Stimulated right into being another Europe

He makes it sound like a bad thing.

Don't tread on me

Just amazing.  You'd think that after the catastrophic failures of their idol Bush and the catastrophic failures of their beloved unrestricted capitalism, those rightwing schmucks like Steyn would have the good sense to stand humbly in the corner and let somebody else run the show for awhile.  The fact that they continue to imagine that they are still relevant in any sense is just astonishing.

What's funny about this is that Steyn is play-acting at being a puritan.  It's all very well and good to pretend that men still wear bowler hats and carry pocket watches, and that women enter the publican's house from the ladies entrance wearing a gigantic hoop skirt, where ribald men "trick them" into having sex (except for the "fallen women") but everybody knows real life isn't like that.  So steyn goes on pretending as if he doesn't drink in bars (the guy's a canadian, right? I am so sure he's never had a sip of booze in his life or been to one of canada's hundreds of thousands of bars) or as if the concept of men and women co-mingling is something he's never experienced.

What he comes off as is a finger-wagging prig.

John Mccain Called his wife WHAT??

The Repubs are screaming that the Stimulus is loaded with "liberal" wish projects! So be it! What the Democratic/progressive/liberal folks have to understand is the tactics that the Dems are using to get the real stimulus projects properly funded in the bill. If the Dems crafted the bill just for the critical "shovel ready" infrastructure (roads, bridges, water, and sewer)projects, the Repubs would propose a flurry of amendments designed to reduce the money available to these shovel ready projects. THE REPUBS WILL TRY TO UNDERCUT WHATEVER IS IN THE BILL, REGARDLESS WHAT IT IS. If the projected amount was $800 million, they would still be trying to undercut it.

So the Dem's strategy is to load up the bill with a lot of ancillary projects just to give the Repubs a lot of stuff to cut or amend out. For example, $200 million to clean up the Washington Mall, $335 for STD prevention, $50 million to the Center for the Performing Arts, etc. These projects are "red herrings" for the Repubs to go chase after, thereby protecting the real bread and butter projects necessary to achieve real stimulus by putting people back to work.

Without question, the Republicans are becoming more and more delusional.  How does one ever understand where they are coming from? But, if the republic is to survive, such bizarre thinkers may have to be institutionalized, for every ones good.

Suppose you scrub your ethical skin until it shines, but inside there is no music, then what? Kabir

So if we spend $335 million (1 dollar for every man, woman, and child in the country) that will lead to "trillion-dollar deficits" on its own?  That's pretty stupid.  He also seems to think that STDs cause children.  Maybe someone should explain the birds and the bees to him.

"The more interviews Speaker Pelosi gives explaining how vital the STD industry is to restarting the U.S. economy, the more I find myself hearing 'syphilis' every time she says 'stimulus.'"  That says a hell of a lot more about Mark Steyn than it does about Nancy Pelosi.

so, family planning is pork. and performing arts is pork. now, what else in the stim bill that the repugs refused to support is pork. seriously, what other grotesque horrors do the repugs categorize as port?
 all i can say is that if the dems just make the public aware of all the "concern" the repug have for the public, we may grow the Dem majority each and every election cycle for the next fifty years.my god- they even chose a leader that reeks of the stench of loser!

The religious right has always thought of disease -- and pretty much any other calamity -- as being divine vengeance. (Except, unsurprisingly, when it happens to them.) They live in a delusional universe where there is no ordinary causality; actions happen more or less randomly in a vacuum, and their consequences are determined by the will of God. And since their God, like all gods, is an imaginary projection of their own wish-fulfillment fantasies, every event is interpreted as divine reward for people they like and divine punishment for people they dislike.

Of course, it's not surprise that they dislike women. Women, in their infantile mythology, are responsible for getting them kicked out of Eden through the original sin of questioning and defying authority. Male authority, of course. Their model for female virtue is Mary, the rape victim who liked it and whose sole duty is to support the child who was forced upon her and to silently suffer.

There is genuine terror on the right of the day when all STDs are cured and effective contraception is widely available. Then there will be no more divine punishment for the terrible sin of rubbing one's parts however one wants, whether it be against oneself, a member of the same sex, or a whole series of random strangers. And without the fear and sexual frustration that provides most of the driving energy behind, well, most of the uglier and hateful forms Christianity, the whole thing collapses.

Here's what folks are missing:  Those STD prevention programs and family planning programs already exist and are being run by the states.  But states in between a rock and a hard place with constitutionally mandated balanced budgets.  Therefore, governors and legislatures are looking to cut budgets and cut employees.

This might not be stimulative but it damn well prevents digging a deeper hole through state layoffs.

50 states, 210 media market, 435 Congressional Districts, 3080 counties, 192,480 precincts

Corvus has it exactly right. And think about it, no wonder the extreme pro-lifers oppose abortion even in the case of rape or incest...Jesus was the result of both! Poor Mary was raped by "God the Father". Man, that's messed up.

loose women

C'mon. "Loose women"??? Seriously? What happened, did a wormhole eject him from the 19th century?

Mark Steyn is one of the many reasons I quit subscribing to The Atlantic. I refused to subsidize that blowhard.

This moron needs a good stiff kick to the crotch. Hopefully one stiff enough that it leaves him with a new set of tonsils.

You people are hilarious.

How can you read Steyn's passage, and then say "I'm not concerned with Steyn's critique of the efficacy of STD prevention as a stimulus, etc..."?

It's like reading, oh, I dunno, American Psycho, and saying. "Well I'm not concerned with Easton Ellis' portrayal of 1980s metropolitan hedonism, what concerns me is that his murderer wears a suit".

How can you get his point, and then completely sidestep it? Unless, that is, your own sexual psychopathologies and preoccupations lead you round by the nose as completely, if not more so, as you suggest Steyn's do to him...