O’Keefe Antics, Again

Journalism, Media, Republicans

Among the many dumb things Republicans have given us (read “GOP and Man at Yale”) is a brand of tease “journalism” headed by Hannah Giles, a well-connected, monosyllabic, Town-Hall tartlet, who partook in an ACORN-exposing (tush-wagging) operation. Her partner (he played the pimp) was James O’Keefe, who, it transpires, is even dumber than Hannah.

O’Keefe’s latest antics include a “plot”

to embarrass a CNN correspondent by recording a meeting on hidden cameras aboard a floating “palace of pleasure” and making sexually suggestive comments, e-mails and a planning document show.
James O’Keefe, best known for hitting the community organizing group ACORN with an undercover video sting, hoped to get CNN Investigative Correspondent Abbie Boudreau onto a boat filled with sexually explicit props and then record the session, those documents show.
The plan apparently was thwarted after Boudreau was warned minutes before it was supposed to happen.

MORE TO MAKE YOU YAWN HERE.

PATTY MURRAY: Abject Moron

Ann Coulter, Democrats, Elections, Politics

When Ann Coulter’s right, she’s right: PATTY MURRAY is “a remarkably unimpressive woman [that] has tried to turn being a flat-footed dork into an advantage by selling herself as a tribune of regular folks.” It’s good to see the Coulter guns turned on a maggot from my neck of the woods:

“Murray, whose college major was ‘recreation,’ got her start in politics fighting to save her own useless government job.

The laughably apocryphal story she tells is that she was told by some crusty old male politician — still unnamed decades later: ‘You’re just a mom in tennis shoes — you can’t make a difference!’ (You know how politicians love gratuitously insulting their constituents.)

This stuck in Murray’s craw and so, filled with righteous anger, she ran for state office and won as a ‘mom in tennis shoes.’

The real story is that Murray was teaching a ‘parenting’ class at a community college, which no one was taking, so the state decided to cut it. Murray’s reaction was, ‘Wait — I’m a public employee! You have no right to fire me!’

She wasn’t a parent upset that her child’s school was dropping an art history class. She was a deadbeat public employee who didn’t want her job cut. No one was taking her course, but she thought taxpayers should be required to pay her salary anyway.'”

MORE.

UPDATED: They Call It "Quantitative Easing"

Debt, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, The West

“Quantitative Easing” is state-speak for the government monkeying with the money supply. “Fed head Ben Bernanke,” who tinkers all the time, has announced that inflation is too low, no less. “The solution?” writes Larry Kudlow, is to “punch up the money supply and punch down the dollar.” By another $1 trillion, I believe.

The increase in the money supply is in fact inflation. This legalized counterfeiting raises prices; the new money generates price hikes throughout the economy. However, it reaches the politically connected first. They get fat checks well before the general price increases caused by all the new money affect their purchasing power. Depreciation of the dollar spells higher prices and hardship for those of us who are removed from power and from the new money.

Then there’s hyperinflation.

“In a system with fractional reserve requirements, an increase in bank reserves can support a multiple expansion of deposits,” explains economist Anna J. Schwartz. “An increase in the supply of money works both through lowering interest rates, which spurs investment, and through putting more money in the hands of consumers, making them feel wealthier, and thus stimulating spending.”

They feel wealthier, but they are not, Schwartz ought to have added. Yes, and the outcome of “easing” is “malinvestment,” never sustainable investment. Any “recovery” invariably reported by the polls is a result of this “easing,” which further serves to mask economic reality.

UPDATE (Sept. 29): Such artificial expansions of the money supply cannot but result in a massive misallocation of scarce resources, enormous waste, and, eventually, a drastic lowering of the standards of living for all.

As is argued in the July 2010 issue of The Free Market, a publication of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, the current, unprecedented expansion, will impact our very civilization, throwing us backwards to more atavistic times.

UPDATED: They Call It “Quantitative Easing”

Debt, Economy, Federal Reserve Bank, Inflation, The West

“Quantitative Easing” is state-speak for the government monkeying with the money supply. “Fed head Ben Bernanke,” who tinkers all the time, has announced that inflation is too low, no less. “The solution?” writes Larry Kudlow, is to “punch up the money supply and punch down the dollar.” By another $1 trillion, I believe.

The increase in the money supply is in fact inflation. This legalized counterfeiting raises prices; the new money generates price hikes throughout the economy. However, it reaches the politically connected first. They get fat checks well before the general price increases caused by all the new money affect their purchasing power. Depreciation of the dollar spells higher prices and hardship for those of us who are removed from power and from the new money.

Then there’s hyperinflation.

“In a system with fractional reserve requirements, an increase in bank reserves can support a multiple expansion of deposits,” explains economist Anna J. Schwartz. “An increase in the supply of money works both through lowering interest rates, which spurs investment, and through putting more money in the hands of consumers, making them feel wealthier, and thus stimulating spending.”

They feel wealthier, but they are not, Schwartz ought to have added. Yes, and the outcome of “easing” is “malinvestment,” never sustainable investment. Any “recovery” invariably reported by the polls is a result of this “easing,” which further serves to mask economic reality.

UPDATE (Sept. 29): Such artificial expansions of the money supply cannot but result in a massive misallocation of scarce resources, enormous waste, and, eventually, a drastic lowering of the standards of living for all.

As is argued in the July 2010 issue of The Free Market, a publication of the Ludwig Von Mises Institute, the current, unprecedented expansion, will impact our very civilization, throwing us backwards to more atavistic times.