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

Clinton Announces When She Will Disclose Her Healthcare Insurance Improvement Plan: She’ll announce it just as soon as the Republican presidential candidates tell us theirs. [Typo in sentence referencing Max Ehrenfreund’s Wonkblog post corrected 3/2 at 2:28 p.m.]

Paul Krugman has been incessantly complaining about some Sanders supporters who accuse him and other high-profile Sanders critics, especially academics, of conflict of interest. The Sanders supporters allege all manner of self-interested reasons for the Sanders animus, much of it (including Krugman’s) expressed with vitriol. I’m not among the Sanders supporters who subscribe to the […]

@ilduce2016 #FF

You owe it to yourself to read “How We Fooled Donald Trump Into Retweeting Benito Mussolini” True genius expressed through the limited limited medium of twitter. Orwell would have been proud. Also Will Rogers, Moliere and Aristophanes. Our Fascist bot was anything but subtle. It was, after all, directly named after Mussolini. The New York […]

The Koch Brothers Read Angry Bear! [links fixed]

Yep.  As I said, a monkey could beat Rubio in the general election.  So maybe the Republicans should urge a monkey to run as a third-party candidate.  Someone who works for the Koch brothers’ super PAC, maybe? — Me, here, Feb. 24 OMG! Okay, if you think the timing of this is a coincidence you are […]

Democrats and Progressives need to accept the likelihood that their nominee will be facing Trump in November. And they need to seriously consider what that actually means. [Edited. Cringe-inducing cut-and-paste typo corrected**.]

— Clinton [at a CNN-sponsored town hall last night in South Carolina] promised to go hard after Wall Street. The former Secretary of State faced criticism in a different department: her failure to release transcripts of paid speeches given to Goldman Sachs. “Sure, I’ll do it if everybody else does,” the former Secretary demurred, circling back to a familiar refrain […]

Paul Krugman Hits It Home [Updated]

And let me say that the great thing about a progressive agenda is that it doesn’t require big growth promises to make it work, because the elements of that agenda are good things in their own right. Conservatives need to promise miracles to justify policies whose direct effect is to comfort the comfortable (cutting taxes […]

US Federal Marshals Picking Up Student Loan Defaulters . . .

Alan Collinge of the Student Loan Justice Org sent me an email yesterday. Bad Stuff from Texas . . . Hey Bill! This is a scary story. They are arresting people en masse in Texas over student loan debt. I got on the Thom Hartmann show to talk about it: https://youtu.be/a1OBJGs2PeE There’s no direct tie-in […]

Hillary Clinton’s not very good at math.

The truth is, we aren’t a single-issue country.  We need more than a plan for the big banks. The middle class needs a raise. — Hillary Clinton, last night in her Nevada-caucuses victory speech We’re not a single-issue country?  Who knew?  That’s a peculiar message on which to hang her campaign—as she has been doing […]