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

Arkansas Republican Senate Candidate Tom Cotton Wants to Require Employers to Provide Employees With Multiple Healthcare Insurance Choices. Seriously.

[T]here is probably no one more gung ho for Obamacare repeal than [Senate Republican nominee] Tom Cotton. He talks about it all the time. So he obviously would roll back the Arkansas version of the state’s Medicaid expansion, right? Well, he has consistently refused to say. And in a new interview this week, Cotton was pressed on […]

SWAT

From Tom Dispatch author Matthew Harwood points out the rapid growth in the use of SWAT teams for regular police functions: In 1984, according to Radley Balko’s Rise of the Warrior Cop, about 26% of towns with populations between 25,000 and 50,000 had SWAT teams. By 2005, that number had soared to 80% and it’s […]

Libertarian? Or Fascist-Light?

The shooting death by police of Ferguson, MO teenager Michael Brown, and what has happened in the aftermath, has been blanketing the news for the past few days. It’s a story about race, but it’s also become a story about the power of the state and how it’s wielded, and against whom. So my question […]

The mayors report in on Income Inequality (and miss the conclusion).

(lightly edited for ease of reading) Yesterday the Conference of Mayors and the Council on Metro Economies and the New American City released a report prepared by IHS Global Insight that is a repeat and thus update of a similar study performed after the 2001 – 2002 recession.  Income and Wage Gaps Across the US. I […]

Gerrymandering Michigan

I have been somewhat of a thorn in the Michigan Republican’s side as I know about the PPACA, can explain how it will benefit Michigan, can show by the Governor’s own report it will not cost Michigan anything up to 2027/28, and I can refute the arguments using economic data on other topics. I have […]

Illinois’ next governor may make Romney look like a saint

Does the name Bruce Rauner ring a bell? No, me neither. It turns out he’s the Republican nominee for governor in Illinois, which under normal circumstances would mean he’s a nobody. But he’s been leading incumbent Democrat Pat Quinn in polls all summer, and could actually end up as the state’s next governor. This is […]

More drought?

Is there more drought in store for California and the Southwest?  The Kelvin Wave that preceded an El Nino has dissapated and the  El Nino not not expected to develop. That’s because the largest surge of heat ever recorded moving west to east in the Pacific Ocean, often referred to as a Kelvin Wave, which was supposed […]