Well, well, well. The Senate Judiciary Committee has created a new subcommittee this year to specifically oversee the federal courts and the nation’s bankruptcy system, including administration and management, judicial rules, the creation of new judgeships. Last session’s Administrative Oversight and the Courts Subcommittee has been split into two separate subcommittees for this session. Senator […]

On Saturday Mish wrote a really awful article with those words in it’s title. The article borrows these words and includes a quote from an even more awful article by Austrian school economist and author Detlev Schlichter.  Part of that quote is presented here. What makes him [PK] so annoying is his unquestioning, reflexive and […]

Construction has been one of the more encouraging sectors, adding jobs each of the last four months. The hiring there was probably because of a combination of rebuilding from Hurricane Sandy, unseasonably warm weather that led to fewer work stoppages, and the nascent housing recovery, said Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomic Advisors. Retailing, […]

This was another tepid employment report not much different than the reports in 2012. Payroll employment rose 168,000 and the household survey showed a gain of only 17,000   Private payrolls expanded 168,000 while government employment fell 9,000.  Perhaps more importantly the year over year change in employment is showing significant signs of weakness,  Both […]

I watched NBC Nightly News with Brian Williams last night.  Big Mistake. Big mistake. Because now I’m really confused.  I was pretty darn sure until then that “raising the debt ceiling” meant allowing the Treasury Department to pay financial obligations already incurred, such as interest on bonds, Medicare payments, and contract obligations, and to allow […]

This is more or less relevant to Beverly’s post from earlier today. How many times have you heard Boehner, McConnell, Ryan or one of the legion of right-wing talking heads say, “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem?”  I refuted that lie repeatedly in this AB post and at the included […]

Politico’s Glenn Thrush reports this morning that Republicans believe the GDP report showing the economy is shrinking gives them political “leverage” over Obama, since bad economic news is terrible for the President. But Thrush notes that this shouldn’t be the case, since the contraction was the result of spending cuts, which in theory should undermine […]

There were three big political stories that came out of David Gregory’s fabulously interesting interview of Paul Ryan aired last Sunday on Meet the Press.  One was that Ryan said: Well, we can debate the efficacy of Keynesian economics or not. And I don’t obviously believe– I think the debt is pretty clear it doesn’t […]

This coming weekend is the annual Jon Swift Memorial Blogroll Amnesty, the reasoned, proportionate response to some of the Bigger Names suddenly deciding that they needed to cull their recommendations.  Swift’s brilliant (and certainly modest) proposal was that you should instead find five blogs with lower hits than you and recommend (i.e., promote) them, not […]

The American Future Fund is an Iowa based 501(c)(4) tax-exempt organization affiliated with the Center to Protect Patient Rights, which in turn has reported ties to billionaires Charles G. Koch andDavid H. Koch. American Future Fund was founded by individuals who worked for Mitt Romney‘s 2008 bid for the Republican U.S. Presidential nomination. Nick Ryan, […]