Dems hold small edge in Congressional ballot matchup: A new Quinnipiac poll finds that voters support the Dem candidate in their district over the Republican by 41-37. Sixty seven percent disapprove of the Congressional GOP, versus 60 percent who disapprove of Dems. Sixty two percent say Republicans don’t care about their needs and problems; 54 […]

When Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was arrested Friday night, the celebration was instantly overtaken by an ideologically charged debate. Liberals argued that the government must respect Tsarnaev’s constitutional rights, by which they meant that he should be treated the same as any ordinary criminal suspect—informed of his Miranda rights, supplied with a lawyer, presented to court as […]

The two immediate what-everyone’s-talking-about legal issues in the Dzhokhar Tsarnaev case concern his Miranda rights–that is, at what point must he be read his Miranda rights notifying him that he has the right to remain silent and to the counsel of an attorney–and whether he can, and if so should, be classified as an enemy […]

Re-posted from last year is Dan Becker’s post: Due Process: Holder vs Colbert. Art or Reality. Choose. This is the object: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due […]

This is a re-posting of a Bruce Webb post from January, 2010.  A reminder of a well crafted plan to date: Seven Steps to Social Security cuts via Debt Commission For those of you who didn’t go the short version of my comment is that the strategy to get major slashes to Social Security and […]

This story has rapidly made the rounds in the blogosphere, and it is indeed a big deal. One of the most significant economics papers underlying the argument for why high government debt (especially over 90% of gross domestic product) is bad for growth was published in 2010 by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, “Growth in […]

I posted all I can say publicly at Skippy. And even that wouldn’t work at a family blog like this one. The rest are jokes that I am told–undoubtedly correctly, but lapsed traders are difficult to retrain*–are “too soon.” The Phantom Scribbler came out of her retirement (first post in more than eleven months), though, […]

Am I misunderstanding (certainly a possibility), or do the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza and Sean Sullivan write an entire article based on a really obviously ridiculous conflation of two separate concepts: what tax law is, and what tax law should be? The article, titled “Mitt Romney was right (on taxes),” chastises the public for hypocrisy […]

by Sandwichman  (re-posted with author’s permission): In his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke affirmed, “I do not question but that human knowledge, under the present circumstances of our beings and constitutions, may be carried much farther than it hitherto has been, if men would sincerely, and with freedom of mind, employ all that industry […]

With all the chaff that’s been flying around (recently, and for years now) about saving and investment, dissaving, and lending/borrowing, I felt the need to go back to the numbers and see how they’ve played out over the decades in what we tend to call the “real” economy — domestic households and nonfinancial business. Click […]