As Senator Nelson from Nebraska took to the floor last Friday to announce the triumph of Joe Leiberman's new gang, more stood out than how awkward the phrase “milking the sacred cows” is, which you can find around 2:00 minutes in to the speech. What really stood out was how this list of “wasteful” projects that were cut actually seemed like projects that this bill was intended to produce, because, you know… they created jobs and stuff. These cuts of around $80 billion Nelson that talks about are the ones that Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman described as, “Not based on any coherent economic argument, but simply to demonstrate their centrist mojo.”

We Minnesotans usually tune out the noise from out east when the partisan antics become too much for our gentle Midwestern sensibilities, but we cannot do that this time around. This compromise hurts our state, and we need these jobs. The Senate bill would provide between 6,055 and 7,942 less jobs for Minnesota than the bill that passed the House. To put that in a little better prospective, that’s the population of the city of Crookston having jobs taken away for the sake of “compromise”. Is this the “trimming of the fat, frying of the bacon” that this so-called “gang of moderates” is proud of?

Like many of these Senators themselves have said, this bill is about creating jobs. They should step back and say those words again, maybe a couple of times so they can feel more comfortable with them. This bill isn’t about a ticket back to prominence for the ailing Republican Party. It isn’t about who Anderson Cooper thinks is winning the spin wars, even if he is the best dressed man on the news. This bill is about putting people back to work. And to that end, even amongst former campaign combatants there seems to be little doubt:

“The House bill will create more jobs and a stronger economy than the Senate bill,” said Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, who was a campaign adviser to Republican presidential candidate John McCain. (From Bloomberg)