Interesting

Maybe this is just a coincidence. Then again, I can’t recall three nominees for positions in an incoming administration (or two nominees and a rumor) all withdrawing on the same day before.

Sanjay Gupta, CNN’s chief medical correspondent, has told network officials will not leave his television career to become the U.S. Surgeon General, according to sources familiar with his decision.

Gupta, who had been described as the leading candidate for the public health post, withdrew his name even as President Obama hosted a health care summit at the White House today that Gupta did not attend.

The decision means that the often low-profile job will not get a mass-media jolt from appointing the well-known television celebrity. Gupta, a neurosurgeon who continues to practice medicine, has become ubiquitous on CNN, where he hosts a half-hour show called “House Call “and appears on numerous other programs.

Gupta was never officially nominated, so he is the rumor. Now, what to make of this:

Two candidates for top positions at the Treasury Department have withdrawn from consideration, according to people familiar with the matter.

Annette Nazareth, who was expected to be tapped as deputy secretary, has taken her name out of the running, these people said.

In addition, Mr. Geithner’s pick for undersecretary for international affairs, Caroline Atkinson, has also withdrawn.

One has to wonder about this. People are, apparently, disassociating themselves from the Obama administration. Maybe it is just a huge pay cut for Gupta as the first article implies. Maybe it is just the protracted vetting process as the other article implies. Maybe it is just a coincidence.

On the other hand, the best way to avoid being accused of deserting a sinking ship is to avoid getting on it in the first place.

Via Memeorandum

Popularity Contests

Peter Wehner, writing at NRO, points out an interesting tidbit of data. Obama is actually less popular at this point in his presidency than George W. Bush was at a comparable stage.

Here’s an interesting data point comparison: Barack Obama’s approval rating in the Gallup Poll today is 61 percent, with 28 percent disapproving (the Real Clear Politics aggregate of polls has his overall job approval rating at 59.8 percent). A March 5-7, 2001 Gallup poll found President Bush’s job approval at 63 percent as well, with only 22 percent disapproving. So George W. Bush, at a comparable time in his presidency, was in marginally better shape than Barack Obama is right now, at least based on the Gallup Poll survey.

Not that these types of popularity contest polls mean a lot this early on in any President’s tenure. But it is an interesting bit of information. The press is spinning - hard - about how popular Obama is. This casts their spin in another light.

I wonder what Carter’s numbers looked like at this stage.

Glad They Passed That Amendment

During the last election, the voters in Iowa passed an amendment to their constitution that struck certain language from the Constitution. The clause banning an “idiot or insane person” from voting was removed. Which is a good thing. Since it allowed the Iowa legislature to pass a change to a department name in their government.

Lawmakers in Iowa on Wednesday raised some eyebrows when they voted to rename a department that deals with seniors, allowing it to carry the acronym DOA.

DOA is a term that stands for dead-on-arrival.

“You can’t have an acronym like this when you’re referring to elderly people,” Rep. Dave Heaton, 68, said after both houses of the legislature voted to change the name of the Department of Elder Affairs to the Department on Ageing (DOA).

I once attended a department reorganizational meeting where changes to the engineering department I worked in were announced. In order to respond to plant operational concerns faster, the powers that be signed off on creating a group who would have the sole responsibility for meeting emergent problems.

They - and I am completely serious - stood at the front of the room and announced the Fast Action Response Team. They figured out that they had made a mistake about one second after revealing the overhead for that one.

(I blame the slow response on an early meeting and not enough coffee.)

And yes, they changed the name to the Rapid Response Team. But they were still routinely called by the original acronym when I left that company.

Childishness

Jay Cost over at Real Clear Politics has this one exactly right. He’s writing about the latest, all-out Democratic smear campaign against Rush Limbaugh and, by extension, against Republicans. I never listen to the man, but have called out ridiculous attacks on him in the past. This time, the smearing is being directed right from the White House itself. Cost takes exception:

What’s the political payoff here? It’s simple. By assigning Limbaugh - who “wants the President to fail” - as the leader of the Republican Party, the White House can make it look like congressional Republicans hope the President fails, and that their opposition to his budget is rooted in this sinister desire. It’s an easy way to misrepresent Republican opposition to the President. Just as his Republican opponents wanted to do nothing in the face of economic collapse, they oppose the budget because they want the President to fail.

I understand why Democrats in Congress, the media, and the DNC are doing this. Frankly, that doesn’t bother me at all. That’s the way political games are played, and GOP politicos have certainly done their fair share of this over the years to deserve all that they get. But I am deeply disappointed that the President himself is playing this game - not just because he is the President and this kind of nonsense should be beneath him. It’s also because he is the President in part because he promised he wouldn’t do this stuff! And yet, we’ve seen this kind of immature nonsense quite a bit from an administration that has only been in place for a month.

Cost refers to this piece from The Politico that tells the inside story of the coordinated smear campaign. He also points to this particularly bad performance by Obama toward Gordon Brown, Prime Minister of Britain.

The murmurs began when President Obama returned to the British Embassy the Winston Churchill bust that had been displayed in the Oval Office since Tony Blair lent it to George W. Bush.

The fears intensified when press secretary Robert Gibbs, announcing British Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s visit to the White House, demoted the Churchillian phrase “special relationship” to a mere “special partnership” across the Atlantic.

And the alarm bells really went off when Brown’s entourage landed at Andrews Air Force Base on Monday night. Obama, breaking with precedent, wouldn’t grant the prime minister the customary honor of standing beside him in front of the two nations’ flags for the TV cameras. The Camp David sleepover that Blair got on his first meeting with Bush? Sorry, chaps.

Still, Brown kept a stiff upper lip as he sat in the Oval Office yesterday as Obama, skipping the usual words of welcome for his guest, went straight to questions from the news services. Brown didn’t get to speak for six minutes, after Obama had already answered two questions.

A President who has lots and lots of energy to direct attacks at a talk show host but projects coldness toward one of our longest, strongest allies. Amateurish doesn’t begin to describe this. The title of the post comes closer.

That Sinking Feeling

There appear to be at least some members of the media falling off the Obama bandwagon. In an unsigned editorial, the Detroit News blasts the carbon tax proposed by Barack Obama as a dagger aimed at Michigan’s heart.

The carbon tax will be paid by energy companies, manufacturers and public utilities, who will pass the cost on to their consumers. Michigan will be especially targeted. It gets 60 percent of its electric power from coal plants, and the state’s economy is still reliant on heavy manufacturing such as car and truck assembly and auto parts production.

Michigan will lose as carbon tax money is shifted to states with a greater presence of high-tech and service businesses.

The proposed tax would take effect in 2012 and has the very real potential to throw the nation back into recession, if indeed the expected recovery has arrived by then. It’s impossible to raise costs for such basics as manufacturing and energy production by more than half a trillion dollars over a decade and not have the effects felt across the economy.

No, the effects cannot be avoided. They will be drastic. This is nothing more than a huge tax increase that will be devastating on the economy and on the people of this country. Worse yet, the effects of this massive tax hike will be particularly harsh on those who can afford it the least. It is regressive at its very core.

Even the Detroit News sees the one important truth - or lie, depending on how you look at it - of this massive carbon tax: The companies will not pay the cost of it. We will. Each and every one of us who buys, consumes or uses pretty much anything.

Worsening The Crisis

The Wall Street Journal charges that the Obama administration is deepening and widening the financial problems the country now faces.

As 2009 opened, three weeks before Barack Obama took office, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 9034 on January 2, its highest level since the autumn panic. Yesterday the Dow fell another 4.24% to 6763, for an overall decline of 25% in two months and to its lowest level since 1997. The dismaying message here is that President Obama’s policies have become part of the economy’s problem.

Americans have welcomed the Obama era in the same spirit of hope the President campaigned on. But after five weeks in office, it’s become clear that Mr. Obama’s policies are slowing, if not stopping, what would otherwise be the normal process of economic recovery. From punishing business to squandering scarce national public resources, Team Obama is creating more uncertainty and less confidence — and thus a longer period of recession or subpar growth.

I heard an Obama sound bite today dismissing the stock market drops as little more than noise. I don’t think they are. There is real damage being done here. Capital is trying to find a refuge from the announced redistributionist policies of the Obama administration. The economy will suffer. So will the people.

The economic recovery is bound to be damaged by the new policies of the Obama administration. When the energy prices average people pay in this country skyrocket as a result of the Obama cap and trade scheme, the economy will take another hit. When the administration finds that the “rich” don’t exist in enough numbers to fund their plans the “rich” will, inevitably, be defined downward.

I think the WSJ has this one called out right. We are in for a severe - and lasting - economic downturn.

Illusions

The Wall Street Journal takes a look at the illusions that Barack Obama is selling. Taxes, according to Obama, will only rise for the “rich”. The Journal points out the absurdity of that claim:

Consider the IRS data for 2006, the most recent year that such tax data are available and a good year for the economy and “the wealthiest 2%.” Roughly 3.8 million filers had adjusted gross incomes above $200,000 in 2006. (That’s about 7% of all returns; the data aren’t broken down at the $250,000 point.) These people paid about $522 billion in income taxes, or roughly 62% of all federal individual income receipts. The richest 1% — about 1.65 million filers making above $388,806 — paid some $408 billion, or 39.9% of all income tax revenues, while earning about 22% of all reported U.S. income.

Note that federal income taxes are already “progressive” with a 35% top marginal rate, and that Mr. Obama is (so far) proposing to raise it only to 39.6%, plus another two percentage points in hidden deduction phase-outs. He’d also raise capital gains and dividend rates, but those both yield far less revenue than the income tax. These combined increases won’t come close to raising the hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue that Mr. Obama is going to need.

But let’s not stop at a 42% top rate; as a thought experiment, let’s go all the way. A tax policy that confiscated 100% of the taxable income of everyone in America earning over $500,000 in 2006 would only have given Congress an extra $1.3 trillion in revenue. That’s less than half the 2006 federal budget of $2.7 trillion and looks tiny compared to the more than $4 trillion Congress will spend in fiscal 2010. Even taking every taxable “dime” of everyone earning more than $75,000 in 2006 would have barely yielded enough to cover that $4 trillion.

The Journal also points out that the carbon cap and trade scheme is nothing more than another - brutal - tax that American taxpayers will pay. That tax is completely regressive. It will impact the less well off much harder. All energy will cost more. You and I will pay for all of that.

Do not be confused here. The word “rich” will have to be defined downward in the coming years. Eventually, anyone with a part time job at a fast food stand will be considered a plutocrat.

O-Bingo!

I wish I’d thought of this. For tonight’s much ballyhooed Obama speech, Americans for Tax Reform has come up with handy-dandy O-Bingo cards, so you can play along at home. They have a handy key to what the words mean:

“Since the Great Depression” – The economic one, not the feeling you’ve had since he signed the “stimulus” bill.

“Save or create” jobs – Obama’s new metric whereby he can claim credit for the outcome no matter what happens (how exactly does one determine the number of “saved” jobs?)

“Crisis” - Excuse to hike taxes and grow the government per Rahm Emanuel’s theory: “Never let a crisis go to waste.”

“Stimulus” – The 1,000 page Pelosi-Reid-Obama pork bill rushed through in the dead of night with no transparency and that not a single member of Congress who voted for it actually read.

“Hope” – The optimistic expectation, against all evidence that this government will be the first in the history of time to succeed in spending its way out of economic problems.

“Change” – Take-home pay of future generations due to massive spending increases and government expansion.

There are, of course, more definitions at the link, along with multiple versions of the cards so you can play with family or friends. Personally, I suspect that the speech will consist (other than the buzz words and phrases that will surely get shouts of “O-Bingo!”, if you’re playing at home) of several things:

Bragging, job-destroying tax increases, Federal spending sprees, self back-patting, onerous regulations, tax increases, more government spending, self-congratulations, expensive regulations that cripple job creation, tax increases, extra-special spending, self-praise, tax increases and a few extra tax increases and draconian regulations leading to further job loss, Congressional waste and tax increases for good measure. Ending on some praise for his leadership and a final tax increase.

O-Bingo!

Bailouts As Reality Shows

The Wall Street Journal is not impressed with the Obama administration’s efforts to stabilize the economy thus far. In fact, they liken it to a bad “reality” show:

The current fear stems in particular from the uncertainty of the government’s intentions toward some of the largest banks that are thought to be too big to fail. The Treasury has promised what it calls “stress tests,” which are reasonable in theory and should have been going on for many months at regulated institutions. But the Obama Treasury has announced them as if they are a new cable TV reality show — Survivor: Manhattan.

Which institutions will be sent off the island this week? Will any of them end up like AIG, wasting away in federal hands? How many of the survivors will be forced to take “mandatory” preferred shares that could convert to common and dilute shareholders, as yesterday’s statement put it? And if they do, what new tortures will Barney Frank and Chris Dodd force them to endure? This is no way to restore financial confidence, much less begin an economic recovery.

The bank insolvency problem needs a disciplined approach, not a bailout of the day announcement. Yet that is what we are getting. As a result, the stock market is tanking, down to 1997 levels as of yesterday. The talk of nationalization of the banks neglects the fact that such a move will hurt little people, not rich plutocrats. Pension funds and 401k funds that hold bank stocks will get creamed by such a move.

Like all reality shows, “Survivor: Manhattan” sucks.

Stimulus?

We are assured by Barack Obama that “Because of what” they did, our economy will rebound.

We are fed the news that Barack Obama will present a budget plan that will “slash” the Federal deficit despite a massive “stimulus” plan that increased government spending by a significant amount.

We are promised that the great, wise leaders in Washington will now unilaterally declare carbon dioxide a dangerous pollutant without benefit of Congressional action on that.

The last two items appear to effectively kill the first one.

To slash the deficit you must increase government revenues or slash the Federal spending. Given the nature of what Congress has just done in passing the “stimulus” we can effectively rule out cutting spending. That leaves raising revenues via tax increases. The choices are to raise taxes on individuals or on corporations.

The “stimulus” plan includes a provision for “buy American” that will likely trigger a trade war. That is most likely to damage American corporations and decrease tax revenues from that source. Leaving individuals to pay the taxes.

The regulation of carbon will, by any measure, greatly increase the cost of energy for individuals. Taxpayers are about to get hit with “sticker shock” over the cost of their energy consumption. Individuals will get hit with rising energy prices, rising taxes and a falling economy - all at once.

Stimulus?

Elaborations

Well, the Roland Burris saga continues. The ever-changing stories Senator Burris spins out daily are reading more than a bit like a soap opera plot. Or a crime novel. Take your pick. It seems the junior Senator from Illinois DID try to raise money for Rod “Highest Bidder” Blagojevich.

U.S. Sen. Roland Burris now acknowledges attempting to raise money for ousted Gov. Rod Blagojevich — an explosive twist in his ever-changing story on how he landed a coveted Senate appointment from the man accused of trying to sell the seat.

Burris made the admission to reporters on Monday, after releasing an affidavit over the weekend saying he had more contact with Blagojevich aides about the Senate seat than he had described under oath to the state House panel that recommended Blagojevich’s impeachment. The Democrat also said in the affidavit, but not before the panel, that the governor’s brother asked him for fundraising help.

There is more than a bit of the appearance of impropriety here. Burris denied many things and has now admitted doing many of the things he denied. While Roddy the salesman might be gone from office, his aroma lingers.

Seriously, Burris cannot possibly be an effective Senator. The unseemly way he got the appointment and what is increasingly looking like potential perjury make him friendless in the Senate. He simply won’t accomplish anything even if he retains his seat.

Burris is supposedly preparing a “concise document” explaining all this. As a former resident of Illinois, I can attest to the fact that many people there would like to see a very, very concise document from him.

Reading “I resign”.

Via Memeorandum.

No Hurry

For all the dire warnings about the urgency of passing the “stimulus” plan, Barack Obama isn’t inclined to take any time to actually sign the bill that Congress spewed until he takes some time off.

After pushing Congress for weeks to hurry up and pass the massive $787 billion stimulus bill, President Obama promptly took off for a three-day holiday getaway.

Obama arrived at his home in Chicago on Friday, and treated wife Michelle to a Valentine’s Day dinner downtown last night. The couple was spotted leaving upscale Table Fifty-Two, which specializes in Southern cuisine, with the first lady toting what appeared to be a doggie bag.

The president plans to spend the Presidents’ Day weekend in the Windy City, and is not expected to sign the bill until Tuesday, when he travels to Denver to discuss his economic plan.

Far be it from me to nay say a person’s wish to treat their spouse to a getaway. I just returned from doing just that. I, however, have not been proclaiming - several times daily - that there is an emergency that requires immediate action. There’s a bit of a difference there.

It’s a bit hard to believe that there is a crisis when the one proclaiming it takes a three day vacation. There is a huge disconnect between Obama’s urgent proclamations and his behavior. Those mixed signals are a problem that he appears to be oblivious to.

The Detroit executives who went, hat in hand, to Congress begging for taxpayer dollars found out the hard way that flying in to beg on private jets was not smart. One hopes that the American voters also notice the stupendously bad judgment of a doomsayer who takes a vacation before delivering “salvation”.

Let’s Not Go There

A chilling column today from Mark Steyn. He recaps the “progress” of the Obamateur administration to date - and isn’t impressed:

It requires a perverse kind of genius for the 44th president not to have waited for a single “event” to throw him off course. Instead, he threw himself off: “Is Obama tanking already?” (Congressional Quarterly) “Has Barack Obama’s presidency already failed?” (The Financial Times). Whether or not it’s “already” failed or tanked, the monthly magazines still gazing out from their newsstands with their glossy inaugural covers of a smiling Barack and Michelle waltzing on the audacity of hope seem like musty historical artifacts from a lost age. The ship didn’t need to hit an iceberg; it stalled halfway down the slipway. This is still the phase before “events” come into play, when an incoming president has nothing to get in the way of his judgment and executive competence. President Obama chose to nominate Tim “Indispensable” Geithner and Tom “Home, James!” Daschle, men whose enthusiasm for the size of the federal budget is in inverse proportion to their own urge to contribute to it. He chose to nominate as commerce secretary first the scandal-afflicted Bill Richardson and then the freakishly scandal-free Judd Gregg, and wound up losing both of them.

Do read the whole thing. Steyn is spot on, but somewhat muted today. Usually, Steyn is a wealth of snarky humor. There is not much to laugh at today:

America has a choice: It can reacquaint itself with socioeconomic reality. Or it can buckle its mandatory seat belt for the same decline most of the rest of the West embraced a couple of generations back. In 1897, troops from the greatest empire the world had ever seen marched down London’s Mall for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. Seventy years later, Britain had government health care, a government-owned car industry, massive government housing, and it was a shriveled high-unemployment socialist basket-case living off the dwindling cultural capital of its glorious past. In 1945, America emerged from the Second World War as the preeminent power on Earth. Seventy years later….

Think hard about that parallel. Even we Americans are diminished in the power we can project. Pirates are thriving again because the two great powers that used to guarantee the freedom of the seas are down to one - and shrinking. The stimulus bill is a down payment on our decline.

Let’s not go there.

Who Is The Stimulus Directed At?

Daniel Henninger at The Wall Street Journal examines the beneficiaries of the largess in the “stimulus” bill. His opinion is that the Republicans are very wise to stay as far away from this toxic waste of money as they can. Because the only people getting stimulated here is the Federal government.

Check your PC’s virus program, then pull down the nearly 700 pages of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. Dive into its dank waters and what is most striking is how much “stimulus” money is being spent on the government’s own infrastructure. This bill isn’t economic stimulus. It’s self-stimulus.

(All sums here include the disorienting zeros, as in the bill.)

Title VI, Financial Services and General Government, says that “not less than $6,000,000,000 shall be used for construction, repair, and alteration of Federal buildings.” There’s enough money there to name a building after every Member of Congress.

The Bureau of Land Management gets $325,000,000 to spend fixing federal land, including “trail repair” and “remediation of abandoned mines or well sites,” no doubt left over from the 19th-century land rush.

There is, of course, quite a lot more, please read the whole thing. When all the Federal spending just to boost Federal agencies is laid out this way, one gets the sense of just what a colossal waste of taxpayer money this is. Worst of all, the suspicion that this increased spending on government will be the new floor for budgets is looming as well. In other words, this one-time “stimulus” may never go away.

If the Republicans can distance themselves far enough from this mess, they may well benefit politically. But they will need to start communicating better ideas - even if they can’t get the Democrats to play along with them for now.

This Will Cheer You Up

Well, actually, it won’t. If the writer of this piece is correct, the Obama administration is in for a rough ride. Unfortunately, that rough ride will take all of America and a goodly chunk of the world along.

All along two contrasting views have been held on what ails the financial system. The first is that this is essentially a panic. The second is that this is a problem of insolvency.

Under the first view, the prices of a defined set of “toxic assets” have been driven below their long-run value and in some cases have become impossible to sell. The solution, many suggest, is for governments to make a market, buy assets or insure banks against losses. This was the rationale for the original Tarp and the “super-SIV (special investment vehicle)” proposed by Henry (Hank) Paulson, the previous Treasury secretary, in 2007.

Under the second view, a sizeable proportion of financial institutions are insolvent: their assets are, under plausible assumptions, worth less than their liabilities. The International Monetary Fund argues that potential losses on US-originated credit assets alone are now $2,200bn (€1,700bn, £1,500bn), up from $1,400bn just last October. This is almost identical to the latest estimates from Goldman Sachs. In recent comments to the Financial Times, Nouriel Roubini of RGE Monitor and the Stern School of New York University estimates peak losses on US-generated assets at $3,600bn. Fortunately for the US, half of these losses will fall abroad. But, the rest of the world will strike back: as the world economy implodes, huge losses abroad – on sovereign, housing and corporate debt – will surely fall on US institutions, with dire effects.

Personally, I have little doubt that the second view is correct and, as the world economy deteriorates, will become ever more so. But this is not the heart of the matter. That is whether, in the presence of such uncertainty, it can be right to base policy on hoping for the best. The answer is clear: rational policymakers must assume the worst. If this proved pessimistic, they would end up with an over-capitalised financial system. If the optimistic choice turned out to be wrong, they would have zombie banks and a discredited government. This choice is surely a “no brainer”.

The stock markets tanked on the announcement of the latest plan to bail banks out. That does not bode well for hoping for change. If the author is correct, the hope for the best strategy is not going to work out at all. We’ll be left with a bunch of propped up zombie banks. And the global economy will tank. If the banks are, in fact, insolvent, the plan announced today will only briefly stave off a real collapse.

Houston, we have a problem.