It Takes An Honest President to Live Outisde the Law

At its core, I applaud and support President Obama’s budget aims, the goals it is trying to accomplish, and the new direction it will take this country. The whole “don’t punish hard work” theory of taxation is hogwash, and anyone who thinks that the fruits of hard labor have not been exorbitantly allocated towards certain segments of society over the past 2 decades is kidding themselves. Coal miners work their butts off, but I don’t see their bosses giving them enough of a raise to stick some money in a private equity fund and benefit from a lower capital gains rate. If a single guy making $275,000 a year has to drive  a 5-series instead of a Porsche in order for us to provide adquate health care to the masses and rebuild sullen infrastructure, I’m sure he’ll live. Whether or not this government and its private sector partners in this enterprise can meet these objectives remains to be seen, but even Bill O’Reilly is taking a wait-and-see approach on this one. I’m not looking forward to paying China and India interest on this debt for the next 20 years, but it’s here and if were going to take on more, I simply don’t trust the private sector to make the right decisions on where to put their equity and investment independently

But there’s no denying it, Obama is fudging the numbers on the budget. His growth projections are unrealistic, and even if they were, a budget this transformative and bold should make conservative projections. His claim that he can balance the budget once the majority of the costs have been outlayed is also unrealistic, and cannot be anything more than political posturing to counter the deficit-spending critics. In truth, he is just accepting that this country is sunk inexorably into debt and that only a major shift in resources and investment will spur the long-term growth that can eventually get us out of this hole down the line. Way, way, way down the line.

As John Dickerson points out, Obama also did some funky accounting on where budget savings would come from. He overestimated future costs from soon to be non-existent sources such as the Bush tax cuts (which were going to run out anyways next year) and the Iraq War (which can’t cost what Obama is projecting because he has committed to us drawing down). In short, he is anticipating costs that will not come, removing them, and then claiming them as savings. I do believe that Obama is serious about diminishing government waste, but he is clearly saving budget cuts that generate true savings for a later date.

As Dickerson also points out, this manuevering pales in comparison to the fantasy land budgets that Bush put together, but it’ still antithetical to this Administration’s promise of transparency and honesty. Until now, Obama has done well to play his cards close to the vest lest he give his opponents ammunition against him. While he has basically told the “tax-and-spend” critics to bring it on, he’s still vulnerable to criticism of waste and irresponsibility in his spending. It takes an honest man to live outside the law, and to some extent, this deficit spending and major restructuring of our economy that Obama is spearheading is “outside the law” as far as modern American capitalism is concerned. It will benefit the President to operate under that auspice as dishonesty and “fudging” of budgets and spending will only give his opponents more fodder to support their criticisms, which are as ambitious as are his goals and will obstruct him in reaching them.

Man, Do I Know How to Pick ‘Em

Remember my “Some Girl I Dated Falls Through A Hole” post?

Now good ol’ Sarah has found her way onto TMZ and is suing the company that ran the fashion show (among others).

In the words of Johnny Pope and Lester Carp, “This town (head shake, head shake head shake).”

Joe the Plumber Speaks at CPAC

And I’m supposed to take these people seriously? This is just pitiful.

Ronald Reagan, Barry Goldwater, and William Buckley are projectile vomitting in their graves.

Clips Beat Celts. Shocker?

At the urging of my friend and Faux Hawk With A V-Neck Committee Chairman Alex Rosenblatt (pictured below), I’m going to take another moment to bask in the radiant glow of the Clippers” “upset” of the Celtics last night. When the buzzer sounded, the Clippers celebrated like they had just won the Showcase Showdown and the Celtics sulked off the court in disbelief.

But honestly, I don’t know what everyone is so surprised about. The Celtics without Kevin Garnett are a team with a point guard who’s perimeter game rivals Dennis Rodman’s, a 6′7″ shooting guard who hasn’t scored a point within 18 feet of the basket in about 3 seasons and can’t post-up Derek Fisher, a small forward who got his ass handed to him on the defensive end by Mardy fucking Collins, and started the juggernaut front line of Big Baby Davis and Kendrick Perkins.

And let’s not forget another thing, the Clippers did this without their best swing-man in Al Thornton, and with their #2 option, Eric Gordon, leaving the game in the 2nd quarter. The Celtics eek out victories by playing harder and making less psychotically retarded mistakes than their opposition….but that don’t mean they’re good.

Yet Another Industry Brought To Its Knees

This time it’s the “Let’s Profit From Negative Body Image Inspired Desperation By Peddling People A Needlessly Restrictive Yet Easily Marketable Diet That Defies Common Sense” industry. The Atkins Diet, the South Beach Diet, the Grapefruit Diet, the Spin On Your Head While Rubbing Jello Under Your Armpits Diet, turns out they’ve all been a sham.

A 2 year study by the New England Journal of Medicine (i.e., Harvard), has proven, once and for all, that it doesn’t matter what you eat, weight loss is governed by calorie consumption. In other words, there’s a Magic Formula to losing weight: burn more calories than you consume, and you WILL lose weight. Not maybe, not probably, you WILL lose weight.

The South Beach Diet has sold 22 million copies and has generated over $400 million in aggregate revenues. Hey, maybe I should take a shot at creating my own diet program. Ok, here it is.

Ya know how much you eat now? Eat less.

Ya know how much you exercise now? Exercise more.

In the gratuitous spirit of the blogosphere (or the fact that we prematurely abandoned the subscription model), I extend you this wisdom free of charge.

Gov. Kumar, extended

David Brooks goes a little further on the shallowness of Jindal’s speech, referring to the GOP’s free market fundamentalism as economic “nihilism”.

Here

Governor Kumar

Bobby Jindal (the silver-tongue, southern-twanged, evangelical young Governor of Louisiana whom Republicans believe is their Barack Obama) was the GOP’s bearer of response tonight in response to the President’s speech. Since I couldn’t really do much better than Andrew Sullivan in describing the response, I’ve posted him word-for-word below. All I’ll say is this: it’s nice to see some sense of decency, thoughtfulness, and humility out of the GOP as embodied by Jindal, but as Sullivan points out, their solutions (meaning, cut taxes) continue to be bland, simplistic, and tired. Ok, we get it, it’s preferable to put money back in the hands of the populace, but when the nation’s financial problems are on the scale that they are right now, sticking some cash back in people’s pockets alone is not going to bring us back to the black. At this point, they just sound like a bunch of wind-up dolls. Anyways, here’s Andrew:

Close your eyes and think of Kenneth from 30 Rock.

Stylistically, he got better as he went along but there was, alas, a slightly high-school debate team feel to the beginning. And there was a patronizing feel to it as well – as if he were talking to kindergartners – that made Obama’s adult approach so much more striking. And I’m not sure that the best example for private enterprise is responding to a natural calamity that even Ron Paul believes is a responsibility for the federal government. And really: does a Republican seriously want to bring up Katrina? As for the biography, it felt like Obama-lite. With far less political skill.

It was also odd for Jindal  to keep talking about the need for tax cuts – when Obama just announced a massive tax cut for 95 percent of working Americans. He gave no alternative proposal on the financial collapse; and tried to attack government spending simply because it’s government spending. In a deepening depression, grown-ups can take a slightly different view of such spending in the short term. But give him his due: he did in the end concede that the GOP currently has a credibility problem on the fiscal issues they are now defining themselves with. This matters – it matters for the future of the GOP and the possibility of minimal accountability after an age that disdained it.

The rest was boilerplate. And tired, exhausted, boilerplate. If the GOP believes tax cuts – more tax cuts – are the answer to every problem right now, they are officially out of steam and out of ideas. And remember: this guy is supposed to be the smart one.

More Room to Fall

So the stock market is down nearly 50% from its 2007 highs, multiple generations have had their life savings wiped out, and once-billion dollar companies are now worthless. This would all suggest that we’re nearing a bottom of the stock market decline and that stocks, on the whole, are cheap, right? Not so fast. As any investor knows, low-price don’t mean cheap when it comes to equities.

Despite the incineration of wealth we’ve experienced, stocks are still expensive based on relevant price-to-earnings ratios (i.e., ratios that factor in an anticipated decline in corporate earnings). As the NY Times Economix blog notes, stocks right now are at their historical average based on earnings, and are far more expensive than they’ve been during other recessions and downturns. And that might be wishful thinking if corporate earnings come back weaker than expected. Will we see Dow 7,000? Almost surely. Whether we see 6,000 or even 5,000 only time will tell.

Frau Farbissina Wins

Kate Winslet’s victory for her performance in “The Reader” was at best laughable and at worst offensive. She was atrocious in that movie. Winslet nailed a German accent about as well as Costner nailed a British one in “Robin Hood”. The entire movie she basically sounded like Frau Farbissina getting fisted by Dr. Evil. She was like some 2nd session acting school student who just got the instruction to “act tragic!”. Horrible.

She’d be more productive as the female lead in “Sprockets.”

Sean Penn: Husband of the Year

Sean Penn makes a public acknowledgment that “I know sometimes I make it hard to appreciate me.” Well yeah, when you do dickhead things like forget to thank your wife during your Academy Awards victory speech, it certainly does. I mean, even I noticed that slight. I’m sure Penn thinks that only artistic peasants like Best Animation award winners need to do hokey things like thank your wife, but it would be a gracious gesture.