Inflation, Deflation, and the Federal Reserve

The U.S. spent close to 100 years in the 1800's without an effective central bank. These years were exemplified by a constant cycle of inflation and deflation that served to strip wealth from the debtor class (i.e. people like you and me) and transfer it to the creditor class. This was caused by fractional reserve lending and the business cycle. As the business cycle went up, banks expanded their lending and thus created inflation by reducing their reserve ratio (the money supply increases as an percentage of the banking system's overall reserve ratio). As the business cycle went down, banks contracted their lending and thus created deflation by increasing their reserves in case there was a run on their bank by people who'd lost their jobs and needed their money. And if the bank was hit by a lot of defaults on its loans because deflation rendered the loans unpayable, so that it could no longer sell its loans on the open market to other banks in case it needed cash to deal with a bank run (or worse yet other banks or investors refused to buy the loans because they too were preserving capital), then banks collapsed, causing even more deflation and more economic misery as everybody with money in that bank lost it.

This happened while the U.S. was on a "hard metal" standard, so Ron Paul's idiotic call to return to the gold standard won't resolve it. Only banning fractional reserve lending would resolve it, and that would kill the economy because fractional reserve lending is how the capital equipment that produces future income is purchased using current income. Without fractional reserve lending you basically do not have banks and the amount of capital available for lending implodes dramatically. That is, in a mildly inflationary environment where virtually all capital is in a bank at any given time (since that is where you earn interest, as vs. mattress stuffing where your money loses value), your economy can leverage the capital of the entire nation as backing for bank loans that produces future economic output. And bank loans are also important because bank lending allows the capital expenditures to respond to future demand using the future income generated by that future demand, and thus allows a capitalist system with functioning banks to be far more flexible and nimble at meeting consumer needs than a system without functioning banks. Without functioning banks, you must wait for capital to slowly accumulate before you can make the capital investments needed to meet new needs... which slows economic activity drastically over a modern economy with a functioning fractional reserve banking system.

Okay, so the gold standard won't work at solving these inflation/deflation cycles as long as we have fractional reserve lending, and we can't ban fractional reserve lending without basically knee-capping capitalism, so now what? Well, we could hypothesize a central bank that could print money during "down" cycles to replace the money that's being lost as banks contract their lending, and that could *unprint* money during "up" cycles to keep excess inflation from taking hold. By carefully adjusting the money supply up and down, this hypothetical central bank could keep the money supply growing at the slight amount of inflation needed to keep most capital in the banking system (and thus available to leverage for future economic activity). In addition, this hypothetical central bank could buy loans from banks hit by bank runs i.e. serve as a lender of last resort if necessary to prevent banks from collapsing. That prevents the stripping of wealth from people who have money in banks.

There is only one problem with this scenario: It had been tried multiple times before, and the result was almost always disaster. The core problem: Governments, given access to a printing press, are almost compulsively driven to print money to meet their financial needs rather than raise taxes to meet their financial needs. And there is only one end game there -- hyperinflation, which is a disaster of *another* sort for the economy because then banks once again cannot serve as an instrument of leveraging current income into future economic activity, because people yank their money out of banks to spend it as quickly as possible before it becomes worthless.

So it is clear, then, that putting a central bank with the power to print money under the direct control of the U.S. Congress or of the President is a bad, bad, bad, BAD idea. The notion that they could long resist the impulse to print money rather than tax the general public to pay for the government's expenses simply doesn't pass the laugh and giggle test. So if it cannot be under the direct control of the President or Congress, then what?

So the general scheme arrived at was to put some of the control in the hands of those entities that have the most to gain from a stable (but slightly inflating) money supply: Banks. Thus banks are the shareholders of the Federal Reserve Banks and appoint 2/3rds of the board of directors at the Federal Reserve Banks. But then there would be the temptation to manipulate the money supply to benefit bankers rather than the public as a whole, so the overall Federal Reserve System was given a board of governors appointed by the President with staggered 14 year terms (to insure that no single President could overly influence the board) with the consent of the Senate and with the final power to determine the money supply. In short, that's today's Federal Reserve, which is a bizarre setup, but it's a bizarre setup for a reason -- it's a work-around to two major problems, the first being inflationary-deflationary cycles caused by fractional reserve lending and the normal business cycle, the second being hyperinflation when government itself has the power to print money.

So there you go. It sounds all so prosaic now that you see where the Fed came from, why we need it, and why it's set up the bizarre way it's set up rather than as a direct federal agency. As for the natterings of gold bugs and conspiracy theorists? Well, what can I say... some folks' tin foil hats just need adjusting.

-- Badtux the Monetary Penguin

Bad Bush Lawyers, Part Deaux

I pointed out, earlier, that giving bad legal advice isn't a crime. Thus the bad advice that the Bush Administration's lawyers gave is not sufficient reason to charge them with a crime. Criminalizing the practice of law is 100% opposite of rule of law, and being an incompetent lawyer is simply bad lawyering, not something which is criminal in nature.

But Hilzoy states the next logical step that is part of the whole concept of rule of law: Disbarring bad lawyers. These guys gave *terrible* legal advice, ignoring clear precedents in their eagerness to provide their clients with legal advice that they believed their clients wanted. Hilzoy says:

The difficulty with prosecution is establishing intent. When a lawyer makes a stupid legal argument, it's always possible that s/he is not malicious, just a terrible lawyer. When you've narrowed the options to criminal intent or complete ineptitude, you have not got enough to prosecute. You have, however, got enough to disbar someone, since while total ineptitude is not an indictable offense, it is a good reason not to let someone go on practicing law.

Indeed. I agree 100% with Hilzoy: Yoo, Bybee, Bradbury, and anybody else involved in this outrageous example of bad lawyering ought to be immediately disbarred by their state bar associations and forever prohibited from practicing law again. And those who happen to be on the bench (hello, Bybee!) ought to be immediately impeached. They have proven, at the very least, that they are not fit to practice law. It's the least we can do for them...

-- Badtux the Law Penguin

An interesting debunk of Federal Reserve conspiracy theories

Who controls the Federal Reserve system?. A well documented rebuttal, with cites of source documentation. Hint: Ben Bernanke was *NOT* selected to lead the Fed by a secret cabal of foreign Jewish bankers!

General debunk of most popular conspiracy theories regarding the Fed. Also follow the links to detailed debunks, including cites to source papers that you can go track down for yourself.

I will return later with my notes on why we need the Federal Reserve (hint: fractional reserve lending), and why the Federal Reserve is set up the way it's set up. Hint: Weimar Germany (albeit that hadn't happened yet, it's a perfect example of the sort of thing the Fed's governance was purposely set up to avoid).

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

World Nut Daily: Your daily ration of crazy

Okay, so a threat to liberty is not a President who says that it's okay to intern any American as an "enemy combatant" without trial for as long as he declares you an enemy combatant, or who says it's okay to torture you while you're imprisoned (without trial) as an "enemy combatant". A threat to liberty is... the U.S. Census Department adding GPS coordinates to the address maps they get from your local 911 system so that they can more reliably guide census workers to those addresses for the upcoming 2010 census? WTF?!

BTW, addresses are a real problem, especially in rural areas. When I worked census fifteen years ago, I came in doing quality control behind other census workers (the point being to work up adjustments so we could estimate how many people were missed by the normal census process and adjust the numbers accordingly). In rural areas, not only are street signs almost unheard of, people very rarely post numbers on their houses. They know where they live, their neighbors know where they live, anybody who comes to their house knows where they live, why would they need a number? They do post numbers on their mailboxes though so that the postman will put the mail into the right box. But then they tend to live in family compounds, two or three trailer houses on one plot of family land, and the order of the mailboxes does not necessarily have anything to do with the order of the houses. The only way to know which trailer is which is to knock on the door and ask. And as you can imagine, after thirty years of right-wing hate radio people saying that any gubmint worker at your door is there to take your guns and take your kids, this can be a bit more awkward than you'd think. I mostly did okay because I was very polite, very nice, very non-threatening (what's more cuddly than a penguin after all?), but it definitely did get awkward a couple of times.

So anyhow, especially in rural areas, you can either equip your census workers with some *very* detailed maps or you can just give'em a GPS-equipped tablet computer with all the addresses already programmed in. The Census much prefers the latter, because it's much less bulky and a lot easier to provision than all those $#%@! 911 maps... but that, of course, requires having the GPS coordinates to program into those computers. Which many 911 maps do *not* provide.

The solution: Send someone out with the 911 maps to take GPS coordinates of each house. Can be done at the local level by the local branch of the census bureau in multiple years before the actual census has to be done. Duh. But as far as World Nut Daily is concerned, this is part of some bizarre Obama gummint conspiracy to steal your guns or sumthin'... despite the fact that it's been underway since *2005*, which is when this effort started under the Bush Administration as part of the Census Bureau's preparations for the 2010 census. Gah! The crazy! It burns, it burns!

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Ron Paul zealots prove they're idiots -- again.

Their latest blogswarm: They want to audit the Federal Reserve.

Okay, now, first problem: The Federal Reserve possesses this marvelous technology called the PRINTING PRESS. And they have the power granted unto them by Congress to print as much money with this printing press as they wish. So why does that matter? Well, it matters because the core principle of financial auditing is that money can NOT be printed upon demand. If there's money in an account, it wasn't printed. It came from somewhere else. Auditing tracks those money flows within an enterprise and makes sure that each debit has a credit somewhere.

But that whole paradigm breaks down when the entity in question has been granted, by law, the right to print all the money it feels like printing. So yeah, you can audit that $X went out, and assets valued at $X by the Federal Reserve came back in return. But what use is that? And even if $X+Y went out and it can be proven that the asset was *really* worth only $X, overpaying for an asset isn't a crime unless there's deliberate fraud involved. Otherwise everybody who overpays for a used car is a criminal. GAH! The stupid, it burns, it burns!

So what's the point? Well, it's all about all those ridiculous conspiracy theories that the gold bugs, Austrian "economists", and fellow travellers have built up around the Federal Reserve. Apparently their whole intent is to prove that the Federal Reserve is actually a conspiracy by Jewish bankers to impoverish America or something like that, despite the fact that the greatest economic expansion and greatest improvement in wealth of the average American in U.S. history -- the 1946-1973 expansion -- happened under the Federal Reserve. In short, they're just plain nuts. And more on the Federal Reserve in my next posting, where I discuss *why* we need the Federal Reserve if we're going to have fractional reserve banking, not to mention why we want fractional reserve banking in the first place, and why the Federal Reserve's current governance is not a conspiracy, it is necessary to keep the U.S. dollar credible as a currency. Please wait for that posting to discuss those particular topics. Thanks!

-- Badtux the Economics Penguin

WWLDD?

The first LD in the above is Lou Dobbs. So what would Lou Dobbs do if: North Korea threatened to incinerate Japan with a nuclear missile. On the same day that Israel launched a ground offensive against Syria and Iranian troops crossed the border into Iraq on their way to support their Syrian client state, triggering a war between Iran and the United States that resulted in three U.S. Army divisions turned into Dien Bien Phu hamburger meat as the entire Iraqi population rose up and overwhelmed them with sheer numbers. On the SAME DAY that millions of people around the world just vanished, poof, into thin air, as four horsemen rode in the sky and trumpetted the end of the world. On the SAME DAY that an invasion of multi-tentacled aliens swooped down from the sky and started stuffing innocent women and children into their multi-tentacled maws. *AND* it was the 5th of May, Cinco de Mayo.

What Would Lou Dobbs Do? Well... bash Mexicans, of course. Like, duh.

-- Badtux the Snarky Penguin

Why journalism is dead

It takes a 4th grader to ask Condi a probing question about torture. None of the other "reporters" who have interviewed her since her original "it's not torture if the President says it's okay" statement asked her whether she agreed with torture or not, because that would have been "adversarial" -- why, they might have even been disinvited from her dinner parties in the future! It took a fourth grader.

I've earlier stated that the reason mainstream newspapers are dying is because of a self-inflicted wound -- they're simply not selling a product that the majority of people want. There are fewer newspapers sold today than when JFK was elected President of the United States in 1960, and that's not a coincidence, that is a steady drip-drip-drip of people deciding newspapers simply do not provide them with what they're looking for (which, for the most part, is truth -- not "he said she said" transcription of "he said the sky is blue, she said the sky is purple", which fails once issues become too complex to be immediately obvious). This is yet another example of Journalistic Fail. I think in the future we should just eliminate the whole White House press corpse and replace them with 4th graders. I suspect the end result will have more value. Which says a lot about the value of today's press corpse (sorry, Helen, but you're not typical today).

-- Badtux the News Penguin

Public health system collapsing

3.8 million people have lost their jobs and thus their health insurance at the exact same time that state and local budgets have collapsed due to the Depression of 2007 (started in December 2007). The result: public hospitals are overwhelmed and unable to provide critical care to patients, leading to people literally dying in the streets for lack of health care.

People, this is not sustainable. While the Rethugs might cry "socialism, socialism, socialism!", people will not willingly die in the streets just because Republican's ideology of selfishness and greed says that people ought to. Republicans might say that poor or unemployed people have a moral duty to just die quietly if they can't afford health care, but human beings do not "just die quietly". Republicans may believe that the U.S. now has such an effective prison state that the need to maintain social peace and public order via providing necessary services to the people is no longer necessary in order to maintain the State, but that system is already creaking under the weight of having 3% of the U.S. population on probation or in prison at any given time, and it's unclear that the U.S. police state would be in any way capable of handling an uprising by those who've been told that the solution to their health care problem is to go home and die.

There is, of course, a solution -- Medicare For All. Old people seem reasonably happy with Medicare, even though they grumble about how much it costs and how it won't cover some of the stuff they wish it would cover. The last time someone proposed eliminating Medicare a bunch of old people with canes and walkers attacked his limo as it left the Capitol and that was the end of that. But wait, I forget, "socialism, socialism, socialism!". Well, Medicare has been around since 1968 and as far as I can tell has not made America less free, but then, I'm a pragmatic realist who lives in the real world, rather than ideologue living in a fake made-up la-la land like the morons shouting "socialism, socialism, socialism!", so that probably makes a difference too...

-- Badtux the Health Care Penguin

Monday sad music blogging

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Hiking in the rain sucks

Admittedly it would have been better if I'd brought my rain pants and some waterproof boots, but I was experimenting to see if those were really necessary. Conclusion: Yes, they are. But the bigger issue was the fact that the $#%@! mist was so thick that I couldn't see a dadburned thing. The whole point of grunting uphill for three hours is so that you can see a view when you get to the top. If all you can see is freakin' mist... well. Bah humbug!

Other than that, everything seems to be working okay. A bit tired, but that's to be expected, given that I had roughly 3500 feet worth of total altitude gain during the hike (once I got to the top, the road back was up and down from hilltop to saddle and back up to hilltop again to hike the ridge back to where I started in this loop hike). I had hoped to explore some of the old ranching ruins and old ranching roads, but I couldn't see a #$%! thing once I got up into the mist level, so that will have to wait until next year, probably (since the season is turning to the point where long hikes in the desert aren't feasible -- even this early into summer and even with the rains we had the past few days, the stream was almost dry).

-- Badtux the Hiking Penguin

Pete Seeger: 90 years old

Pete Seeger will be 90 years old tomorrow. It seems like he has been around forever? Well, that's because he has been around forever. A man who was singing a song for freedom before most of us on this blog were even born is still singing.

Happy birthday, Pete. And if the banjo playing is shot and the voice barely is there, well, you have an excuse. All those who do not take up the guitar or banjo and sing a song of freedom... they have no excuse at all.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Saturday sad music blogging

Blaze Foley singing at a wedding in 1985, his music distilled down to a minimalist accompaniment on his steel-string guitar and that sad sad voice.

-- Badtux the Music Penguin

Pack is loaded...

27 pounds, including food and 8 pounds of water. The 8 pounds of water is for desert hiking, though it's the rainy season so no desert involved here. This load includes a very small tarp-tent, barely big enough to sleep in, that weighs in at 24 ounces, as well as full rain gear (because it's going to rain tomorrow), complete safety gear, cooking gear, and lots of socks (see previous parenthetical statement about rain). Because it is impossible to keep your feet dry in the rain, I'm just going to have to hike with wet feet and trust my duct tape on strategic spots, wicking socks and trail runners to do the job of keeping my feet from turning into blister-fests :-(. 'Cause ain't nothin' except the Great Penguin Himself who could keep my feet dry in that situation...

So now to see how my leg handles under load, backpacking an overnight trip. Wish me luck.

-- Badtux the Waddling Penguin

H1Z1 virus

Five local schools here in the SF Bay Area are shut down because of the H1N1 swine flu virus. As I've previously pointed out, there currently appears to be no indication that this virus has sufficient virulence to create a 1918-style mass death even if it proved to be as deadly as the 1918 virus (not likely, in any modern society where there is sufficient access to anti-inflammatories to keep people from drowning in their own inflamed lung tissues).

On the other hand, all it would take would be a single mutation... such as the H1Z1 mutation...

Gotta go. Need to clean and oil my Mossberg 12 gauge pump and make sure I have sufficient shells for the upcoming zombie apocalypse. If you need me, I'll be hiking out in the national forest far from civilization...

-- Badtux the Mutation Penguin

Snark bites

1. Happy Mission Accomplished Day! Codpiece optional.
2. WWJT (Who Would Jesus Torture)?
3. Oxford Health Plans falls victim to that evil supervillain, The Gay Agenda.
4. Waiting for World Nut Daily to announce that Obama's pick to replace Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court is... Osama bin Laden. 5... 4... 3... 2......

Reminder: Snark bites get posted to Twitter (see left margin box), this is just a taste. Yes, I'm now a twit. Sigh.

-- Badtux the Twit Penguin

Note: There is some controversy over whether the codpiece is optional for celebration of Happy Mission Accomplished Day. After all, Dear Former Leader clearly was wearing a class-A codpiece as part of his celebration of this most hallowed of days. However, I say it's quite clear that the codpiece is optional, as none of the sailors participating in the first Happy Mission Accomplished Day were wearing obvious codpieces. Besides, have you ever tried to buy a codpiece for a penguin?!

Yay, it's a kitty pile!

-- Badtux the Cat-owned Penguin

Who owns the airwaves?

A small group of right-wing broadcasters own all but two of the AM radio stations in the San Francisco Bay area. These right-wing broadcasters have a history of cutting off profitable but politically incorrect (a.k.a. "liberal") content in order to make room for more right-wing talk show hosts on their stations, even if this results in less profit for their radio stations, because they place their political beliefs ahead of profit. So, does this mean that the right wing should be allowed to dictate what political beliefs are allowed to air in the local area?

According to the right wingers, the answer to that question is "Yes." Their notion is, "we paid for it, we own it, we have a right to put whatever programming we want on the radio stations we bought and paid for." For right-wingers, it's a case of property rights -- being able to use their property any way they wish.

But what is their property? Well, that's where things get fuzzy. First, it is clear that all of their physical infrastructure -- the radio tower, the transmitter, the studio, etc. -- is their property. And of course their actual content is their property. But none of this would be useful without the third thing that is their property: Their license to use a particular slice of the frequency spectrum in order to broadcast their drivel.

Without that license, all their expensive equipment would be useless. I could come in and broadcast right over the top of them using my own AM transmitter setup. And the only thing that makes that license useful is that it is enforced by the government. I.e., every broadcast radio station in the country can exist only because the government grants them a license to exist. Otherwise people like me, with RF radio experience and capabilities, would just broadcast our own drivel to the world over the top of these people, and every frequency you tuned to would be either weird mishmash of various people trying to broadcast their own opinions, or unintelligible garble.

In short, the public airwaves are public because they must be public in order to have any value at all. A private party cannot simply say "I own 1540AM" because there are thousands of us out here who have the capability to broadcast on 1540AM, and would do so if there were no law prohibiting us from doing so. A private party can "own" 1540AM only if all of us who have the capability to broadcast on 1540AM -- i.e., WE THE PEOPLE (also known as "the government") -- grant them a license to "own" 1540AM. If KRTR (Rightwing Talk Radio for the masses!) is to have any value at all, it is only if they can somehow obtain from the public (We the People) a license giving them the exclusive right to use a particular frequency. Otherwise all those assets they do own are useless.

So now that we've straightened that out: What gives 1540AM KRTR more right to have their views aired on 1540AM than I have? Well, we've established that it's not because they somehow "own" the frequency 1540. I can broadcast on 1540 just as well as anybody else can, using simple equipment that I can create from surplus gear from the Bay Area's many electronic surplus stores. All they "own" is a GOVERNMENT-GRANTED LICENSE to broadcast on 1540AM. Right now, they can broadcast their views on 1540AM -- and prevent my views from being broadcast on 1540AM -- only because they can call up the FCC and have me arrested if I broadcast my views on 1540AM. In short, GOVERNMENT is the only thing that gives them more right to broadcast their views (and lock out my views) on 1540AM. And that's wrong. Government should not be giving one right-wing oligarch more right to have his views broadcasted than mine. That's government-enforced censorship of my views.

Thus all the shorts-crapping of the tightie righties as they shit in their pants over the thought that the government might actually require them to air *all* views if they are to retain their monopoly on the public air waves. Because they are scared of competition. They are scared that if people can hear both left-wing and right-wing ideas on the public airwaves, that people might choose left-wing ideas. They want their government-granted monopoly, and they want it on their terms, terms that prevent me from broadcasting my own views on 1540AM. In short, they are the ultimate in welfare whores, who have wheedled special treatment from the government to give them more right than me to have their views aired on 1540AM, and who will use government to shut me down if I dare broadcast my own views on 1540AM. They claim to be "free market advocates", but that's just a lie. The very fact that they would call the government in on me to arrest me if I dared broadcast my own views on 1540AM shows it's a lie. What they are, are a bunch of oligarchs who have bribed the government into giving them an exclusive right to have their views and only their views broadcast on 1540AM, and who have no problem with calling in the government to censor my views if I dare broadcast them on 1540AM. They exist only because they're government welfare prostitutes, and there is no free market involved at all -- and cannot be, as long as they have a government-granted monopoly.

-- Badtux the Radio Penguin

Backpack!

I have the older version of the Gossamer Gear Mariposa Plus, the one that came with carbon stays. The carbon stays weighed only 0.4 ounces apiece and brought the total weight of the pack up to 1 pound 1 oz, but were fragile, and I managed to break one of them. So I went over to Gossamer Gear's site and noticed that they weren't shipping with the carbon stays anymore -- they now have curved aluminum stays. At a weight penalty of 3.4 ounces per stay. Ouch!

So anyhow, I have an old tent where one of the aluminum poles, due to years of abuse, decided to split on one end. So I took that pole and broke it apart by cutting the elastic inside it, and created two new stays using two pieces of pole per side. Then last night I went down to the garage and cut the stays to the correct length with my dremel tool's cutting bit, then squared and smoothed the cut end with a grinding stone in the dremel tool. I put my new aluminum stays on the scale upstairs here and and they weigh 1.1oz apiece, or roughly 1/3rd the weight of the updated stay system for the Mariposa Plus, and raise the weight of the pack to 1 pound 3 ounces but with a huge increase in durability compared to the carbon fiber stays (that aluminum tent pole went through years of utter *hell* before one end of one segment finally got mushroomed by me abusing it horribly, it's as close to indestructible as you can get with backpacking gear).

Color this penguin satisfied. Now all I have to do is find a place to go backpacking in order to test it out...

-- Badtux the Outdoors Penguin

No credibility

So I got an email from the RNC about how Obama's first 100 days were "100 days of taxing, spending, and borrowing." Now, nevermind that Obama gave a tax *break* to everybody who isn't a millionaire and thus the "taxing" thing is total bullshit, the Republican Party has no credibility - none, zero, zip - on that whole spending and borrowing thing.

The Bush Administration raised spending more than any President since Lyndon B. Johnston, who was fighting a war with 500,000 U.S. troops in theatre, sending a man to the moon (Bush only managed to send seven men to the boom), creating Medicare from scratch, largely finishing the initial construction of the Interstate Highway System, pass a comprehensive Civil Rights Act to end state-enforce apartheid in America and began enforcement of it, and otherwise giving us something tangible for that money. Well, other than that war thing, which was money sunk into a dismal jungle of no use to anybody. But Bush and his Republican Congress managed to give us *two* wars for more money than LBJ did all that other stuff with, leaving America with fewer good roads, less health care, less of everything that matters than when he started his term. Well, except the dead bodies, of course. President Bush was great at giving America dead bodies, whether they were dead GI's overseas, or dead Americans floating in the ruins of New Orleans, or dead bodies in the ruins of the World Trade Center (albeit he had help with that last one, he completely ignored the warning "bin Laden determined to strike inside America" and did nothing to prevent it).

So when the RNC rants about "taxing, spending, and borrowing", that's like a hooker ranting about irresponsible sex with strangers. It's a fucking hoot, is what it is. Almost literally.

-- Badtux the Mildly Amused Penguin

Just to show that stupidity isn't strictly a right-wing thing....

I decided to take a drive over to the loony left's haven at Shakesville to find out what the latest outrage was that those outrage junkies were getting their panties in a knot about. And what I found out was that the most important problem facing America and Americans had nothing to do with swine flu, the collapse of the economy, or anything like that. No, the real problem was:

A Mayflower Moving commercial that features a newlywed bride.

Because, y'know, brides are sexist. Or something.

No, I'm not kidding you (though you'll have to go there yourself). Just like the Shakesvillians got their panties in a knot about that funny German shopping video that I showed you a few days ago, they are just outraged, outraged I say, about this Mayflower Moving commercial.

Sigh. Lunatic ideologues. Doesn't matter whether they're righties or lefties, if they don't have their outrage of the day, they just aren't happy.

-- Badtux the Head-shakin' Penguin