Shocker.

Timothy Geithner paid most of the past-due taxes days before Obama announced his nomination in November, an Obama transition official said. The unpaid taxes were discovered by ObamaÂ’s transition team while investigating GeithnerÂ’s background, the official said.

Head of Treasury = Head of the IRS, too.

Wesley Snipes just emailed me to say he too "forgot" to pay his taxes, and would have been reminded to pay them, if only Obama had named him IRS Collector in Chief.

More: Not paying his own self-employment taxes or the withholding taxes for an employee (a maid) either.

On one hand we're assured he's brilliant and possesses a steel-trap mind for finance.

On the other hand, he "forgot" that he had to pay taxes in America.

I am having some difficulty comprehending how both of these statements can be true simultaneously.

The Steve Martin Nominee: One of his old bits was about how to make a million dollars and not pay taxes on it.

Step One. Make a million dollars.

Step Two. When the IRS comes and demands to know why you didn't pay taxes, simply say "I forgot I had to pay taxes on that million dollars."

Simple.

And yet... so very effective.

Thanks to CJ.

Posted by: Ace at 12:51 PM | Comments (77)
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Well! I'm glad his first ten or fifteen priorities have been squarely sorted out, so now he can start expanding his mission to address secondary concerns well outside his actual responsibilities and jurisdiction.

The U.S. Treasury and other finance ministries around the world should play a major role in fixing climate change, outgoing Bush administration Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson said Monday at an event sponsored by the environmental group Resources For the Future. The discussion was titled, "How Markets Can Help Address Climate Change and Other Major Environmental Problems."



Paulson, who once served as chairman of the Nature Conservancy and co-chair of the environmental group Asia-Pacific Council, has long been involved in fighting global warming.



“I will be actually surprised and disappointed if the Office of Treasury isn’t a leader -- probably the leader -- in the government in terms of having more resources and knowledge than any other place,” said Paulson, referring to research on alternative energy and climate change.



“We need to play a major role going forward, and I think that other finance ministries around the world will need to play a major role,” he said. “Again, I see it as essential that finance ministries or departments of treasuries have people in place who understand not just the economics but also conservation and the environment.”

In related news, incoming CIA Head Leon Panetta wants the CIA to play a "vital role" in the promotion of Spanish Classical Guitar, because he really, really likes Spanish Classical Guitar.

As has been pointed out by those of quicker wit than I, this financial disaster is the best medicine for the "feverish" planet earth. If all that industry and production and wealth was causing us to poison the sick earth, coughing on its death bed, with carbon dioxide (The Invisible Killer), then a long, deep global depression is just what the doctor ordered. Oil prices have plummeted because factories are slowing down, if not closing down, and there are fewer goods to shuffle around by truck, train, or ship.

So Hank Paulson seems to have achieved his goal of "fighting global warming" already. And his feckless dickering will help us fight even more global warming in the years to come.

Mission accomplished, Hank. Why not just give yourself a gold watch now and drink a nice tall cool glass of Shut the Fuck Up and Get Out of My Fucking Face juice.

The Warmistas will not admit -- because the public would revolt -- that a serious diminishment of the world's wealth is a feature, not a bug, of their quixotic drive to return the world to the halcyon days of a pre-industrial economy.

Posted by: Ace at 12:40 PM | Comments (67)
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Women's studies majors. Is there anything they can't do?

Natalie Dylan, 22, claims her offer of a one-night stand has persuaded 10,000 men to bid for sex with her.

Last September, when her auction came to light, she had received bids up to £162,000 ($243,000) but since then interest in her has rocketed.

The student who has a degree in Women's Studies insisted she was not demeaning herself.

Miss Dylan, from San Diego, California, USA, said she was persuaded to offer herself to the highest bidder after her sister Avia, 23, paid for her own degree after working as a prostitute for three weeks.

She said she had had a lot of attention from a wide range of men, including "weirdos", "those who get really graphically sexual about what they want to do to me" and "lots of polite requests from rich businessmen".

Yes, it's the guys trying to find out what they get out for a million bucks who are the "weirdos."

There's a pic at the link but she's not cute and it's only her face. So, as tipster DK notes, we might have some OKCupid shenanigans going on here.

Posted by: Ace at 12:06 PM | Comments (140)
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Obama is still a week away from actually becoming President and he's already threatening his fellow Democrats with vetoes.

Lawmakers who emerged from the session said the president-elect pledged to correct what they believe were shortcomings in the way the Bush administration handled the first $350 billion. They added he would veto any attempt to block his own administration's use of the funds.

Oh, well he promises not do be stupid with $350 billion so it's all good, right?

Here's the thing, I think there should be oversight on how the money is spent, I'm just not sure congressional Democrats and I would be on the same page as to what constitutes good use of that money. I wonder why I have this funny feeling we're screwed either way.

Related...popcorn and snack food future rally in late trading.

Via The Page

Posted by: DrewM at 11:48 AM | Comments (20)
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Scary stuff.

When I supported the TARP bailout, this is what I was hoping to avoid. I see now -- not so much, not so much.

We are in the midst of a crisis caused by so many financial institutions borrowing too much money. Somehow, a critical mass of policy makers now believes that the correct response is for the U.S. government to borrow too much money.

The Congressional Budget Office last week forecasted that the 2009 federal budget deficit will be about $1.2 trillion, roughly triple what it was in 2008. We should hope we are that lucky. The deficit will be that low only if Uncle Sam dies and goes to heaven.

Make no mistake, the CBO forecast is the lowest of lowball estimates. It excludes President-elect Barack Obama’s proposed stimulus package and understates the likely costs of the Iraq war, among other things. A comprehensive estimate that accounts for all “known knowns,” as Donald Rumsfeld might say, would be higher by about half a trillion dollars. If the stimulus bill passes, the deficit next year will be $1.7 trillion.

...

Perhaps the most disturbing comparison is this one: When President George W. Bush was first elected, total federal government spending was about $1.7 trillion. In other words, the difference between federal outlays and federal revenue this year will be bigger than the entire government was as recently as 2000.

...

The deficit has skyrocketed because spending has grown from $1.8 trillion in 2000 to a projected $3.5 trillion in 2009, fully 95 percent higher. Of course, all that happened mostly on a Republican watch.

One reason the increase is so dramatic is the mystery of compounding. Each year, Congress passed pork-laden expenditure bills, which became part of the long-run baseline the minute they became law. Each time that the federal government wasted a billion dollars, it created budget space to waste $1 billion again and again, ad infinitum.

ThatÂ’s perhaps the scariest fact about next yearÂ’s budget. The skyrocketing spending of 2009 will be the CBO baseline for every year after that. It will be easy to provide health care to everyone; the budget space will be blocked out. Indeed, Congress can spend with impunity in years to come, covered by the protective shroud of the CBO baseline that this year delivers.

We can ride big government spending and trillion-dollar deficits all the way to 2017, when the Social Security trust fund itself starts running deficits.

This year may establish a government-spending black hole with gravity strong enough to suck the U.S. economy over the event horizon. Such a spending path has two possible endgames. Neither is pretty.

I defend Bush, then I read this and am reminded that, except for a few things, he was a weak president and took the path of least resistance -- most terribly of all on spending -- rather than act as a tough and vigilant steward of the nation's prosperity.

And now, as Michelle Malkin has said, Bush has "pre-socialized" the economy for Obama.

Only Nixon can go to China, and only a red-state conservative Republican can bring China to the US.

All that Crap You Just Read? Forget It. The stimulus won't be $775 billion.

Some liberals are now agitating for a two trillion dollar stimulus, above and beyond bailouts and costs of war and normal (ever-bloating) costs of government.

Two. Fucking. Trillion. Additional dollars we don't have spent on top of everything else.

Ummm...

Ron Paul!!! (?)

This is a Spinal Tap "But this goes to 11" moment. The actual amount of wealth the nation possesses is not some infinitely flexible quantum. Printed money represents a fraction of the wealth of the nation (which the government can seize, basically, to put tangible value behind printed paper money).

You can print up all the new money you like, but this does not actually create more wealth. It merely makes each dollar represent a smaller fraction of that pile of wealth.

So, like the amp which goes to 11, you can make up any denomination you like but you're not actually increasing output.

And once confidence in the currency is damaged enough... well. Ask interwar Germany, ask Zimbabwe. Ask a dozen Latin American countries which turned on the printing presses to "satisfy" their debts.

Predatory Lending: Of course we could just keep borrowing all this money, in the form of selling government debt. But this presupposes there are willing lenders.

China is getting nervous about our ability to repay and is less inclined to buy up more of those T-bills. They already own a lot of them. If they buy more and the US defaults, they're screwed.

And as the US demonstrates more of this confidence-undermining behavior -- talking about two trillion dollars in new spending -- any potential lenders get more and more scared about our ability to pay the debt off.

And then of course, to the extent they're willing to lend at all, they begin demanding ever-higher rates of return to justify the increased risk. The US is getting to the point where T-bills rapidly decline in safety and once we go down that spiral it is not long before they end up in junk status.

And that means even higher rates of return. Saddling future taxpayers with more and more debt. And thus actually decreasing the odds that we will ever actually pay it back, thus requiring higher rates of return, lowering still further the odds of payback, thus increasing the risk premium needed to make the bills attractive, etc., etc., etc.

At some point the rates of return a lender demands for his debt pretty much guarantee the borrower can never, ever repay.

Which is not unlike the NINJA loans banks made to credit-unworthy borrowers, which partly got us into the mess in the first place. To make these kinds of risky loans profitable, the interest rates have to go up, etc., saddling the borrower with a debt-load he probably can't repay at all.

That's when the left comes in and calls the loans they demanded "predatory lending," because the lender offers the borrower such awful terms that the borrower is pretty much sure to default.

And if China does lend the US more money, it will be on NINJA terms. "Predatory lending." And the US will go the way of all those CRA home-owners with massive mortgages far exceeding their actual income.

The US has long been able to get away with borrowing, and at fairly cheap rates, because it has been considered to be a good credit risk and had very little chance of defaulting. The piles of new borrowing the US is considering will make it almost inevitable we will default. That might actually be the plan of some proposing this.

I don't really mind the idea of sticking China with the tab for all our excesses and making our problems suddenly their problem.

But China can kind of see this coming. They're not stupid. They can see the default option becoming more attractive to the US, just as US politicians apparently begin seeing it as an attractive option.

And good luck ever selling t-bills again after a default.

Posted by: Ace at 11:16 AM | Comments (141)
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I shouldn't say "mosque." The Geneva Conventions define a mosque with an anti-aircraft cannon in it as a "permitted military target."

So here's a gun hidden in a permitted military target. more...

Posted by: Ace at 10:27 AM | Comments (61)
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Securing a country with so much space, so many mountains, and so many people is a difficult thing, it turns out. And bringing genuine democracy to such a backwards place might be impossible.

Please do note that all of this was equally true a year ago -- but the media then was busy telling us that Afghanistan could be secured fairly easily if only we "hadn't taken our eyes off the ball" and fought the War in Iraq. Now that Obama's President, the media are falling over themselves to repeat his expectations-lowering spin and impress us all as to how terribly difficult this mission really is.

All it took was an election to inject some nuance into the media's war coverage. Winning an unconventional war in a backwards, landlocked country where the enemy can easily seek safe haven in a country we can't quite invade is hard? Who knew?

President-elect Barack Obama intends to sign off on Pentagon plans to send up to 30,000 more U.S. troops to Afghanistan, but the incoming administration does not anticipate that the Iraq-like "surge" of forces will significantly change the direction of a conflict that has steadily deteriorated over the past seven years.

Instead, Obama's national security team expects that the new deployments, which will nearly double the current U.S. force of 32,000 (alongside an equal number of non-U.S. NATO troops), will help buy enough time for the new administration to reappraise the entire Afghanistan war effort and develop a comprehensive new strategy for what Obama has called the "central front on terror."

The additional troops aren't there to win a war, but, it seems, to provide breathing room for a "comprehensive new strategy."

Meaning what? Deal-making with the Taliban? That's not said but I think the premise is being offered to support that. If the best we can hope for is a negotiated deal with the Taliban, gee, we should take that. It's the best we can hope for, after all.

With conditions on the ground worsening by nearly every yardstick last year -- including record levels of extremist attacks and U.S. casualties, and the expansion of the conflict across Pakistan and into India -- Obama's campaign pledge to "finish the job" in Afghanistan with more troops, money and diplomacy has encountered the daunting reality of a job that has barely begun.

Diplomacy? With warlords, sure. We do that. But what new diplomacy is The One considering?

Since the November election, Obama has been flooded with dire assessments of the war. A National Intelligence Estimate warned that a reconstituted al-Qaeda leadership, dug into the mountains along the Afghan-Pakistani border, continues to plan attacks against the United States and Europe. The Bush White House delivered a major review of Afghanistan last month that echoed that judgment, acknowledged that a modern Afghan democracy -- stable and free of extremists -- may be both unattainable and unaffordable, and said that the United States may have to accept trade-offs among priorities.

But I thought all we had to do was surrender in Iraq.

...

The military is as concerned about the mission of additional troops as it is about the size of the force and is looking for Obama to resolve critical internal debates, including the relative merits of conducting conventional combat vs. targeted guerrilla war. With limited resources, should the military concentrate on eliminating a Taliban presence -- a task for which most think the United States and its allies will never have enough troops -- or on securing large population areas?

I'm stunned at how adult the conversation has suddenly grown. No more childish neener-neener sniping and baiting from the MSM. It's a tough job, it may take a long time, and it won't be pretty.

Bush has been saying that for seven fucking years.

It's only now the media suggests he was telling the truth. Just as he walks out the door.

Thanks to Thomas.

Hey... You know what else is hard? Making the right fiscal and monetary moves to repair a badly-damaged economy.

Only now is that hard, though. After 9/11, it really should have been automatic that Bush restored the country to the white-hot bubble economy that Clinton enjoyed for eighteen months or so.

Honestly. That bubble was unprecedented in American history. Every economist said, at the time, it was a historical anomaly that would not last long. And it didn't.

And yet that was the bar set for success for Bush. Bush had to not only deliver a vigorously expanding economy (which he did) and low unemployment rates (which he did) and controlled inflation and interest rates (which he did).

He did not only have to match Clinton's two-term average economic performance (which he did).

He had to specifically match the eighteen-month unsustainable bubble economy Clinton enjoyed for a very brief time at the the tail end of his expansion. Failing to do so would make him a miserable failure.

Question:

Does anyone expect the MSM to insist that Obama match that eighteen months of overheated and unsustainable expansion to be deemed a success?

Posted by: Ace at 10:22 AM | Comments (69)
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It seems not everyone is on board with unicorns and rainbows. Didn't will.i.am think to release a Farsi version of Yes We Can?

Iranian demonstrators burned photographs of Barack Obama today as they protested against AmericaÂ’s inaction over Gaza.

Dozens of people gathered in Tehran waving Palestinian flags and defacing and setting fire to images of the President-elect.

...The demonstrators, waving Palestinian flags, some chanting “Death to Obama”, had gathered outside the Swiss embassy which handles US interests because Tehran and Washington have not had diplomatic ties for nearly three decades.

Pictures showed the president-electÂ’s image laid on the road for cars to drive over it and other images showed demonstrators burning an Obama poster.

Well, I guess they won't be on the guest list for the promised meeting between Obama and Ahmadinejad.

I can't wait to see all the people who so recently praised the piece of shit Iraqi who threw as shoe at President Bush suddenly decide how uncool all of this is.

And no, it won't be any fun to see people on the right channel their inner Kosack and suddenly think this is acceptable since it's Obama.

Posted by: DrewM at 09:21 AM | Comments (116)
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It's on.

During my trip to Washington, D.C., I had a chance to catch up on some matters neglected while I was overseas. My attorney may have to file a lawsuit against Mr. Michael Moore. In May we contacted Mr. Moore, through his counsel, about Mr. MooreÂ’s unauthorized use of my work on his website. He did not respond. My attorney has written again. If Mr. Moore and his counsel continue to ignore our correspondence, we will proceed with a lawsuit.

(Whoops - Link added.)

Posted by: Slublog at 06:50 AM | Comments (60)
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A reader at The Muqata sends along the following story:

Today, 10.000 people demonstrated against Israel here in my hometown Duisburg (Germany) and to express their solidarity with Hamas. So, my girlfriend and me put two Israel flags out of the windows of our flat in the 3rd floor. During the demonstration which went through our street the police broke into our flat and removed the flag of Israel. The statement of the police was to de-escalate the situation, because many youth demonstrators were on the brink of breaking into our apartment house. Before this they threw snowballs, knifes and stones against our windows and the complete building. We both were standing on the other side of the street and were shocked by seeing a police officer standing in our bedroom and opening the window to get the flag. The picture illustrate this situation. The police acquiesced in the demands of the mob.

Naturally, there was a youtube video of the episode, and naturally, persons unknown (IYKWIMAITYD) have been playing the old complaint/suppression game with it. Luckily, Jewish Odysseus has managed to find a copy of the tape that is up as of this posting. WeÂ’ll see how long that happy state of affairs continues.

If youÂ’re looking for the original Muqata post, itÂ’s at the 1:16 a.m. mark from Monday. (Man, that cat should figure out how to permalink those entries!) Click through to both for commentary and additional developments, as well as excellent Gazablogging by Mutaqa.

ThereÂ’s a lot IÂ’d like to say about this little episode, but right now, I think itÂ’s best I hold back lest I be too inflammatory. GodwinÂ’s law and all that.

Luckily, this blog allows comments.

Correction: Spelled Muqata wrong. I apologize for the error. You can all thank Gabe for alerting me to this. The Lawyer. Typical.

Update and Clarification below the jump. more...

Posted by: Open Blog at 05:34 AM | Comments (149)
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