My cat shares far too many traits with a goldfish.   I've heard that a goldfish swims constantly around their bowl mostly because they have such short memories that by the time they have swum around their bowls, they have forgotten what they saw before, and are now again fascinated by the same things they just saw.  This morning I was petting my cat, then she wandered too far off for me to reach from the breakfast table, and she got interested in something else.  So I called her again and held my hand out, IMMEDIATELY she comes running back, as if this was the possibility for something great to happen.  This happened about 5 times in a row, after which she got interested in a fly and chased it across the house and then I couldn't get her to come back any more.  Maybe the same thing is wrong with people.  Maybe tv commercials and modern TV shows and their constant refocusing of our attention has made us so dependent on being told "look at this!" over and over that we forget everything that just happened and are willing to do the same wrong thing again.  After a presidential campaign where tax cuts managed to somehow get past the OMGDONTTAXME enough to actually be the bad guys in the winning candidate's campaign, here we are again with the stimulus bill.  How do we fix the economy? Tax cuts.  Unemployment? Tax cuts.  Seriously, this approach hasn't worked on any problem since, what, JFK times?  Somehow, the peeps have already forgotten that tax cuts don't help anything.  I don't wonder why the republicans in congress always push for tax cuts.  They aren't confused about how effective they'll be in fixing the world.  They just don't care.  I don't believe for a second that they are do gooders trying to make the world a better place and are just so misguided that they really believe tax cuts are going to do the job.  They just want more tax cuts so they can make more money, and their donors will make more money, so they can stay in power.  But how in the world do they sell that crap to their constituents?  I think it's the goldfish phenomenon.  They saw a flashy thing and they got distracted for a while, now you can use the same story on them you used 20 minutes ago.  The failure of the last 30 years washed clean in seconds.