by Barclay Rosser (reposted from Econospeak with permission from the author) Fred Hiatt Thinks Obama Not War whooping Enough In today’s Washington Post, editorial page editor, Fred Hiatt, has a column under his own name entitled, “A critique of Obama catches on.” The critique amounts to Obama being “too passive” in foreign policy, with this […]
Greg Sargent gets a great nugget from Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who “recently conducted a statewide poll in Kentucky for an unnamed client and found that Kynect polls very positively, in contrast to Obamacare, which is underwater.” Kynect is the Kentucky version of the Affordable Care Act exchange. To the extent the polling is correct, […]
This particular post was first picked up at Economist’s View and fits with Sandwichman’s posts on Labor. I have been watching Participation Rate in conjunction with U3 since 2001 along with others such as Laurent Guerby and while the US has decreased in the numbers of people in the Civilian Labor Force, our counterparts in […]
Readers of my AB posts know that a recurring theme of mine is the right’s cooptation of the word “freedom” to disembody the word from actual physical freedom–e.g., from imprisonment–or from personal choice, and to instead define it as a Reagan-era Conservative Legal Movement checklist. And that these folks achieve this by declaring it mandated by the Constitution’s […]
That’s the conclusion of Stuart W. Elliott in his recent paper, “Anticipating a Luddite Revival.” (Hat tip: RobotEconomics.) We’ve seen that scale of transformation before. But this one promises to be roughly four times as fast, dwarfing Luddite-era concerns: …the portion of the workforce employed in agriculture shifted from roughly 80% to just a few […]
Correction appended below. —- Scott Lemieux weighs in at The Week, writing that, although “Supreme Court voting is too complex to be explained by any single factor,” the “attitudinal model” – which posits that “Supreme Court votes are explained by what judges consider desirable policy” – “still contains a good deal of truth.” — Amy […]
I’m encouraged any time government functions. We’re a very philanthropic society. We always want people to have safety nets. Medicaid is meant to be a temporary measure to provide benefits for people who are in difficult circumstances. It’s not meant to be going on forever. — Scott Brown, when Politico reporter Kyle Cheney asked him […]
Update appended. 5/17 at 1:37 p.m. —- I’ve written several times in the last three-plus years about a Supreme Court case called Bond v. U.S. Actually, to be precise, Bond v. U.S. is two Supreme Court cases, although it’s only one lower-court case. This is not unusual, but the case itself is; both the facts and the […]
The problem we have in this country is not income inequality. It’s opportunity inequality. — Chris Christie, today And since there’s no causal relationship whatsoever between income inequality and opportunity inequality, this is sure to be a winning political message in 2016. Christie made the comment “at a ‘fiscal summit’ hosted by the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, which […]