Wednesday Morning Reads

Posted: November 24, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: morning reads | Tags: , , , , , , , | 65 Comments
Good Morning!!!

I thought I’d give you reason to be glad that Bobby Jindal the Terrible isn’t your governor.  He’s tearing around the country trying to start up his presidential wannabe campaign and we’ve just about had it with him.  This is from Baton Rouge’s The Advocate.  He singled out some woman professor as the poster child for unnecessary research in his new book.  He’s been out pimping for the book ala other Republican Governor Presidential Idiot Wannabes that want to be independently wealthy before they take the plunge to New Hampshire.  The poor anthropology professor was doing a longitudinal story on Russian Mail Order Brides and their U.S. husbands.  It turns out the research was funded by a grant and not tax payers too.  That didn’t stop Jindal from tearing into the article in his book or fact-checking his words or reading the article for that matter.

Read the entire Op-Ed piece and be appalled that some one with so many educational opportunities in his life wants to deny so many others that opportunity and force them into oil rig serfdom.  Baton Rouge is not exactly a bastion of liberalism so this piece may be a good sign that he’s wearing out his welcome here.   The article even sneakily mentions the one university that should be shut down and a trio of universities that should be merged because they are all in the middle of nowhere and have fewer students than most high schools. Jindal would never man up and do that. Instead he’s just draining ever useful and viable university by 1/3 of their budget a year. He’s sucking the life out of LSU, the med centers, and the law school.  LSU has consistently rated among the top public universities in the country.  Jindal obviously prefers we all go to community colleges instead.

Stop this man before he can do more damage any where else!!

Gov. Bobby Jindal’s machine of aides, bloggers, talk radio hosts and boutique publishers has turned its focus on college professors and what they do.

They attacked sabbatical study last week as a waste of money that takes teachers out of the classroom. The governor criticized scholarly study as unworthy of taxpayer dollars because such research fails to “create better lives and more job opportunities.”

At the base of this hubbub is Jindal’s apparent desire that higher education’s top officials just shut up and accept deep cuts he has planned for public college and university budgets
It all has the absurdity of season ticket holders dictating that the LSU Tigers no longer hold huddles because the quarterback’s primary job is to throw touchdowns.

If you haven’t ventured into Jindal’s ‘scholarly work’ at the New Oxford Review, please do so!!!   It’s called BEATING A DEMON ; Physical Dimensions of Spiritual Warfare. It’s all about participating in an exorcism.

”The crucifix had a calming effect on Susan, and her sister was soon brave enough to bring a Bible to her face. At first, Susan responded to biblical pas­sages with curses and profanities. Mixed in with her vile attacks were short and desperate pleas for help. In the same breath that she attacked Christ, the Bible’s authenticity, and everyone assembled in prayer, Susan would suddenly urge us to rescue her. It appeared as if we were observing a tremendous battle between the Susan we knew and loved and some strange evil force. But the momentum had shifted and we now sensed that victory was at hand.”

Maybe Jindal the Terrible should consider signing up for the new recruiting effort by the Catholic Church for exorcists and leave those of us that prefer science, rational thought, and education alone.  This is what you get when you vote for people without researching them carefully.

So, just when you think politicians couldn’t get any more elitist and just plain whacked, this brings me to something BostonBoomer, Pilgrim and I have been discussing.  The book is called ‘C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy’ by Jeff Sharlet.  It’s the follow-up to a book called ‘The Family’. Both let you know how many of our country’s most important institutions–like Congress and the military–have been invaded by crazy people.  Bart Stupak, John Ensign, Tom Coburn, and Jim Inhofe are among the resident nutjobs of this frat boyz for jeezus club.  This group of good ol’ boys supports some of the most villainous, heinous murders in the world you could imagine because they believe being rich is a sign that you are chosen by god.  They helped Papa Doc. They helped Suharto.  Here’s a bit from the author about David Coe, one of the C Street Family.

What was the concept? “Men who are picked by God!” Not the many, but the few. Under Coe’s guidance, Family politicians embraced the idea that God prefers the services of a dedicated elite to the devotion of the masses. “I have had a great and thrilling experience reading the condensed version of The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, ” one of Coe’s lieutenants wrote him after Coe had given him a reading list for “the Work,” as their mission was often called. “Doug, what a lesson in vision and perspective! Nazism started with seven guys around a table in the back of an old German Beer Hall. The world has been shaped so drastically by a few men who really want it such and so. How we need this same kind of stuff as a Hitler or a Lenin.” That is, for Jesus, of course

You don’t get to call it a Godwin when a group does it to itself on its own, do you?

Okay, so those poor little put out TSA staff are now speaking out about all the trauma that they have to endure.  People actually yell at them!!!  Poor babies!!!   This is from the Daily Mail.

‘It is not comfortable to come to work knowing full well that my hands will be feeling another man’s private parts, their butt, their inner thigh,’ one told the BoardingArea blog.

‘Even worse is having to try and feel inside the flab rolls of obese passengers and we seem to get a lot of obese passengers!’

Another said he had a huge problem dealing with a ‘large number of passengers… daily that have a problem understanding what personal hygiene is.’

Well, that’s a thought.  If you’re going to travel, don’t shower for days and that will certainly raise a stink for them!  What, they thought  they were only going to get to feel up super models?  Was that in the recruiting ads some where?  Maybe they should consider quitting or complaining to their boss, John Pistole.

Just a quick heads up. Wikileaks tweeted that Wikileaks said, “Next release is 7x the size of the Iraq War Logs. Intense pressure over it for months,” and asked supporters to continue donating to the cause.  We need to start up an Ellsberg Prize for Truth.

The always outspoken Congressman Barny Frank defended Ben Bernanke and the QE2. Additionally he called Republican detractors to be more in line with China than U.S. interests.

Frank said that in the absence of additional fiscal measures, the Fed’s asset purchases are an appropriate response.

“I wish we had some more fiscal stimulus,” said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat. “In the absence of that, given unemployment, given the complete absence of inflation, he is doing a very reasonable thing.”

The Fed has been making speeches before congress and exercising monetary policy in concern of both inflation and unemployment since the Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Law was passed in 1978.  I wasn’t really aware that there was anything questionable about that goal until Bostonboomer called my attention to this over at the NYT.
It seems that some Republicans want to limit the Fed’s policy scope to inflation fighting only.  This further convinces me that they have no interest in putting Americans back to work.  I’ve pretty much decided that most of the hoopla over QE2 is from financial interests who really don’t want to lend money at reasonable rates any more.  This also brings me in mind of that thought.

The Fed’s being using a modified Taylor rule for some time and has very much taken a stand in keeping with Anna Schwartz and  Milton Friedman’s seminal work on the Great Depression.  That’s the CONSERVATIVE economist Milton Friedman, remember him?  He basically said that the FED botched monetary policy and let deflation ruin the economy. What most conservatives don’t get these days–probably because they never actually both to read anything factual–is that Friedman’s analysis owes a lot to Keynes.

Read this and see if you see any similarities.

FDR was inaugurated on March 4, 1933, and two days later he declared a “bank holiday,” allowing banks legally to refuse withdrawals by depositors; it lasted ten days. With his famous phrase, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” he intended to dissuade depositors from running on their banks, but by then it was far too late. In 1929 there were a total of 25,000 banks in the United States. As the bank holiday ended, only 12,000 banks were operating (though another 3,000 were to reopen eventually). The effect on the money supply was equally dramatic. From 1929 to 1933 it fell by 27 percent—for every $3 in circulation in 1929 (whether in currency or deposits), only $2 was left in 1933. Such a drastic fall in the money supply inevitably led to a massive decrease in aggregate demand. People’s savings were wiped out so their natural response was to save more to compensate, leading to plummeting consumption spending. Naturally, total economic output also fell dramatically: GDP was 29 percent lower in 1933 than in 1929. And the unemployment rate hit its historic high of 25 percent in 1933.

Friedman and Schwartz argued that all this was due to the Fed’s failure to carry out its assigned role as the lender of last resort. Rather than providing liquidity through loans, the Fed just watched as banks dropped like flies, seemingly oblivious to the effect this would have on the money supply. The Fed could have offset the decrease created by bank failures by engaging in bond purchases, but it did not. As Milton and Rose Friedman wrote in Free to Choose:

The [Federal Reserve] System could have provided a far better solution by engaging in large-scale open market purchases of government bonds. That would have provided banks with additional cash to meet the demands of their depositors. That would have ended—or at least sharply reduced—the stream of bank failures and have prevented the public’s attempted conversion of deposits into currency from reducing the quantity of money. Unfortunately, the Fed’s actions were hesitant and small. In the main, it stood idly by and let the crisis take its course—a pattern of behavior that was to be repeated again and again during the next two years.

According to Friedman and Schwartz, this was a complete abdication of the Fed’s core responsibilities—responsibilities it had taken away from the commercial bank clearinghouses that had acted to mitigate panics before 1914—and was the primary cause of the Great Depression.

Okay, what exactly is the QE2 then?  It’s large scale buying of treasury bonds.  Why are they doing it?  Because the Federal Government is not doing it’s job with the fiscal policy end.  We had a stimulus that was way too weak and way too loaded with stuff that doesn’t stimulate very well and now we’ve got these idiots around talking about deficits and inflation.  It’s like their trying to actively sabotage the economy!

Alright, well, I think I’m hitting MABLUE’s limit for being long winded so I’ll stop now. I need to go to the grocery store and see a man about some trade statistics.

What’s on your blogging and reading list today?