Follow this link to the article in the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.

If you had been under the mistaken impression that you could morally cast a vote for Scott Brown for Massachusetts Senator, then this article should be enough to disabuse you of that idea.

Not only is Scott Brown willing to wreck the economy, he seems to be willing to give up our constitutional rights at any opportunity.

The man accused in the attempt to bomb an airplane is being handled in the civilian justice system.  From what little is covered in the news, the investigation seems to be going along quite well.  Even without signs of any trouble handling this case in a constitutional manner, Scott Brown wants to torture the suspect and let the military handle this case.

It seems that getting educated as a lawyer is no guarantee of having any moral center.  It just proves that if you have no moral center when you start, law school is not the place to get one.

An article at TimesOnline discusses the situation in Yemen.

It looks like the government there is exactly the kind of government that we should avoid like the plague.

Perhaps we ought to pursue an approach of trying to support the rebels to lure them away from al-Qaeda.  Trying to fight al-Qaeda via the Yemeni government sounds like a losing proposition to me.

At least we could have our rebels fighting the al-Qaeda rebels and completely bypass the central government.

Why should we spend money trying to train government forces that do not want to be trained when we can work with rebels who seem to be more than adequately trained already?

Did that get your attention?

The headline may be a bit of a stretch for the article John Brennan rails on Dick Cheney, explains ‘systemic failure’.

There is this quote from Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R) of Michigan, the ranking member of the House intelligence committee:

“In 2004, we focused on making sure that we were collecting all of the information that we needed to collect,” said Mr. Hoekstra, speaking of post-9/11 reforms.

“The challenge that we now face is that we are collecting so much information, we are sharing it, we now need to develop the capabilities to do a better job of analysis,” he added.

By my interpretation, the reaction to the original 9/11 attack was a little misguided.  Just as in this latest situation, we had the information, but we didn’t analyze and act on it.  The Patriot Act, which promoted the use of unconstitutional means to gather more information, went after the exactly wrong target.  Rather than increase the flood of information we had, we needed to increase our ability to analyze and act on the information we had.

It made no sense to add to the burden of too much information on those who had to sift through it and find what was important.  Yet, that was exactly what Cheney insisted on.  Now he is blaming Obama for his own failures.

The LA Time article  Ron Paul’s ideas no longer fringe mentioned in the previous post is a gold-mine of misinformation.

Paul traces his economic views to his frugal upbringing in Pittsburgh at the tail end of the Depression. He saved pennies from delivering newspapers and helping out his father’s small dairy business.

And his first economics class at Gettysburg College was an eye-opener, Paul said. When a professor explained how banks keep only a tiny part of their deposits on hand and earn money by lending out the rest, Paul discovered one of the “tricks” of the financial system.

In this case, a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.  What his professor explained is called fractional reserve banking.  It is not a trick, but an essential part of a smoothly running capitalist economy.

If banks were required to keep all deposits on reserve, they would have no ability to lend money and earn interest. They would have to charge you a fee for safeguarding your money. Corporations can take advantage of the stock market to raise capital if they are large enough.  For the ordinary citizen to finance a home mortgage would require some new institutions.

So one important arm for providing credit to the economy would be cut off if you did away with fractional reserve banking.

There is a good reason to want this type of credit in an economy.  It allows the available credit to be adjusted to keep the economy moving.  If credit is too tight for the needs of the economy, the reserve requirements can be loosened by the Fed.  If credit is too loose, then the reserve requirement can be tightened by the Fed.

Just because the Fed, under a particular set of circumstances and leadership, did not do as good a job as it should have doesn’t mean that the idea of the Fed is totally wrong.

It does mean that a person like Ron Paul can learn a snippet of information and then turn off his hearing aid and not learn the rest of the information he needed to learn.  He then runs off half-cocked to develop absurd theories of how to solve problems.  Half-cocked seems to be the appropriate term.  He was half-cocked with knowledge.  Had he continued his economics education and become fully-cocked, he might have been able to do some good.

Follow this link to the nonsense article in the LA Times.

If this is the level of journalism that we can expect from the LA Times, then this country is in real trouble.

Fortunately for the world economy, most of the other countries will not follow our lead down this path of idiocy, if that is where we are going. Unfortunately for us, our competitive position in the world will be destroyed.

Of course in the LA Times’ alternate reality poverty will be declared to be wealth and we will still be the richest nation in the world.

Just to go after one false notion of Ron Paul, I will comment on the following quote from the article.

Paul contends that Austrian economics explains the most recent financial meltdown: “It says if you inflate too much, if you have no restraint on monetary authorities, you’re going to bring on a crisis.” Now, Paul says, administration policies are leading the country toward disaster.

Ron Paul’s first sentence has some merit.  The timing of his second comment is absolutely absurd. If he manages to get the right boom time policy implemented during the recession recovery, it will be a disaster.

Or as Keynes might have put it, it was absolutely against all Keynesian theory to run huge fiscal deficits during an economic boom such as what Bush was doing.  To have Alan Greenspan at the Fed pumping the economy when he should have been trying to rein it in is another part of the foolishness of the Bush era.

When the inevitable crash occurred, the Bush administration had already wasted the two tools that were needed.  We had to go to an even greater extreme to get them to work.

When we get through this and wiser heads, now in power, can carry out the other side of Keynes’ theory, the Congress will step in and mess it up if Paul has his way.

The other side of Keynes Theory is what Bush should have been applying during the boom times and which will be applied in the next boom if we can keep the reins of government out of Republican hands.  During boom times the government should be running a surplus and paying down debt. This was the Clinton policy.  The Fed can apply the appropriate restraint, but it won’t have to go to excess because fiscal policy will be running in the same direction as monetary policy.  During Reagan/Bush/Bush years fiscal policy was always fighting against monetary policy.

Economic theories that are developed to apply under certain circumstances can be a disaster when applied in the wrong circumstances.  We are not now in hyper-inflated pre-WWII Germany, so let us not apply the remedy for that situation now.  If we don’t do something stupid, we will never get to that German situation.

Ron Paul seems to have the knack to pick the exactly wrong policy for any given circumstance.  Maybe it just like the fact that even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Follow this link to the article in The New York Times.

There were a few items in the list that I thought might be worth a follow-up.

The one that I have tried is:

READABILITY The single best tech idea of 2009, though, the real life-changer, has got to be Readability. It’s a free button for your Web browser’s toolbar (get it at lab.arc90.com/experiments/readability). When you click it, Readability eliminates everything from the Web page you’re reading except the text and photos. No ads, blinking, links, banners, promos or anything else. Times Square just goes away.

It works as advertised on a few web pages that I have tested it on.  It might take a day or so for me to figure out if it is really worth it.  It is very easy to add to your browser.  Once you do, you can apply it on this blog.

I have posted a number of emails from politicians recently.  Those emails happened to contain requests for contributions.

Do not interpret my posting of such an item as a suggestion that you contribute.  My posting the item doesn’t even mean that I contributed.  To satisfy myself that I am making fair use of their material, I leave the link to the request for donation in the posting.

All the posting means is that I found something worth contemplating in the email.  I leave it to you to take away what you will from the reading of the post.

As with any other post that I make, there will be something in the item that I find worthwhile to read.  If I don’t forget, I will make some comment about what part interested me.  If I make no comment about other parts of the item, there is no guarantee that I agree or disagree with those other parts.

For things that other authors post on this blog, I set no general rules.  They may adopt my policy as stated above or they may not.