by Cactusman (Dan here…not so heavy post) The Simpsons’ Predictive Powers Demonstrate the Limits of Forecasting The long-running TV show The Simpsons is attracting much attention for some of its uncannily accurate predictions. The United States’ curling team’s defeat of Sweden in the Olympics – something The Simpsons predicted in 2010 – being the most recent […]
First I stress the great effort I put into avoiding all Lamb puns in the title. Second, I think the discussion of his recent extremely narrow voctory makes the discussion of the campaign seem almost sane. Before their humiliating loss, Republican operatives insisted that voters were coming around to support their tax cut bill. In […]
I met Lynn while working with Alan Collinge of the Student Loan Justice Organization. She too has been working with Alan to call attention to the plight of students who took loans out to pay for college and the mishandling by servicers of them. The first story is of an older man who took out […]
It is unfair for me to pick on Paul Kane writing in the Washington Post, but he does seem to me to be a clear example of political reporters who interview operatives and quote them and do not look at relevant publicly available data. The main point of the article is that Republicans are in […]
Saudi Crown Prince Tortures Fellow Princes A new report by Hugh Miles at Middle East Monitor, Is the “Saudi Elite Cannibalizing Itself?” by Juan Cole, reports the recent purge of supposedly corrupt princes and high officials was (and continues to be) much more horrendous than previously reported, which I fear does not surprise me. Apparently […]
Janet Colbert of Stop The Organized Pill Pushers Blog: “The death rate from Opioids continues to escalate year over year due to Florida ignoring the opiate epidemic for so long. Since STOPPNow (Stop The Organized Pill Pushers) started posting, the death rate went from 7/day in Florida. to 14/day. To keep the pressure on the […]
Dahlia Lithwick writes at Slate: We should all take a lesson from the Stoneman-Douglas students 1. Give Donald Trump Precisely 5 Percent of Your Mental Energy They have no interest in talking to him or even about him. They have internalized the lesson that he is a symptom of the problem but unworthy of credit or […]
1. The White House 2. The Republican National Convention 3. Mar-a-Lago 4. The U.S. Capitol Building 5. Republican Town Halls * Kali Holloway / AlterNet
No, Matt Yglesias, Trump is *not* “probably gonna be re-elected” While I generally agree with the political and social observations of Matt Yglesias and Ezra Klein, their takes that involve the economy frequently drive me crazy. So it was this morning when I encountered these two tweets from Yglesias: This is just incredibly shallow analysis and, […]
Four biographies for President’s Day In the past several years, I have read four biographies of overlooked or more controversial Presidents. On this President’s Day, I thought I would briefly discuss each in order of how well I thought they covered their topic. I. “The Man Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and […]