After Harry Reid announced the Senate would defer voting on the stimulus bill until Friday, a group of clueless “centrist” Senators continued meeting to find ways to make the stimulus bill less effective and a depression more likely. And they may succeed.

According to Robert Gibbs in a just-concluded press conference, Obama is going to hold town halls in Elkhart Indiana and Ft. Myers Florida on Monday. Which appears to be an attempt to pick up the needed Senate votes for the stimulus bill — Dick Luger and Mel Martinez looking to be the most persuadable Republicans.

OMG! Rep Pete Session takes a page out of the Taliban playbook. I’m not kidding.

The debate on the stimulus continues (watch it here). Don’t watch if you’re in the middle of lunch. The GOP’s increasingly hysterical objections to the bill are getting tough to stomach.

Coburn described it as “the largest generational theft bill we’ve ever had in the history of our country.”

Yes, Coburn is a crazy person, but that’s pretty much the GOP party line on the stimulus bill.

Greg Sargent has the latest list of cuts to the stimulus package by the Nelson/Collins group:

Total Reductions: $80 billion

Eliminations:

Head Start, Education for the Disadvantaged, School improvement, Child Nutrition, Firefighters, Transportation Security Administration, Coast Guard, Prisons, COPS Hiring, Violence Against Women, NASA, NSF, Western Area Power Administration, CDC, Food Stamps

I had to play the TIVO back several times in order to make sure I heard this right. Here’s John McCain this morning on the floor of the Senate, talking about the stimulus bill: MCCAIN: Mr. President, the American people are figuring it out that this is not a stimulus bill it’s a spending bill full of unnecessary spending, unexamined policy changes or policy changes that have been examined and rejected in the past and of course tax cuts, which really do not stimulate the economy.

I’ve always thought of change in politics as a sort ripple effect: each of us takes a step toward making a change, and that ripples out to others taking the same steps. Suddenly, you have a wave and enough momentum to crash into the static and hopefully force a change of course.

We go live with the latest addition to the FDL family of blogs this morning — Christy has her own blog!

We’ve got so much great content these days it’s an embarrassment of riches, and we don’t want to limit people to posting on an increasingly crowded front page.

If Obama gave a more impassioned speech during the campaign than the one he gave to Democratic House members at their retreat last night, I missed it. It was a truly great speech.

Boo yah. A sampling of smackdowns across the internets: As ever, digby: “[Graham] was whining and fulminating and pretty much working himself into a frenzy. Which means this is an orchestrated hissy fit….”