This morning, Ed O’Keefe of the Washington Post reports about the lack of shovel ready projects paid for by the stimulus:

President Obama admits (in yet another New York Times Magazine piece about him) that “there’s no such thing as shovel-ready projects.”
That’s a critical admission because the Obama administration argued before the recovery program’s passage that hundreds of major shovel-ready projects just needed a few million federal dollars to get started and hire unemployed workers.

Well, yes, considering that most of the discretionary spending went to the department of education.

Here is more:

Obama also admits he should have “let the Republicans insist on the tax cuts” as part of the stimulus package. Probably a good idea in hindsight, because it would have allowed the White House to spread the blame (or credit?) to Republicans willing to vote for a massive spending package that included tax breaks.

The whole think is here.