[CrackerBarrel]

Good. The stimulus contains very little which would actually stimulate anything, it's a minimal amount of tax savings (which, admittedly in this economy is going to be saved/used to pay off debt and not spent, but that will fix some problems as well), a relatively small amount of infrastructure building, and aside from that just trying to frontload all the government spending programs that Dems have been dreaming of for years into one bill before there is time for opposition to gather to them. The idea was that this was the time to get all those proposals that used to be pipe-dreams passed and call it a "stimulus". My hope is that the Senate GOP will filibuster this collection of garbage if the Senate version comes out anything like the House version.

From a political standpoint though, there's nothing to lose in voting against it. The remaining GOP members of the House are for the most part from districts that are going to be Red no matter what, so go back to the fiscal responsibility platform of being a Conservative and make the Democrats own this bill. When it fails and only increases the national debt with no results to show they won't be able to say "we tried our best!" because the entire GOP caucus can now say "we saw that it was just a load of pork, why couldn't you?".

And there was never going to be bipartisanship with comments like "I won." and "Beat me over the head all you want with it, I don't think we're going to compromise on that." Obama went to the Hill and talked to Republicans, but did absolutely nothing to address their concerns, that's not exactly bipartisan. A good first step towards bipartisanship for the White House would be to start either reeling in or distancing themselves from Nutty Nancy though.

ETA: And my thoughts on what would work? Some actual infrastructure spending (as in building things that will be useful later, not just dumping money into entitlement programs), some housing assistance, increased unemployment funding, and one hell of a cut on the corporate tax rate for a period of 3-5 years. Why? Because then companies can use money they would be paying in taxes to keep around more of their workers and buy capital. Those things create wealth, because more people with jobs buy more things, more capital lets things be made more efficiently, and then you get a cycle going. People who feel secure in their job can spend, which gives more money to corporations who can invest it in people and capital again since they don't have to pay nearly as much of it away to taxes the next year either. The companies in rough financial situations can use the tax savings to pay back some debt, which means banks are taking money back in from somewhere other than just the Fed and have money to lend again which starts unfreezing the credit markets. And in my opinion it wouldn't hurt to suspend the capital gains tax for a year. Yes the benefit would be primarily to higher income people, but folks watch the Dow to tell them how the economy is doing and nothing would get money out of essentially 0 yield government bonds and into stocks faster than suspending the capital gains tax.