The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

Rule 5 Monday: Beautiful Together

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 5 Comments

Well, just one more weekend left in tax season, and then Rule 5 Sunday will return to its proper place on the weekend. For now, I appreciate your patience.

Too late for last week’s roundup (or maybe just way too early for this one), Fishersville Mike submits a pic of Kaley Cuoco and the Pink Berets preparing for the debut of “Hop”.

Soylent Green celebrates his 750,000th visit with a grand display of scantily- (or completely un-) clad ladies that defies description, except for the obligatory NSFW warning. Also, bacon! He then goes on with Spring Spasms (NSFW) and Lynda Redwine (not NSFW).
What, no corsets? 🙁

The Rio Norte Line has some exemplary Thunder From Down Under; Reaganite Republican makes its Rule 5 debut with the biggest bust in Michigan State Police history; the POH Diaries bring us Ivanka Trump and some Rule 5 linkagery; Eye Of Polyphemus contributes Ashley Greene; Maggie’s Notebook brings us another charming songbird, Carrie Underwood; and That Mr. G Guy brings us Babes With Guns, including Miss Utah.

MUSICAL INTERMISSION

END OF MUSICAL INTERMISSION

Okay, moving right along, WyBlog has a post on Kim Cattrall, and Dustbury tips us to Bollywood import Mallika Sherawat
as well as providing links to the luscious Anna Torv. A View From The Beach offers a combination of babes and beer and nutritional advice. Well, two out of three ain’t bad.

The Camp of the Saints offers Shannon Long, Kym Malin, and two installments of Rule 5 News here and here, the latter featuring Gina Elise.

The DaleyGator profits from the Wombat’s lateness, and submits a clutch of links! First Azaylia Sen, then Roselyn Sanchez, Maria Ozawa, Natalie Portman, and finally Ali Sonoma. Verily, the Gator doth provide the BEST slideshows.

We close out this week’s Rule 5 with a video from Three Beers Later, in which Eva Longoria becomes slightly overexposed on the Letterman show.

Submissions for next week’s Rule 5 roundup should be sent to the Rule 5 Wombat mailbox no later than Saturday, April 16. See you then.

Category: Rule 5

It Looks Like The Debt Limit Increase Will Make The CR Fracas Look Like Beanbag

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 3 Comments

by Smitty

Keith Hennessy has a detailed post, from which I’ll mooch his bullet points:

  • First, a temporary continuing resolution has a hard deadline, while a debt limit increase does not.
  • Second, defaulting on a debt obligation is potentially far more serious than a temporary government shutdown.
  • Third, a freestanding debt limit increase bill doesn’t contain any spending cut, so there is no “natural” fiscal policy that should obviously included.

So there are questions as to when and how much to extend the debt ceiling. This will become another football, as Boehner can force the administration to come begging again soon by being too frugal with the extension.
These cruel ways, Mr. Boehner: don’t. Stop. Don’t stop.

Category: Budget

Oh Sure, Right After I Got Wrecked Converting The Traditional IRA To A Roth

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 12 Comments

by Smitty (via Insty)

Mrs. The Other Smitty and I this year listened to the financial adviser and converted the modest Traditional IRA to a Roth. By making the optimal choice on what to do with the sudden profit, we managed not to get completely destroyed on income tax. The amount of money in question was not tremendous.
I, for one, am sick and tired of Congress treating the tax code with the malevolence of software virus writers, trying to come up with new ways to crash my wallet.

In return for little more than ordinary upfront taxes, Congress waived untold billions in future Treasury receipts. Then, too, Roths could be a drag on the U.S. economy. Since no withdrawals are required, assets can lie idle indefinitely.

For Roth holders, the accounts become a permanent, federally sanctioned tax shelter. For America, they’re a bit like toxic instruments on the nation’s books. Worse, Congress has them on steroids, and President Obama wants to up the dosage.

Those assets are private property. Letting them lie fallow is a perfectly rational act. If someone perceives the assets a drag, then their perception, not the tax code, needs tweaking.
“federally sanctioned tax shelter”? No, really: it’s what I’m putting away for a rainy day. You know: SAVING. That thing that wise people do.
“toxic instruments on the nation’s books”? How can prudent stewardship be seen as toxic by anyone rational?
Gerald E. Scorse concludes:

Whatever the answer for individuals, there’s little doubt that Roths are wrong for America. They’re Frankensteins, fated to wreak havoc. It’s time to retire Roth IRAs.

No, it’s time to kill the 16th Amendment and come up with a simpler mechanism for funding the government. If the federal government could be trusted not to turn the country into an ATM, then some form of flat tax might be interesting.
I, for one, favor billing the states after some manner, so that the federal government is driven toward a balanced budget without explicitly Amending the Constitution for such.

Meanwhile, on Twitter, a storm rages:

Category: Taxes

Sexy Asian Farmhouse Antiques

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | Comments Off on Sexy Asian Farmhouse Antiques

by Smitty

Fish Fear Me has a picture of a folding sign in his neighborhood that is right off of Engrish.com. Sort of brought the mighty Tap to mind:

Maybe it’s too subtle for some, but mocking the over-sexed nature of rock’n’roll by trying to find innuendo in common agricultural objects is, to my twisted mind, extremely funny.

Category: Blogging, humor

‘An Aimless and Slovenly Disaster’

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 6 Comments

The quote is from Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly reviewing Charlie Sheen’s Friday live show at Radio City Music Hall in New York. A great phrase, worthy of a book title. As to exactly why Charlie’s show sucked:

In the early stages of his madman meltdown phase . . . he created the sex-and-dope version of a Howard Beale mad-as-hell moment. He held out the prospect of danger, of saying the things that we aren’t allowed to say. . . . Which leads one to ask: What does a Howard Beale who has already had his mad-as-hell eruption do for an encore?

Sheen is an actor, and actors require a script, but Sheen is not a writer. A guy who made $2 million telling other people’s jokes can’t seem to understand that the joke-writers — who got paid a lot less than he did — were important to his success.

Besides which, a live stage show is not a TV sitcom, where you can do re-takes or add a laugh track. And deranged narcissism isn’t really funny.

Category: Celebrities

Obama, the Deficit-Hater

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 4 Comments

After two years of pissing away trillions of dollars in borrowed money, President Obama this week will present “a multiyear debt-reduction plan” — which is kind of like Tiger Woods deciding to cut back on banging cocktail waitresses after his wife left him.

Notice that Obama sends a campaign strategist onto Meet the Press to explain what is supposed to be a policy proposal:

Gee, it’s almost as if this “Let’s Get Serious About Deficits” message was more about getting Obama re-elected than about anything else.

Category: Barack Obama, Budget

Hef at 85: A Myth Grown Old

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 24 Comments

The octogenarian hedonist celebrated his birthday in Vegas, at one point posing with 31 previous Playboy centerfolds, the oldest of them being Miss May 1998, Deanna Brooks, now age 36.


Hefner is now engaged to 24-year-old Crystal Harris (Miss December 2009) and, of course, the bride-to-be will be required to sign a pre-nuptial agreement prior to the June wedding.

Because it’s all about the money. And the sexual “liberation,” as Daniel Flynn explained at The American Spectator:

Nobody told Izabella St. James that sexual liberation came with curfews, monitors, and allowances. A former live-in girlfriend of Hugh Hefner, St. James has come clean on the dirty life inside the Playboy mansion. . . . The busty blonde reflected in the Daily Mail earlier this year, “Little did I realize that by moving into the mansion I was losing all the freedom I associated with the Playboy lifestyle.” . . .
Reality-television star Kendra Wilkinson, a five-year resident of the mansion, recalls: “It was way more strict than my parents had ever been.”
An authoritarian libertine is not as unusual as one might think. American history is littered with immoral moralists seeking gratification through the domination of others. As Chesterton put it, “A man must be something of a moralist if he is to preach, even if he is to preach immorality.”
Hugh Hefner is one in a long line of preachy perverts. . . .

You should read the whole thing.  Blog readers will remember reading the story of Izabella St. James here in January:

Ex-Playmate: ‘Everything in the Playboy
Mansion Felt Old and Stale’ Including Hef!

Really, however, what could be more old and stale than the ridiculous myth of “liberation” that Hef has been peddling the past half-century? While Rule 5 — “Everybody loves a pretty girl” — certainly applies, the aesthetic admiration of nubile pulchritude should not be confused with an incitement to concupiscent promiscuity. Read more

Category: Celebrities, Rule 5, Sex

Sweet, Sweet Quantitative Easing

Posted on | April 11, 2011 | 4 Comments

by Smitty

There is something special about nihilistic joy. You spot doom on the horizon. You track it. Doom comes in, at constant bearing and decreasing range, despite every possible maneuver to avoid it. And the doom is so huge as to cause the people in charge to loop in stage one of the KĂźbler-Ross Model, not merely denying the problem, but actively repeating behaviors that worsen it.

In the month of March, the U.S. government spent more than eight times its monthly tax receipts, when you include the money spent for maturing U.S. treasuries. The U.S. treasury netted $128.18 billion in tax receipts during the month of March, but paid out a total of $1.05 trillion, which included $49.8 billion in Social Security benefits, $47.4 billion in Medicare benefits, $22.58 billion in Medicaid benefits, and $37.9 billion in defense spending. However, by far, the U.S. paid out the most for maturing U.S. treasuries, which equaled $705.3 billion.

In order for the U.S. government to stay afloat with only $128.18 billion in tax receipts, it had to spend $72.5 billion from its balance of cash, which ended the month at $118.1 billion, and sell $18 billion worth of TARP assets. But most importantly, the U.S. treasury had to sell $786.5 billion in new treasury bonds.

The U.S. government is the largest ponzi scheme in world history. We can only fund our government expenditures and pay off maturing debt plus interest, by issuing larger amounts of new debt. Americans are lucky that we have been blessed with record low interest rates for an unprecedented amount of time, but NIA believes that as we roll over U.S. treasuries in the future, we will have to refinance them at much higher interest rates. Our national debt is now so large that interest payments on our debt will become the government’s largest monthly expenditure.

If the Federal Reserve doesn’t implement QE3, NIA believes it will just about guarantee a bursting of the U.S. bond bubble in the second half of 2011. If the Fed stops buying U.S. treasuries, there is a chance that we won’t find foreign buyers for our bonds no matter how high interest rates rise. The world is waking up to the fact that the U.S. government is insolvent, and the benefits of propping up the U.S. dollar are no longer worth the expense to our foreign creditors. The U.S. government ponzi scheme will soon be exposed for the world to see.

Oh, it’s the elephant in the room. The question will be whether the plutocrats will step up to the plate and buy some debt to keep the entire system from blowing up in their faces. It could happen. Or not. As with a punishment from dad whenever I broke something as a child, I just want to get it over with.

Category: Uncategorized
« go back — keep looking »

    About

    This is an area on your website where you can add text. This will serve as an informative location on your website, where you can talk about your site.

    Subscribe to our feed

    Search

    Admin