So much for Obama's meeting with conservatives before taking office... Charles Krauthammer nails him in this one, and makes some damn good points in the process:

"A failure to act, and act now, will turn crisis into a catastrophe."

-- President Obama, Feb. 4.

Catastrophe, mind you. So much for the president who in his inaugural address two weeks earlier declared "we have chosen hope over fear." Until, that is, you need fear to pass a bill.

And so much for the promise to banish the money changers and influence peddlers from the temple. An ostentatious executive order banning lobbyists was immediately followed by the nomination of at least a dozen current or former lobbyists to high position. Followed by a Treasury secretary who allegedly couldn't understand the payroll tax provisions in his 1040. Followed by Tom Daschle, who had to fall on his sword according to the new Washington rule that no Cabinet can have more than one tax delinquent.

More:

It's the essential fraud of rushing through a bill in which the normal rules (committee hearings, finding revenue to pay for the programs) are suspended on the grounds that a national emergency requires an immediate job-creating stimulus -- and then throwing into it hundreds of billions that have nothing to do with stimulus, that Congress's own budget office says won't be spent until 2011 and beyond, and that are little more than the back-scratching, special-interest, lobby-driven parochialism that Obama came to Washington to abolish. He said.

Not just to abolish but to create something new -- a new politics where the moneyed pork-barreling and corrupt logrolling of the past would give way to a bottom-up, grass-roots participatory democracy. That is what made Obama so dazzling and new. Turns out the "fierce urgency of now" includes $150 million for livestock (and honeybee and farm-raised fish) insurance.

Krauthammer makes some great points, although I'd rather see money spent on schools than honeybees any day. As some have said before, this bill is Obama's first major test, and it really is a test of whether he controls the agenda in Washington, or lets Nancy Pelosi and her ilk do it for him. If he doesn't insist that a few hundred billion of this pork is pared off (which is hopefully happening with the Senate version), then what was the point of promising all this change from the way things have always been done? Congress cannot be allowed to dictate the agenda. That is the deal Bush made to get his 9/11 legislation through, and it resulted in the Republicans turning into the big-spenders they had been running against for so many years.