Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Naked Capitalism was right legislation

Via Naked Capitalism comes this analysis of the current state of regulatory translucence and the Warren Coburn bid for more transparency.   David Dayen writes: I’ve been going out of my mind the past few days seeing the easily duped traditional media uncritically printing statistical analysis from JPMorgan Chase’s roundelay of get-out-of-jail-almost-free settlements. The gist of […]

Sunday Reads

The 1% are Still Stealing Our Homes Hat Tip Crooks and Liars Diane Sweet Following the bank’s instructions, Laura and her partner missed three months of their mortgage payments to qualify for a loan modification. But instead of working with the family, Bank of America put the home in foreclosure, using the highly controversial process […]

Identity theft

America’s fastest growing crime problem points us to some numbers: When we talk about crime at the city level, we tend to focus on violent crime and property crime. These two categories don’t encompass the entire universe of illegal behavior, but they cover crimes that a) have victims, and b) local police can actually  investigate. […]

More On the Real Reason Healthcare Insurance Companies Are Now Encouraging Obamacare Enrollment

In light of some of the comments to my post yesterday arguing that that the real reason that healthcare insurance companies are now madly encouraging Obamacare enrollment is fear of a pro-public-option or pro-single-payer political juggernaut, I want to make clear that by single-payer I do not mean Medicare-for-all.   Single-payer would be, in essence, “the […]

The Affliction of Judicial Affluenza [Updated]*

I normally don’t post here about high-profile news stories on which I have nothing, really, to add to what has been reported extensively in news stories or argued in opinion pieces in the mainstream media.  So my first inclination when I saw an email from Dan Crawford yesterday suggesting that I post on the affluenza […]

The Antidisestablishmentarianism Theory of Obamacare Illegality. (The ACA has a (dis)establishment clause! Who knew?) [Updated.]

A federal judge in the District of Columbia will hear oral arguments on Tuesday in one of several cases brought by states including Indiana and Oklahoma, along with business owners and individual consumers, who say that the law does not grant the Internal Revenue Service authority to provide tax credits or subsidies to people who […]

Ending the Era of Minority Rule

Obstructionism has been the modus operandi by Republicans in Congress to oppose President Obama with special emphasis in the Senate. Through the use of the filibuster, the Senate Republican minority has been able to block presidential appointments or sway them to less likely candidates, block the appointment of Federal Judges to the bench, and obstruct […]

The Kosher Butcher Who Was Not a Person Until He Incorporated Himself*

Religious liberty, [Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals] Judge Tymkovich wrote, cannot turn on whether money changes hands. “Would an incorporated kosher butcher really have no claim to challenge a regulation mandating non-kosher butchering practices?” he asked. — Court Confronts Religious Rights of Corporations, Adam Liptak, New York Times, today Why, yes, Judge Tymkovich, of course […]

Code as law

Lambert Strether and Bob Goodwinn via Naked Capitalism offer a point of view on how law is being implemented through large system programming, as it played out in the MERS system of property ownership fait accompli, and other systems.