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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. [Read more]

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 [Read more]

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.  [Read more]

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.