Yesterday, President Obama strongly condemned members of both political parties for characterizing the economic recovery package before Congress as a “pork” spending plan for pet projects: “[W]hen you hear these attacks deriding something of such obvious importance as this, you have to ask yourself, ‘Are these folks serious?'” Despite the loss of 600,000 jobs last month alone, debate over the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 has been reduced to petty bickering over extremely small portions of the overall recovery plan. Marching to Rush Limbaugh’s drumbeat, conservatives spent all week on cable news caricaturing tiny portions of the bill — including provisions that they had previously supported — in order to score political points and embarrass the Obama administration. But these antics have distracted Washington from “the reality that we may well be falling into an economic abyss.” Today, The Progress Report takes a step back and looks at the key principles that should guide the construction of any compromise on the economic recovery package.

From The Progress Report