Noted for Your Lunchtime Procrastination for August 27, 2015
Whose Recovery?: Where Is the People's Central Bank Woodrow Wilson Thought He Was Creating?

Jackson Hole 2015 Weblogging: Steve Lonegan Once Again

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We of Whose Recovery? and all of our friends at the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City Economic Policy Conference and Drinking Party are not the only people up in Jackson Hole this week. There is the American Principles Project down-valley somewhere--a conference that seems to me to be totally composed of grifters and goldbugs, with the accent on the first. They are there, charging their attendees a healthy sum, because, they say, current Federal Reserve policies are dangerously inflationary, and so they need to "bring sanity back to U.S. monetary policy".

The top five speakers for the goldbug-grifter project: George Gilder, Steve Moore, Benn Steil, Peter Schiff, and Jim DeMint. There's no need to talk about Jim DeMint, is there? Let's talk instead some more about the conference organizer, Stephen Lonegan:

Andy Kroll (2013): 6 Crazy—and Cruel—Things Said by Cory Booker's New GOP Opponent: "Steve Lonegan... [from] 1996 to 2008...

...served as mayor of Bogota, New Jersey (pop. 8,241 in 2011).... He has earned more than his fair share of headlines for...

'I have a handicap, you know. I am a white guy running in the state of New Jersey.' On August 8, Lonegan's campaign tweeted: 'Just leaked - Cory Booker's foreign policy debate prep notes.' Accompanying the message was a picture of a map of Newark, but with areas of the city labeled as countries in Africa, South America, and the Middle East. The campaign quickly deleted the tweet after Booker and others called it racist and 'deplorable.' Here's a screenshot....

'I'd hate to see you get cancer, but that's your problem, not mine.' While at the helm of AFP-NJ, Lonegan chided Gov. Chris Christie for not moving fast enough to reject Obamacare.... This is what he said at a debate on Obamacare in July 2011: "I'll be as callous and uncaring as you can imagine. I have no interest in paying for your health care. I'd hate to see you get cancer, but that's your problem, not mine. I'm going to pay for my health care, I'm going to take care of my children's health care and tend to my wife. And when I stand for charity care (inaudible), you [and] no one else has the authority to infringe on my right (inaudible) dig into my pocket and my ability to pay for your health care or anybody else's."...

A Spanish-language McDonald's billboard was 'divisive' and 'unfair'…because it was written in Spanish. When he was mayor of Bogota, Lonegan called for boycotting McDonald's because the company put up a Spanish-language billboard promoting a new iced-coffee drink....

May I say that to be opposed to Spanish while you are mayor of a town named Bogota shows a unique degree of cluelessness?

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