Reply to a Troll

Posted on Comments

Someone who failed to understand the policy sent me an e-mail, to which I replied:

Listen, a–hole: You don’t pay for this bandwidth, OK? It’s not HuffPo or DKos or LGF or wherever it is you customarily practice your trolling. We are under no obligation to publish *any* comments, and when someone habitually and repeatedly posts abusive, hostile or disruptive comments, my response is always the same: Get your own f–ing blog.

My general policy toward the comments has always been one of benign neglect. This isn’t one of those members-only forums where you have to sign up for permission to comment.

We’ve had something upwards of 50,000 comments and/or pingbacks in the past year, and it is a very rare thing to have to delete comments or ban IP addresses. But if you want to cheer for the destruction of TheOtherMcCain.com, you’re going to have to do it somewhere else.

Ruh-Roh, Again: Chinese Now Worried About Inflation, Raise Interest Rates

Posted on Comments

First, the end of QE2, and now Beijing tightens up credit:

China staged its third interest rate increase since October on Tuesday, the latest sign of the authorities’ intensifying efforts to temper the blistering pace of economic growth and prevent already worrisome inflation levels from escalating further.
The central bank in Beijing raised its benchmark one-year deposit rate by a quarter of a percentage point, to 3 percent, and its one-year lending rate by a similar amount, to 6.06 percent. . . .
In fact, many economists forecast still more increases and other growth-dampening measures during 2011 as the battle to combat price rises intensifies.
“There are plenty of reasons to expect inflation to pick up further in the next few months,” Brian Jackson, an analyst at the Royal Bank of Canada in Hong Kong, wrote in a note following the rate rise announcement Tuesday.

So while the Fed has been lending at an effective zero rate since late 2008 — and has actually been buying Treasury bonds to make even more credit available — the Chinese central bank is raising interest rates to slow down an overheated economy. Given the fact that the Chinese are holding a lot of U.S. debt, what will be the impact on the American economy? Stay tuned.

Death by Political Correctness

Posted on Comments

“The lights are going out all over Europe. Anyone who thinks or speaks individually is at risk. Freedom loving citizens who criticize Islam, or even merely suggest that there is a relationship between islam and crime or honour killing, must suffer and are threatened or criminalized. Those who speak the truth are in danger. … Everywhere the Orwellian thought police are at work, on the lookout for thought-crimes everywhere, casting the populace back within the confines where it is allowed to think.”
— Geert Wilders, at his trial in Amsterdam

Michael Moore Announces New Film: Those Greedy Jews Ripped Me Off!

Posted on Comments

The award-winning documentary director has filed a lawsuit claiming that producers Bob and Harvey Weinstein cheated him out of $2.7 million of his share of proceeds for Fahrenheit 9/11 using “Hollywood accounting tricks.”

Meanwhile, Moore is reportedly hard at work on plans for future projects, including Never Trust Those Crooked Bagel-Eating Yid Bastards and a comedy called Does This Lawsuit Make My Butt Look Big?

Ruh-Roh: Fed to End QE2?

Posted on Comments

How will markets react to the end of “quantitative easing”?

Today, Dallas Fed President Richard Fisher . . . said that he will not support any further QE expansion beyond the current $600 Billion Treasury buying program which is set to expire in June.

The era of fiscal stimulus is over and now, if the end of monetary stimulus is truly in sight, then we’ve finally reached the end of the neo-Keynesian route. And it’s about damned time, as Daniel Indiviglio says:

If the labor market is still failing to add enough jobs to bring down the unemployment rate, then that’s a pretty clear verdict that the second round of quantitative easing didn’t do the trick. If that’s the case, then you have to ask when the Fed would admit that its efforts to expand credit again and again are failing to create jobs.

What has been proven in the past two years is something we ought to have learned from the “stagflation” of the 1970s: Keynes was wrong!

Spotted Owls and Moderate Democrats

Posted on Comments

Both of them are endangered species:

The Democratic Leadership Council, the iconic centrist organization of the Clinton years, is out of money and could close its doors as soon as next week, a person familiar with the plans said Monday.
The DLC, a network of Democratic elected officials and policy intellectuals had long been fading from its mid-’90s political relevance . . .

(Via Memeorandum.) Now, if only we can hunt the RINOs into extinction, maybe we can finally have an honest debate that presents Americans with a straight-up choice between liberalism and conservatism. Good-bye, backstabbing crapweasels!