>
> DH:
>
> And firmly reality-based.
>
> JG:
>
> No sense in speculating at length until the Geithner scheme
> is announced, but if it looks like what your leaks suggest, then
> maybe the Republicans will have considerable success remaking
> themselves into marauding paleo-cons after all. In fact right-
> wing populist critique of the stimulus package and TARP II
> could be rolled up into one piece, against unaccountable big
> gummint misallocating your hard-earned tax dollars (and more
> scandalously, giving freebies to cosmopolitan speculators and
> the undeserving indigent). Stupid "left-wing" "libertarianism"/
> "populism" of the sort depicted earlier by Alan Rudy (with its
> occasional nativist and protectionist overtones) will have only
> greased the wheels, however unwittingly...
AR:
The paleo-cons call place-based stimulus funding "pork", "bloat", etc. remember???? Any spending on schools, hospitals, roads, museums, natural resources or any other kind of infrastructure outside of their districts/states isn't stimulus in the national interest it is liberal pork barell spending out of control. Until the Dems start telling their constituents that the paleo-cons don't want to stimulate the constituents' economy/quality of life (only the paleo-cons' infrastructure and elite constituents) they're gonna continue to get whooped. Should they start down such a road, expect a liberal, nationalist form of we're all in this together populism long before anything else.