Skygazers have only a few more opportunities to view Comet Lulin and tonight is the best time to see the winter comet. Grab the binoculars its time to look at the green flash. Carl Hergenrother has this in a very well done item on what Fox News calls, “a strange, backward-traveling, greenish-hued ball of ice and gas.”

“Now is the best time to observe Comet Lulin. Two nights ago, Comet Lulin was easy to find as it passed close to Saturn, last night the comet came closest to Earth. He adds, “Don’t worry if you are not able to see the comet tonight. Just because the comet is at its brightest doesn’t mean it won’t be bright enough to see for the next few nights.”

How much money could the state of California collect if they legalize marijuana? In a move that has been called for by many to help stuff the state’s coffers with green (that’s the money) from green (that’s the weed) making pot legal certainly makes good business sense, but will it fly high for voters? A state assemblyman from San Francisco has introduced legislation to make pot legal and tax it at the state level. How long before it goes national?

The Obama budget has grabbed headlines and all sorts of reaction and ends up almost $2 trillion in the red.  According to a report from the New York Times, the number clicks in at $1.75 trillion.  Certainly some lawmaker will also try and push some sort of marijuana tax, nationally.

Gwyneth Paltrow has fired back at critics of her Goop. According to an OK! magazine report, Gwyneth Paltrow hosted a New York charity event for Bent on Learning on Wednesday and offered up statements regarding her new website and also dishes on why she and Madonna are such good pals. Paltrow’s website, GOOP.com carries the tagline…”Nourish The Inner Aspect” and she decided to launch the site “because I felt like I had a lot of really useful information that I was privileged enough to get, because I have this amazing, super, fortunate life.”She’s received a lot of grief for her holier than thou attitude but the middle aged starlet defends herself stating, “I think the people who are criticizing it or criticizing the idea of it, don’t really get it, because if they did, they would like it…”  The current newletter centers around Paris and all if has to offer.  If you’re planning a trip to Paris, the site may actually be beneficial.  It reads somewhat like a tour guide, albeit, poorly written and quite honestly boring,  offering suggestions for restaurants, hotels and different sights so see.

TV buzz for the week has been mostly American Idol, but Hosea Rosenberg was crowned the “Top Chef Winner.” Fox’s big reality TV show is off to the races and already in Hollywood for season eight and the group 2 results are in. Three brand new possible American idol winners are through to the top 12. Allison Iraheta is only sixteen and she is in the top twelve. I love her, she seems solid and remember, David Archuleta.

Kris Allen stunned nearly everyone when his baby face made it through.  How far can he go?  Adam Lambert is solid if not spectacular, with the confidence for at least a top five spot.  Can he keep it together for the entire season and make his run?

It’s getting closer to a red hot showdown. Bad things occurred after Jack (Matthew Fox), Kate (Evangeline Lilly) and the other Oceanic Six fled the island. Now Jack’s brought them back. So how long with the flashes and the time travel and confusion? “It’s not a season-long quest, but there are complications,” coexec producer Damon Lindelof told Us Weekly in an earlier interview. “They’re the opposite of safe,” says Lindelof.

It looks like we are closer to sex on the beach!  “It’s not all bleakness,” co-exec producer Carlton Cuse tells Us Magazine.  “We have romance!”  Yes, the quadrangle of Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Juliet played by Elizabeth Mitchell (shown here kissing Angelina Jolie) continues.  “Kate and Jack are picking up their pieces, but she still pines for Sawyer,” says Lindelof, adding, “Sawyer can only wait for so long.”

Jennifer Aniston (in Balenciaga) and Gwyneth Paltrow strike a pose and Nicole Kidman is global in japan to promote Australia.  In style has the photo call and notes first that Jennifer Aniston  got a hold on Owen Wilson during a photo call for the French debut of Marley & Me—translated to Marley & Moi for local filmgoers at The Bristol Hotel in Paris.

Gwyneth stayed in Gotham but Paltrow was still able to show off the positive effects of yoga in a figure-hugging Jasmine di Milo dress when she helped host the 2009 Bent on Learning benefit at the Stephan Weiss Studio in New York City.

A couple of years ago, when speaking to a local group, I mentioned that The Chronicle was losing money. A couple in the back of the room rudely applauded. How thrilled those two must have felt when — if — they learned of San Francisco Chronicle Publisher Frank Vega’s announcement Tuesday that the Hearst Corp. will implement “significant” workforce cuts. If the cuts don’t pay off, then the Hearst Corp. will “offer the newspaper for sale or close it altogether.”
Bloggers and e-mailers are crowing. If The Chronicle is shuttered, they’ll be dancing a jig. Many conservatives feel a warm glow at the possible demise of an institution that they believe to be failing because of liberal bias. On the far left, that same glow will satisfy those who think newspapers are not liberal enough.

As for those who only read their news online, here’s a news flash: News stories do not sprout up like Jack’s beanstalk on the Internet. To produce news, you need professionals who understand the standards needed to research, report and write on what happened. If newspapers die, reliable information dries up.

Reduced ad revenue and falling newspaper circulation mean that there will be fewer people to cover the same number of stories. In the middle of an economic crisis and President Obama’s federal spending bonanza, there will be fewer watchdogs to guard the shop.

So, to those of you who argue that the demise of liberal newspapers (The Chronicle in particular) is deserved, I offer a caveat: Be careful what you wish for.

Remember the ugly consequences of San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy for juvenile offenders, who were sent abroad instead of to jail? Or Oakland Mayor Ron Dellums failure to tackle crime in Oaktown? Or reports on corporate bonuses for execs at bailed-out banks? Imagine that those things happened, but there was no journalist to investigate and report.

I wonder who will be around in five years to cover stories. Or what talk radio will talk about when hosts can’t just siphon from carefully researched stories because they never were written.

Newspapers are the public’s referees as to which information is credible. You can go online and read no end of fiction and smear about public figures. But when you read content in a newspaper, you consistently can rely on it.

As every conservative pundit knows, there is a special credibility that comes with being able to say, “as the New York Times reported,” or “as the Washington Post reported.” Even “as The Chronicle reported.”

One of the great American pursuits in my lifetime has been to trash the local paper. It is a healthy, cathartic exercise — and, at times, practiced in this column.

But at some point in recent years — and publishers’ decisions to post material online at no charge no doubt contributed — this very American pastime devolved from spirited criticism to foolhardy prickliness. News consumers somehow moved from thinking their paper let them down to thinking that their paper was not worthy of them.

Despite all the solid stories, and all the reliable information, and all the articles that tell you something you did not know and all the opinion pieces that made you stop and think, a growing number of people have decided that it is more important for their news to be pure than it is for the public to be informed.

And I hear this from people who say they care about news. They look to the site-rich Internet for salvation, unaware that the decline of newspapers means that those shiny new websites are linking to fewer real news stories. What looks like more choice isn’t. It’s more doors leading to fewer rooms.

When a newspaper dies, you don’t get a comprehensive periodical to fill the void. You get an informational vacant lot into which passersby can throw their junk.

You have to hand it to him. Barack Obama’s speech before Congress was, from a presentation standpoint, incredibly strong. It needed to be, because what he likely did not know was that a new poll shows that 37 percent of all Americans, and nearly 50 percent of Democrats, believe the nation’s economy is not in a recession, but rather a depression.
Of course one would never guess that things could be so dire after they watched Speaker Nancy Pelosi springing from her seat like a jack-in-the-box every 30 seconds during President Obama’s appearance in her House chamber.

But since Nancy obviously doesn’t comprehend depression — economic or psychological — I sought numerous definitions of an economic depression to see if people might be onto something.

There is no one conclusive definition of what constitutes a depression. However, many of the definitions included virtually every major economic hurdle we currently face, absent significant inflation or, in the alternative, deflation.

The best definition I could find was one that suggested that an economic depression is a period of severe economic slowdown in which individuals have to sell tangible assets in order to continue to stay afloat economically. Bingo. That explains the poll. It also tells us just how dangerous might be the practice of throwing trillions of dollars at this crisis.

It would not surprise me at all if a third of Americans have been forced to sell possessions, whether primary ones — such as their homes — or luxury items such as boats, second cars and vacation properties.

Certainly times are bad when one of the major ads for the Super Bowl was sponsored by a sleazy “we buy gold items” group using poor old Ed McMahon as their pitchman. People selling possessions to live? Well, if that’s the definition, maybe there are plenty more folks who feel we are in a depression than anyone ever wanted to admit.

The problem is that for all the hype of both the stimulus proposal and the future bailouts of banks and insurance companies, the one segment of Americans who could most readily lift the economy up are the very ones who qualify for absolutely nothing in any of the legislation I’ve seen so far.

Let’s be honest. It’s great to talk about helping small business owners. But in reality, few people want the hassle of running or owning a small business unless they can make more on their own than they can working for someone else. Yet a couple that earns over $150,000 a year doesn’t qualify for any tax cut; and a family that works a small business that earns more than $250,000 a year gets kicked in the teeth with tax increases once the Bush tax cuts come to an end next year.

Add to that the fact that these same people, who hardly consider themselves rich, probably did qualify for more expensive homes that then required that they take out what is deceptively called a “Jumbo” loan. Under the proposal by the president and Democratic Congress, people with such loans won’t qualify for any mortgage relief whatsoever when the next round of handouts are awarded. But they will still be responsible for paying an inordinate share of the taxes that are funding all of these giveaways.

So how will the “rich” Americans, whose small businesses provide nearly half the jobs in the nation, get by? First, they will shed employees and cut down on vendors. That’s already underway. Next, they will start selling off assets in order to generate income to meet their daily expenses. With no relief, and with additional tax burdens, it is conceivable that the very legislation passed to try to remove us from the “uber-recession” of our time might actually push the nation into a true depression.

Years ago I wrote about the oncoming collapse of the housing market. I learned of it from polling data. Now the same polling data may be telling us that we are in the midst of a depression whether we recognize it or not. The question is, will the medicine President Obama and Congress are prescribing cure us, or will it push the percentage of those who believe we are in a depression over the 50 percent mark?

Trust me, if we hit that 50 percent level, we will be in a depression. And we will have a new way of measuring and defining it.

How big should government be? The answer is: As big as it has to be — and for small-government types, no bigger than it has to be. The whole debate about the proper size of government is a blind alley leading into a dead end. Government must grow at times of war or collapsing economy. It grows when there are lots of schoolchildren, elderly people or natural disasters. Government provides necessities that the private sector can’t. We can argue over what constitutes a necessity.
There was no joy in President Obama’s discussion Tuesday night of the expensive economic-recovery plan. He told Congress that he asked for it, “not because I believe in bigger government — I don’t.” It was because “a failure to act would have worsened our long-term deficit by assuring weak economic growth for years.”

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal’s Republican response to the speech showed a stunning disconnect from reality. First he called for a pile of new tax cuts, then warned that Democrats would “saddle future generations with debt.”

Future generations are saddled with debt precisely because of reckless Republican tax cuts — and spending. Obama repeated his vow to cut the deficit in half, once the crisis has passed. And he spoke in real-world specifics of tax loopholes to be ended and higher levies on the richest 2 percent.

Well, what about spending? There are fiscally righteous Republicans who fervently believe in small government and have the courage to vote against popular programs. They are but a handful. George W. Bush, working with a Republican Congress, embarked on the biggest spending spree since Lyndon Johnson, even excluding money allocated to defense and homeland security.

A current Republican talking point, repeated by Jindal, holds that “our party got away from its principles.” Sadly, the party gets away from its principles most every time it’s in power.

Bush wasn’t a special case. Under Ronald Reagan, the U.S. government consumed the highest percentage of gross domestic product in American history, except for during World War II.

In his first address before Congress, in 1981, Reagan made shocked reference to the nearly $1 trillion in debt his administration had inherited. He called the number “incomprehensible.” But Reagan’s rhetoric had no bearing on subsequent policy. By the time he left office, the national debt had more than doubled, to over $2 trillion.

The national debt almost doubled under George W. Bush, from just under $6 trillion to nearly $10 trillion.

The one fiscally honest Republican president in recent decades was the much-maligned George H.W. Bush. Deciding that the time had come for America to start paying its bills, the elder Bush broke his “no new taxes” pledge. For that gutsy move, his party’s tax-a-phobes reviled him.

Their barbs multiplied for Bush’s successor, Democrat Bill Clinton, who backed higher taxes for some upper-income Americans. That helped create budget surpluses — a fiscal Eden from which America was ejected soon after.

A recent New York Times-CBS News poll asked Americans whether it’s more important for Republicans to stick to GOP policies or work with Obama and the Democrats. Only 17 percent preferred that Republicans stick to their policies. That’s not much of a thumbs-up for the Republican way.

Nobody likes the deficits being run up. Everybody gripes about some of the ways the money’s being spent. But at the moment, only government can pull us out of the economic swamp.

If Obama succeeds in cutting the deficit in half, he will have presided over a very big government followed by a much shrunken one. Both versions will have been right for their times. Clearly, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” circumstances for government.

The speech made it apparent that Obama’s Administration’s response to this crisis will either go down in the history of political science as a success Americans will admire for decades or become a case study in economic failure students and scholars will study and pick apart for generations.

The speech began where it needed to begin — with a bold affirmation of faith in the rebuilding and recovery of America. Then the president listed some of the more popular parts of his spending-stimulus program. The specific items he recalled from the package were attractive.

But Americans know, by now, that much of the program, largely unmentioned by the president, is a mountain of pork, money spent for the sake of spending it to spur recovery, not to achieve particularly important ends.

Obama did not seek to justify the spending for the specific purposes to which it is dedicated. Courageously, he said that he passed it because it will work. For his sake, it better. But I doubt it.

Then the president spoke unconvincingly about his bank rescue plan. Promising to punish and regulate bankers even as he stressed the need to restore their confidence, he reminded me of the facetious sign posted in a friend’s workplace, “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”

How he plans to restore the nerve and confidence of our bankers as he castigates them was unclear. But so is his program for financial rescue. One suspects that he knows full well that he will nationalize the banks. But even that step says that politicians can do what bankers cannot — act quickly, ruthlessly and honestly — never a notable attribute of elected officials.

Halfway through the speech, the president got to the minefields of Social Security and health care reform. He avoided any specifics, but it is clear that he plans to salvage the former by increases in the payroll tax and implement the latter by government rationing of health care. If you like your HMO, you will love Obama’s health plan.

And then, Obama affirmed that he will support big tax increases on the richest 2 percent of American families. Disregarding the fact that these households already pay upward of half of the income taxes, while earning only a quarter of the national income, he singled out the entrepreneurs, professionals, innovators and businesspeople of America for taxation. But he won’t raise taxes until he’s had a few years to stimulate the economy. He makes one feel like one of the huge hogs in the Chicago stockyards, being fattened up to slaughter the next year.

Can all this work? Can Obama get banks to lend even as he terrorizes them? Can he get the engines of our economy back to work even as he announces that he will take away more of their earnings? Can he persuade the American people to accept bureaucrats deciding their health care choices? And can his economic stimulus survive a huge increase in the payroll tax on the most productive citizens?

Probably not. Obama will likely not succeed. This speech will be viewed as his high water mark, the time before we came to realize how flawed is his understanding of economics and how supreme is his commitment to expanded spending. It will be seen as a sort of age of innocence before we realized what he had in mind. But it was a great speech … while it lasted.