Any chance Burris could get anything done in the Senate? I doubt it.

Also: I kinda wish Blago had had the chutzpah to appoint himself. THAT would be political drama at its apex.

Hey, at least that asshat Blago is managing to keep his name in the headlines.

Whoa. Blago thinks he stil has a job, how adorable.
Well... If Roland Burris is seated (which I'm not sure the Senate can stop. They can remove him after he's seated, but I don't know that they can prevent him from being seated, as Nate Silver notes) then we still have a black man in the Senate... Which is great, if you're into affirmative action at the highest level. 

I don't know how I feel about this. His career seems fine, if boring. He has a remarkable ability to lose primaries, it seems. I wonder if this will appointment will hold water... I also wonder what Burris is paying Blago.

Has Blagojevich broken entirely with reality? We'll see...

And now Axelrod appears to be a proponent of what I think is the dumbest way of trying to provide economic relief. One-time cash payouts do not promote a healthy economy; they don't jump-start anything. First of all, this money only goes to those working already. Unemployment needs to be directly addressed by any stimulus option. Infrastructure investment addresses unemployment by creating new jobs and making sure that existing jobs don't disappear. Handouts help noone, and Bush proved that earlier this year. Sure, I'd love th money, but I don't think it's a good idea. People will do what they did with it last time: Bank it, or pay down their debt with it. While I think that paying down debt could theoretically help to stimulate the economy, in actuality the money appears to vanish into the same money hole that the bank bailout money has disappeared into. This money is better spent as use-it-or-lose-it pork, given to state governments with a mandate to spend. 

Cha-ching!

I'm glad to see that Larry Summers thinks that we need to spend ridiculous amounts of money on this bailout operation. I think it's completely necessary, and as someone on Obama's economic "team" (whatever that means) I'm glad to see that Summers agrees. This is certainly no time for anything but decisive action. I also think that the idea of infrastructure investment is a sound one. While I advocate mass transit as much as possible, and oppose the building of new roads in most situations, I think that distributing the money to state governments in a "use it or lose it" fashion is the fastest and most feasible method of getting the cash circulating. Also- and I'm speculating- much of that money will be used to repair existing infrastructure, a task that I am not opposed to in a knee-jerk fashion. I believe that the Alaskan Way Viaduct should die, but money should still be spent on replacing it with a surface/transit option (I've been brainwashed by The Stranger). And some of this money is going to trickle into mass transit; I think it's that simple. Money should be invested in AmTrak, but I don't know how soon they could use it, and the purpose of the bill is going to be economic stimulus; infrastructure comes as a side bonus. Besides, if we end up switching to electric cars in the next ten to twenty years (something that I don't think is absurd; I believe the name of the game is 'energy' and not 'oil' and that America should be the world's largest manufacturer of high-efficiency large batteries) then that infrastructure will act as a benefit without as many carbon-emission negatives. So get excited! Here comes the trillion-dollar shot in the arm! Let's hope it does more good than Bush's impotent cash handout.