Dan Crawford emailed me shortly after the news broke about Justice Scalia’s death, asking whether I have any random thoughts about it.  Here’s what I wrote back: I posted a comment to Bill’s post on the announcement, saying that I think everyone should take a deep breath before saying much of anything.  It’s absolutely huge, […]

The significance and impact on the nation and SCOTUS of his passing goes without saying. If President Obama can appoint a more liberal Justice on the Court, the balance could shift and perhaps some of the nonsense of the court’s previous rulings could be overturned. Thinking of United Citizen, etc. Of course this happening with […]

Nicholas Kristof  ✔@NickKristof Clinton is accusing Sanders of being anti-Obama. Feels fake and contrived to me, and rather nasty. 10:47 PM – 11 Feb 2016 Twitter ___ What worries me more than anything else about a Clinton general election campaign is her propensity to say obviously silly things. Elsewhere in that speech, in Clinton, IA […]

This is not about math — this is about people’s lives, and we should level with the American people.  Every progressive economist who has analyzed that say the numbers don’t add up. And we should level with the American people about what we can do to get quality affordable health care. — Hillary Clinton, at […]

Socialism has always appealed to the young, the cure for which isn’t age but responsibility. This usually comes in the form of taxes and children, both of which involve working and sacrificing for the benefit of others, the extent of which forms the axis upon which all politics turns. That Sanders never outgrew his own […]

A progressive is someone who makes progress. That’s what I intend to do. — Hillary Clinton, during last night’s debate. Clinton also thinks a “conservative” is someone who conserves. Which, she says, also is what she intends to do. First, though, she intends to redefine the entire Oxford English Dictionary.  Progressive, and presumably then, conservative don’t […]

Okay, what she actually said is that she can’t be part of the establishment, because she is a woman.  Because by definition, women aren’t part of the establishment. Shucks! No one told all those corporate folks who paid her $225,000 to hear her reminisce to them about how stressful it was to advise President Obama on whether he should approve the raid on […]

I’ve been a fan of New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler dating back to his days as a Salon writer, but in a piece today called “Bernie Sanders Will Be Unelectable If He Keeps This Up” he misinterprets the essence of Sanders’s current criticism of Clinton as a fair-weather progressive in a way that I […]

Last week 31 countries signed a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreement providing for country-by-country corporate information reporting and the automatic exchange of tax info between countries under the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA). Country-by-country reporting, the brainchild of noted tax reformer Richard Murphy,* is a principle that makes it possible to […]

It’s worth noting that Clinton has an interesting built-in advantage here. Clinton is campaigning as the candidate of continuity, at least in the sense that she is promising to build incrementally on the Obama agenda, while Sanders is implicitly arguing that the change of the Obama era has been woefully insubstantial when compared with the […]