In an email this morning, Bill H asked me whether I know much about a case called Harris v. Quinn, in which the Supreme Court will announce the likely 5-4 majority’s ruling tomorrow.  I responded: I know LOADS about it, Bill, and wrote about it–and about a bizarre comment by Alito during the argument on the […]

Yves at Naked Capitalism writes “NY Fed’s Bogus Estimate of Return on College and the Neglect of the Intellectual Commons” Yesterday, the New York Fed released a new report by Jaison R. Abel and Richard Dietz, Do the Benefits of College Still Outweigh the Costs? which is getting good coverage in the mainstream media. Its […]

Yves Smith linked this morning on her Naked Capital blog to my post from yesterday called “The Secretive Democracy Alliance’s Secret Is Out: Some of its members are elitist, racist and self-serving,” and added a comment about it: Helpful, but does not follow the logic to the obvious conclusion. Why is the Dem apparatus harping […]

Clarification appended below. —- [David] Brock, a former “right-wing hit-man”-turned-top-big-money-Democratic-operative, is part of a behind-the-scenes campaign to convince donors it’s OK to attack the Koch brothers for spending millions of dollars while doing the exact same thing for the left. “You’re not in this room today trying to figure out how to rig the game […]

Shocked by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor’s defeat in last week’s Virginia primary, many in the media have decided that this “earthquake” has re-shaped the political landscape. Immigration reform is dead, they say, and tea party radicals are far stronger than many suspected. Meanwhile, the alarmists warn, political polarization has divided the country, poisoning our […]

From the BBC comes a note on a crowd control drone:      South Africa-based Desert Wolf told the BBC it had secured the sale of 25 units to a mining company after showing off the tech at a trade show. It is marketing the device as a “riot control copter” that can tackle crowds […]

Today, “Economist’s View showcased Paul Krugman’s latest NYT article“Veterans and Zombies”. Paul discusses how the hyped-up VA issues are being used as an example of under performing government healthcare to emphasize how bad the much larger PPACA healthcare reform could be if allowed to proceed. Of course this is not true; but both Mark and […]

Anecdotal evidence, the basis of so much journalism prior to the rise of the data movement and still, to my mind, over-relied upon — is just that: anecdotal. Roughly 65,000 people voted in the Cantor-Brat primary; Brat won by more than 7,200 votes. Assuming that what a non-scientific sample  of 1, 10 or even 100 […]

If you have been watching the ongoing saga unfolding in Wisconsin on Governor Scott Walker and his recall election and election shenanigans, it probably comes as no surprise there was fire where there was smoke. “Prosecutors allege Gov. Scott Walker was at the center of an effort to illegally coordinate fund” raising among conservative groups […]

Warming slowdown? WHAT warming slowdown? A result of discussions at: Part one was mentioned at Angry Bear a few weeks ago. Here is Azimuth…part 2