Why oh why are liberals concerned about a battle of wits with the conservatives?

I have often pointed out now the one sided battle of wits that the Conservatives and the Liberals have going on. The Conservatives have to twist and distort what the Liberals say to degrade them. While all the Liberals have to do is either quote the Conservatives word for word or simply give them enough of their own rope to be hung by.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036677/vp/31514246#31514246

In case you did not watch countdown tonight its the number one.

I am Rooting For the Criminal in this Story!

 

This man and maybe an accomplice have been responsible for robbing a number of payday loan businesses.  This dude even hit the same payday loan business twice;  a week apart.  In my view, this is just one of those beautiful ironies of life – sometimes criminals steal from other criminals – I just can’t feel unhappy about it.

Payday loan businesses can charge interest in excess of 30% in Kansas.  They can charge as much as 70% interest in Wyoming.  These businesses target poor and working poor individuals.  Their prevelence across the country rose steeply after welfare reform.  In fact, a Clinton era figure started a payday loan business – “Advance America – Cash Advance”.

As nutjobs on the BTSNBN used to tell me, “Donnelly, don’t like payday loans: Don’t get one.”  These robberies are really a free-market correction those clowns over there like so much.  May this robber practice his trade with a vengence, and may he roam free for a very long time.

I am going to have to figure out why these types of business piss me off so much.

The Eagle story about this noble robber.

The “invisible” not “infallible” hand…

Milton Friedman

Free market dynamics can fix many problems, but all.  Milton Friedman called the combined process whereby 1) businesses fail due to not meeting customer needs and 2) when these failed businesses are replaced by businesses that did meet the customer needs as “creative desctruction”.  This “creative destruction” was powered by the “invisible hand” of free markets.  Friedman never believed that this hand was “infallible” AND “invisible”.  This latter silliness most recently came into fashion during the reign of Ronald Regan.

In case it is not obvious, allowing the domino-like effect of several businesses failing and the world economy collapsing is not “creative destruction”.  It is just plain “destruction”.  Milton Friedman was crtical of the U.S. Federal government for not acting sooner when banks started failing in a domino-like manner in 1931.  [FDR did not take office until 1933.]

Over our history, our economonic policies have been influenced by times of greater reliance on government intervention alternating with periods of greater reliance on free-market strategies.  This mixture, in my belief is better than either free market  or government regulation being the sole strategy.

NPR is featuring a series of articles on the tinkering that is going on with our economy – here is the first.

iggy donnelly

Tiahrt Introduces Plan to Stimulate Next Great Depression

Any Todd Fans out there? I can’t hear you! ~sekanblogger

The $787 billion stimulus is not nearly enough – Paul Krugman, professor of economics at Princeton University and Nobel Prize winner.

Shawn’s Famous Friends — THE BEATLES

Okay, I know. This is really becoming annoying, huh? Addictive personality, WHO ME? Yes me. I admit it, freely. So instead of working on that defect of charcter here at PrariePops for all to see, maybe I can try to twist it into something positive.

Those of you who know me here know that I’ve been shamelessly promoting my favorite artist Shawn Phillips http://www.shawnphillips.com/. That can’t be all bad, The Friggin Loon has started listening to Shawn. So instead of doing a disservice to him, (by making you all bitter through my own obsessive behavior) I’ll take a different approach. A series of videos featuring Shawn’s more well known friends. Gauranteed to blow your mind!  ~sekanblogger

 “I was invited a couple of times to Paul McCartney’s and George Harrison’s house. We were on a very friendly basis. Paul invited me to a session, and I ended up singing background vocals on “Lovely Rita Meter Maid”, and we saw each other socially many times after that, at the Moody Blues house, and various clubs around London. I gave George some basic lessons on sitar, before he ever actually met Ravi Shankar. It was basically the same with John and Ritchie (Ringo). Although, I never went to their houses.” 

“Very nice guys, every single one of them. John Lennon and I got along very very well. George was really the quietest one. He was quite an introvert. He didn’t really finger pick, but he was a much better guitarist than a lot of people give him credit for. When we sat around jamming, he would play things that just absolutely amazed me! It wasn’t what he played; it was the speed at which he’d play them. He never really showed off that side on any of the Beatles’ records. That guy could jam and he’d play these amazing runs.”  – Shawn Phillips

LYRICS HERE

Ed McMahon Seated At Carson’s Side Again

 

“Most comic teams are not good friends or even friends at all, Laurel and Hardy didn’t hang out together, Abbott and Costello weren’t best of friends. But, Johnny and I were the happy exception. For 40 years Johnny and I were as close as two nonmarried people can be. And if he heard me say that, he might say, ‘Ed, I always felt you were my insignificant other.’ ”  -Ed McMahon

 My favorite Ed McMahon memory is the episode where Richard Pryor had retuned for the first time since his near death free-basing accident. That’s been a number of years ago, and I’m telling this from memory. Richard appears to thunderous applause, gets seated and tells one joke; “Do you know how many niggers can ride in a volkswagon?….SIX! Five in the seats and Richard Pryor in the ash tray.” Ed prompltly FELL OUT of his chair, crawled over to Carson, climbed on his lap and laughed like a crying baby. God rest Ed. All of us boomers could learn a thing or two about being a BEST FRIEND. ~sekanblogger

obituary here http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/24/arts/television/24mcmahon.html?_r=1&scp=5&sq=ed%20mcmahon&st=cse

OBAMA HAS SLOWED THE ECONOMIC BLEEDING – by Donald Kaul

There was a headline in “The New York Times” the other day that illustrates the kind of Catch 22 economy we’re in. “Rising Gas Prices Threaten to Slow a Recovery,” it said. 

Bad news, right? We don’t want the economy to slow down any more than it’s already slowed. 

On the other hand, we are basing our hopes for saving our collapsing car industry on a universal switch to cleaner cars that get better gas mileage. We also want to stimulate mass transit in our cities in order to get people out of cars entirely. (I won’t mention global warming because it drives a lot of people crazy.) 

But to achieve those things, we have to have higher, not lower, gas and energy prices. People will not give up their big, honking cars and trucks in favor of matchboxes on wheels; even less will they walk to their corner bus stop, unless they can’t afford to do otherwise. On this I will stake my reputation as a soothsayer.

The sad truth is that we will continue to be at the mercy of oil producers so long as we are unwilling to go through the painful transition to a society that does not see the auto as a necessity for work, play, status and raising children. And the even sadder truth is that the pain of the transition to green transportation (widespread unemployment, a spike in the suicide rate, higher taxes, walking) may be more than the American people can bear. 

The problem is so vexing that even a wise Latina woman would have trouble figuring it out. But that’s not the only problem facing Mr. Obama and Capitol Hill’s Gang That Couldn’t Talk Straight. 

You may not have noticed but the economy fell off a cliff last fall. One minute prosperity was there beside us, laughing and talking, telling jokes; the next it was gone—disappeared. 

When we looked over the side of the cliff we were walking on, there it was, tumbling toward the bottomless abyss, a fate so terrible that we only refer to it as “the D word.” 

Tuesday, 06/23/09, Public Square

Do you suppose it’s cool up in those mountains? Sure is pretty!

I’ll be catching up with everyone this evening when I get home. Make a bunch of posts for me to read — I’ll be ready to relax.

What topic will you choose to talk about today?

fnord