THIS GUY SHOULD NOT BE ON THE FEDERAL RESERVE BOARD

The WSJ has some juicy quotes from the recently released minutes of the 2008 Fed meetings & this is the best one:

June 24-25 Meeting: Fed Holds Rates Steady at 2%

Richard Fisher
Dallas Fed President

"So, Mr. Chairman, I would say that currently our patient—the economy—is indeed a sick puppy. … I think we have, like loyal practitioners and with the equivalent of the Hippocratic oath, done the job that we are expected to do in terms of resuscitating the victim. That is the good news. The real bad news is that our patient appears to be acquiring a staph infection in this hospital that we have created, and that staph infection is inflation. "

UPDATE: Shahien Nasiripour and Zach Carter found another super-genius:

Some of the more vocal committee participants, such as James Bullard, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, argued in 2008's pre-September months there was little, if not “zero,” systemic risk in the financial system.

A TINY PUZZLE SOLVED

I've read in a few places that in the Ukraine, it's mostly the people who live in the western part of the country that want stronger ties with the EU so I was a bit surprised to read that the Ukrainian parliament had voted "unanimously" to impeach Pres. Yanukovyc.  The problem seems to be that many news sources didn't know how many delegates were in the parliament, so they mistakenly went with unanimous instead of the correct "328 of the 447 deputies."

THE STATE OF THE GOP

I think Ted Nugent is at best a distraction and at worst, well I'm not sure how low he can go so I can't say.  He recently called Pres. Obama a "subhuman mongrel" and a "chimpanzee" and the reaction of several GOP luminaries was a real disappointment.  Sarah Palin indicated that Ted Nugent is A-OK in her book, Rick Perry clearly didn't want to talk about Nugent and Sen. Ted Cruz clumsily avoided denouncing Nugent. 

Sen. Rand Paul is the only major GOP figure to unabashedly denounce Nugent.

UPDATE: Sen. McCain also denounced Nugent.

STAND AGAINST RELIGIOUS BIGOTRY

Please urge Gov. Jan Brewer to veto the Bigotry Bill, SB 1062. This page has several ways to get in touch with her.

NO, THEY'RE JUST STUPID & INCOMPETENT

In 2012, Mitt Romney invested serious money in Project Orca, "an expensive technological undertaking that was supposed to provide the campaign with real-time poll monitoring that would allow Republicans to target GOTV efforts on Election Day." (Business Insider) By all accounts, it was a huge FAIL:

ORCA failed miserably. In a fascinating piece for Ace of Spades, Romney poll-watcher John Ekdahl describes a perfect storm of technology problems that made the ORCA app unusable and left scores of Republican volunteers "wandering around confused and frustrated" on Election Day.
 
Worse still, Ekdahl told Business Insider that the Romney campaign failed to provide poll-watching volunteers in his region — Jacksonville, Florida, a key Republican city in a major swing state — with proper credentials and accurate voter strike lists, rendering them unable to perform their duties even if the ORCA app had worked. 

Alex Roarty writes that the GOP has a "talent gap" but he fails to drive home the point: the GOP's base, the GOP's media, the GOP's think tanks and the GOP's elite are all full of fuck-ups and that problem can't be solved by any amount of technology.

HOOVER SAID BASCIALLY THE SAME THING IN 1931

David Brooks put s few hundred words together for not much purpose but he did manage to give away the scam he's running by praising an article by Arthur C. Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, where he is also the Beth and Ravenel Curry Scholar in Free Enterprise.  Here's where Arthur shows that he's 80 years behind liberals:

The first pillar is personal moral transformation. 

The banksters need moral transformation more than the bottom 10%.

MAYBE THIS WILL NUDGE THE NEWS MEDIA

Coast to Coast AM had a bankster story yesterday that mentioned the recent scandals and that makes it about as good as most regular news shows:

Banking Cartels/ RV Predictions

Date:	02-20-14
Host:	George Noory
Guests:	_ V, Major Ed Dames

First Half: Former commodities trader and contributor to private think tanks dealing with geo-strategic initiatives, V, will discuss how powerful cartels have manipulated world events over past decades to further the international banking agenda. He'll also talk about the recent mysterious deaths of three JPMorgan bankers.

IF I TOLD YOU THAT THE CURE FOR BACTERIAL INFECTIONS WAS...

(h/t Atrios)

to gradually eliminate antibiotics, you would be justified in thinking that I was a quack.  Following that logic, Sen. Mike Lee is at best a quack because his idea to lessen poverty is to cut anti-poverty programs:

Tea Party's Mike Lee leads unlikely Republican push against poverty

Paul Lewis in Washington
theguardian.com
Wednesday 19 February 2014 09.54 EST

His latest contribution was a bill, introduced last week, that would restore a work requirement for recipients of food stamps that was first introduced by president Bill Clinton in 1996.

Joshua Smith, a senior policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a liberal thinktank, described the measure as “completely backwards logic”, because it wrongly assumes there are swaths of unemployed people who would work if only they were given a nudge. “In fact, it pretty clear the problem is a lack of labor demand,” he said.

Smith is even more scathing of another proposal contained in Lee’s bill: capping means-tested welfare spending at 2007 levels, a move the senator says will save $2.5tn. The reduction would be adjusted for inflation, phased in over three years, and only come into force when unemployment is below 6%.

But it still constitutes a dramatic reduction on government money spent on the poor – distorting a budget that ordinarily rises and falls depending on the performance of the economy. “It doesn’t make sense,” Smith said. “It can only hurt the most vulnerable people.”

Asked who would bear the burden of the massive welfare cut, Lee was non-committal. “It would have to be worked out between the various state programs, in figuring out how they are going to do more with less money,” he said.

JUST LIKE FOX NEWS, MOST CONSERVATIVE RADIO LISTENERS...

are over 64 years old.  From Nielsen:

January 2014 PPM Markets Top 5 Formats by Average Quarter Hour Share (Full Week Daypart)

Persons 6+	Adults 18-34	Adults 25-54
News/Talk (9.3%)	Pop CHR (12.7%)	Pop CHR (9.0%)
Pop CHR (8.2%)	Country (9.1%)	Country (7.5%)
Country (7.6%)	Rhythmic CHR (7.1%)	AC (7.1%)
AC (7.4%)	Hot AC (6.7%)	Hot AC (6.6%)
Hot AC (5.9%)	AC (6.2%)	News/Talk (6.5%)

HERBERT HOOVER, THE GREAT DEPRESSION & THE WORLD WAR I VETERANS

After World War i, a concerted effort to increase the compensation for veterans finally succeeded in 1924 with the passage of a compensation package over the veto of Calvin Coolidge:

A compensation measure worked its way through Congress by the fall of 1922, but President Warren Harding vetoed it, an action in keeping with Treasury Secretary Mellon's drive to avoid all unnecessary government expenditures. Undeterred, the veterans’ groups kept up the pressure and succeeded in gaining passage of what was popularly known as the Soldiers' Bonus Act in the spring of 1924. Calvin Coolidge’s veto of the measure was overridden.

Provisions of this law applied to veterans who had held the rank of captain or below and provided:

Adjusted compensation was to be paid at the rate of $1.25 per day for time spent in foreign service and at the rate of $1 per day for domestic service.

The sum earned by veterans was not to be paid in cash, but was to be used to create a 20-year endowment; in the short term, participants were entitled to borrow up to 22.5 percent of the value of the fund.

Veterans and their advocates were not satisfied with this measure and pressed immediately for cash settlements. The Republican presidents and legislators of the later 1920s resisted those appeals and the issue would continue into the next decade.

In 1931, President Hoover vetoed a bill that would have provided badly needed money to veterans caught up in the Great Depression, in part because

"It is therefore urgent in any event that local committees continue relief to veterans, but this legislation would lead such local committees and employers to assume that these veterans have been provided for by the Federal Treasury, and thereby threatens them with greater hardships than before. The breach of fundamental principle in this proposal is the requirement of the Federal Government to provide an enormous sum of money to a vast majority who are able to care for themselves and who are caring for themselves.
[snip]
The need of our people to-day is a decrease in the burden of taxes and unemployment, yet they (who include the veterans) are being steadily forced toward higher tax levels and lessened employment by such acts as this.
[snip]
The matter under consideration is of grave importance in itself; but of much graver importance is the whole tendency to open the Federal Treasury to a thousand purposes, many admirable in their intentions but in which the proponents fail or do not care to see that with such beginnings many of them insidiously consume more and more of the savings and the labor of our people. In aggregate they threaten burdens beyond the ability of our country normally to bear; and, of far higher importance, each of them breaks the barriers of self-reliance and self-support in our people.

CONSERVATIVES & EMAIL

Back in 2007, Karl Rove was caught using an RNC email system when he shouldn't have because he was a presidential adviser and it seems Scott Walker did pretty much the same thing:

Emails tie Walker to secret email system; give fodder to GOP

By Patrick Marley, Daniel Bice, Bill Glauber and
Kevin Crowe of the Journal Sentinel
Updated: 7:56 p.m.

Madison — Thousands of documents unsealed Wednesday revealed the closest links yet between Gov. Scott Walker and a secret email system used in his office when he was Milwaukee County executive, but also provided fuel for Republicans who believe a probe targeting his aides was politically motivated.

Court documents have previously shown Walker's aides set up a secret wireless router in the county executive's office and traded emails that mixed county and campaign business on Gmail and Yahoo accounts.

EXTREME FUNDIE MURDERERS

I would like to read a defense of these two because they just took regular Fundie teaching a couple of steps further.

Pa. couple sent to prison for 2nd prayer death
By MARYCLAIRE DALE 4 hours ago
AP

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A couple who believes in faith-healing were sentenced Wednesday to 3½ to seven years in prison in the death of a second child who never saw a doctor despite being stricken with pneumonia.

Herbert and Catherine Schaible defied a court order to get medical care for their children after their 2-year-old son, Kent, died in 2009. Instead, they tried to comfort and pray over 8-month-old Brandon last year as he, too, died of treatable pneumonia

Experts say about a dozen U.S. children die in faith-healing cases each year.

The Schaibles are the rare couple to lose a second child that way. Their pastor, Nelson Clark, blamed Kent's death on a "spiritual lack" in the parents' lives, and insisted they would never seek medical care, even if another child was dying.

UPDATE: I found some defenders on the Yahoo News comment thread:

James 5 hours ago
64 down votes
6 up votes

You may not agree with their religious positions, but they have the RIGHT BY LAW to practice their faith as they see it. The child is THEIR responsibility, not the state's. And I've heard nothing to suggest the child was abused. No, they didn't LET the child die, they did what they believe in to do all they could to heal the child. You don't have to agree with them but BY LAW THAT IS THEIR RIGHT!!! This is just more overreach by a blue state into people's private lives.

A guy 1 hour ago
23 down votes
1 up vote

If it wasn't for church prayers I probably would have died as a kid. This is just another attempt at making God look bad. Look at those two, do you really think they prayed with faith? The devil has many ways of putting God down, don't fall for it.

MAYBE IT'S BECAUSE THEY KNOW SOME HISTORY

Since 2001, I've heard or read many conservatives express puzzlement over the tendency of American Jews to vote for Democrats instead of Republicans and perhaps one reason is the anti-Semitism promulgated by many conservatives since 1900.

The Liberty Lobby and the American Right (LLAR) documents some of the early conservatives/Fundies in the first half of  20th Century, including Father Denis Fahey, the author of The Mystical Body of Christ in the Modern World (1935).  Fahey considered Communism to be a plot of Jewish bankers and Marx an example of Jewish revolutionary messianism. (LLAR, p. 18) Money Creators (1935) by Gertrude Coogan is not rabidly anti-Semitic only because she uses the code "international bankers" instead of Jewish bankers. In Imperium (1949), Francis Parker Yockey adopted "an intense anti-Semitism which designated the Jew impersonally and symbolically as the agent of decomposition in modern civilization." (LLAR, p. 26)  For Earnest Sevier Cox, all you need to know is the title of one of his books, Teutonic Unity (1951).  There are several others named in LLAR, including post-WW II H.L. Mencken.

SEN. TED CRUZ IS ALSO A PRINCE OF IRONY

(h/t TPM)

He unintentionally describes grifters like himself:

"It's like they think the American people are just a bunch of rubes," Cruz said, referring to GOP senators who earlier promised to use the debt ceiling to fight for conservative fiscal reforms.

SUCKING UP TO THE FUNDIES

Both Dennis Prager and Mark Levin use polygamy and incest to argue against marriage equality and I assume Levin is doing this to appeal to the Fundies in his audience because they will be a crucial demographic for the Baggers in the 2014 elections. Prager has made a career out of Fundie sucking, so this is SOP for him.

MORE GRIFTING + CHECK THE TITLE

I subscribed to email newsletters from this new conservative group because I thought it might live up to its name.  I was wrong again.

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WORTH RE-STATING FROM AN INSIDER'S PERSPECTIVE

Kenneth Minogue is a past president of the Mont Pelerin Society and in this book review in the WSJ, he re-states a critique of F. A. Hayek that I made before:

Hayek, however, was convinced that even the mild social democracy of Clement Attlee's welfare state in Britain, in the late 1940s, would eventually degenerate into something resembling the totalitarian extremes of the Soviet system.

Today, thinkers such as Glenn Beck & Mark Levin carry on the Hayekian tradition of crying wolf.

TALKERS MAGAZINE IS FULL OF SHIT

It reports that same radio ratings for Limbaugh and Hannity despite the fact that they are now on lower rated stations.  The ratings for January (reported as February) are the same as reported in December.

ONE QUESTION

Why didn't the UN do this investigation 10, 20 or even 30 years ago?

'Abundant evidence' of crimes against humanity in North Korea, panel says
By Michael Pearson and Jason Hanna, CNN
updated 10:28 AM EST, Mon February 17, 2014

(CNN) -- A stunning catalog of torture and the widespread abuse of even the weakest of North Koreans reveal a portrait of a brutal state "that does not have any parallel in the contemporary world," a United Nations panel reported Monday.

North Korean leaders employ murder, torture, slavery, sexual violence, mass starvation and other abuses as tools to prop up the state and terrorize "the population into submission," the United Nations Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in North Korea said in its report.

EARLY NIELSEN RATINGS FOR THE GASBAGS

Tom Taylor Now has begun posting the latest ratings and it doesn't look too good for KEIB, the station Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck and other gasbags moved to in LA:

KEIB-AM+

Talk/Personality

0.2

0.1

0.4

The ratings aren't much better in NYC for Limbaugh and Hannity:

WOR-AM

News Talk Info.

1.4

1.4

1.7

The work of the groups Stop Rush and Flush Rush is really paying off.  There's more information about this movement at DKos.

LOCAL RADIO GOOD NEWS (I THINK)

Tom Taylor's NOW reports that we will have a new talker in Tucson and from the list of hosts, it doesn't seem to be yet another gasbag outlet:

Tucson’s KEVT (1210) goes talk today through an LMA with a group led by Jim Parisi. Tucson Weekly says the local talkshow host/entrepreneur explored several ways to put a new locally-based station on the air, and ultimately found the best way was to LMA Spanish Christian “Radio Vida 1210” KEVT, Sahuarita. The station runs 10,000 watts daytime and 1,000 watts (directional) at night, and remains under the ownership of Armando Zamora’s One Mart Corporation. The talent lineup confirmed so far is Steve Kass, 5-7am, Parisi, 7-10am, John C. Scott, 3-5pm, and Matthew Conde, 5-7pm. Nothing yet for middays. Nights and weekend, they’ll fill in with Fox Sports Radio. Parisi says he’d rather go with sports “as opposed to unknown national hosts overnight, that only people who are political addicts will enjoy...I want to have all kinds of topics.”

Parisi and Scott seem to be moderates and I don't know about Kass & Conde.

UPDATE: This may not be so good after all given the choice for national news:

National news will be provided by Glenn Beck's The Blaze, he [Parisi] said.

CORPORATIONS AND THE FOUNDERS...

billmon pointed out this post on the Founders conception of corporations and I recalled Jefferson's famous quote so I looked here for any other Founders on limiting corporations.  Here's are two snippets from James Madison:

ONE:

But besides the danger of a direct mixture of Religion & civil Gover[n]ment, there is an evil which ought to be guarded agst. in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by ecclesiastical Corporations. The power of all corporations, ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses.

TWO:

Incorporated Companies, with proper limitations & guards, may in particular cases, be useful; but they are at best a necessary evil only.

GREG MANKIW IS A DESPICABLE HACK

(h/t Atrios)

Who needs the Heritage Foundation or AEI when there are so many tenured professors who are willing to whitewash & perfume the banksters?  From Whiskey Fire:

"Greg Mankiw" is an exact anagram for "Grima Wormtongue." Look it up.

Those who work in banking, venture capital and other financial firms are in charge of allocating the economy’s investment resources. They decide, in a decentralized and competitive way, which companies and industries will shrink and which will grow. It makes sense that a nation would allocate many of its most talented and thus highly compensated individuals to the task.

MONEY TALKS LOUDLY (AS USUAL)

(h/t Atrios)

Digby reports on another anti-democratic consequence of Citizens United:

In a first of its kind case, federal prosecutors say a Mexican businessman funnelled more than $500,000 into U.S. political races through Super PACs and various shell companies. The alleged financial scheme is the first known instance of a foreign national exploiting the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision in order to influence U.S. elections.

You can read the full story here.