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Here's a fascinating little piece in the Economist I just stumbled across;
http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2011/08/stimulus-thinking

Basically the Obama administration proposed reducing the carrier fleet from 11 carriers to 9. In response, Judson Phillips, head of one of the more far right Tea Party Organisations, Tea Party Nation, responded with this;

"If we decided to build a couple of new carriers, thousands of workers would be hired for the shipyards. Thousands of employees would be hired for the steel mills that would provide the steel for the hull and various sub contractors would hire thousands. Do you know what that means?
It means they would receive paychecks and go out and spend that money. That would help a recovery. That is a shovel ready project!"

Here, Mr Nelson makes a very clear, obvious argument. It's basically just common fething sense. When government undertakes big projects, it spends money that creates employment, those people then spend their money and so on, this is what stimulus is, so yes, if you want to prevent the worst of the recession impacting the economy, it is good and sensible. Well done Mr Phillips.

Except Mr Nelson thinks that stimulus only works when building military weapon platforms. He doesn't seem to have any similar level of enthusiasm for building bridges or high speed rail. Having a mill produce steel for an aircraft carrier would mean jobs, but having that same mill produce as much steel for a network of bridges wouldn't create jobs because socialism. Or something.

I've thought a few times that we must finally have reached the bottom of intellectual incoherence in the US rightwing, that surely now they'd start to man up, get honest, and get back to being the party of Eisenhower. I've been wrong everytime before, but maybe just maybe this is as bad as it's going to get, and from now on we might see some improvement.

Very true.

Honestly the bizzare love the TP lot have for guns n ammo is baffling to me.

They have a staggeringly narrow understanding of how the real world works.