Republicans And The MSM Just Making Shit Up As Usual

Over the past week or so we have seen Republicans trumpet and the Mainstream Media folks parrot, the conclusions of a Congressional Budget Office report that said President Obama's ecocnomic stimulus package wouldn't get much of the money included in the bill into the economy for two years. They have used this to decry the stimulus bill as "flawed" and as proof that instead it should be focused more on tax cuts which according to them would get money into the economy quicker. There was just one problem with that, the report doesn't exist.

From HuffPo:

Reports of a recent study by the Congressional Budget Office, showing that the vast majority of the money in the stimulus package won't be spent until after 2010, have Democrats on the defensive and the GOP calling for a pullback in wasteful spending.
Funny thing is, there is no such report.

"We did not issue any report, any analysis or any study," a CBO aide told the Huffington Post.
Rather, the nonpartisan CBO ran a small portion of an earlier version of the stimulus plan through a computer program that uses a standard formula to determine a score -- how quickly money will be spent. The score only dealt with the part of the stimulus headed for the Appropriations Committee and left out the parts bound for the Ways and Means or Energy and Commerce Committee.

Because it dealt with just a part of the stimulus, it estimated the spending rate for only about $300 billion of the $825 billion plan. Significant changes have been made to the part of the bill the CBO looked at.

The CBO numbers were given to a small number of congressional Democrats and Republicans, but were not posted online because they're not an official CBO product. (Media outlets, while reporting widely about the "report," have declined to post it online. Here's the whole thing.) Democratic aides say they are certain that the GOP leaked it to the Associated Press in order to undercut the spending portion of the stimulus.

A Republican aide for the House Appropriations Committee denied involvement, saying that her staff did not see the CBO numbers until after the AP reported them. The Washington Post followed the AP and reported that aides to Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) provided the report.

So once again the Republican party is more interested in playing politics than doing what is right for the American people. How anybody could believe in these clowns at this point is beyond me. At some point you have to look past their rhetoric and evaluate their deeds and for the last 8 years there is no doubt that the GOP has been all about looking out for the GOP. And this illustrates yet another failure of the MSM. Instead of learning about their subterfuge from the Washington Post or the AP instead they became complicit in pushing the faux controversy. And then of course their MSM bretheren of all types picked up the story and ran with it. It should tell you something that it took the Huffington Post to investigate the report that does not exist in order for the truth to come our rather than CNN or the New York Times. Such is the state of journalism today.