In general I find the writing at the libertarian Cato Institute rather well-reasoned and frequently on target.  That is why I am highly agitated by a piece written by Dan Mitchell of the institute today, which seems to throw facts to the wind in order to very belatedly jump on the “blame Bush” bandwagon.

In theory and out of context there is a grain of truth in Mr. Mitchell’s assertion that the first fiscal year of a presidency is not the responsibility of the incoming President.  It is true that the FY 2009 budget was passed in 2008, when Bush was President.

But Mr. Mitchell seems to be quite willfully ignoring the extenuating circumstances of this fiscal year.  The $787 billion “stimulus” package, which is very heavily responsible for the ballooning of this year’s deficit, was passed under Obama, not Bush.  Yet by Mitchell’s mechanical scoring, that piece of… stimulus becomes retroactively Bush’s responsibility.

But beyond that there’s a more basic flaw in Mr. Mitchell’s reasoning, and admittedly one many here are partially guilty of at times.  Budgets are written by Congress.  Yes, the executive branch has influence in the process, but when it comes to actually writing down the numbers Congress has the final say.  That is the way it is, and, in line with the Constitution, the way it has always been in this country.

I don’t know what sort of insect has penetrated Mr. Mitchell’s posterior to provoke such a loose and antagonistic piece out of him.  But regardless, it is a great disappointment to see this sort of thing coming from the standard bearer for a political school which I have great respect for much of the time.

Apologies in advance for this, but as a choral singer by way of hobby, the recent post by Congressman Frank Lucas inspired me to jot down new lyrics to the tune of one of my group’s favorite songs, “Seasons of Love” from the Broadway play and movie Rent.  So without further ado…

One trillion four hundred and nine billion dollars
One trillion four hundred billion dollars, oh dear
One trillion four hundred and nine billion dollars
How much can you spend, spend in a year?

On bailouts, on healthcare, on stim’lus, on cups of coffee?
On jet flights, on dressing the President’s wife?
With one trillion four hundred and nine billion dollars
Have you seen such loose purse strings in your life?

But Obama’s still… looooooooooooved.
Press gives him their… loooooooooooove.
Don’t like it then, tooooooooooooough.
We’ve had enough…

In truth that gets spurned or the time Matthews cried
In allies we’ve burned, or integrity died
It’s time now, to stand up, though the struggle never ends
Let’s… make 2010 a year where we start to make amends.

(Refrain)

Following CNBC and TheStreet.com’s Jim Cramer can be a frustrating experience at times.  Just when you think he’s onto something regarding what’s wrong with the administration, like his proclivity for starting trade wars, the stock market decides to ignore the news, causing Cramer to decide there’s no story there at all.

So with that in mind, we’ll have to wait and see how long this latest trend of disgust Cramer has with the party he supports lasts.

As we know from today’s headlines, unemployment hit 9.8% last month, putting the quite a dent in whole narrative of economic recovery forged by the sheer willpower of The Won.  And Cramer is out with a juicy rant, beginning thus:

So it is all about the Chicago Olympics? So cap-and-trade is the next issue? So we need to hold bankers accountable? So we need to worry about carbon dioxide and global warming? So we have to focus on the doughnut hole for seniors and the health care tax?

What’s right with any of this?

Careful, Jim, you’re going to get called back into Principal Stewart’s office at this rate.

Cramer spends most of the rest of the article on stock-specific advice, which I will refrain from relaying out of respect for my fellow paid subscribers to RealMoney.com.  Instead let’s head for the Money Quote:

From the beginning of this Democratic regime, I have emphasized that it has had the wrong emphasis to the agenda. The stimulus plan was rightly criticized, as it was all Pelosi. The obsession with fixing health care and the environment and labor via tariffs was never right.

Now the longs are going to pay.

The first several times I read that second sentence I had trouble parsing it because my mind kept wanting to treat “Pelosi” as an adjective, as in, “The Buccaneers’ effort against the Giants was the Pelosiest display I’ve seen in years.”  But in fact he’s simply blaming Pelosi for that debacle, even as Obama himself has repeatedly claimed credit for it during those moments when it appeared to be working.

I think this might be reflective of Cramer’s new tactic for venting against his party.  I think he’s decided he can rant against “Democrats” in general, and certain individuals like Nancy Pelosi, but just so long as he never directly mentions Obama (as he did not at any point in this article), he can hope to fly under the radar of the Truth Squads.

As always, keep in mind that this is Jim Cramer, who CNBC’s Mark Haines once accurately dubbed “The Reverend Jim-Bob of the Church of What’s Working Right Now”, and as such, his comments potentially have a shorter shelf-life than even those of Obama himself.  If the dip-buyers plunge in fearlessly and actually make the markets close positive today (and as I write this at 10:20am Eastern that actually seems a live possibility), Cramer is likely as not to decide that 9.8% isn’t such a bad number after all and move on.

So, cherish those quotes above.  They may not last long.

moar funny pictures

It’s been a while since Jim Cramer of CNBC fame has turned out to complain about the actions of Barack Obama, the man whose candidacy and election he whole-heartedly endorsed.  In fairness to Cramer, though, epic market rallies (over 50% in six months) will tend to mollify a person for whom the markets are, for practical purposes, his life.

Nevertheless, the honeymoon couldn’t last forever, and Cramer is once again calling out the President, albeit not on any of the issues most RedState readers are focusing on, but one which may nevertheless prove vital in the months to come.

It stems primarily from a decision made over the weekend, while Obama was dodging tea-partyers, to impose stiff increases in the tariffs on Chinese-made tires.  As with most things done over the weekend by both government and business alike, it’s something that was hoped would go unnoticed.  But there are far too many workaholics on Wall Street for that trick to work, and sure enough, the issue is getting plenty of play on CNBC, if not anywhere else as yet.

As the Reuters article states, the tariff is “not… meant to spark a trade war”, but pretty much everyone in the financial media, Cramer included, is thinking that to be the likely result.

Cramer does not go so far as some commentators, who invoked the specter of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff, the infamous legislation widely blamed for prolonging the Great Depression, in describing the administration’s action.  Nor does there seem to be a whole lot of attention that this isn’t even the first time Obama has strained trade relations in the name of supporting the unions, or whatever his goal actually is.

But what’s really ticking off Cramer is that this tariff decision is being followed up by one of Obama’s patented speeches to Wall Street today.  You remember how those go, right?  If not, here’s Cramer to remind you, in today’s Money Quote:

“Wall Street…now view[s] Obama as a meddler in places he doesn’t know all that much about. Will he give us the “now is not the time for profits” speech? Will he call a recovering Wall Street an unregulated cesspool still one year after Lehman?

Will we be scolded? Probably in some form or another.

…[I]t’s 5 a.m. EDT[, and already] I can’t wait for this day to be over.”

So far the stock market seems to be shrugging all this off.  But the day is yet young.

One of the sticking points for me on this whole healthcare debate has always how the left always comes back, “well where’s your side’s plan?”  Somehow responses of “stuck in committee” or “never to see the light of day while Pelosi is in charge” never seemed entirely satisfactory.

But this morning I got tweeted a link to a smoking gun, what should be the final proof that when the left says they want to see our side’s plan, they don’t mean it.

Check out the Whole Foods Market boycott.  It’s not over trade in countries with human rights violations, it’s not over any union or discrimination issues, but rather, it’s because its CEO and founder dared to write about an alternative idea to Obamacare in a Wall Street Journal editorial.

Thank you so very much, “Open” Left, for proving once and for all your complete and utter disingenuousness in your demands to hear alternative ideas.

I’m very appreciative of the positive feedback I’m getting on this series, but I have to caution those optimistic that we are seeing a “conversion” in progress that we’re a very long way away from that.  Case in point, Jim Cramer’s morning article titled, “Don’t Hit the Brakes on ‘Cash for Clunkers’”, written in response to a Wall Street Journal editorial shredding the program.

I’m not entirely sure where Cramer falls in terms of economic theory, since his emphasis is so heavily on the practical aspects of events, i.e. what stocks should you buy and sell because of this.  But as I noted before, Cramer is definitely not shy about increasing federal spending when he feels it is justified.

Cramer’s response to the WSJ editorial makes four basic points.  First, that the $4 to $5 billion or whatever it ends up comes to is “no big deal”.  Of course, as we read this morning, a bunch of these “no big deals” can add up to a lot.

Second, and I’m not sure Cramer realizes what he’s admitting here, that “GM and Chrysler are gigantic welfare programs” and continues in a tenor suggesting that employees there are effectively in “make-work”.  I’m not sure why we should be encouraged about the revival of something reminiscent of the New Deal (Cramer is a good enough student of history to know that that didn’t really end the Depression), other than maybe if the unemployment numbers are made to look low, people will feel better about the economy.  Or something.

Cramer’s third point is that Ford is benefiting from this too.  Which I suppose it is, for now anyway.  But I can’t help wonder what’s going to happen when the goodwill from that $3500 or $4500 runs out and people start to have to start making car payments that they likely didn’t have to before.

Cramer’s last point — and this is going to be a gut shot for those rooting for a conversion — is that it’s good for fighting global warming.  Yeah.  Admittedly, the environmental downside here is hard to see, at least if you choose to ignore what it’s going to take to dispose of all the clunkers being turned in.

To Cramer’s credit, he does go on to come up with a counterargument to his own view, that this is reminiscent of the New Deal’s Agricultural Adjustment Act, one of its more infamous provisions wherein livestock was slaughtered in mass in order to raise prices.

But to summarize his view with the Money Quote:

It worked for the Chinese with their vouchers to spend, it’s working here. What’s the issue? Come on Senate, go make it bigger!

When being more like China is his goal, you know we have a long way to go.

Show of hands, everyone who thinks Sarah Palin was the worst thing to happen to the Republican Party in a long time.  Okay, now put them down, because I have someone worse, far worse, in almost every way.

His name is Patrick M. Byrne, and if the Daily Kos could have its way, he, not Palin, would be the new face of conservative political activism in America.

Byrne is the founder and CEO of Internet retailer Overstock.com.  He is, to put it bluntly, not a very good businessman.  In a way he’s almost the worst kind, one unable to turn a profit with any regularity, in spite of years of confident predictions to the contrary, yet never failing spectacularly enough that his enterprise fails outright and causes him to go find another line of work.  Blogger Jeff Matthews has written an excellent series of posts (the best and most detailed ones are from 2005) running down many of the various failings and blunders of Byrne’s tenure as CEO, and, until recently, Chairman as well.  Another worthy read is that of Sam Antar, of Crazy Eddie’s infamy, who knows a thing or two about accounting fraud, having committed it himself, and makes a strong case that much the same is going on at “The O”.

Byrne has, how shall I put this, some very severe personality flaws.  Thin-skinned, vindictive, ego-driven — he kind of reminds me of the current occupant of the Oval Office in a way, except that he lacks the latter’s ability to maintain his composure in public.  Still, he’s close enough that I think he’d fit right into the party of Nancy Pelosi and Barney Frank — but alas, he is a full-blooded conservative from that reddest of the red states, Utah.

The big problem with Byrne (and I don’t count this against his being a conservative because this is something that transcends political viewpoints) is that he is a big supporter of the First Amendment, except when it’s his own ox being gored by that pesky freedom of speech thing.  Unable to satisfactorily answer the criticisms leveled against his business practices, he sadly falls back on the time-dishonored practice of attacking the messenger, defaming or otherwise attempting to ruin those who speak out against him publicly, and for those who choose to air their criticisms anonymously, he has been known to go to some rather drastic lengths to uncover their identities and then go after them.

Aiding him in this cause, sadly, is one Judd Bagley, who claims on his LinkedIn profile to have been a “spokesperson and speechwriter” for no less than then-Governor Jeb Bush.  Some who have looked into the claim have stated it to be something of an exaggeration, but for those with a leftish political axe to grind it’s a linkage they’re more than happy to take at face value.  Bagley is Byrne’s primary hitman in terms of digging up dirt on his critics.  After many months of work (which some would call cyberstalking) on Byrne’s behalf, while simultaneously denying any direct relationship with Byrne (a claim which was eventually proven false), Bagley was hired on officially at Overstock as its “Director of Social Media”, whatever that means.  (In a twist of deliberate irony, Bagley runs a web site called antisocialmedia.net, which I caution you to visit at your own risk.)

One other player here is Mark Mitchell, former editor at the Columbia Journalism Review, and ongoing author of the website Deep Capture (another visit-at-your-own-risk site in my view), which describes in nigh-impenetrable detail (not to mention surprisingly poorly written, as pointed out by one person who attempted to review the original namesake article) Byrne’s account of the vast conspiracy of the media and shadowy figures from the world of finance, against the US economy, the markets, and, above all, Patrick Byrne and Overstock.com.

Yes, that’s right, on top of everything else, Patrick Byrne is a conspiracy nut.  In a rather infamous conference call back in 2004, Byrne announced that the company was under siege by an individual he referred to as a “Sith Lord”(!!) and who was to ultimately end up with control of Overstock.com after the whole thing had played out.  (Yes, this actually happened an official, Overstock.com corporate conference call, and no, I cannot explain why Byrne was not immediately fired afterward.) Subsequent evidence strongly suggests the intended identity of the “Sith Lord” was to be Michael Milkin, the junk bond king of the 1980’s, but before that was ever confirmed the story had shifted and the Sith Lord became “just a metaphor”.

So if Byrne is a nutcase, why not continue to do as this RedState has uniformly done and simply pretend he doesn’t exist, much as I’m sure many on the left prefer to do with some of their more out-there figures?  Well, unfortunately, I count four problems with that policy.  The first three are: Byrne is rich, Byrne is outspoken, and Byrne is politically active.  He was, for example, a major backer of the referendum for private-school vouchers in Utah in 2007, which went down to ignominious defeat.

But number four is the killer (and the impetus for this diary entry): the left has begun to take notice of him.  And what is worse, apparently Byrne (no doubt via Bagley) has gone on the attack against them in his own, non-constructive, and arguably illegal way.  (Thanks to Gary Weiss for the heads-up on this, and yes, that’s the latest in another collection of blog articles about Byrne, if you somehow haven’t had enough already.)

Ignoring Byrne has arguably been the best course up until now, but with the developments of the past couple of weeks, he has, in my opinion, crossed the line into becoming dangerous.  I don’t know what is to be done about the man (the SEC taking those Overstock.com accounting issues seriously would be a good start, but that’s not something we can really influence), but given the GOP’s penchant for turning on its own, and doing so with relish, I’m sure there’s someone out there with an idea or two.

As Don Knotts used to famously say, we gotta nip this in the bud.

(Edited to correct Mark Mitchell’s name — 7/30/09)

I haven’t had a lot to report on the Jim Cramer front for a little while as the Mad Money host’s mood seems to swing very much in line with the stock market.  When it’s down, he’s angry, when it’s up, he’s ebullient.  I suppose that’s only natural for a professional investor like himself, but he seems to live that song by Billy Joel and goes to extremes.

Even though I’m labeling this a “non” remorse episode for Cramer, he’s not totally out in left field in his column this afternoon, as you might glean from its title, “The Market Repudiates Obama”.  Basically, he’s choosing to see the recent rally in the stock market as a sign that Obama is losing.  Obamacare is dead, Cap and Trade is seriously on the defensive, with card check the next domino to fall — that’s Cramer’s takeaway from the 700 point gain we’ve seen from the Dow in the past week and a half.

So ironically, Cramer is sounding more optimistic than Limbaugh and Hannity about where the political battle stands.  And make no mistake, it’s true optimism on Cramer’s part; even if he doesn’t have an objection on principle to what Obama wants to do, he knows that there are economic consequences that we absolutely cannot afford in a weak economy.

Of course, Cramer doesn’t seem to get the Rahm Emanuel thesis of “never let a crisis go to waste”, in order words, it is precisely when the chips are down that changes of the radical nature that Obama is pushing become politically possible. Or to put it another way, if times were such that Cramer would judge that we could “afford” Obamacare, card check and all the rest, there simply wouldn’t be enough agitation for massive changes to get them passed.

But it’s the money quote that is the most off-putting:

In fact, I am sure some feel this rally will ultimately be deemed the “Obama’s a moderate” rally, made moderate by members of Congress who aren’t as safe in their districts as Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) is in hers.

In other words, Cramer thinks Obama will be forced to bow to political reality and actually govern as the moderate he portrayed himself as when he was Candidate Obama.

To which I say: Objection, Your Honor.  Presuming facts not in evidence.

Obama simply doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who bows to anything (apart from maybe a Saudi king), and that goes for so-called “political reality” too.  His words might change, but will he?  Not counting on it!

It’s possible that for once Cramer is ahead of the curve and has successfully predicted the outcome of the current political battles more boldly than even Rush.  But frankly, I’ll put more stock (pardon the expression) in the opinions of those who didn’t push for Obama’s election in the first place.

A few things that I did not know about Pastor F, came to light as I took my turn to serve as scripture reader this morning.  A note on the wall indicated that he should be added to the prayer list because his “cancer has metastasized” (spread).

I did not know before today that he had cancer at all.  In hindsight it explains a lot about the church’s embrace of him as a person in spite of his radical politics from the pulpit.

Not long ago we did a choir anthem titled “Hymn of the Spirit”, which had one line in it that struck me as out of place: “Teach our tongues to be silent when they should.”  Since when is the Holy Spirit about keeping silent, I wondered.  I guess I have my answer now.

I’m normally not a fan of unilateral disarmament, but I now know I must lay politics aside, even as I know he may not, and put all my prayers to him.