Good Takes Time

Josh Marshall passes along the story that:

President Obama is "frustrated by the public perception that the recovery bill was becoming laden with partisan pet projects."

I am not sure where the partisan label comes from. But on the pet project side, wasn't that inevitable? If you are only going to give money to "shovel ready" projects then some member of Congress or Governor has to have a plan sitting in their back pocket. And if we actually need rapid stimulus there is nothing wrong with this, since the alternative is allocating giant blocks of money to agencies, setting up grant applications, giving people 6 months to apply, weeding through them for the next year, and finally dispursing the first dollars in 2011 (at which point the economy is completely in the crapper).

I am pirating this from somewhere else (can't remember exactly where though) but while the goal is for government spending to be good, fast, and cheap, you can only pick two. With the size of the stimulus we haev already picked cheap, so what is the other one going to be?