> …Greenstein said he was amazed to learn that senior Bush administration officials had effectively turned over the staff of the president's budget office to a "shadow" budget office created by Obama. Career professionals at the Office of Management and Budget rigorously scrubbed the costs of the Obama stimulus package, item by item, almost as if Obama were already president….

> "This is, I think, unprecedented," he said. "I did not think one could pull this off this early."

I bet W is an expert at setting up “shadow” organizations. OTOH, it is good to see a positive gesture from W. I bet that's what is considered surprising.

> Obama's team, he said, had stuck to two key principles in putting a package together: only proposals that could quickly stimulate the economy were included and new spending plans that might be viewed as longer-term initiatives, rather than temporary ones, were rejected.

I’d rather see details of the projects by type rather than fuzzy allusions to things which “quickly stimulate the economy”

> In more than three decades in Washington, Greenstein said he's never seen such a broad consensus develop, across the political spectrum, on the need for a huge injection of new government spending to help the economy recover.

Like giving a kilo of heroin to a house of addicts at a party, where is the surprise?

> But when the Obama team added up all the "shovel-ready" infrastructure projects and other initiatives proposed as part of the stimulus package, "they discovered, to their dismay, that the number was nowhere near" the roughly $1 trillion target set by some economists for an overall recovery plan.

Again, we need details. Greening of buildings? Widespread installation of train infrastructure? Hiring teachers and street cleaners? What? As far as the cost being too low, that won’t last.

As to the vilifying O for not being liberal enough, bfd. It’s only posturing.