(Dan here…..lifted from an e-mail via iphone and I am tossing it out to the fray) by new deal democrat A few thoughts, hopefully from 30,000 feet, about the shutdown: 1. It looks like Schumer is getting rolled again. The reason the Bush tax cuts became permanent, even when the Dems held almost all the […]

Carbon footprint conundrum would be my title.  Personal involvement is important (macro is too but not the point here), but this list points to involvements well beyond many our imaginations to implement as individuals.  Personal decisions are much harder for the top activities mentioned, and from personal contacts not much on the radar of people’s […]

Via David Dayen comes Playboy sues Boing-Boing: You can read our motion here, and EFF’s press release here. We’ll have more to say after the judge issues his ruling. Here’s the introduction from our motion to dismiss: This lawsuit is frankly mystifying. Playboy’s theory of liability seems to be that it is illegal to link to material […]

In case you forgot, a neighbor of Senator Rand Paul was charged with assaulting him. And the reason? Rene Boucher was angry by seeing the 55-year-old senator stack brush near Boucher’s property. An attorney for Boucher did not immediately return a call seeking comment. Boucher faces a maximum of 10 years in prison if convicted, […]

By Steve Roth (reposted) How Amazon’s Accounting Makes Rich People’s Income Invisible Increasingly, businesses don’t generate profits. They generate capital gains. It’s fiendishly clever. Image you’re Jeff Bezos, circa 1998. You’re building a company (Amazon) that stands to make you and your compatriots vastly rich. But looking forward, you see a problem: if your company […]

I do not understand the silence of the Democrats when it comes to dealing with the issues of this country such as student debt, the attacks by Trump and Republicans on the ACA, the Republican and Trump tax reform plan giving $billions to the 1% of the taxpayers making greater than $500,000 annually, the more […]

Minority unemployment: progress vs. prejudice On this Martin Luther King Day, let’s take a look at minority unemployment. This got a little attention earlier this month when the December jobs report showed the smallest gap ever between the unemployment rates of blacks and whites. So let’s start by confirming the good news.  Indeed last month […]

Are Voters In Nations With A Poland Problem Especially Sophisticated?  The argument here is that a nation with a Poland problem has a disconnect between its economic conditions and its political  outcomes.  It could be argued that in such a case the voters of that nation may realize that elected leaders (especially presidents in the […]

Jason Schwartz buries the lede in this genuinely alarming article in Politico “Study: Americans view media negatively, can’t agree on meaning of ‘fake news’” I attempt to excavate it. The study — the 2017 Gallup/Knight Foundation Survey on Trust, Media and Democracy, based on mailed-in responses from more than 19,000 Americans age 18 or older […]

Via Marketwatch Jamie Galbraith states his thoughts on a how the current US economy functions.  Here are a few snippets: University of Texas economist Galbraith, the son of the famous Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, believes mainstream economists and the Federal Reserve are too wedded to old ideas to see what is really going on […]