“Legal observers were surprised by the relatively light, 47-month sentence received Thursday by President Trump’s former campaign chairman Paul Manafort, who was convicted in August on charges of tax and bank fraud. The 69-year-old, who appeared in the court in Virginia in a wheelchair and pleaded for compassion, could have been sentenced to up to […]
This is really, really Rich . . . Nick Sandmann, high school junior who faced off with Native American elder Nathan Phillips on the Lincoln Memorial steps is suing WaPo for $250 million. It is “only the beginning said attorneys Lin Wood and Todd McMurtry, on their firm’s website, noting that it was the ‘first […]
Another Question for the Census The Trump gang has kicked up a ruckus over its plan to insert a question about citizenship in the 2020 decennial census. It’s a transparent attempt to reduce the response rate of immigrants, disenfranchising them in reapportionment and government spending formulas, despite the Constitution’s call for an enumeration of “persons”, not citizens. […]
It Is Monday And Usual Suspect Bashes Social Security That would be Robert J. Samuelson at the Washington Post, and, yes, he has done it yet again, actually for the first time in a while. Dean Baker has already done a good job of cutting him up over on CEPR, but I can’t help piling […]
Reduction in Representation as the remedy for voter suppression This is the second take prompted by my reading of David W. Blight‘s biography of Frederick Douglass. In the “nothing is every really new” department, voter suppression was very much on the mind of Douglass and other radical Republicans during the Civil War and its immediate […]
Frederick Douglass, Andrew Johnson, and the Copperhead GOP I am currently reading David W. Blight’s biography of Frederick Douglass, the 19th century orator and champion of black equality. Today I wanted to briefly write on several timely topics inspired by that tome. Douglass was biracial, or in the parlance of the day, a mulatto. His […]
There is quite a bit of Medicare fraud occurring in the nation and there has been a coordinated attack on it. The fraud can be measured in the $billions. Commercial healthcare Insurance fraud is also a problem and insurance companies spend quite a bit of money fighting it which adds to their administrative fees of […]
The most recent year for reported year-round earnings data available for full-time workers revealed the gender earnings gap to be 20 percent between men and women or said a different way women earned 20 percent less than men (Hegewisch 2018). The earnings gap between women and men has been measured (in the past) by taking […]
Persuasive Case of Voter Fraud and Republicans Do Not Care North Carolina: The first public indication things were not right in Bladen County occurred weeks ago. The North Carolina State Board of Elections did not certify the results of the closely watched 9th Congressional District race. Republican Mark Harris appeared to defeat Democrat Dan McCready […]
“On my wall, the colors on the maps are running” Two years ago in a post entitled “Those who cannot see must feel”, I wrote: That’s the translation of an old German saying that I used to hear from my grandmother when I misbehaved. It is pretty clear that, over the next four years, the American public […]