If even Jim Cramer cuts Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner some slack, perhaps there is bonafide hope for our most influential tax evaders' plan to save the economy.
The rarely-equivocating CNBC host's New York column, "The Bottom Line: Defending Tim Geithner," concedes that he finds Geithner "a man with practically no business experience" who "gave a free pass to just about every single kind of reckless behavior that has brought this nation to its financial knees" as New York Federal Reserve president." He adds that Geithner "is famous for currying journalistic favor through background interviews that erase his fingerprints from every major financial crime scene." For good measure, he cites the "outrageous series of admittedly accidental tax evasions, ones that my lawyer told me would most likely lead to an indictment had I committed them."
And, yet, Cramer doesn't buy into the not-enough-details Capitol Hill conventional wisdom about the Geithner financial system rescue plan announced last week. He calls Geithner's a "deft mix" of three basic strategies that will let "the worst banks go under while distributing the cost of saving the rest o among taxpayers and private investors." Despite the markets' negative response, Cramer said Geithner "got a lot of things right last week: His plan is big and bold, economically sound and politically viable (no nationalization, no more cost to taxpayers than absolutely necessary)."
There's much more elsewhere on our painful economic drama.
"This Isn't Your Grandfather's Recession" is a Daniel Gross argument on the minimal impact of tax cuts right now on Slate.com. Meanwhile, Fortune's Nina Easton's "Inside Obama's Economic Crusade" on CNNMONEY.com spends time with most of the key players, including Geithner and Lawrence Summers. The most notable comment may be from University of Chicago economist Austan Goolsbee, who's got two different jobs for Obama and says he'd deem the stimulus plan a success if all hell doesn't break loose, namely, ""if by the end of 2009 we aren't looking at GDP numbers that are huge negatives, if unemployment rises to the 8 percent range rather than the 11 percent that some are predicting."
---March Vanity Fair's annual pre-Academy Awards issue melds with the coming of Team Obama to give us two mini-album of Annie Leibovitz portraits, with her Hollywood efforts (see dissolute Mickey Rourke with director Darren Arofosky) superior to Washington shots of 56 Obama-ites (Tom Daschle, did you have to smilingly pose prior to your failed nomination to be Mr. Health?!).
The best of the Hollywood tomes are Todd Purdum "Children of Paradise," on kids of Hollywood royalty who were able to grow up vaguely normally; Mark Seal on "The Godfather Wars," the mostly previously-told but still engrossing look at how a longshot classic somehow came together; "Out to Lunch: Sue Mengers," a quickie profile of the female agent who broke into a mostly -male enclave with a bang; and "It Happened at the Hotel Du Cap," Cari Beauchamp's reprise of Marlene Dietrich's intimate ties to the Kennedy family, notably patriarch Joseph and, decades later, President Kennedy. The best of the rest is James Wolcott's "Final-Exit Strategies," his politically incorrect qualms about the death-as-teaching-tool essence of mega-successful books such as "The Last Lecture" an "Tuesdays With Morrie," as well as movies such as "The Bucket List."
---Feb. 23 New Yorker includes Jane Mayer's "The Hard Cases," a look at how President Obama may have to respond a bit differently than Candidate Obama to difficult legal issues involving terrorism and enemy combatants. This focuses on the one such combatant detained on U.S. soil, at a brig in South Carolina, and how an upcoming court case could impact all those stuck at Guantanamo. Will it be as simple as sending people back to their countries or holding criminal trials here? Oh, one learns that the brig detainee, Ali Saleh Kahlah al-Marri, does get to watch Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart, apparently calling the latter, "that Jewish guy." Elsewhere, "Opening Night" is the estimable Katharine Boo's dissection of the view of "Slumdog Millionaire" from both the slums of Mumbai and among India's educated class, including her take on the truth of the movie's notion that a child's very miseries are the very things to spring him from his deprivations.
---"Hillary's Road Trip" is Robert Kaplan's argument on Theatlantic.com that selecting Japan, South Korea, China and Indonesia for her first trek is significant because a blend of economics, military strength and nationalism "makes Asia the strategic focal point of the new century." And "because Southeast Asia has become an area of intensive Chinese commercial expansion, the best way for the new administration to subtly and responsibly counter China's growing influence is by regularly visiting this region."
---March Outside, a bastion for the kayak, camembert and chardonnay set, includes "What I Learned On My Summer Vacation/French Surf Expedition With the Fireman, the Nudists & the Shampoo Addict," or Mark Anders' and chums' eventful trek down France's Atlantic Coast. The "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen" (and one female) includes a nice profile of pro basketball star Steve Nash, a whirling dervish of commercial and charitable activities, including funding early-childhood education in Arizona, pediatric-cardiology wards in Paraguay and a youth center in Uganda. And while we just celebrated Honest Abe's 200th birthday, this reminds that it's the 200th birthday of Charles Darwin, with the naturalist's Galapagos Islands obsession memorialized in various pricey tours through the area.
---Feb. 20 The Week, that handy compilation of news digests for a digest-craving age, also includes, "IED's: The Poor Man's Artillery," a look at how the deadly improvised explosive devices, whose Iraq terror were best chronicled by the Washington Post's Rick Atkinson, now bedevil U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan, accounting for most of our injuries and deaths. It notes how we've spent about $20 billion in the Joint Improvised Explosive Device Defeat Organization, helping to develop heavier armored vehicles and radio jammers to disrupt detonators, among other responses to this nastiness.
---If you're a worry-wart who regular attends church, you may need doctors less than the rest of us, if you read both Feb. 23 Time and Newsweek.
They offer dueling health covers of modest revelations. Time's "The Biology of Belief" underscores how "a growing body of scientific evidence suggests that faith may indeed bring us health." Reporter Jeffrey Kluger notes how one University of Michigan public health expert discerns an upside to being a regular churchgoer and that those who "give help fare even better than those who receive it." Of course, there are limits to spirituality, as inadvertently symbolized by the four-page ad for Ambien stuck in the middle of this cover story in my edition. Meanwhile, Newsweek's "Stress Could Save Your Life" really doesn't make that claim but Mary Carmichael details a few upsides. It's unclear, though, whether stress will assist Alex Rodriquez, ungraciously featured in a Newsweek web-only ("Yes He Did"), snarky poster, labeled, "DOPE."
---Hey, how about this lede?
"The long commercial absence of the Fleischer Studio Popeye cartoons, with their brilliant pacing, wit, and numerous technical innovations, seemed to me as both a fan and a film programmer not only inexplicable but criminal."
Criminal? Well, whatever, Vol. 8 No. 1 of The Moving Image includes Sean Savage's "Popeye the Sailor, Volume One: 1933-1938." They're now available and, we're informed, it's "a wonderful set for the long-suffering fans that have been clamoring for it." And you can learn how some of these were "outsourced to Korea to be redrawn" after Ted Turner bought the MGM/United Artists library in 1986.
---Feb. 16 Sports Illustrated memorializes its headline-grabbing coverage of "The Latest and Greatest to Fall," namely Alex Rodriguez conceding he was juiced. This also profiles new Tennessee football coach Lane Kiffin in "Rocking Old Rocky Top," a look at a young and brash fellow who even wrongly accused a big competitor of being a recruiting cheat. Big on discipline, he's convinced that where one sits in a classroom has some utility. "One of his rules requires that players sit in the first or second row at every class. If a player sits in even the third row, he's marked as absent and faces time on the StairMaster as punishment."
Hey, if congressional Republicans don't like all that stimulus money going for education, perhaps they'd agree to generating jobs by buying more StairMasters.