In the movie, ‘Indecent Proposal’, a rich man offers a husband $1,000,000.00 to bed his wife.  After initial resistance by the couple, the prompt cashing of his check was all the foreplay required. Although with the dawn came seller’s remorse, what was lost could never truly be regained.

    This film created many a conversation, oft rowdy discussions, about various topics focusing on the queries of ‘what would it take for you to ‘(fill in the blank)’.  Today, when applied to the political arena, at least in the hypothetical, it seems many would rather pimp out their spouse than vote for a candidate who doesn’t share their base political ideology.  

    Selling out one’s core paradigms when casting a ballot may not be in the same emotional and moral arena as desecrating our marital vows, but how we choose to vote does employ the same process we use when making any decision.  In the end, it always comes down to our own priorities and judgment.

Matt Taibbi has a recent blog giving his analysis of a  jobs bill signed into law by our President, Barack Obama. Taibbi believes it is a very bad law. He gives his view and quotes the opinion of others in position to have informed opinions.

The reign of Black-On-Black crime is over, but first an update:

NEWSFLASH

It seems that George Zimmerman's lawyers have quit because they cannot contact their client. Simultaneously, Zimmerman has set up a website requesting contributions  for his legal defense. Zimmerman defied his lawyer's advice and personally called the Special Attorney. The ex-lawyers believed that Zimmerman spoke to Sean Hannity of Fox News. Hannity confirmed the conversation with Zimmerman on his radio show. Hannity, at least, for now, refuses to state what he was told by Zimmerman. Reuters is reporting that the State's Attorney is holding a press conference within 72 hours.

Wonder who gets the money from the website? Wonder if the money will used to support a lifestyle in exile?

Now to the discussion at hand

Zimmerman's defenders have used the diversion of black-on-black crime in an attempt to stem criticism of the admitted murderer. The question goes up how can blacks focus on Zimmerman when Trayvon Martins are killed across the county everyday by blacks. Black on Black crime negates any murder of a black youth by anyone from another ethnic group.

     As we await the verdict of nine Supreme Court Justices on the constitutionality of all or part of the Affordable Care Act (ACA), it is worth asking what the remaining Republican Presidential nominees would create in its place. We know that they would have to create something, because each is committed to the rapid abolition of what they insist on calling “Obamacare”. Mitt Romney’s Plan for Jobs and Economic Growth is quite clear: “An Order to Pave the Way to End Obamacare,” it tells us, will be the first of “five executive orders for Day One” of a Romney presidency.[1] Newt Gingrich would be similarly engaged on the first day of his presidency. So too would Rick Santorum and Ron Paul. All four remaining Republican presidential candidates are enthusiastic First Day Abolitionists!

As I've been regaled with requests to blog (or more accurately, "get off my lawn, go shit on your own"), I've been looking for inspiration to return to a post (or reason to quit commenting at all, and Get.A.Life, as I often suggest to others).

It's not that I'm not inspired or urged on by events, with a chronic distaste in my mouth. But what to say that I haven't already said or is being droned on by others?

[yes, I posted something like 150 diaries of my own over the course of a couple of years - some serious, humorous, distasteful, incendiary, lame, and other aspects to my personality]

One reader's comment, "I call it Somerbyitis," almost got an "oh yeah" response, but it goes back to Greenwald and Digby and Gene Lyons' "Fool for Scandal".

I'm tired of people making shit up. Left, right, conservative, liberal, centrist, whatever.

Paul Krugman argues in a recent New York Times column  that right-wing critics of Ben Bernanke and his colleagues are trying to bully the Fed into a misguided obsession with inflation, and that “the truth is that we’d be better off if the Fed paid less attention to inflation and more attention to unemployment. Indeed, a bit more inflation would be a good thing, not a bad thing.”

Krugman is absolutely right to lament conservative pundits’ and politicians’ obsessions with inflation when tens of millions of Americans are languishing in unemployment, with all of the personal, social and economic misery and waste that unemployment entails.  But his argument, which assumes that the Fed can boost employment by engineering higher inflation, is problematic.  He defends the inflationist approach this way:

“For one thing, large parts of the private sector continue to be crippled by the overhang of debt accumulated during the bubble years; this debt burden is arguably the main thing holding private spending back and perpetuating the slump. Modest inflation would, however, reduce that overhang — by eroding the real value of that debt — and help promote the private-sector recovery we need. Meanwhile, other parts of the private sector (like much of corporate America) are sitting on large hoards of cash; the prospect of moderate inflation would make letting the cash just sit there less attractive, acting as a spur to investment — again, helping to promote overall recovery.”

I believe this is the wrong approach.  The Fed’s ability to boost employment is very limited, well-intentioned citations of the Fed’s full employment “mandate” notwithstanding.  Rather than looking to central bankers and the banking system to accomplish a task for which they are not really cut out, we should turn our attention back toward fiscal policy as the primary tool for bringing the country up to full employment and keeping it there.   And rather than seeking engineered inflation as the mechanism for boosting spending and employment, we should implement the MMT job guarantee proposal to achieve full employment and price stability at the same time.

... Read the rest at New Economic Perspectives

Even though Romney's prospects look dismal by virtue of today's polling matchups with the President, I would not count him out. And anyone who thinks this election will be won by more than a few points in the national popular vote is dreaming. Romney may look like a lost dog but he will be rescued by Karl Rove, Frank Luntz and the Super Pac money crowd, as well as the unlimited wealth of the Koch Brothers funneled into the election on his behalf.

As was predicted on this site previously, the onslaught of negative advertising from both camps will reduce this election to a choice between which candidate one dislikes the least. Having said that, Romney's numbers (if you exclude what seems to be an outlier in Rasmussen's national polling) have deteriorated rather quickly. Whereas for the last three years Obama has been on the defensive, it is now Romney who must make a comeback---particularly with women and Independents. 

Just to let you guys know what I am up to, I thought I would blog a blog about my new initiative, "The Bush Center Freedom Collection." This week, I hosted China founder Bob Fu who said, “President Bush is a compassionate and unwavering advocate for freedom, especially in China."

These days I tend to fly under the radar because I do what I do for the good of all humans and not for publicity (I told turd blossom to take a hike), but I wanted my buddies here at Dagblog and my friends at RedState to know what the little woman and I were doing with this new freedom emphasis. I plan to bring other freedom marchers to town as well.

After the ceremony, I invited Bob to break some boards with his karate (he said he wasn't into that so I was disappointed) and we all went to Asia kitchen for lunch (they have a great buffet). As you can see from the picture, Bob eats pretty good.

The recent exchange on the nature of banking among Paul Krugman, Scott Fullwiler, Steve Keen and others has been feisty and instructive.  But some readers might be left wondering whether the whole exercise is too wonky by half.   The anatomical details of banking systems might be juicy and interesting for the academics who like to dissect those systems and dig deep into their entrails.  But how significant are the details for practical questions of public policy?  They are in fact very significant.

The functional details of institutions matter, and without understanding how the banking system actually works it is impossible to distinguish causes from effects in our attempts to guide that system toward the service of the public good.  Conventional textbook models of banking and monetary systems are responsible for widespread commitment to the money multiplier and loanable funds models of the relationship between central bank reserves and the volume of bank lending.  Relying on these models, some prominent economists and pundits have been telling us throughout our recent economic crisis that we can address the problems of a stagnating economy and persistently high unemployment with the reserve management tools of monetary policy alone.

Read the rest at New Economic Perspectives