Re-posted from last year is Dan Becker’s post: Due Process: Holder vs Colbert. Art or Reality. Choose. This is the object: No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury,… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due […]
Reader Matthew McOsker sends a note pointing us to 2004 and reading for context: Who are the Boston Marathon terrorists? Some early reports state the men are Chechen. So where does Chechnya fit into global terrorism? I found the following piece that gives a nice summary: ” On September 1, 2004, a group of Chechen […]
by Mike Kimel Reagan and Rios Montt: The Company You Keep Former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt is on trial for genocide. I was born in the US, but my formative years were spent in South America in the 1980s. That the right wing Guatamelan military dictatorship was massacring unarmed civilians on a large scale […]
With constant delays due to significant engineering issues and design flaws, the cost of the F-35 has risen to $395.7 billion. But that’s just to build the planes. When you add in the cost of testing, operations and support, it will cost an additional $1.1 trillion — bringing the overall price tag to an incomprehensible […]
It’s official: President Obama has proposed cutting Social Security by replacing the program’s current inflation adjustment with the stingier “chained” Consumer Price Index. As I’ve discussed before, this risks undoing all the progress made against senior poverty since the passage of Medicare and Medicaid in 1965. 25% of seniors were poor according to official poverty […]
Center for Effective Government presents side by side budget comparisons: Click image to see full-size PDF chart and analysis A larger image is also available (JPG format)
Greg Mankiw suggests a part of the new budget proposed by President Obama affects 401k and IRA accounts. Some comment in general retirement accounts from AB starts here. Apparently, President Obama’s budget is going to include some kind of penalty for people who have accumulated more than $3 million in retirement accounts. The details are not […]
Margaret Thatcher, Polarizing Right-Winger The major news media celebrated Margaret Thatcher upon her death. They seem to praise her stubbornness and ability to move the UK to support her very conservative anti-union, pro-deregulation and privatization policies and talk of her impact on the UK. David Brooks, a typical voice on the right who saw Thatcher […]
The headline numbers in the employment report were very weak as payroll employment rose by only 88,000 and the household survey reported a -206,000 drop in employment while the labor force fell by -496,000. The futures markets are reacting very badly. But the workweek expanded and aggregrate hours worked increased 0.3% as compared to 0.5% […]
by run75411 Re-posted from New Agenda April 2009, Bill reminds us of some of the history leading up to today: Editor’s note: We are pleased to present this guest post by Bill H, who’s known around the internet as run75441, and who can usually be found writing in his area of expertise: finance. Recently, Stanford Magazine […]