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Toothful

February 5, 2009, 11:59AM

The Obama Administration is losing the spin war surrounding the stimulus bill. Obama is allowing himself to be pwned by the Republicans. By continuing to insist on seeking bipartisan solutions, he is making himself and the Democratic Party look like weak sisters.

Obama's caving, this we know, for the MSM and bloggers tell us so.

It's true. It's so true. It must be true. Everybody says it's true.

And yet... and yet...

In the middle of Matthew Benjamin and Christine Harper's exultant victory cry regarding the ineffectuality of President Obama's newly announced executive salary caps, I find the following passage:

"In addition, some executives may be compensated for the potential reduced salaries with restricted stock grants, which may result in huge paydays after the bank repays the government assistance with interest.

"They're just allowing companies to defer compensation," said Graef Crystal, a former compensation consultant and author of "The Crystal Report on Executive Compensation."

The restrictions are "a joke," he said, because "if the government is paid pack, you can be sure that the stock will have risen hugely."

Weak. Ineffectual. Wimpy. Stupid. Any idiot can clearly see from this that... er... wait. Hold on. Does that actually say that President Obama's executive salary caps will allow restricted stock grants in lieu of executive salary and bonuses? Stock grants that would never mean anything if the bank did not recover, and thrive, and pay the government's TARP money back again?

Why, that sounds like... a clever, and probably effective, incentive for the distressed banks to pay the government back all the bailout money they've received... assuming, of course, that their CEOs want a huge payday somewhere down the road.

But that couldn't be.

I mean... it's not like this Obama guy is smart or anything, right?

I don't know, guys. Maybe we shouldn't take to the lifeboats just yet.

Maybe the major media outlets have some kind of vested interest in spinning things so President Obama and the Democratic majorities in Congress look weak and ineffectual. Maybe the vast hypercorporations that actually own pretty much the entire mainstream media would prefer to do everything they can to minimize the effectiveness of Hope and Change, because Hope and Change aren't going to put any money in their pockets. (In fact, given the way these modern day robber barons have been lining their pockets throughout the Bush Jr. era of massive deregulation, corruption, and corporate fraud, maybe the actual owners of the mainstream media have known for months or years that if Hope and Change ever actually did come along, they stood to lose a lot of money... and maybe go to jail.)

Maybe, just maybe... that, y'know, kinda bright fella we elected President actually knows what he's doing.

Obama's new executive salary caps are toothless. He's losing the spin war on the stimulus bill. His bipartisan approach is a bad miscalculation. An unknown black man who was born in Hawaii can't get elected to the U.S. Senate from a state like Illinois! A first term junior Senator can't run for President! This is Hillary's year, Obama can't possibly beat her in the primaries! A black man with a Muslim father and a Middle Eastern middle name can't get elected President!

It's impossible. We should all just give up. The world... is doomed.

I don't know. I'm no expert. I don't want to go out on a limb, and I certainly don't want to tell anyone else how to think.

Just for myself, though, I think I'll have faith in President Obama for at least a few more weeks... or months, maybe, whacky as that sounds... before I write him off entirely.

Call me crazy.

Doc Nebula

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Website: miserableannalsoftheearth.blogspot.com
Location River City
Party Socio-Anarchist
Politics I'm a social anarchist and an economic socialist.

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Favorite Blogs TPM, Washington Monthly, Roy Edroso, The Poor Man -- also, theoralreport.blogspot.com is pretty cool, too.
Favorite Books most Heinlein, some Zelazny (LORD OF LIGHT, the Amber stuff), a lot of Colin Wilson's stuff, Bujold's Vorkosigan novels, GRRM's Song of Ice and Fire, Varley's GAIA trilogy, other geek stuff
Favorite Quotes "The four points of the compass be logic, knowledge, wisdom and the unknown. Some do bow in that final direction. Others advance upon it. To bow before the one is to lose sight of the three. I may submit to the unknown, but never to the unknowable. The man who bows in that final direction is either a saint or a fool. I have no use for either." - Roger Zelazny

Bio

Born in the heart of a nuclear explosion, DOC NEBULA came snarling into existence at the dawn of time, armed and armored to wage a war on entropy for the sake of all existence. Now, accompanied by that band of hard rocking scientists THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS, he races across the universe...

No, wait. That's some other guy entirely.

I'm starting again.

Snatched from limbo and brought wailing into Earthly existence in late 1961, DOC NEBULA quickly became a living legend among his peergroup, even though he would not think to call himself by the name "Doc Nebula" until decades later when he got his first online account and needed a screenname and all possible variations of "GiantMan" were already taken. (Sad but true. Doc is a big Hank Pym fan.)

In the early years of this incarnation, DOC was regarded with an awestruck admiration by his peer group that frankly bordered on religious worship, said awestruck admiration most commonly being manifested in the form of ridicule, public humiliation, and frequent beatings whenever an adult authority was not in the immediate vicinity to intervene.

Undaunted by this, DOC NEBULA escaped the horrors of childhood and entered the hallowed halls of Academe at prestigious SYRACUSE UNIVERSITY, back in the late 70s when the English Department had not yet been taken over by a pack of gumchewing idiots who threw out all the classes on Shakespeare and replaced them with seminars on People Magazine.

At SU, DOC excelled in his fields of study, quickly mastering such arcane arts as pizza consumption, sleep deprivation, keeping every square inch of floorspace covered at all times with pornography, empty pizza boxes, and old issues of Steve Engelhart's AVENGERS, and most importantly of all, how to schedule all his classes so he never had to get out of bed before 1 PM. (Not that he attended many of them anyway.)

Dropping out of college without a degree, DOC embarked on a nomadic existence, wandering from job to job, apartment to apartment, always seeking that effervescent and intangible something we all call Happiness, but which DOC likes to think of as an old Army duffle bag stuffed to the top with bulky bundles of 20s, 50s, and hundred dollar bills.

In 2005 Doc Nebula somehow tricked the most wonderful woman in the world into marrying him, making him the offical stepfather to the three most wonderful stepdaughters in the world, which is really quite enough for any man and more than most can brag, thank you very much.

He has written seven or eight novels, six of which are available in Kindle editions, a whole bunch of short stories, and does a whole lot of other geek related stuff you don't care about. Many of his book length works can be found at:

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ZAP FORCE #1: ROYAL BLOOD

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The Fear Masters

Memoir:

In The Early Morning Rain

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