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Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza!

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Young Turks: Obama v. some reporter.

Garfunkel and Oats: Weed Card:

EARTH DAY 2011:

Newsy: G.O.P. struggles to find a candidate for POTUS.

Laura Flanders: Demonizing taxes and heightening inequality.

Young Turks: Sarah Palin’s disapproval is 61%. Oh…that’s in Alaska!

Seriously Trumped Up:

The “Don’t say Gay” bill introduced in Tennessee.

South Carolina teabaggers speak up:

Cenk: Boehner appoints high-priced lawyer ($520 per HOUR) to defend DOMA.

Nutcase Pastor Terry Jones accidentally fires his gun after meeting with Imam (via Crooks and Liars).

Apple Tracks:

TYT Network: Glenn Beck’s corn cow conspiracy.

White House: West Wing Week.

“Family Values” Sen. John Ensign Resigns:

Young Turks: The James O’Keefe “music video”.

Pap on FAUX News crushes opponent on “fair tax” issue.

ONN week in review: 268 feral cats removed from U.N Headquarters.

Cenk: Gov. Haley Barbour (R-MS) making outrageous statements about his state’s health care.

Maddow: The idiotic Bush color coded alert system is no more. Kiss your Terror Rainbow goodbye!

U.S. Budget:

Young Turks: Former Gov. Gary Johnson says end child labor laws.

Thom: Atlas Shrugged.

Laura Flanders: Another bad effect of the Citizens United decision:

Young Turks: The Glenn Beck comedy show.

Teabaggers get excited some times (via Crooks and Liars).

Newsy: Gov. Brewer vetoes birfer bill.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

Comments

  1. 1

    * Rep. Inslee (D-WA) wants answers from Apple.
    * Sen. Franken (D-MN) to Apple: You got some ’splaining to do on iPhone tracking (via Crooks and Liars).
    * ONN: Should the nation’s unemployed buy new Apple computers?

    Another reason Puddy doesn’t own Apple products. Golly this was known over a year ago.

    It’s not clear if other smartphones and tablet computers are logging such information on their users. And this week’s revelation that the Apple devices do wasn’t even new — some security experts began warning about the issue a year ago.

    But those same DUMMOCRAPTS took Apple’s DUMMOCRAPTIC Senate and Congressional contributions and Steve Jobs political largesse for the 2010 election cycle and turned a blind eye.

    I love it when DUMMOCRAPTIC loving peeps hide technology in devices and then surreptitiously spy on their fellow DUMMOCRAPTS for like PIED PIPER sheep buy it. Apple been tracking peeps immediately when you turn it on. Now where is that database kept so we can see what ylb and other leftist really do all day?

  2. 2

    Wow Darryl,

    12 links from the Mediaite LOSER Cenk. Must be something in the Anthropology Studies Department.

    “If this stuff is so crazy, why do they keep putting this guy on the TV?”

    Because Cenk has nothing else to discuss on his poorly conceived and barely watched show.

  3. 3

    Somehow this was not a Friday Night Extravaganza even though this is hilarious…Best comment

    Oh yea; don’t forget racist. If you do not redistribute your GPA and any of the students with low grades are Minorities, you are most definitely RACIST!!

  4. 4

    Maddow is providing great coverage of how Michigan municipalities are being kicked when they’re down by state-appointed emergency managers. Where’s the Tea Party on this tyranny, czar-abuse, and taxation without representation?

    Benton Harbor taken over to push golf club on public park site: http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.co.....ton-harbor

    Cops arrest Pregnant mothers in Detroit for protesting school closure: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26...../#42725827

    All Michigan at Maddow: http://maddowblog.msnbc.msn.com/michigan

  6. 6

    Getting back to the Apple iPhone issue, this didn’t make the Friday Night Leftist Funny Pages cuz it’s right wing but it explains the problem much more clearly than Darryl’s leftist links. Darryl’s links only focus on leftist political dynamics. Useless and worthless. But the best comment on leftist crooks and always liars was

    Suddenly “Late to the Party” Al realizes big brother exists? What a jackass.

    Somehow Darryl missed the real deal on those kook-aid sites…

    “Alright, so one day after learning of a hidden iPhone feature that tracks your every single move, there’s new concern that tracking technology purchased by police can lead to racial profiling,” Roberts said. “You are looking at what’s called the ‘Universal Forensic Extraction Device.’ It can copy the entire content of a cell phone including text messages, contacts, GPS data and do it in just minutes. Michigan State Police purchased this device, though we don’t know how exactly they’re using it but civil liberties groups worry that the device endangers the privacy rights of blacks and Latinos. A Nielsen study shows blacks talk on average twice as much each month on their cell phones as white counterparts.”

    Did you leftist know the leftist dominated “California Supreme Court just recently ruled that police officers can swipe or can take information from your cell phones upon arrest”? So ylb, when jo mama gets stopped in CA, what ya gonna do when they sieze her cell phone and track down your silly ASS?

    Yep leftist are 1984 George Orwell types. Like the cockroaches they are, when the light of day appears their actions stay when the cockroaches scatter.

  7. 7

    How cum Darryl didn’t include this in his Friday Night Comedy Links?

    Craig Newmark, Cissie Swig, Steve Westly and will.i.am each happily dropped $35,800 to dine with President Obama at billionaire Marc Benioff’s San Francisco home Wednesday evening. These are just some of the 85 famous names on the fundraiser’s guest list which was plainly visible to rubberneckers as attendees checked in. Combined, Obama’s take for the 90-minute event was a cool $3 million — or $3,043,000 to be exact (85 guests x $35,800 each).

    Will these rich doofuses be paying Obummers higher tax rates? The economy continues down the toilet and Obummer is campaigning already.

  8. 8

    This was also missed the Friday Night Comedy Hour…

    “The White House is terrified of the gas price issue because many of their policies – like the national energy tax – are explicitly designed to raise energy prices,” said Michael Steel, a spokesman for House Speaker John Boehner. “It was the President himself who said [in 2008] that under his plan, electricity prices would ‘necessarily skyrocket.’” Steel said.

    And this too…

    “The Justice Department and every agency might want to check with the Secretary of the Interior who is restricting oil supplies deliberately” at the request of the environmentalist lobby, Kish responded. “They might want to check the Federal Reserve to ask [Fed chairman Ben] Bernanke why he is dropping the price of the dollar and pushing the price of oil up through the roof,” he said. International gas prices are set in dollars, and gas prices rise as the dollar declines in exchange value. Over the last year, for example, the value of each dollar has declined by 9 percent compared to the Euro, partly because the Treasury Department is increasing the quantity of U.S dollars. “It is Obama’s own policies that are creating the problem,” Kish said.

    The economy is crumbling and those facts pass Darryl by.

  9. 9

    And this from the leftist NY Times was skipped by Darryl… Must be this paragraph…

    And slightly more Americans approve than disapprove of a proposal by Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin to change Medicare from a program that pays doctors and hospitals directly for treating older people to one in which the government helps such patients pay for private plans, though that support derived more from Republicans and independents. A recent Washington Post/ABC News poll that found 65 percent opposed Mr. Ryan’s plan, suggesting results can vary based on how the question is asked.

    Of course… ABC has George Steponallofus as one of their lead anchors and he’s definitely in the DUMMOCRAPTIC Tank!

  10. 10

    My my my… this would have made Darryl’s top five list if it was GWBush in office… It’s only $125 Billion!

    Or this too… ICE is only doing Eric Holder’s bidding…

  13. 13

    Stupid loves stupid and stupid hates what it doesn’t understand.

    That’s why you are stupid ylb.

  14. 14

    Why isn’t Darryl interested in this? It didn’t make any of his Friday Night Funny Pages.

    On March 28th, I had a post on the Big Government website that highlighted the details of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) ‘Operation Gun Runner.’ This operation, sometimes called by the name ‘Fast and Furious,’ entailed selling thousands of guns to known Mexican criminals in the U.S., allowing the weapons to be carried into Mexico, and tracing the movement of the guns in hopes of catching major players in the Mexican Cartel.

    So why is this sad sad sadministration arming Mexican Cartels? Why are they stonewalling the family of Border Agent Brian Terry killed in the line of duty with one of these guns?

  17. 17

    Wasn’t it the stupid one above who once wrote liberals can disagree with each other now and then? Wait a minute… he’s too stupid to remember without the databazze!

  18. 18

    16 – Poor Puddybud – his beloved Beck threw his beloved Breitbart under the bus..

    Is his beloved Breitbart saying that Beck was the one who deceptively edited the Sherrod video?

    Not paying all that close attention to those morons but it’ll all come out in court I’m sure.

  19. 19

    Home sales are still in the toilet, except for the sales of smaller urban homes and town homes. You know, the type of places that our trolls tell us only a handful of hipsters will buy,

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04.....using.html

    Sales of new single-family homes in February were down more than 80 percent from the 2005 peak, far exceeding the 28 percent drop in existing home sales. New single-family sales are now lower than at any point since the data was first collected in 1963, when the nation had 120 million fewer residents.

    Builders and analysts say a long-term shift in behavior seems to be under way.

    Instead of wanting the biggest and the newest, even if it requires a long commute, buyers now demand something smaller, cheaper and, thanks to $4-a-gallon gas, as close to their jobs as possible.

    Builders like Mr. Meier who specialize in putting up entire neighborhoods on a city’s outskirts — Richmond is some 50 miles northwest of downtown Chicago — cannot compete despite chopping prices.

  20. 20

    so little run down inner city houses townhomes are cheap….your point?

    The wannabe hipsters dont buy those and never have.

  23. 23

    not gonna happen in this area….just too many things going against that type of growth – foremost being city leaders and planners themselves….

  24. 24

    @22

    if thats true, then fine with me. The less people coming out here the better.

    BTW, new housing construction is going on all over the place out here now….

  25. 25

    ..and I highly doubt places like Gig Harbor are “about done”…Gig Harbor is a great area.

  26. 26

    Several of my comments intended for this thread ended up in the “On Initiatives” thread because my new security software is causing my browser to act up. I won’t bother to repost them here; you can read them there.

  27. 27

    @15 “Pelletizer: It is well known China is slant drilling in the Gulf. Your pea-brain rabbit mind can’t figger it out while others can.”

    Geez, you have a better memory than I do! I’d forgotten that zinger. But then, that’s not real surprising, given that puddinghead posted it back in June of ’08.

    In order for China to slant-drill under the Gulf, they’d need a drillpipe several thousand miles long (or several hundred miles long, if they can find a friendly Caribbean country to host their drill rig). Or drill through the center of the earth and come out the other side. Even Exxon doesn’t have technology like that.

    If China could slant drill their way to oil riches, they’d do it to Vietnam in the South China sea. They don’t have to dig nearly as far there, and that area may have more oil, too.

    Puddy long ago ceased to be even remotely coherent. He became a babbling fool years ago. So it’s not very shocking that he posted something as idiotic as this, even as long ago as 2008.

  28. 28

    You gotta laugh! When “The Donald” jumps in and immediately shoots to the top of GOP popularity polls, that tells you just how weak the GOP field is doesn’t it?

  29. 29

    if they can find a friendly Caribbean country to host their drill rig

    The country was/is Cuba. AFAIK that deal is on – I have no idea if a rig as of yet has been put up or not but the slant drilling crap back in ’08 was a total right wing fantasy..

    And the right wing idiot brigade brought that one in right on cue…

    Including the most credulous one of them all – Puddybud.

  30. 30

    @25

    Last I checked Gig Harbor was a city (well town anyway). There’s a bunch of building going on in side of the city right now, most of it’s condos and smaller homes. ;-)

    if thats true, then fine with me. The less people coming out here the better.

    Exactly.

  31. 31

    Sorry $5+ oil is going to KILL the suburbs in this country – no two ways about it. This country is incapable of handling gas prices that high – not like in Europe and other places where they’ve had those prices since at least the 70’s.

    Shit I remember the days of the hyper-commuters in California. Fools driving 100+ miles daily.

    That shit will be the first to go if it hasn’t already.

    Sadly there’s goes any hope of quick relief on the economic front. The whole economic growth model of this country and to a decent extent the rest of the world is structured around cheap fuel. Either we find another cheap fuel or the model has to change.

  33. 33

    @31..

    LMFAO…if you say so.

    Trust me, gas could got to $20 a gallon and I wont move my family to that shithole you call a city.

    the wannabe hipsters will continue to hit the city…so be it.

    when they finally grow up and decide to have a family, they will leave, just like they have always done.

  34. 34

    @31
    It’s already happening. Sun Belt track-home meccas like Phoenix and Las Vegas are starting to dry up and blow away. The sprawl outside of Minneapolis is mostly vacant.

    @19
    A little sloppy on my part, what we’re really talking about is growth within incorporated areas V. track home suburbia in outlying areas. Altho, places like Cleveland* where the county it’s in (Cuyahoga) is losing population, the population of the traditional urban core is growing. City living really is on the rise and isn’t something for just a handful of hipsters.

    *Why the fuck anyone would want to live in Cleveland is still baffling the experts.

  35. 35

    33 – Cling to whatever idiocy you like. Things are going to change whether you like it or not. This planet isn’t making enough oil to keep up with dipshits like you.

    My kids are growing up just fine.

    Any Columbines here? Nope.

  37. 37

    I think we are gonna contribute to globull worming again tonight – time for a nice big outdoor fire(can you even do that in seattle?), smores for the kids, wine for the wife, and a cigar for dad.

    kicking back with the stars overhead…

    god I love making greenhouse gases and burning wood.

  38. 38

    @33

    the wannabe hipsters will continue to hit the city…so be it.

    Spokane has population of round about 209,000 people in it and is fairly hipster free. I’d move back there in a heart beat.

    when they finally grow up and decide to have a family, they will leave, just like they have always done.

    Yeah, ’cause there’s no schools or kids in Seattle.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.....l_District

    when they finally grow up and decide to have a family, they will leave, just like they have always done.

    Actually, it’s the suburbs that are a new thing.

  39. 39

    On the subject of “shitholes” – quite a few dense urban hellholes are represented on this list:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_shooting (scroll a quarter’s way down).

    In WA, Seattle(the UW shooting) and one shooting in Tacoma are there..

    But so is one in Moses Lake – isn’t that a right wing paradise of some kind??

    Gee why would kids want to kill kids with guns in a right wing piece of heaven on earth?

  44. 44

    Tenderhands YLBleeder is like a bonus puppet: you tug on his strings once, and he jumps for you three times.

    3 words Tenderhands: Big….Roaring….Bonfire..

    smell them greenhouse gases…LOVE IT!

  46. 46

    Big….Roaring….Bonfire..

    I’ll complete the picture – moronic dumbass who says the U.S. buys Iranian oil in the middle of his lonesome pines “acreage” (all trees mowed down to minimize the fire hazard), serenaded 24/7 by barking rottys and pit bulls grabs his ankles.

    Wife and kids put bic lighter to exposed butthole and …

    Huzzah! The Olympic torch for willfully ignorant right wing troll dipshits.

  47. 47

    In order for China to slant-drill under the Gulf, they’d need a drillpipe several thousand miles long (or several hundred miles long, if they can find a friendly Caribbean country to host their drill rig

    CUBA Roger Dumb Bunny.

  48. 48

    Ummmm here is a classic

    Take the test. Take the test. Oh… it’s fake!

  49. 49

    48 – Yawwwwn…. You’re the only right winger batshit insane enough to brag about his junk to his own sockpuppet and never give it second thought that he’d be called on it.

    Anyone want the link just ask..

  50. 50

    Ohhh poor ylb@49… doesn’t like to remember his crazy!

    LMBBAO! If you are sleepy take a nap moron!

    Take the test fool!

    HAHAHAHAHAHAHA

  51. 51

    Hey el stupido ylb… I gots more of your crazy and I don’t need a databazzze

  54. 54

    @31 People have known for years that the era of cheap oil was coming to a close. Anyone who bought a house 50 miles from their job within the last 10 years is a damned fool.

  55. 55

    @33 “Trust me, gas could got to $20 a gallon and I wont move my family to that shithole you call a city.”

    Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Please buy $20 gas from the oil companies whose stocks I own! You’re paying for my retirement. And I do appreciate your business.

  56. 56

    Taking money from Republicans is my favorite spare-time activity. And I have a lot of spare time. I don’t have to work anymore thanks to capitalism.

  57. 57

    Where’s the comment link dummy? How’s the audience supposed to get what you mean?

    and yawwwn…. Only thing crazy about that is that it’s true.

    If Mike Webb’s grave was before you, you’d dance on it..

    Here’s a recent favorite:

    A fantasy about Goldy and a butt-plug.

    Money quote:

    I came even imagine that one.

    That one’s too unfreaking believable…

  58. 58

    Too stupid to fathom@57,

    Mike Webb was alive sucka. Gotta go. Things to do and you are NOT one of them.

    See ya moron!

  61. 61

    Rabbit,
    You are either a fool or just agitating for sport. The price of oil/fuel has less to do with speculation and oil company manipulation than the US pringing money out of thin air…

    There is ample supply. Producers have greater capacity. This isn’t supply and demand of the commodity, it’s a vast over supply of US Dollars.

    Thank you Mr. President.

  62. 62

    How To Stop Wasting $350 Billion A Year

    “‘Obama offers a false hope,’ says Dr. John Geyman, former chair of famil medicine at the University of Washington and author of Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It./em> ‘We cannot build on or tweak the present system. Different states have tried this. The problem is the private insurance industry itself. It is not as efficient as a publicly financed system. It fragments risk pools, skimming off the healthier part of the population and leaving hte rest uninsured or underinsured. Its administrative and overhead costs are five to eight times higher than public financing through Medicare. It cares more about its shareholders than its enrollees or patients. … [P]remiums … have gone up by 87 percent from 2000 to 2006. The insurance industry is pricing itself out of the market for an ever-larger part of the population. The industry resists regulation. It is unsustainable by present trends.’

    “Our health-care system is broken. There are some 46 million Americans without coverage and tens of millions with inadequate policies that severely limit what kinds of procedures adn treatments they can receive. Eighteen thousand people die, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can’t afford health care. …

    “The corporation that run our for-profit health-care industry would be shut down if single-payer, not-for-profit health-care was provided for all Americans. The for-profit health-care industry … has vigorously fought to protect itself through campaign contributions and lobbying. They have placed profit before the common good. A study by Harvard Medical School found that national health insurance would sve the country $350 billion a year.”

    Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion, pp. 155-156.

    http://www.amazon.com/Do-Not-R.....038;sr=8-2

    http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I.....038;sr=1-1

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: Now watch the Know-Nothings jump in here and tell us this is all a crock — they know more than a U.W. medical professor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Harvard Medical School put together!

    There’s a couple of things I want to say about Republicans right now. First of all, their deficit-slaying hero, Paul Ryan, wants to privatize Medicare. That’s going in exactly the wrong direction and will make a bad situation even worse. Secondly, they’re playing for small ball — they’re making a big deal of cutting $38 billion from the federal budget when our private health insurance industry is wastig $350 billion a year. So what do they do? They protect that industry and its perks, and try to give them more!!!!!! If you’re voting Republican, you’re voting for the wrong party. Why would anyone with half a brain do that??

  63. 63

    Hmmm, the italics in #62 are fucked up and there’s no edit function to fix it, so I think I’ll repost that comment.

  64. 64

    How To Stop Wasting $350 Billion A Year

    Executive Summary: Don’t Vote Republican!

    “‘Obama offers a false hope,’ says Dr. John Geyman, former chair of famil medicine at the University of Washington and author of Do Not Resuscitate: Why the Health Insurance Industry Is Dying, and How We Must Replace It. ‘We cannot build on or tweak the present system. Different states have tried this. The problem is the private insurance industry itself. It is not as efficient as a publicly financed system. It fragments risk pools, skimming off the healthier part of the population and leaving hte rest uninsured or underinsured. Its administrative and overhead costs are five to eight times higher than public financing through Medicare. It cares more about its shareholders than its enrollees or patients. … [P]remiums … have gone up by 87 percent from 2000 to 2006. The insurance industry is pricing itself out of the market for an ever-larger part of the population. The industry resists regulation. It is unsustainable by present trends.’

    “Our health-care system is broken. There are some 46 million Americans without coverage and tens of millions with inadequate policies that severely limit what kinds of procedures adn treatments they can receive. Eighteen thousand people die, according to the Institute of Medicine, every year because they can’t afford health care. …

    “The corporation that run our for-profit health-care industry would be shut down if single-payer, not-for-profit health-care was provided for all Americans. The for-profit health-care industry … has vigorously fought to protect itself through campaign contributions and lobbying. They have placed profit before the common good. A study by Harvard Medical School found that national health insurance would save the country $350 billion a year.”

    Chris Hedges, Empire of Illusion, pp. 155-156.

    http://www.amazon.com/Do-Not-R.....038;sr=8-2

    http://www.amazon.com/Empire-I.....038;sr=1-1

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: Now watch the Know-Nothings jump in here and tell us this is all a crock — they know more than a U.W. medical professor, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and Harvard Medical School put together!

    There’s a couple of things I want to say about Republicans right now. First of all, their deficit-slaying hero, Paul Ryan, wants to privatize Medicare. That’s going in exactly the wrong direction and will make a bad situation even worse. Secondly, they’re playing for small ball — they’re making a big deal of cutting $38 billion from the federal budget when our private health insurance industry is wastig $350 billion a year. So what do they do? They protect that industry and its perks, and try to give them more!!!!!! If you’re voting Republican, you’re voting for the wrong party. Why would anyone with half a brain do that??

  65. 65

    @61 “You are either a fool or just agitating for sport. The price of oil/fuel has less to do with speculation and oil company manipulation than the US pringing money out of thin air…”

    That’s exactly what I’ve been posting here for the last six months, you fucking idiot.

    Apparently you either haven’t read my posts and you can’t understand plain English. Or you’ve chosen to deliberately misrepresent my position on the subject.

  66. 66

    Although, to clarify and amplify, it’s not as simple as just the Fed expanding the money supply. I’ve been critical of QE2 for many months now, but there are other things going on: Growing demand from a reviving global economy, supply restraints caused by the shutdown of Libya’s oil production and Saudi Arabia’s production cut, and dollar-leery investors moving wealth into tangible assets including commodities like oil. There’s sort of a perfect storm going on. The ascent of oil prices was predicted over a year ago — that’s why I started loading up on oil stocks in January 2010. And the current oil price cycle is close to peaking — that’s why I’ve begun taking profits on my oil stocks (I sold off about 20% of my holdings this month.)

  67. 67

    In case anyone else here has misinterpreted by posts, let me be explicit: I don’t believe oil companies are manipulating the market, nor do I believe speculators are causing high oil prices. Oil has gone up for the reasons stated above.

  68. 68

    @61 (continued) Obama doesn’t control money supply, Bernanke does, so if you want to bitch about M2 or M3, blame Bernanke. He’s not Obama’s employee, he acts independently of the White House. And he’s your guy — a Republican, a Wall Street type, appointed by Bush after chairing Bush’s council of economic advisers.

    Bernanke and Geithner were among the people who are blameworthy for the financial crisis. But they also helped fix it. When the shit hit the fan, they and Bush and Obama did exactly the right things, and saved us from Great Depression 2.0.

    When the financial system imploded, bailing out the banks was the right move. Hoover’s failure to do this in 1930 was a major cause of the Great Depression. This generation of presidents and economic policymakers was smarter and prevented the financial system from plunging into a death spiral. And the bank bailout cost taxpayers nothing; we got all our money back. Only conservatives are idiotic enough to criticize a policy that saved the world’s economy and cost nothing.

    Bernanke was also right in pouring money into circulation during the darkest hours of the credit collapse. Almost overnight, cash hoarding sucked three trillion dollars from the economy, causing a dramatic contraction of the money supply. This would have led to an economy-destroying deflation if Bernanke and the Federal Reserve hadn’t replaced that money by “printing” new money and putting it into circulation.

    The trick is to pull it back out of circulation when the sidelined money comes out of mattresses and moves back into circulation. Bernanke seems to think that has happened yet, but rising inflation says otherwise. His policies were sound, but his timing is off. Instead of expanding the money supply by another $600 billion, which is what QE2 is, he should be shrinking the money supply at a slow but steady rate. However, this miscue won’t be terribly destructive; we’ll get a little more inflation, but the damage will be nothing like it would have been if he hadn’t expanded the money supply at the critical point when it was drastically contracting.

    Son, you really should stick to posting on subjects you know something about, like rubbing your meat. Economics is beyond your mental faculties.

  70. 70

    Roger @66.
    I apologize. I had thought that you’re position was that of the professional left. That manipulators/speculators were inflating the price of oil/gas. The Obama cheer team is in full voice for the leadership he is showing….He appointed a commision to look into it…

    We agree with respect to QE and QE2. We disagree a bit on production and supply. The loss of any supply from Libya is a non-factor as surplus supply and capacity is available via other OPEC entities. Worlwide oil demand is lower than projected and, as the dollar is the world benchmark, prices are getting inflated due to a huge oversupply of dollars.
    Blips in price due to emotional (fear) trading are traditionally not long lived. The ME unrest has AN effect, but IMO it’s not the underlying issue.

    My apologies for lumping you in with the crowd….

  73. 73

    If The Donald(TM) wants to be preznit, he might help his cause by taking the trouble to vote for himself in the primary so, you know, he doesn’t get eliminated in the primary!

    “Donald Trump … didn’t vote in primary elections for more than two decades, according to the New York City Board of Elections.

    http://seattletimes.nwsource.c.....ump24.html

  74. 74

    @70 “The loss of any supply from Libya is a non-factor as surplus supply and capacity is available via other OPEC entities.”

    It’s a factor, and the reason it is, is because nobody else is making up the difference.

    One thing to keep in mind is that such “spare” production capacity as exists is mostly poorer quality crude, and many refineries can’t process that stuff. So, replacing the off-line Libyan crude isn’t as simple as the Saudis opening their spigot wider.

    But the Saudis have said there’s ample supply and we’re not seeing shortages in the market, so that does point to increased money supply as the underlying driving force.

    As everyone knows, when more dollars chase the same amount (or fewer) goods, each dollar is worth less and it takes more dollars to buy those goods.

  75. 75

    It’s important to note that a devalued dollar is not directly a result of operating budget deficits. Monetary policy, not public debt or deficits, drives money supply. And money supply, in turn, drives inflation (or deflation).

    Expanding the money supply is not bad, per se. An expanding economy that’s producing more goods and services needs a larger money supply to keep prices stable. If the supply of money remains fixed while output expands, dollars become scarcer and prices have to fall in order to stretch the supply of dollars over a greater quantity of goods and services. This neatly illustrates the problem with the gold standard: When money is tied to gold the supply of money in circulation can’t be expanded any faster than the physical supply of gold, which puts a brake on economic growth and causes deflation when output outstrips monetary expansion limited by new gold discoveries.

  76. 76

    @71 We import primarily from Canada, Mexico, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia with only about a quarter of our imported oil (i.e., about 15% of our total supply) coming from outside the Western Hemisphere.

  77. 77

    One thing to keep in mind is that such “spare” production capacity as exists is mostly poorer quality crude,

    And one of the reasons it’s poorer quality is because we’re post peak. It take more energy to get the stuff out of the ground, it take more energy to refine it and some refineries can’t handle the stuff. EROEI for the Tea Pot Dome era was around 200:1 I think it’s down around 20 now.

  78. 78

    @71

    We’re a long ways from fighting for the last drop of oil, but we are starting to feel the effects of the peak.

  79. 79

    @77 “And one of the reasons it’s poorer quality is because we’re post peak.”

    Actually, that doesn’t necessarily follow. Naturally you take the best quality stuff to market first. After the fresh eggs are sold out, you sell the stale eggs. This occurs even in a pre-peak market. The mere fact that some crude is less marketable than other crude doesn’t speak to whether we’re pre- or post-peak.

    Whether we’ve reached peak oil is a complex question. “Peak oil” is universally defined as the point at which oil production begins to fall and never again reaches that point. A decline in production, or even in production capacity, doesn’t necessarily mean production has peaked. A production or capacity decline can be temporary, and can occur for many reasons besides the physical availability of oil.

    My guess is that we probably haven’t reached peak oil yet. The reason I say that is because there’s still room to expand production as long as market prices support the recovery of harder-to-get oil. Here’s where that additional production might come from:

    1) Expanding pumping capacity in existing fields;
    2) Improving recovery from old fields using new technology;
    3) Reaching previously inaccessible reserves (such as deep sea) using new technology;
    4) Arctic oil becoming more accessible because of ice melthing; and
    5) Finding new reserves offshore, in polar regions, and that were previously bypassed because of better technology for locating and extracting hard-to-get oil.

    Whether oil production will increase in the future depends heavily on the willingness of governments (who control 90% of world reserves) and oil companies (who increasingly are merely exploration and extraction contractors) to invest in new production.

    Saudi Arabia is plowing billions of dollars into expanding its production capacity from about 8 million bpd to 12 million bpd. Some people question whether the Saudis can expand their output above present levels, but they seem to think so, or they wouldn’t be spending that money. The real investment story, though, is whether crude prices will stay high enough to support production from oil sands, deep sea deposits, and arctic oilfields, where costs can reach $60/bbl.

    My thinking is that if crude prices stay in a range of $80 – $100 for an extended time the industry will expand production capacity and output will grow above present levels. If prices somehow were frozen at $60 or even $40, then I think we’d peak right now, because the cheaper sources are already being exploited and the only place you can get the additional oil to expand production is from expensive sources.

  80. 80

    @78 Current estimates say that humanity in the last 150 years has gone through about half of the world’s original endowment of oil. As late as the 1940s and 1950s, conventional oil extraction technologies left up to two-thirds of the oil in the ground. It’s now feasible, technologically and economically, to go back to those oil fields and capture a good portion of the oil that was left behind by first-generation extractors. And we don’t really know how much is left out there to be discovered. There could be huge undiscovered oil deposits in the arctic, antarctic, and deep seabeds for all we know. And if you count the still largely unexploited oil sands and tar sands of Canada and Venezuela, then the “original supply” instantly quadruples and we’re very far from exhausting the planet’s supply of oil-in-the-ground. This, of course, ignores the environmental costs of digging it up — maybe some or all of that oil should be left where it is, as a matter of public policy, but in engineering and economic terms it’s becoming feasible to go out and get that oil.

  81. 81

    @79
    @77 “And one of the reasons it’s poorer quality is because we’re post peak.”

    Actually, that doesn’t necessarily follow.

    The lighter crude tends to get sucked off first (hehehe…) and wells lose pressure after they peak requiring more energy to pump the oil out.

    I’m being way more general than you are.

    Funny enough, Jenna at Cold Antler Farm has a peak oil post up. http://coldantlerfarm.blogspot.....eaked.html

  82. 82

    The 28th Amendment

    Roger Rabbit hereby proposes amending the Constitution of the United States. Currently there are 27 ratified amendments. I propose Amendment XXVIII which reads as follows:

    “A corporation is not a person, and does not have the rights granted to persons, by the constitutions and laws of the United States and the several states.”

  83. 83

    Science Tackles Religion

    No, this comment isn’t about scientists playing football with evangelists. It’s about an article in The Economist, a conservative-leaning U.K.-based opinion magazine.

    http://www.economist.com/node/18584074

    The upshot is that scientists are starting to study, objectively and dispassionately, why religion is so prevalent in human cultures and the psychology underlying religious practices.

    Even the atheists and agnostics (to you Muslim-hating trolls, infidels) among my liberal friends on this blog should find this interesting. Even though you think God is a superstition or magic or whatever, you may be intellectually curious about where religion comes from and want to understand the role it plays in human behavior. I certainly am.

    I’m interested to see how science explains these frequently-encountered aspects of religiosity:

    1) The broad belief in an omnipresent and judgmental being that has your thoughts and actions under constant surveillance;

    2) The related belief that evil is punished and virtue is rewarded by this omnipowerful being; and

    3) The reliance on rituals by virtually all religions.

    Read the article, think about this issues, and have fun pondering the imponderable.

  84. 84

    Roger Rabbit Book Review

    One of the things I do for my loyal fans on this blog is link them to interesting books that might otherwise escape their notice. (I know how busy all of you are.)

    I’m especially well qualified to do this, better than our trolls anyway, because I’m a voracious reader who consumes up to 100 books a year, whereas most of our trolls obviously never progressed beyond coloring books.

    Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges, in “Empire of Illusion,” paints a bleak picture of America in its final stages of collapse — then blows it by ending the book on a happy note … i.e., despite all the horrors inflicted on us by corporatists and oligarchs, love always conquer evil and “Hope exists. It will always exist. It will not come through structures or institutions, nor will it come through nation-states, but it will prevail, even if we as distinct individuals or civilizations vanish. The power of love is greater than the power of death.”

    Yeah, well, you have to be a Pollyanna if you wanna get published because who the hell would buy a book that’s a total downer? Personally, I think the guy’s a whore. I mean, really, look around you — the world is a shithouse. Wars. Genocides. Torture. Corruption. People like Stalin, Hitler, Gadhafi, and George W. Bush run governments. The future no doubt holds more of the same. So what the hell is there to be happy about? What is there to be hopeful about? Think about it, the most we can hope for is that Obama gets re-elected, some hope that is.

    I think you oughta read this book if you can find the time, not because it’s a good book, but because it might get you thinking and lead you to some useful ideas. This book wasn’t pleasant reading for me; it’s polemical, even bombastic, not to mention less-than-uplifting, but then I already knew what state the world was in before I read it. Still, reading a book like this can sharpen your focus. Or, at a minimum, exercise your brain cells, if only by making you want to argue with the author.

    I’ve been thinking about the condition of the world all my life, and especially lately. And this week I got a really original idea (for me, at least) — is the nation-state form of social organization obsolete? Should it be replaced with something else? What?

    The reason I wonder about this is because it’s pretty obvious that the modern nation-state hasn’t served humanity very well. It can be taken under control by one individual through the creation of secret police and internal security apparatuses, then used for any ends that individual chooses, chief of which will be his own perpetuation in power — as Stalin, Hitler, Assad, and others have demonstrated. The nation-state is also a marvelous instrument for organizing mass killing on an industrial scale, as we have seen too many times to recount here. War has always been hideous, but wasn’t quite so dangerous back when it was restricted to a adjacent villages throwing stones at each other. Only a nation-state is capable of building and maintaining an arsenal of nuclear weapons and the planes and missiles to deliver them. Only a state is capable of effectuating the remorseless and impersonal killing on a vast scale that we see in modern-era wars and genocides (see, e.g., the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo). The modern nation-state is also the instrument through which another modern institution, the corporation, subverts democracy and subjugates the masses.

    All of which makes it tempting to say that the modern nation-state is a bad thing and we ought to abolish it. But I’m not sure what we would replace it with. Hippie communes? That didn’t work so well; all the hippies are now fucking Republicans working in banking and finance. There’s gotta be something better than gulags, but I’m not sure exactly how we get there. Maybe the answer is that after the oil runs out we’ll only be able to kill people who live within walking distance of us. That’s how it was done in the old days before the invention of the infernal combustion engine.

    What do you think?

  85. 85

    Economic Reality Check

    I mentioned above that I read a lot of books. Because I do, and post here, you don’t have to. I act as a sort of editor or gatekeeper to keep you informed. In doing so, I exercise editorial judgment, the same as a newspaper editor does.

    That’s a job I’ve held, btw. Most regular readers of HA are aware I’m a lawyer. What I’ve not said very often on this blog is that I attended one of America’s top journalism schools and was a news reporter before I went to law school. And I also served as the editor-in-chief of a college newspaper.

    So, when I exercise editorial judgment about what books to bring to your attention, or when I block-quote from a book or magazine article, you can trust that your intellectual well-being is in the safekeeping of a professional. I’m at least as good at this as Kate Riley or Frank Blethen; personally, and without trying to sound like I’m bragging about it, I think my editorial judgment is a shade better than theirs.

    Joseph Stiglitz won a Nobel Prize in economics. That won’t stop our trolls from criticizing him — or me, for quoting him. Know-nothings … well, they don’t know better, do they?

    The book is “Freefall” and this excerpt is from the Afterword to the paperback edition published last year:

    “In the eight months since the hardcover version of Freefall was published, events have (sadly) unfolded much as expected ….

    “The real news of the last eight months has been the slow acceptance by government officials and economists alike of the dismal picture of the immediate future about which I had warned: a new ‘normal’ with higher unemployment rates, lower growth, and lower levels of public services in the advanced industrial countries. Prosperity has been replaced by a Japanese-style malaise, with no end in sight. …

    “In Europe and America … some economists are talking about a persistent unemployment rate of 7.5 percent …. The financial crisis [has] done long-term damage to our economy, from which we will only gradually recover.”

    Joseph Stiglitz, Freefall, pp. 299-300.

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: When the shit hit the fan, feckless Republicans tried to blame the crisis on poor people who bought houses. Think about that: They argue that when things go wrong in our rich economy, it must be the fault of people who have nothing — they caused all this by wanting to have something.

    What a bunch of horseshit. This calamity was brought about by selfish, greedy people with enormous economic power. Poor people have no power, and no say in anything, so they can’t possibly have caused all this. It wasn’t poor people who made liar loans, bundled worthless mortgages together and sold them to unwitting buyers as triple A-rated securities, and presided over the resulting collapse. Bankers and Wall Street slide-rule boys were responsible for that.

    In a rational world, these people would be in prison. After all, practically everyone from economists to journalists to politicians use the word “fraud” to describe what they did. But that isn’t what happened. Those people are still in power, they still get enormous bonuses, and they’re still lobbying against (and gutting) meaningful regulation of their patently untrustworthy industry.

    Not only will they not be sent to jail, they’ll get to keep their jobs, bonuses, mansions, yachts, and private jets. The rest of us will be reduced to alms-seeking beggars, because we won’t be allowed to support ourselves by working, because there’ll be no jobs.

    This is the stuff of which revolutions are made. When the dispossessed get hungry, they tend to get angry, too. A capitalism that serves only 1% of our people and forces everyone else to go hungry is certain to go the way of French royalty, sooner or later. You can’t get away with this kind of shit forever. Plenty of oligarchs and autocrats try, but none get away with it. That’s what history teaches us.

    And lest you have any illusions about where the deficit-hawkishness is coming from, Stiglitz continues,

    “Despite … stark prospects for the world economy, cries for curbing deficits soon emanated from Wall Street and the financial markets.” (Ibid, p. 300.) Yep, that’s right, Tea Jihadists and Paul Ryan and other deficit hawks are dupes and tools of the bankers and financiers who got us into this mess.

    Continuing with Stiglitz, “[T]here was a moment of national and international unity … when countries stood together …. There was a moment when the whole world was Keynesian, and the misguided idea that unfettered and unregulated markets were stable and efficient.” (Ibid, p. 301.) Then the bankers and financiers derailed i.

    Of course, unfettered and unregulated markets aren’t stable or efficient — they’re highly unstable and inefficient, especially when it comes to pricing things like stocks, which is how I turned $5,000 into $150,000 in the stock market in twenty years. If the stock market was stable and efficient, all I would make in stocks is the rate of economic growth.

    Stiglitz, a Nobel Prize-winner, unabashedly argues for policies based on Keynesian principles. My own opinion is that Keynes was right and the bankers who plunged the world into the Great Depression were wrong — so much for that. Keynes didn’t create or invent Keynesian economics; he merely observed what really happens in the real world, and wrote it down.

    But what do we get from Tea Jihadists, conservatives, rightwingers, Republicans? They want to put us back on the gold standard (the leading cause of the Great Depression), abolish the Federal Reserve, slash public spending, erase the social safety net. In short, they want to take us back to early Industrial Revolution economics of the 1800s — a period marked by frequent financial panics and deep depressions. Why the hell would anyone want to go back to policies that produce outcomes like that?

    The bottom line is, don’t vote Republican. Republicans don’t know what they’re doing. They’re stupid, they’re ignorant, they’re unteachable. They can’t be trusted. If you vote Republican, you’re an enemy of America. Republicans are bad for all living things, and for all inanimate things too. Republicans are good for nothing, and if you vote Republican, you’re a loser voting for losers.

  86. 86

    Good Easter morning to all! (Even to trolls.)

    84 – That’s strange about Hedges – he’s been the most relentlessly downbeat writer on the left. Never bought into happy talk about Obama. We all wanted to hope after the Bush years and Hedges and a few other writers on the left old enough to remember the flawed record of the Democratic party on various social justice and human rights issues shook their heads the whole time.

    Another writer who is perhaps more true to his vision is James Howard Kunstler. I couldn’t finish his book, “The Long Emergency”. It was too freaking bleak and deficient on the technical issues, but there’s no doubt about it – what he’s been writing about for years is coming fast. I’m one of those hopey, changey technophile optimists and will always believe there’s a technical fix – but I acknowledge that humanity too often is its own worst enemy and we may just succeed at blowing it totally.

  87. 87

    Why (at time) I love James Howard Kunstler:

    It was heartening at least to see a few signs of life “out there” in the karmic interstices. Senator Carl Levin of Michigan sent a memo to the Attorney General of the US – viz: something has been going on in Wall Street that merits your attention. As in most seemingly crucial turnings lately, echo answered. Can someone please check to see if Eric Holder over in the Department of Justice is leaking sawdust? He must be stuffed something. Styrofoam would just make him look lumpy. Could he be a computer graphic? Or is he just a simple slab of cardboard with a photo glued on. Perhaps Senator Levin’s next memo might be in the form of a subpoena to Mr. Holder, requesting his testimony as to how many trillions of dollars were snookered, swindled, and Ponzied out of the US public for the benefit of about a thousand guys in and around lower Manhattan (with branch offices in suburban Connecticut and New Jersey). (Cue: sound of Timberwolves howling.)
    Gretchen Morganson and Louise Story over at The New York Times put out a related query last week, asking how come nobody went to jail for misdeeds in the banking sector after several years of incidental revelation through things such as senate hearings, Web journalism, and a few vagrant strolls down the Maiden Lanes of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheets. How did “the newspaper of record” come to wait so long to ask that question? Not even the Times’s Op-Ed viziers have essayed to ask why Lloyd Blankfein is not parked in a court of law instead of a limo. Morganson and Story appeared to conclude that the web of turpitude in finance was too complex for anybody in a disciplinary role to understand, and that was that. Run up the white flag. We give up.

    http://kunstler.com/blog/2011/.....asses.html

  89. 89

    First things First. Stop every Social Security and Medicare check to every teabagger. Why Grandfather these idiots.

  91. 91

    Deficit 101

    This is for you teabag morons.

    Lesson 1: Revenue, as a percentage of GDP, is at an all-time low.

    Lesson 2: Spending, as a percentage of GDP, is at an all-time high.

    It should be obvious that revenue has to to up and spending has to go down.

    Here’s how we get revenue to go up:

    (a) Make the tens of thousands of companies and wealthy individuals currently shielding their income from taxation in offshore tax havens pay U.S. taxes on their U.S. income.

    (b) Make hedge fund managers earning hundreds of millions (or, in a few cases, billions) of dollars a year pay ordinary income rates like the rest of us, instead of capital gains rates.

    (c) Tax capital gains as if they were wages — why should people (and rabbits) getting FREE money from Wall Street pay lower taxes than people who WORK for money?

    (d) Make the two-thirds of U.S. corporations paying no taxes pay taxes.

    (e) Do away with ancient, obsolete, useless tax credits and exemptions.

    (f) Let the Bush tax cuts for the rich expire.

    Here’s how we get spending under control:

    (g) Close a significant number of the 781 U.S. military bases.

    (j) Significantly cut the $112 billio a year we spend on an intelligence bureaucracy that couldn’t even stop 21 Arabs with box cutters from boarding domestic flights.

    (k) Stop building $15 billion aircraft carriers; we already have 11 of them, no other nation has more than 1, how many more do we need? Especially as new weapons are turning aircraft carriers into the equivalent of WW2 battleships: big, expensive, useless, and easy to sink.

    (l) Cut the Pentagon budget, which has grown 80% in just a few years, back to pre-Bush levels; i.e., slash it from over $700 billion a year back to $400 billion a year. That’s still plenty of money to push third world dictators around with.

    (m) Save $350 billion a year by replacing our hyper-expensive and ultra-inefficient private health insurance system with single-payer, publicly financed health care.

    (n) Cut off farm subsidies to anybody raising corn to make ethanol or feed beef cattle with it. Ethanol and beef are bad for us and we don’t need to raise any corn for those purposes.

    Republicans play small ball — they slash a social program here, tweak a highway tunnel there, but they don’t touch runaway military spending or anti-social subsidies and tax credits. GOPers will have no cred on deficit issues until they get serious about the taxpayer money THEY waste. And you CAN’T tame deficits by cutting taxes to zero!!!! No matter how much those blowhards huff and puff that “cutting taxes increases revenue,” it ain’t true!!! Cutting taxes REDUCES revenue, dimwits!!! Repetitively chanting supply-side voodoo incantations isn’t gonna fix our economy.

  92. 92

    World supply and demand sets the price of oil. Since it is a good that is essential for an industrial society, and there is a finite supply, one would expect its price to raise in relation to other goods. This is especially true since the easily recoverable sources are rapidly dwindling.

    The reason the dollar is weakening is due to the fact that we have a huge trade imbalance (imports > exports) and nothing to do with “too many dollars”.

    A strong dollar guts our export industries.

    The word “acerbic” was coined to describe the writings of J.H. Kunstler.

  93. 93

    Shit Flinging Dep’t

    Secret government files on Guantanamo detainees published by the New York Times reveal that numerous detainees have been written up for throwing urine and feces at guards.

    Roger Rabbit Commentary: What a bunch of assholes! Betcha they’re Republicans! Keep ’em locked up.

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