bill has not yet reached this level of stupidity. the only thing dumber than last week's articles reporting that president obama takes off his suit jacket in the house where he lives is making some intern pour through eight years of archive footage to prove that the last tenant of the same house also took off his jacket at least once. maybe that will at least stimulate the newspaper intern job market.
