Three people have died and 31 others were injured, seven severely, in a stampede triggered by sales promotion in a Carrefour outlet in southwest China Saturday.

...People began queuing at the entrance around 4:00 a.m. Saturday, waiting to buy a kind of cooking oil with a much favorable price, said Gao Chang, spokesman for the government of Shapingba District.

...Around 8:40 a.m. when the shop started its business, throngs of people burst in and a mass stampede occurred.

He Yu, one of the shoppers combating for the cooking oil, got bruises in his face and hands in the stampede.

"I rushed to the oil shelf with other people and grabbed four bottles. Suddenly I was tripped over on the floor. Luckily I got hold of another person and escaped from being crashed," the young man said.

Update... Our monetary correspondent "Irrational Exuberance" alerts us that Ron Paul's questioning of Ben Bernanke on Thursday has been posted to YouTube, and points to a good posting on the Mises.org blog on what Paul has interjected into the presidential election:

Yet Ron has made an issue, and a huge one, out of the Federal Reserve and its destructivism and business cycles. Last month, 2,000 University of Michigan students cheered his calls for sound money by chanting "Gold, Gold, Gold."

Republican politicians, who understand quite well that the G.O.P.'s national success since the 1970s owes everything to the partisan switch of Southern whites, have tacitly acknowledged this reality. Since the days of Gerald Ford, just about every Republican presidential campaign has included some symbolic gesture of approval for good old-fashioned racism.

Thus Ronald Reagan, who began his political career by campaigning against California's Fair Housing Act, started his 1980 campaign with a speech supporting states' rights delivered just outside Philadelphia, Miss., where three civil rights workers were murdered. In 2000, Mr. Bush made a pilgrimage to Bob Jones University, famed at the time for its ban on interracial dating.

...the slur spreads. It's spread by people who, before making one of the most heinous charges imaginable, couldn’t even take 10 minutes to look at the evidence.

In reality, Reagan strategists decided to spend the week following the 1980 Republican convention courting African-American votes. Reagan delivered a major address at the Urban League, visited Vernon Jordan in the hospital where he was recovering from gunshot wounds, toured the South Bronx and traveled to Chicago to meet with the editorial boards of Ebony and Jet magazines.

Lou Cannon of The Washington Post reported at the time that this schedule reflected a shift in Republican strategy. Some inside the campaign wanted to move away from the Southern strategy used by Nixon, believing there were more votes available in the northern suburbs and among working-class urban voters.

But there was another event going on that week, the Neshoba County Fair, seven miles southwest of Philadelphia. The Neshoba County Fair was a major political rallying spot in Mississippi (Michael Dukakis would campaign there in 1988). Mississippi was a state that Republican strategists hoped to pick up. They’d recently done well in the upper South, but they still lagged in the Deep South, where racial tensions had been strongest. Jimmy Carter had carried Mississippi in 1976 by 14,000 votes.

So the decision was made to go to Neshoba. Exactly who made the decision is unclear. The campaign was famously disorganized, and Cannon reported: “The Reagan campaign’s hand had been forced to some degree by local announcement that he would go to the fair.” Reagan’s pollster Richard Wirthlin urged him not to go, but Reagan angrily countered that once the commitment had been made, he couldn’t back out.

The Reaganites then had an internal debate over whether to do the Urban League speech and then go to the fair, or to do the fair first. They decided to do the fair first, believing it would send the wrong message to go straight from the Urban League to Philadelphia, Miss.

Reagan’s speech at the fair was short and cheerful, and can be heard at: [link]. He told several jokes, and remarked: “I know speaking to this crowd, I’m speaking to a crowd that’s 90 percent Democrat.”

He spoke mostly about inflation and the economy, but in the middle of a section on schools, he said this: “Programs like education and others should be turned back to the states and local communities with the tax sources to fund them. I believe in states’ rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can at the community level and the private level.”

The use of the phrase “states’ rights” didn’t spark any reaction in the crowd, but it led the coverage in The Times and The Post the next day.

Reagan flew to New York and delivered his address to the Urban League, in which he unveiled an urban agenda, including enterprise zones and an increase in the minimum wage. He was received warmly, but not effusively. Much of the commentary that week was about whether Reagan’s outreach to black voters would work.

I've had this up for almost two decades, but it doesn't stop the "Big Lie" about Reagan's campaign from being told over and over again. People keep trying to sneak it into places like the Wikipedia article on Reagan, etc. With thousands of people telling the same lie it is difficult for the people telling the truth to keep up. Or, as Reagan might have said, a lie can travel around the world before the truth can get its boots on.

Votes in the House of Representatives on ATM patch have begun.

As of 30 minutes ago, Rangel was still shy of a winning margin; accurate counting is impossible. The pressures on Democrats to conform is growing intense. Those Democrats who intend to vote Nay on Rangel, or Yea on a motion to recommit, are keeping as low a profile as possible, seeking to avoid even more pressure.

Working against Rangel is the fear that the Senate won’t be able to pass any bill like Rangel’s. They call this fear “getting BTU’d, a reference to House Democrats voting on favor of then-VP Al Gore’s proposed BTU tax only to see the Senate scuttle it. The Republicans used these votes to great effect, fanning the anger by voters over energy taxes. Such is the ammo of politics – like it or not. Boehner just used this line of argument in his remarks moments ago.

Here we are in 2007. Sixty House Democrats have been elected to serve in districts carried by Bush in 2004. A switch of 16 makes John Boehner the next Speaker, a happy prospect if you care about limited government, low taxes and free markets.

Will these AMT votes matter come election day 2008? Maybe, too hard to say right now.

But if you take these battles one at a time, this will be a good day for Boehner no matter what. He might just beat Rangel, perhaps by passing a motion to recommit the bill with an amendment to relieve AMT without offsets. The odds are that Pelosi, Rangel & Hoyer will squeak out a narrow victory in the House. The only ones who know right now are about eight Democrats. Most of them hiding.

Tune in.

No motion to recommit. They dropped it at last minute so that they could maximize pressure on vote on Rangel. (Some Dems could vote YEA on motion to recommit then YEA on Rangel, but not in sufficient numbers to pass motion or beat Rangel.)

Update 3... Mick adds,

Indeed, and our gang is already at work. The perfect hedge to a potential President Hillary is Speaker Boehner.

One conclusion is that Pelosi & Co came very close today to exhausting their goodwill with the decisive group of her Democratic colleagues. Remember, the hard work of appropriations, earmarks, war funding and wrapping up her first year are still undone. In fact, to make a bad rhyme, none of that work has even begun. She barely escaped, mostly by working over Democrats as if losing meant a “vote of no confidence” in their majority.

If the media treated Republicans as they do Democrats, THAT would be the feature story running besides the news piece. “House Speaker Wins Squeaker: Can she ever do so again? Danger Ahead, Key Colleagues Whisper.”

Lou Dobbs -- a member of the establishment elite and a mouthpiece in the media -- does me the honor of calling me a liar in his latest book (no link to Amazon provided; I don't want you to buy it):

I've been called a lot of names by the establishment elite and their mouthpieces in the media because of my stance on a wide range of issues of national concern. But some of the silliest denunciations originate with the 'free trade' crowd. Because I seek balance and reciprocity in U.S. trade policies, I am a 'table-thumping protectionist.' The Bush administration has hurled at me its favorite public epithet, 'economic isolationist.' Donald Luskin, a contributing editor to The National Review, added to the litany in a piece provocatively titled 'Isolationist Ignorance in Action: Watch Lou Dobbs Ascend to the Pinnacle of Protectionist Prevarication.' Luskin claimed, 'The advocates of free trade have on their side over 200 years of settled science in economics, going all the way back to Adam Smith. The advocated of protectionism have Lou Dobbs. With his nightly harangues on CNN and through his books, Lou Dobbs has become the public face of today's dangerous movement toward economic isolationism.' None of Luskin's claims could be further from the truth. I believe the importance of an international system of trade and finance that is orderly, predictive, well-regulated, mutual, and fair.

Update... I wonder what he means when he says he wants an international system of trade that is "predictive"? What does he want it to predict? The stock market? The races? That would be nice. Maybe he's really onto something.

Update [11/9/2007]... Reader Scott Kelly says,

...that guy is one of the reasons I get so frustrated in domestic airports. I fly on Delta, which means everywhere I fly I tend to get Atlanta-based CNN blared at me at every gate — which is one key reason I so much enjoy my Bose QuietComfort II noise-cancelling headphones, because if anything can fairly qualify as noise in need of cancellation, it’s CNN in general and Lou Dobbs in particular. To paraphrase George Patton, that guy “knows less about [economics] than a priest does about fornicating.”

With regard to his desire for a market which is “orderly, predictive, well-regulated, mutual, and fair,” I submit that the operative phrase is not “predictive” but “well-regulated.” And we’ve seen how wonderfully that works, have we not?

PAUL: Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

The best way I could describe the problems that we face here in this country, as well as the problem that the Federal Reserve faces, is that we're indeed between the rock and the hard place, because we have a serious problem. We don't talk about much how we got here, we talk about how we're going to patch it up.

The bubble has been burst. We saw what happened after the NASDAQ bubble burst. We don't ask how it was created.

And then we have a housing bubble, and it's deflating and then spreading.

And yet nobody says, where does it come from?

And what is the advice that you generally get, and that is inflate the currency. They don't say inflate the currency, they don't say debase the currency, they don't say devalue the currency, they don't say cheat the people who are (inaudible). They say lower the interest rates.

But they never ask you, and I don't hear you say too often, the only way I can lower interest rates is I have to create more money. I have to lower the discount rate, I have to make it generous, I have to increase reserves, I have to lower the interest rates and fix the interest rates -- overnight rates.

And the only way you can do this is by increasing the money supply. And I see this as the problem that we don't want to talk about.

Currently, of course, we can't follow the money supply with M3 but we can follow one of your statistics, which is the MZM -- the ready cash available -- and we see that inflation is alive and well. That money supply figure is going up about 20 percent per annualized.

And this just means that the dollar gets weaker. And everybody says, well, the dollar is -- that's great. Dollar weaker, we're going to have exports. And that is a fallacy -- maybe for a month or two, but it just invites inflation.

And unless we get down to the bottom of it and define what inflation is and not look at only prices -- this was talked by the free-market economists all through the 20th century. They said, Beware: They will increase their money supply, but they will make you concentrate on prices. And they will give you CPIs and PPIs and, you know, fudge those figures and they'll talk about wage and price controls to solve our problems.

And we ignored the fundamental flaw, and that is that not only have we had a subprime market in housing; the whole economic system is subprime, in that we artificially low interest rates. And it wasn't under your tenure in office; it's been going on for 10 years and longer and now we're bearing the fruits of that policy.

I mean, a one percent interest rate, overnight rates and that's not a distortion? Instead of looking at these -- the consumer prices, which nobody in this country really believes, we need to talk about the distortion, the malinvestment, the misdirection, the bad information that is gotten from artificially low interest rates.

In many ways, some people refer to you as a price-fixer, you know, because you fix interest rates.

The market is powerful, and usually overwhelms and does come into play, but when the Fed fixes an interest rate at 1 percent, that is price-fixing.

At the end of your testimony, you suggested that we should address this housing crisis, and we should have rules that would address deceptive lending practices. And I just think that is not the answer at all.

The real deception is when we distort the value of money, when we create money out of thin air. We have no savings. Yet there's so- called capital. There's money available. But it comes from what you have to do and the pressures put on you.

So I think we have to get back to the very fundamentals of where this problem comes from. And the bubbles occur when we have this malinvestment and the creation of new money.

So my question boils down to this. How in the world can we expect to solve the problems of inflation, that is, the increase in the supply of money, with more inflation?

BERNANKE: Well, Congressman, first, just a small technical point. On the growth in money, money growth has been pretty moderate over the last few years. The increase in MZM is probably related to the financial turmoil. People have been taking their savings out of, you know, risky assets, putting them into the bank, and that makes the money data show faster growth.

So I'm not sure that's indicative of policy, necessarily.

What we're trying to do is follow the mandate that Congress gave us. And the mandate that Congress gave us is to look at employment and inflation as measured by domestic price growth.

And as I talked about today, and I think you would agree that we do see risk to inflation and we are taking those into account and we want to make sure that prices remain as stable as possible in the United States.

PAUL: How can you do this and pursue this -- the policy that you have -- without further weakening the dollar? There's a dollar crisis out there and people's money is being stolen; people who have saved, they're being robbed.

I mean, if you have a devaluation of the dollar at 10 percent, people have been robbed at 10 percent. But how can you pursue this policy without addressing the subject that somebody's losing their wealth because of a weaker dollar? And it's going to lead to higher interest rates and a weaker economy.

BERNANKE: If somebody has their wealth in dollars and they're going to buy consumer goods in dollars -- it's a typical American -- then the decline in the dollar, the only effect it has on their buying powers, it makes imported goods more expensive.

PAUL: Yes, but not if you're retired and elderly and you have CDs and their cost of living is going up no matter what your CPI says. Their cost of living is going up and they are hurting. And that's why the people in this country are very upset.

Rubin Is Reported Set to Back Clinton

"I know what presidential candidates are supposed to do; they roll in here every four years and they promise you this, they promise you that. What I'm going to do is tell you the truth," Edwards says at nearly every campaign stop. "It won't be easy, but it is time for a president who asks Americans to be patriotic about something other than war."

The strong medicine Edwards and his fellow candidates are selling -- an 80 percent cut in greenhouse gases from 1990s levels by 2050 -- tracks with a plan espoused by scientists. But it is a plan that will require a wholesale transformation of the nation's economy and society.

Libertarians, by contrast, are not the selfish monsters you might expect. They are earnest and impractical--eager to corner you with their plan for using old refrigerators to reverse global warming or solving the traffic mess by privatizing stoplights. And if you disagree, they're fine with that. It's a free country.

Update... Oh, did I forget to mention something? Yes... click here to join the Paul parade!

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 3:46 PM | link    

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:50 AM | link    

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 11:48 AM | link    

Posted by Donald L. Luskin at 9:22 AM | link    

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