By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

According to this morning's exposé in the Washington Times, those very same Republican members of Congress who publicly condemned the 2009 stimulus bill--insisting to us all that it would neither stimulate the economy nor create jobs--privately believed just the opposite. These GOP representatives and senators were so sure that the stimulus bill would be effective, in fact, that they could not get to their desks fast enough to start peppering the federal government with requests for projects in their districts.

After using the Freedom of Information Act to acquire the congressional correspondence to just one federal agency--the Department of Agriculture--the Times discovered more than a dozen two-faced GOP members, including Rep. Joe "You Lie" Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who interrupted President Obama's speech to a joint session of Congress last year.

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

I wrote last week about Chris Cillizza's poll of Washington political junkies, and how their rankings of American political fiction were so way, way wrong.

Now, it's on to the non-fiction category, where the Fix fans did a little better, as one might expect of readers of The Washington Post. Yet there are glaring omissions--most notably the work of Post stars Bob Woodward, Carl Bernstein and David Maraniss.

How does any list of significant books on contemporary politics not include All the President's Men, or The Final Days or The Brethren and other Woodward books, or Maraniss's biography of Bill Clinton, First in His Class, or his collaboration with Michael Weiskopf on that little classic, Tell Newt to Shut Up!

I call it the Woodward School, though the New Yorker's Elizabeth Drew gave us more high falutin' versions for many years, and probably ranks as a co-founder of the academy.

The latest entry, secure atop the best-selling lists, is Game Change, a guilty pleasure from John Heilemann and Mark Halperin, about the 2008 campaign.

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

For all those self-righteous Republicans in gated retirement communities who are killing off healthcare reform because you are just too selfish to care about the problems faced by working moms and their kids--I know most of you are noble, but there are a few of you out there--here are a few questions to take to the bathroom mirror.

If you claim you're irate about the deficit, and outraged because the Democratic senators from Louisiana and Nebraska cut sweet deals for their states during the healthcare debate, what do you think about Alabama's Republican Sen. Richard Shelby, who is obstructing government operations until he gets two wasteful porky earmarks for Alabama?

And if you insist that your revolution is to counter the strength of special interests in Washington, explain to me why the newest Republican senator--your new hero, Scott Brown from Massachusetts--had to rush to be sworn in so he could cast a deciding vote to keep the National Labor Relations Board under corporate sway?

By John A. Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Over at The Fix, ace compiler Chris Cillizza has been soliciting nominations from his readers for the honor of the Best Political Books Ever, and just published his findings. The list has its ups, and plenty of downs. Cillizza starts off strong by recognizing the one volume on American politics--fiction or non-fiction--that has stood, above all others, for more than half a century. That would be All the King's Men by Robert Penn Warren. Nothing else comes close. Maybe, nothing ever will. It's the American King Lear or Julius Caesar.

(I'm assuming that Mr. Shakespeare's plays, and the Bible, fall into other categories, otherwise they would top all lists of political fictions.)

So I was flabbergasted to discover that Fix readers slighted Warren and chose The Last Hurrah by Edwin O'Connor as the best novel on politics. The choice says something about the decline of higher education and literary standards in the Internet age: What are the colleges teaching these days?

By John A. Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

I suppose it is a mark of Democratic ineptness or complacency that, a year after Congress passed one of the biggest tax cuts in U.S. history, President Audacity still found the need to inform us of this fact in his State of the Union address. Republican partisans may have preferred an across-the-board tax cut, or a gift to corporations, or the Paris Hilton Honorary Estate Tax Repeal Bill, rather than targeted tax cuts for working families. But there is no denying the fact: The Democratic stimulus bill gave middle-class families a huge tax break.

And there is more--much more--tax relief to come. It's getting lost in the cacophony again, but Obama's proposed budget has $2.7 trillion in tax cuts for middle-class families, working folks caring for children or elderly parents, college students, small businesses and investors, research and development--even cellphone users--over the next 10 years.

Another fact: That much-maligned stimulus bill, along with the hated bank bailout loans, also did what economists (including those who were advising the Bush administration, which initiated the stimulus process and the bailout loans months before Obama took office) said they would. They stabilized an economy in free fall. The banks have even begun to pay us back.

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

Several years ago, when my last surviving aunt died, I became responsible, with my sister, for our mentally disabled cousin. I say this not for sympathy, but for context. I don't have a baby with Down's syndrome at home, like Sarah Palin does, but like most Americans I have someone dear to me who suffers from mental illness or addiction or developmental shortfalls.

Palin claims to be outraged by White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel's reported statement, made in a private meeting last summer, that Democrats who attack other Democrats are "f…ing retarded." This is an insult to the disabled, says Palin, and he should be forced to resign.

I'm disappointed to see Palin embracing this kind of political correctness. I thought that was the province of very silly liberals.

When he used the adjective "retarded," Emanuel was not insulting or commenting about people with special needs. If he had been, then some sort of wrist slap or apology might be in order, as the noun "retard" has, at the request of advocates for the mentally disabled, been deemed too crude for general use, and retired to the closet of public discourse.

By John Aloysius Farrell, Thomas Jefferson Street blog

In June, 1891 Supreme Court Justice David Brewer was called to New Haven to address the graduates of Yale University. Brewer knew the key to success at such occasions, and told the sons of the Gilded Age just what they wanted to hear. "From the time in earliest records when Eve took loving possession of even the forbidden apple, the idea of property and sacredness of the right of its possession has never departed from the race," Brewer said.

"Human experience," he said, "declares that the love of acquirement, mingled with the joy of possession, is the real stimulus to human activity."

Given the recent Supreme Court decision on corporate campaign spending, with its twisted view of corporations as the building blocks of liberty, Brewer might feel right at home on the current court.

So, kudos to Barack Obama, that former constitutional law professor, for saying it right to the justices' faces last night.