Pelosi, Reid Continue P.R. Assault on Their Own Bill

At around 3 p.m. today, stimulus negotiators held a press conference announcing a deal on the bill, thanks to deal-making meetings to which GOP conferees were reportedly not invited.

At around 4 p.m., the New York Times reported that the deal is not cemented yet, as Pelosi doesn't yet have her Democratic colleagues in the House on board:

The Democratic leadership from the House and Senate are meeting in the Speaker's office, trying to salvage the deal that had been announced earlier. There were hard feelings by some House members that an agreement on the economic stimulus had been announced before they had seen the details.

At least some of the differences, aides said, appeared to be over construction spending measures. Aides said the situation would be resolved.

"I think we're moving very rapidly toward making an announcement of a deal," Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for the House Speaker, told reporters who crowded the corridor outside Ms. Pelosi's office.

Well played, wise Democratic leadership. Perhaps their inability to handle even the announcement of a deal is what leads 67 percent of Americans think they could handle the multi-trillion-dollar American economy better than Congress.