Sometimes you learn a lot from commenters.

I was going through the comments tonight at my Pajamas Media column about the Geithner nomination that went up earlier today, and came across this at Comment 39 from “Mike M”:

The deduction he took for the summer camp as a day care expense is EXPRESSLY PROHIBITED IN THE IRS CODE! That’s out and out tax fraud. Even Leona Helmsly (sic) is jealous in her grave ….

Summer camp!?

It turns out that there is a lot more to the Geithner story. It has been sitting right there in details that were made public last week, but were mostly ignored by the Washington press. While the amounts involved aren’t anywhere near as large as those relating to Geithner’s self-employment taxes from 2001 through 2004 on his earnings at the International Monetary Fund — taxes he didn’t pay until audited by the IRS (2003 and 2004) or until just before his nomination was announced (2001 and 2002) — they are nonetheless revealing, infuriating, and disturbing. They make the claims of “honest mistakes” that his defenders up to and including Barack Obama continue to employ look much, much weaker (paragraph image is from Pages 3 and 4 of the relevant report stored here as a PDF; a larger JPEG image is here):

Let’s start with the 10% early withdrawal penalty. One of the dumbest things anyone saving for retirement can do is to withdraw, or “cash in,” part or all of their tax-deferred retirement plan balance. When someone does that, they have to report the amount withdrawn as taxable income to Uncle Sam and most states (including Maryland, where Geither apparently lived during his years with the IMF). On top of that, the taxpayer has to pay a penalty of 10% of the amount withdrawn. It appears that Geithner reported the amount withdrawn as income, but “forgot” to pay the penalty.

Once again, something Geithner and his supporters want characterize as an “honest mistake” looks like tax evasion. It is virtually inconceivable that a financial guy like Geithner would not have learned about the penalty on tax-deferred retirement plan withdrawals in his 20-plus year career. His failure to record and pay the penalty on his return is more than mere negligence.

But this situation goes beyond tax evasion, and provides a possibly troubling window into Geithner’s personal financial situation.

Congress created the current taxable treatment of withdrawals, and added the 10% penalty, to prevent retirement savers from whimsically liquidating funds meant to be used during one’s golden years. It forces those who go this route to pay a very steep price in hopes that they will be deterred (all too many aren’t).

Since it is mentioned first in the report, I suspect that the penalty represents the largest element of the $4,334 of tax that was not paid. If the penalty was, say, $2,000, this would mean that Geithner withdrew $20,000, and paid about $7,000 in federal and state taxes (assuming federal rates of 28% or 33% plus roughly 5% for Maryland). If he had paid all of his taxes and the penalty on time, Geither would have ended up salvaging about $11,000 of the original $20,000. Since he didn’t pay the penalty until audited, he initially came away with $13,000.

Considering the impact, you don’t withdraw a retirement-plan balance as Geithner did unless you’re financially unsophisticated (supposedly not the case here; after all, the New York Times’s Andrew Ross Sorkin called him “a 47 year-old wonder boy“), or unless you’re in very difficult financial straits. What caused him to do something so financially dumb?

Perhaps the answer lies in the second item, the recapture of the Section 179 depreciation deduction in a discontinued business. What happens here is that tax law allows a business to immediately deduct expenditures on capital equipment that would ordinarily have to be depreciated (i.e., gradually deducted over time). But if the taxpayer does that, the business needs to keep and use the equipment over its estimated useful life. If that doesn’t happen, either because you sell the equipment or go out of business before the end of its estimated useful life, you have to “undo” a certain percentage of the deduction originally taken, and pay tax on that amount.

This amount of tax involved may be minor, but the larger question is whether Geithner lost money on a business venture, and how much. There’s obviously nothing wrong with that, but it would be nice to hear what happened, and how much it might have cost him.

If business losses didn’t cause him to withdraw retirement-plan money, what did?

Let’s skip the next few items and go to the final one, the dependent child care credit. As Pajamas commenter “Mike M” said, the IRS’s explanation is very clear cut (bold is mine):

Parents Can Get Credit for Sending Kids to Day Camp

Here’s a tax break for the busy summer. Many working parents must arrange for care of their children under 13 years of age during the school vacation period. A popular solution — with a tax benefit — is a day camp program.

The cost of day camp can count as an expense towards the child and dependent care credit. Expenses for overnight camps do not qualify. If your childcare provider is a sitter at your home or a daycare facility outside the home, you’ll get some tax benefit if you qualify for the credit.

This Geithner gambit caused the Washington Post’s Marie Cocco to hit the roof last week at the paper’s Post Partisan blog:

It’s the sleep-away camp that goes beyond the definition of simple mistake.

….. It’s the audacity that’s the problem.

Millions of families do without decent child-care for their children while they’re at work. Millions send their kids to untrained and unlicensed daycare providers. Some put older siblings — kids who are ten or twelve, sometimes younger — in charge of younger brothers and sisters. The child-care tax credit is a small and hardly adequate way in which a limited portion of expenses can be recouped, but only if they’re incurred when parents are working or looking for work.

Sleep-away camp sure doesn’t count. It’s a luxury for affluent kids, not a necessity the taxpayers subsidize. ….. this one reeks of something worse than sloppiness. It’s that sense of entitlement we’ve seen all too often.

If this is all news to you, it’s not your fault. As far as I can tell, with the exception of Cocco’s critique and this January 21 Bloomberg article, the Associated Press, the New York Times, and other media outlets haven’t mentioned any of this.

The non-coverage excuse that the amounts involved are relatively trivial compared to Geithner’s self-employment tax problems simply doesn’t fly. There’s a 15-year record of nonpayment of taxes, including frequently failing to pay them even when advised that they are due; deduction-mongering ranging from overly aggressive to obviously wrong; and a terribly expensive retirement plan-related financial move that is ordinarily a telltale sign of financial distress. To use favored media phraseology, we’re seeing a “disturbing pattern that leaves many questions unanswered.”

Not the least of those questions is why Barack Obama, if he really knows all of these things, wants Geithner so bad, and is willing to risk his own credibility and his perceived squeaky clean reputation among a large percentage of the populace (yeah, I know it’s undeserved, but it’s there) to get him.

It would be nice if the press and/or cowed Republicans would hold the hosannas long enough to find out.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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Previous Posts:

• Jan. 21 — AP Geithner Hearing Report: No Mention of IMF ‘Reimbursements’ for Taxes Not Paid, Related False Statements
• Jan. 19 — He Should Be Out ….. Because He ‘Can’t Explain’
• Jan. 19 –- NRO’s York: Geithner ‘Can’t Explain’
• Jan. 17 –- AP’s ‘Q&A’ on Geithner’s Taxes Has Excuses Galore, No Mention of ‘Reimbursements’ Pocketed
• Jan. 16 –- Geithner Must Go
• Jan. 15 — Tax ‘Goof’ Update: Geithner Was ‘Reimbursed’ for Taxes He Didn’t Pay; AP Story Buries, Then Deletes
• Jan. 14 — Geithner Update: AP’s Early-AM Revision Flushes Many Details, Calls His Tax Problems ‘Goofs’
• Jan. 13 — Treasury Nominee Geither’s Persistent Tax Problems Getting the Glossover Treatment; AP Coverage ‘Forgets’ at Least Chavez, Baird

The Associated Press’s 1:12 p.m. coverage (saved here, as the dynamic link changed during the drafting of this post) of the Senate Finance Committee’s hearing on Barack Obama’s nomination of Timothy Giethner as Treasury Secretary has plenty of discussion of Geithner’s tax “mistakes” (the picture, but not its heading, is from a November 21 New York Times article).

But as has been the case with every AP report I’ve seen, there is no mention of the fact that the International Monetary Fund, Geithner’s 2001-2004 employer, partially reimbursed him for his Social Security and Medicare “self-employment tax” liabilities.

Here are the first eight paragraphs of AP Economics Writer Martin Crutsinger’s report:

Geithner apologizes for not paying taxes

Treasury Secretary-designate Timothy Geithner said Wednesday he was careless in failing to pay $34,000 in Social Security and Medicare taxes earlier this decade but declared “I have paid what I owed” and apologized to Congress.

He told the Senate Finance Committee he was sorry that his past transgressions were now an issue in his confirmation at a time of deepening economic distress. He urged Congress to act quickly and forcibly to deal with the crisis. A top administration priority is to foster economic recovery and “get credit flowing again,” Geithner testified.

As to his failure to pay payroll taxes from 2001 to 2004 while he worked for the International Monetary Fund, Geithner said: “These were careless mistakes. They were avoidable mistakes.”

“But they were unintentional,” he said. “I should have been more careful.”

Geithner told the panel that, for the 2001 and 2002 tax years, he had prepared his tax returns himself with a popular tax-preparation computer program.

He said that he hired an accountant to do his 2003 and 2004 taxes who also “did not catch my error.”

He acknowledged signing an IMF statement saying he was aware that it was his responsibility to fully pay U.S. Social Security and Medicare taxes.

“I absolutely should have read it more carefully,” he said. “I signed it in the mistaken belief I was complying with my obligations.”

To refresh, here is what AP has, as far as I know, failed to report thus far in any of its Geithner coverage. Byron York wrote it up at National Review a week ago on January 14 (bolds are mine):

Geithner Accepted IMF Reimbursement for Taxes He Didn’t Pay

The IMF did not withhold state and federal income taxes or self-employment taxes — Social Security and Medicare — from its employees’ paychecks. But the IMF took great care to explain to those employees, in detail and frequently, what their tax responsibilities were. First, each employee was given the IMF Employee Tax Manual. Then, employees were given quarterly wage statements for the specific purpose of calculating taxes. Then, they were given year-end wage statements. And then, each IMF employee was required to file what was known as an Annual Tax Allowance Request. Geithner received all those documents.

The tax allowance has turned out to be a key part of the Geithner situation. This is how it worked. IMF employees were expected to pay their taxes out of their own money. But the IMF then gave them an extra allowance, known as a “gross-up,” to cover those tax payments. This was done in the Annual Tax Allowance Request, in which the employee filled out some basic information — marital status, dependent children, etc. — and the IMF then estimated the amount of taxes the employee would owe and gave the employee a corresponding allowance.

At the end of the tax allowance form were the words, “I hereby certify that all the information contained herein is true to the best of my knowledge and belief and that I will pay the taxes for which I have received tax allowance payments from the Fund.” Geithner signed the form. He accepted the allowance payment. He didn’t pay the tax. For several years in a row.

On Monday, blogger Steve Hull made an important additional point (bold is mine):

….. when our soon-to-be Messiah President says “it was an honest mistake that could happen to anybody”,  I must strongly disagree.   For 20 years, I was in a position where I had to make just those kind of filings and payments.  I too had to sign a quarterly statement, under penalty of perjury, certifying that I had indeed made such payments.  I also knew darn well that if I didn’t make said payments, it would eventually catch up with me and I would end up in jail… instead of nominated for, and likely to be confirmed as, the person with the most power over the entire US economy in history.

I believe that the reimbursement and false attestation aspects of Geithner’s situation, if known by most Americans, would cause a tidal wave of public outrage well beyond what has been seen thus far.

In the rest of Crutsinger’s report, you’ll see evidence that some Republicans, including Iowa’s Charles Grassley and Kentucky’s Jim Bunning, are raising objections to Geithner’s nomination. However, despite stating that his phones are “‘ringing off the hook’ from people in Kansas complaining about the prospects of having a Treasury secretary who was careless in tending to his own tax liabilities,” Pat Roberts said, “You will be confirmed.”

A concise rundown of the troubling aspects of Geithner’s nomination, which are by no means limited to his tax problems, is here.

I should also note that at least one of Crutsinger’s earlier dispatches from the hearing  — dispatches that I would expect many AP subscribers will run without updating during the rest of the day — did not mention the existence of Geithner’s tax problems, even though they have hung over the nominee for at least a week. Does anyone think that an AP reporter would have granted a GOP presidential nominee such deference?

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

It’s here.

The subheadline says it all:

Obama campaigned on his alleged “judgment to lead.” The Geithner nomination makes a mockery of that claim.

It will go up Friday morning at BizzyBlog (link won’t work until then) after the blackout expires. Hopefully it won’t be an after-nomination post.

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UPDATE: From an early PJM commenter “eon” (#3) -  –

I have a very serious problem with a well-connected gent who repeatedly flaunts laws that I would long ago have been in jail for violating. I have an even bigger problem with the new administration handing the keys to the treasury to someone who is noted for playing fast and loose with the country’s financial laws. …..

The fact that Geithner is even being considered for Treasury Secretary tells me all I need to know about the new administration’s attitude toward the law. Namely, that like Leona Helmsley, they believe that “laws are only for little people”. And to them, we are all little people.

….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• Anyone know if the incoming Obama team came in to find a bunch of computers with the Os missing or rooms trashed? Didn’t think so. Seems doubtful, based on this. Here’s a related 2002 story about what happened eight years ago. The article’s claim that there was significant vandalism in transitions prior to Clinton-Bush 43 is news to me. I don’t believe it, and I challenge anyone to find a contemporaneous story from 1993, or for that matter 1981, 1977, 1969, or 1961 proving that it happened.
• Nix makes a great point about Nancy Pelosi’s controversy on prosecuting Bush for (non-existent) crimes vs. not impeaching Bill Clinton in 1998 for real ones.
• Key mortgage meltdown point at IBDeditorials.com — “Yes, Bush was “eager,” as the Washington Post described it, to put more Hispanic (and other) families into their own homes, even setting a goal of higher minority homeownership soon after taking office. But Bush didn’t pressure lenders to adopt sloppy underwriting standards. Nor did he encourage Fannie and Freddie to underwrite subprime loans to meet quotas for minority lending.” Nor did he have any control whatsoever over Ben Bernanke and Timothy Geithner.
• Bill Frist — “Bush Saved 10 Million Lives.” Frist doesn’t pick up the lives not lost because Saddam Hussein was deposed and killed. Based on his track record before he was deposed, it would have exceeded the worst believable estimates of civilian war deaths in Iraq.
• Walter Williams — “One-third of the $15 trillion of mortgages in existence in 2008 are owned, or securitized by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Ginnie Mae, the Federal Housing and the Veterans Administration. Wall Street buyers of repackaged loans didn’t mind buying risky paper because they assumed that they would be guaranteed by the federal government: read bailout from the taxpayers. Today’s housing mess can be laid directly at the feet of Congress and the White House.”
• I said back in September that “Whether or not Ohio Representative John ‘Hugs‘ Husted does or does not spend enough time in the district he represents is not an unimportant matter, as anyone who has followed this blog knows, and what that percentage is would be useful to know.” It would appear, based on this January 15 Kettering-Oakwood Times report, that the percentage is very low. Based on a number of factors, Husted may not be a legal resident of the Senate District he currently represents. At this point it’s up to him to prove that he is. If he can’t, and even though I know that the residency issue will not pertain to his desired higher office, I will oppose his candidacy for Secretary of State, even if no other acceptable candidate is on the ballot. If I have to abstain from voting for that position, I will. The GOP, if it has any brains, will insist that Husted clear this matter up immediately, or abandon his candidacy.

From Hereford, England, UK:

Last updated at 1:59 AM on 19th January 2009

A man has been hailed a hero after he leapt into an icy river and saved a drowning woman by clinging to a branch for 30 minutes until firefighters hauled the freezing pair to safety.

Quick-thinking Jason Pardoe jumped into the rain-swollen river in pitch darkness after he spotted a screaming young woman being carried away by the powerful current.

Jason, 34, was walking home along the banks of the River Wye in Hereford after a night shift when he heard the woman’s frantic calls for help at 3am.

He followed the noise and spotted the woman, who was struggling to stay afloat in water temperatures estimated at just 2 degrees C.

Jason called the police on his mobile phone and leapt in fully-clothed but was immediately swept downstream by the ferocious current.

Luckily the brave printer managed to grab a passing tree branch and clung on for 30 minutes until firefighters arrived in a rescue boat.

Jason, from Hereford, said: ‘I heard a lot of loud screaming and a cry for help. I realised the current was taking her so I jumped in.

‘We were clinging to each other and were both very cold and we were literally praying for the boat to turn up.

‘It was a pretty strong current and felt like a long time, but at the end of the day we made it.’

The dramatic rescue happened in the early hours of Friday morning as Jason walked home early from a night shift because he was feeling unwell.

After being rescued by firefighters the pair were rushed to hospital suffering from mild hyperthermia but were released later that morning. …..

Go here for the rest of the story.

From my guardian angel:

May he recognize that this one IS about him, and all who follow behind him.

Here’s the text (also stored here).

Brian Maloney calls it “strangely divisive, downbeat and depressing.” Haven’t heard it yet (I’ll save that for tonight), but the words match his characterization.

Maybe it’s Joseph Lowery’s stuck-in-1963 race obsession that brought the markets down (video here):

I guess whiteys like myself generally on the right are cool by Lowery. Ya think? :–>

Heckuva post-racial start, guys.

….. But I Don’t Have Any Time For:

• Kurt Brouwer at FundMastery — “Buffett Got Better Deal Than U.S. Treasury.” Yes he did, and his deal will probably end up being better than the one taxpayers get on the second half of the TARP funds too.
• From a DC Examiner editorial 10 days ago — “Massachusetts residents now pay more for less access to health care, yet their state still has an uninsured problem!” Thanks, Mitt Romney.
• ¿Será el Nuevo York Tiempos?
• From Plan Sponsor’s web site — “Let’s be frank: The 401(k) has provided millions of Americans with their first—and only—education about the markets and concepts like tax deferral and the value of compound interest. It has provided an interim source of funds in times of financial stress, and it has provided many with their first—and only—opportunity to invest in our great capital markets. Indeed, each and every 401(k) balance literally represents a conscious decision to forgo compensation in the here-and-now for the security it can (and must) provide in the future. It is a character trait and discipline that Americans are said to lack—and yet, the 401(k)’s tremendous success puts the lie to that conclusion.”
• Someone forgot to tell the Toledo Blade’s Jack Lessenberry and the people of Michigan that the Wolverine State’s headfirst dive into embryonic stem-cell research is scientifically backward. Anything embryonics can do properly trained adult stem cells are doing better, without killing innocent human life.
• IPI’s Tax Bytes on the general thrust of Obama’s stimulus plan — “It’s like scooping a bucket of water out of one end of a swimming pool and pouring into the other end. It may make the scooper feel like he’s accomplishing something, but no one expects there will be more water in the pool—except the Keynesians.”
• The State of Ohio is broke and begging Uncle Sam for $5 billion. Yet Ted Strickland figured out how to have a $80,000-a-year job “custom-designed” for Tomi L. Dorris when she was let go by incoming Attorney General Richard Cordray. As far as the Columbus Dispatch is concerned, this isn’t cause for an investigative report. No-no-no; it’s a reason to do a sappy human-interest story. Zheesh.
• Notice at this USA Today article how the foreclosure problems are concentrated in a very few states. Yet you would think that it’s a countrywide problem. It’s obviously not.

2008 was the safest year ever to be an American miner. The combined number of fatalities from all forms of mining was the lowest ever.

2007 (latest information available) also shows the lowest “all-injury” rate for miners on record by far.

Yet Ken Ward Jr.’s early-January contribution at the Charleston (WV) Gazette to the spate of final-month Bush-bashing pretended that this data doesn’t exist. Instead he gave the impression of an opposite situation. Media outlets have been trying and failing to make this case since the Sago Mine Disaster of January 2006 (at NewsBusters; at BizzyBlog), even while the safety stats have generally showed nearly continuous improvement.

You’ll see that Ward also uses a headline that will leave those who recall Barack Obama’s campaign promise to bankrupt new coal-powered plants shaking their heads in disbelief (bolds after headlines are mine):

Sago families look to Obama
Three years after fatal mine blast, reformers turn to new administration

Peggy Cohen’s youngest son, Hunter, was only 2 years old when the Sago Mine blew up. Today, he still blows kisses whenever the family goes by his grandfather’s grave.

Cohen’s father, Fred Ware, was among the 12 miners killed in the Sago Mine disaster. The family still feels the loss three years later.

….. At the same time, Cohen says she worries about the safety of other miners, and holds out hope that a change in the White House might help more families from losing husbands, fathers and sons in the nation’s coal mines.

“We cannot take mine safety lightly,” Cohen said in an e-mail message. “There is still plenty of work which needs to be done to protect our miners. This is my hope for our new president and his staff.”

Three years ago this morning, an explosion ripped through International Coal Group’s Sago Mine, located outside Buckhannon in Upshur County.

Within hours, the national media had focused on 13 missing miners. Twelve of those workers died before rescuers could reach them 40 hours later. Only Randal McCloy Jr. survived.

….. In response, there’s been a flurry of new laws, tougher regulations and demands for increased inspections and enforcement. Much progress has been made. Last year, for example, the U.S. Mine Safety and Health Administration for the first time completed all of its mandated quarterly inspections of underground coal mines nationwide.

Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W.Va., pushed for additional funding to replace MSHA inspection jobs that had been cut by Bush.

….. despite improvements, many critics say MSHA (Mine Safety and Health Administration) remains a troubled agency damaged by Bush administration budget cuts and efforts to replace tough enforcement with industry-friendly “compliance assistant” programs.

Ward’s claims to blame are truly, truly lame.

Here is a chart that compares the mine-fatality record during the Clinton and Bush administrations (source data is here for coal and here for metal/nonmetal):

Clinton responsibility goes through 2001 because his last budget controlled what the MSHA could do that year. Similarly, Bush will still have responsibility for 2009.

In 2008, there were 29 coal-mining fatalities and 22 in all other mining (collectively referred to a “Metal/NonMetal”). The combined total of 51 is the lowest on record. This has occurred while total employment in all mining has increased almost 19% in the past five years.

Concentrating on coal, as that is the subject of Ward’s report, here is more comprehensive info through 2007 (original page link; full-sized version is here):

The all injury rate in coal mining fell almost 30% from 2001 to 2007. There has been little if any let-up in inspection hours per mine. If there’s an issue, it would appear to be the decline in 2007′s inspection completion rate, which may be due to paperwork and other requirements imposed by the MINER Act of 2006 that became law in response to Sago.

This gets us back to Ward’s most potentially substantive question: Which is better, so-called “tough enforcement” or “compliant-assistant” (I would suggest that they are really “continuous improvement”) programs?

The improvements under Bush support the idea that it’s the latter. This makes sense, unless you think that mine operators could give a rip about employee safety. If there are any such employers, I would suggest that today they are few and far between.

As an inspector, if you come in with the assumption that everyone would like to improve safety within reasonable resource constraints, you make constructive suggestions for improving things without getting adversarial about it — unless you see clear signs of negligence. That seems to have worked quite well during the Bush Administration, despite Ken Ward’s and Bob Byrd’s bleatings.

The so-called “tough enforcement” approach tends to look for violations, no matter how petty, with the goal of maximizing fines and showing up supposedly exploitive employers, who are presumptively believed to be doing as little as they possibly can get away with to keep the workplace safe. This “gotcha” approach does little to improve safety except in situations where there are egregious violations.

If the Obama administration returns to the adversarial approach and ceases the constructive inspector-industry dialogue, I predict slower improvement in mine safety. The fact is, contrary to Ken Ward and Bob Byrd, Obama’s MSHA will have a tough act to follow.

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

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UPDATE: The MSHA’s press release on the record low in fatalities is here (also stored here in case the Obama administration moves it).

Bob Shrum has a funny way of telling the troops to calm down.

The purpose of the long-time Democratic strategist’s opinion piece at The Week (the picture at the right is at that link) is to counsel his ideological colleagues that despite current appearances, soon-to-be president Barack Obama will indeed enact their liberal agenda.

But while telling Democrats to focus on the future and to resist the urge to dig through every nook and cranny in Washington in search of a Bush Adminstration crime to prosecute, his first sentence revives the long-debunked claim that George W. Bush didn’t win the 2000 election fair and square.

Here are key paragraphs from his piece:

Battered Liberal Syndrome

Perhaps there is something in the soul of Democrats, scarred by the stolen election of 2000 and a close loss in 2004, that anticipates setback. Call it Battered Liberal Syndrome. This time, it’s not electoral defeat Democrats fear, but a devaluation of last November’s victory, a scenario in which progressive policy is undermined and Democratic dreams are once again deferred.

A number of liberal bloggers and columnists, most notably the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, worry, hint or state outright that Obama appears to be selling his mandate short. Their indictment of the stimulus—or recovery plan, as Obama prefers to call it—is that the plan is both less efficient and less fair because it includes tax cuts. Then there’s Obama’s reluctance to pledge to investigate and prosecute a wide array of misconduct in the Bush administration. Obama is reproved for his resolve to focus on the future, not the past. At the least, dissenters on the left insist, he should establish a truth finding panel, with subpoena power, to rake through the Bush detritus and expose it to the world.

I decline to join these pessimistic premonitions, this wallowing in disappointment before Obama’s presidency has even begun. …..

I’m convinced Obama’s right to pursue the politics of change in his own remarkable fashion. Americans are fearful, but they yearn to be hopeful; that’s why they voted for Obama. They want solutions, not ideological battle. His stratospheric approval rating as transition yields to inauguration suggests how far he has moved beyond his Election Day majority and how effectively he has harnessed the public will. This could be a powerful force for advancing his agenda—and he’s not going to jeopardize it by letting his presidency be cast in partisan terms.

That doesn’t mean he’s not progressive; he clearly is. But like FDR and JFK, he’s also pragmatic.

….. That same pragmatism will guide each successive stage of what will prove to be a bold agenda.

Shrum “forgot” that a subsequent media consortium recount showed that Bush really did win Florda:

A group of large newspapers got together earlier this year and hired an accounting firm to recount Florida’s disputed presidential election ballots. Their finding: George W. Bush won by a wider margin than he got last year.

And of course, any complete analysis of Florida 2000 has to address the concerted Democratic effort to prevent valid military and other overseas ballots from being counted. This BizzyBlog entry from May 2008 does that.

Shrum also argues that “For the moment, the incoming president has marginalized fevered agitators like Ann Coulter and Sean Hannity.”

Though I don’t agree with the assertion (Coulter is so “marginalized” that her latest book is #2 on the New York Times best-sellers list), Shrum is at least smart to include his “for the moment” qualifier. He knows, as Chris Berman at ESPN is so fond of saying, “That’s why they play the game.”

Cross-posted at NewsBusters.org.

For what it’s worth, I think the fears of deflation are legitimate, but in some cases a bit overwrought.

Going forward, this little stat from an otherwise gloomy Associated Press deflation-obsessive item by Jeannine Aversa gives reason to hope that a relatively quick recovery (which, as I noted in late December, the soon-to-begin Obama Administration would prefer not to see, or would prefer to keep hushed, at least until their precious stimulus package gets through Congress):

Average weekly earnings of U.S. workers, after adjusting for inflation, rose 2.9% last year.

That’s quite a bit, but it masks the fact that higher energy prices earlier in the year sucked out a large portion of those increased earnings. But going forward, if prices remain stable, the increased earnings of the 92.8% of the country that is still employed bode well for either consumer spending, investment, or both.

It’s interesting, and disconcerting to note what sectors are still experiencing inflation, as noted in the final item from Naroff Economic Advisors at this Wall Street Journal Real Time Economics blog entry:

The bursting of the two bubbles that drove up consumer costs, housing and energy, have led to a major retrenchment in retail prices. Energy prices have fallen sharply for the past five months and that is allowing households to keep in their wallets hundreds of billions of dollars that had gone out the tailpipe. Food prices, which had also been soaring, have stabilized. Most other categories also showed that price pressures have disappeared. Excluding food and energy, there has not been an increase since September 2008. The only areas where costs continue to rise are the usual ones: Medical care and education.

How predictable that costs keep rising in the two sectors where the government is most involved. How predictable — and wrong — that so many think that the cure to medical cost inflation is to have the government completely take over health care.

….. But I Don’t Have Time For:

• Surprise (not; HT Hot Air) — “Obama backed same-sex marriage in 1996.” Read the article and visit the links, and you learn that Mr. No Core Beliefs’ current “opposition” to same-sex marriage is only a “strategy” that will be discarded when in his view the populace’s view has become more accepting.
• Noel Sheppard at NewsBusters — “Global Warmingist-in-Chief Al Gore is losing his propaganda war to convince Americans carbon dioxide is destroying the planet.” Just in time, I might add.
• Y’know, I haven’t been impressed with a certain outfit that does statewide blog rankings for Ohio because they don’t disclose their formula. But this result from a couple of weeks ago persuaded me that whatever the formula is, it is “obviously” absolutely accurate and beyond reproach (/kidding).
• That there was a concerted effort, as noted in the Wall Street Journal last week, to persuade the Kennedy family in the 1960s and 1970s that support of abortion and Catholicism were somehow compatible — which they aren’t — is not surprising. But it is sad — actually tragic.
• Obama was cooking the books on the expected deficit even before his inauguration.
• It would appear that according to Bill Cosby, anyone who isn’t African-American who makes the same points he has been making about the importance of intact families in the African-American community for about the past five years is a racist.
• Worldwatch says that we must “Halt all (net) carbon emissions by 2050.” Seriously.
• How to blow up the private health insurance system — “A new plan by New York Governor David Patterson would mandate employers buying health coverage from commercial insurers to provide dependent benefits up to age 29.” You read that right.
• There will be no tears shed here at the demise of Circuit City. I feel for those directly affected by the store closures and their families. The linked Associated Press article blames the chain’s demise on “the expanding financial crisis.” Horse manure — The company is dead because its employment practices were horrid; those practices will hopefully die along with it. First, some 7 or so years ago they took away the sales commission system that got them to where they were and replaced it with a straight (very low) hourly rate arrangement. Expertise largely disappeared. Then a little less than two years ago, the company in essence fired everyone on the sales floor and made them re-apply for their jobs — at a rookie’s hourly rate. Duh — store morale was absolutely dreadful. No one should be surprised at the result. Hopefully, the rest of the business world will learn that short-sighted bean-counting, top line-ignoring, unethical practices such as those used at “Circuit” don’t work.