Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Sea ice in the Arctic and new data from Cryo-Sat-2

Hi folks…coming back on line from experiences in hospital services (not mine) and found this Guardian article on something we haven’t followed closely in posts.   From the Guardian comes this note on the preliminary data of the new Cryo-Sat-2 probe on Arctic ice volumes: Sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing at a far […]

Via The Dailey Beast comes this tidbit from Grover Norquist at the Defending the American Dream Summit in Washington, sponsored by Americans for Prosperity: The most quoted speech at CPAC this year was Mitt Romney’s, but my vote for the most significant goes to Grover Norquist’s. In his charmingly blunt way, Norquist articulated out loud […]

Ed Kilgore Faces Facts about Welfare Reform

Ed Kilgore’s thought develops as he finally faces facts. He wrote It is entirely unsurprising that Paul Ryan and his many supporters have been advertising the [skip]in his budget proposal as the greatest thing since the Clinton-era welfare reform legislation. What is surprising is that some progressives seem to be going along with the characterization […]

numerous abuses of "numerous" or "a number" to mean 2

One interesting Romneycampaign tic is to use “numerous” to mean two. Examples of this abuse of “numerous” follow. 1. “After extensive hearings the bipartisan [Massachusetts] Ballot Law Commission came to the same conclusion as numerous independent fact checkers in finding that Mitt Romney ended his active employment with Bain Capital in 1999.” The numerous fact […]

Health Care Thoughts: Re-admissions, Resident Rights and Pie

by Tom aka Rusty Rustbelt Health Care Thoughts: Re-admissions, Resident Rights and Pie  A follow up to a post on evidence based medicine….  PPACA is putting extreme pressure on hospitals to reduce Medicare re-admissions. Hospitals are putting increasing pressure on nursing home to reduce re-admissions, particularly due to diabetes.  Nursing homes are under constant pressure to […]

Romney to Choose Ryan ?

At this point, the question mark is needed just in case the Romney campaign is deliberately trying to trick the rest of us. This seems to me to be politically insane. Ryan is the guy who wanted to end Medicare and replace it with a fundamentally different program based on vouchers whose value would not […]

PolitiFact evaluates the truthfulness of an Obama ad

PolitiFact, a Tampa based organization  that evaluate the truthfulness of political claims or ads does a very interesting evaluation of an Obama ad about  how much Romney pays in taxes.  The ad says that Romney ‘s tax rate of 14% is probably less than you pay.   http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2012/aug/09/barack-obama/barack-obama-says-most-americans-pay-higher-tax-ra/ PolitiFact says that if you include payroll taxes […]

Which (macro)-economists are worth listening to?

One could add a few names, and people did in comments.  One could also add a couple more thoughts  to Jonathon’s criterion, two of which could be admitting to mistakes and fixing parts of the model one is using if missed called, and a caveat around whether an economist could explain his/her model well and […]

Romney is still hiding his tax history (Part IV)

by Linda Beale Romney is still hiding his tax history (Part IV) As I noted in several prior posts about the reasons that multiple years of the Romneys’ tax returns are essential to evaluating Romney as a presidential candidate, the fact that Romney has adamantly refused to release returns other than the 2010 actual return […]