Noting that "Republicans and their adjunct outlets have been touting one specific lie above all others lately"--that of a fictitious "$8 billion earmark in the stimulus package to build a high-speed rail connector between Las Vegas and Disneyland"--Political Animal blogger Steve Benen reports (WashingtonMonthly.com, 3/3/09) that "yesterday, Fox News gave the story a twist, changing the details of the already-bogus claim to make a brand new lie":

Check out this exchange between Fox News's Megyn Kelly and Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) on the omnibus spending bill pending in the Senate:

Kelly: It's a super railroad, of sorts--a line that will deliver customers straight from Disney, we kid you not, to the doorstep of the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. I say, to the Moonlight Bunny Ranch brothel in Nevada. So should your tax dollars be paying for these kinds of projects?

Note that the brothel in question is outside of Carson City, Nevada--more than 300 miles away from Las Vegas, where the imaginary earmark was previously delivering Disneyland visitors. Presumably this particular brothel was chosen by Fox because it includes the name of an animal, and the first rule of budget reporting is that animals are funny.

Benen particularly "love[s] the way Megyn Kelly adds 'we kid you not' while blatantly lying to a national television audience" and sees "an apparent attempt to win some kind of irony award" in Kelly's request that Rep. Franks "hold lawmakers accountable for made-up earmarks that don't exist outside Republican talking points and the GOP's cable news channel."

Having already caught "the infamous GOP talking point that the stimulus package contains gobs of cash for saving marsh mice" having "found its way into a New York Times story, without the paper mentioning that the claim is untrue," blogger Greg Sargent (Plum Line, 2/24/09) now finds that "earlier drafts of the story did describe the claim as 'misleading'--but Times editors removed that description from the copy":

A reader tells me that he emailed the author of the story, Sheryl Gay Stolberg, to discuss the omission. Here is part of her reply to him in her email, which I obtained:

I did write in the story I submitted that the assertion was misleading, but I’m sorry to report that language was removed by editors and that I didn’t notice the deletion. My initial text read like this:

“….as Republicans decry, often misleadingly, what they see as pork-barrel spending for projects like marsh mouse preservation.” [Sargent's emphasis]

So the words “often misleadingly” were removed by editors.

Often such editing decisions are made in haste or to save space. But this was only two words, and it’s worth recalling that the notion that there was millions in the bill to save the marsh mouse in Nancy Pelosi’s district isn’t just some garden variety talking point. It has been a major component of GOP push-back for weeks, repeated by high profile GOP officials in all sorts of settings.

Stolberg's contention that "wording as published was not inaccurate" is refuted by the simple observation by Sargent that "the story doesn’t note that there are no such funds in the bill"--to the contrary, "the paper removed its own reporter’s assertion that it was 'misleading' before publishing." Besides, we all know how much corporate media economic reporters love news about critters....

Free Press has some good news (2/17/09) about the "$7.2 billion to expand broadband access" contained in President Obama's new American Reinvestment and Recovery Act:

The law attaches open Internet conditions to broadband funds and directs the Federal Communications Commission to produce a national broadband plan.

The National Telecommunications and Information Administration will distribute the majority of the funds, $4.35 billion, through a temporary grant program. NTIA broadband projects must be completed within two years of the award, provide the greatest broadband speed possible, and adhere to Internet nondiscrimination and openness principles established by the FCC. The law also funds programs that promote increased broadband adoption in low-income communities.

While Free Press director Josh Silver is "pleased that this law requires taxpayer-funded networks to adhere to Net Neutrality principles," he warns that "these conditions only apply to the broadband lines built with stimulus money. We need Net Neutrality laws to ensure that all networks are open and free from discrimination." Read the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Deregulation's History of Empty Promises: Net Neutrality and the Supermedia Monopolies" (3-4/07) by Jeff Chester

You see it all the time: You need 60 votes to pass a bill in the Senate.

Not exactly.  Under Senate rules--which can be changed by a majority vote--you need the consent of 3/5ths of the Senate to close debate on an issue; that's 60 votes. To pass a bill, you need a majority of those present. Since Ted Kennedy is sick and Al Franken has not yet been seated, that's 49 votes.

Is that an academic distinction?  No, not really.  Politically, voting against an emergency stimulus bill is very different from voting to block a vote on an emergency stimulus bill.  Particularly if Majority Leader Harry Reid required filibusterers to actually hold the floor, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style, Republicans might find it a great deal harder to keep a 41-vote bloc together.

In any case, Americans are generally under-informed about the way their complex system works. Spelling out what's going on, even if it takes an extra sentence, is preferable to a misleading and sometimes inaccurate shorthand.

Update: jhm in comments is correct in saying that it is not the debate cloture rule, but rather a Senate rule against deficit spending, that required a 3/5ths majority vote to pass the stimulus bill.  Both are self-imposed requirements, adopted through majority vote, but the politics of standing up against deficit spending are different from standing up against the Senate voting.

There's been a corporate media trope lately that the stimulus bill, despite Barack Obama's assurances, contains "pork." It's not always clear what "pork" means, but the Washington Post today (2/13/09) had an example of the genre--headlined "Despite Pledges, Stimulus Has Some Pork"--that opens with a definition of what it means by the term.  Unfortunately, it's a definition that would seem to turn virtually any government spending into an instance of "pork."

Reporters Dan Eggen and Ellen Nakashima lead off:

The compromise stimulus bill adopted by House and Senate negotiators this week is not free of spending that benefits specific communities, industries or groups, despite vows by President Obama that the legislation would be kept clear of pet projects, according to lawmakers, legislative aides and anti-tax groups.

And here's exhibit A:

The deal provides $8 billion for high-speed rail projects, for example, including money that could benefit a controversial proposal for a magnetic-levitation rail line between Disneyland, in California, and Las Vegas, a project favored by Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.). The 311-mph train could make the trip from Sin City to Tomorrowland in less than two hours, according to backers.

Note the language there: "could benefit."  A few paragraphs down the piece clarifies:

Reid spokesman Jon Summers said in a statement that the transportation secretary "will have complete flexibility as to which program he uses to allocate the funds," but he acknowledged that "the proposed Los Angeles-Las Vegas rail project would be eligible."

So the Las Vegas-to-L.A. rail link (huh, that sounds less silly than "Disneyland," doesn't it?) "would be eligible" for the high-speed rail money--as would proposals to speed travel between L.A. and San Francisco, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, the major Ohio cities, etc.  The list of high-speed rail projects on the drawing board would certainly take a lot more than $8 billion to fund.

If being one of several "eligible" projects that could potentially benefit from a program makes you a "specific" beneficiary of that program--and therefore a recipient of "pork"--what government program would not have such beneficiaries?  What kind of stimulus spending would not meet the Washington Post's definition of pork?

There's a trope that you often see in corporate media discussions of the stimulus plan: Yeah, but do you really want to spend money on that? It may have started with the misrepresented contraceptive plan--which seemed to be grounded in a traditional media fascination/embarrassment at anything involving sex--but now it's moved on to anything that...well, it's hard to say exactly what's objectionable about some of the programs media are objecting to.

Take this confused passage from an L.A. Times editorial (2/2/09):

But too many of the items have little apparent connection with economic growth--witness the nearly $5 billion for prevention, wellness, "comparative effectiveness research" and training in the health field, the $2.1 billion for Head Start and the $300 million to improve teacher quality, just to name a few examples from the 647-page House bill. Other provisions, such as the $64 billion for preventing layoffs at schools, colleges and "high priority" state programs, are about saving jobs, not creating them. In the short term, there may be no difference between preventing job cuts and increasing payrolls--one prevents a bad situation from worsening, the other makes a good situation better. But an investment this large should pay long-term dividends by increasing productivity, and that's hard to do when so much of the money is going toward maintaining the status quo.

Let me just say that if you don't see the connection between improving education and increasing productivity, than you really shouldn't be writing editorials about the economy.

Or here's a short item from the New York Times' Science section (2/3/09), a reprint of a blog post by Andrew Revkin:

Both [the Senate and House stimulus] bills would spend "$600 million for accelerating satellite development and acquisition, acquiring climate sensors and climate modeling capacity, and establishing climate data records." They also call for at least $140 million for climate modeling.

Regardless of the merits of such research, does it fit in a bill meant to exploit unoccupied labor in an economic downturn?

The short answer is: yes. A slightly longer answer is provided by economist Dean Baker (Beat the Press, 2/3/09):

Spending that is not stimulus is like cash that is not money. Spending is stimulus, spending is stimulus. Any spending will generate jobs. It is that simple. There is a question of whether the spending will go to areas that will provide benefits, long-term or short-term, to the economy, but there is no question that money that is spent will create jobs and therefore is stimulus.

Any reporter who does not understand this fact has no business reporting on the economy.

Attacking the White House's proposed economic stimulus plan (1/26/09), Rush Limbaugh explained that the issue pits his favored "supply-siders," who see the holy grail in tax cuts, against what he repeatedly referred to as, at least what sounded like "kineesian economists," who he described as partial to "government spending on shovel-ready projects of all kinds." ("Kineesian"--rhymes with "artesian"--is my phonetic version of what Limbaugh said, but listen for yourself.)

As you might have guessed, what Limbaugh meant to say was "Keynesian" (this is confirmed by the corrected transcript at his site), a well-worn adjective derived from the name of John Maynard Keynes, one of the most influential economists of the last century or so.

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman helpfully debunks (1/26/09) some of the more tendentious and misleading criticisms of the White House's economic stimulus package. Here's one such trope:

First, there’s the bogus talking point that the Obama plan will cost $275,000 per job created. Why is it bogus? Because it involves taking the cost of a plan that will extend over several years, creating millions of jobs each year, and dividing it by the jobs created in just one of those years.

It’s as if an opponent of the school lunch program were to take an estimate of the cost of that program over the next five years, then divide it by the number of lunches provided in just one of those years, and assert that the program was hugely wasteful, because it cost $13 per lunch. (The actual cost of a free school lunch, by the way, is $2.57.)

The true cost per job of the Obama plan will probably be closer to $100,000 than $275,000--and the net cost will be as little as $60,000 once you take into account the fact that a stronger economy means higher tax receipts.

Well, that's refreshing; one only wishes that news articles in the same paper would challenge such spin instead of merely passing it along, as they did yesterday (courtesy of GOP Congressmember John Boehner):

Mr. Boehner cited numbers to counter Mr. Obama's, saying the House Democratic plan included $600 million for the federal government to buy new cars, $650 million for digital television coupons and $50 million for the National Endowment for the Arts. "All told," he said, "the plan would spend a whopping $275,000 in taxpayer dollars for every new job it aims to create."