Well I do agree that this bill isn't going to help anything. It's a desperate attempt to keep a junkie from coming off his high by injecting another dose of heroin. That junkie being the economy. I do disagree about the recession part. 70% of the U.S GDP comes from consumer spending- and the U.S consumer is in the process of being slammed with the old  'death by a thousand cuts' routine- the average joe is up to his eyeballs in debt and people have been sustaining an unsustainable lifestyle for too long with cheap, readily available credit and by using their houses as ATM machines.

On the outside, yes things appear fine. In reality we are in the midst of a slow-motion train wreck. People spotted this from a mile away years ago and said that this wouldn't happen overnight, but have continually been shouted down as crazy doomsday naysayers. In reality, it comes down to the fact that you cannot beat the laws of physics. What goes up must come down- and the economy has been going up for such an unnaturally long time due to successive bubbles, that we're due for a hard fall. The question is how hard it's gonna be. The problem isn't that people are losing their homes, the problem is how the banks have gamed the system behind the scenes and bought and sold worthless debt on the market to the tune of billions of dollars at a time. Some estimates say that there's an estimated 2 trillion of worthless toxic junk on the market in the form of off-book "structured investment vehicles" that the banks created ala enron-style. This is what's causing all the woes, among a host of other problems.

Because of these financial shenanigans, the gears of the machinery are slowly grinding to a halt. The pork bill is just the attempt to add a little grease to keep things running a little longer, but the damage has been done. They want to keep things running as long as they can until the current administration gets out of office, and then when the s**t hits the fan they can say "everything was running fine on my watch!" That is why Bush was the one who proposed this 150 billion infusion... he's trying to cover his ass until he can get out of office, like a mechanic who knows and engine is bad but will jury rig it long enough for you to take your car off the lot and get down the road a bit before it breaks down!

I heard the vote was 58-41 (I guess Johnson still is not voting).

And I agree with Artysim, but for other reasons.  Neither Bill is going to do much.  The economy has to take a breather.  Whether you want to call it a recession, or a depression, or the worst economy in the last 50 years, it is a normal part of the thing we call the economy.