I don’t think Chris Christie makes it out of New Hampshire. But he may have put ‘paid’ to Rubio and indirectly punched tickets for his rivals Bush and Kasich. Because Lord knows that Trump didn’t do himself any favors on eminent domain in the Live Free or Die State nor did Cruz for laying back […]
Christie is Done. But Wow! What a Parting Shot!
Trying to Make Progress on Redefining ‘Progressive.’ And ‘Establishment.’
A progressive is someone who makes progress. That’s what I intend to do. — Hillary Clinton, during last night’s debate. Clinton also thinks a “conservative” is someone who conserves. Which, she says, also is what she intends to do. First, though, she intends to redefine the entire Oxford English Dictionary. Progressive, and presumably then, conservative don’t […]
Mahatma Sanders: “First they Ignore You”
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win. I have been firmly in the conventional wisdom camp that Bernie would never be the ultimate candidate and so as much as I always wanted to “Feel the Bern” and more or less identify with Sanders as a Social […]
Open thread Feb. 5, 2015
Clinton Says Margaret Thatcher Wasn’t Part of Britain’s Establishment Because She Was a Woman
Okay, what she actually said is that she can’t be part of the establishment, because she is a woman. Because by definition, women aren’t part of the establishment. Shucks! No one told all those corporate folks who paid her $225,000 to hear her reminisce to them about how stressful it was to advise President Obama on whether he should approve the raid on […]
No, Sanders is not trying to boot moderates out of the Democratic Party and erect a progressives-purity test. He just objects to Clinton’s misrepresenting herself as a progressive Democrat when she is, by her own fairly recent and proud description, a moderate Democrat.
I’ve been a fan of New Republic senior editor Brian Beutler dating back to his days as a Salon writer, but in a piece today called “Bernie Sanders Will Be Unelectable If He Keeps This Up” he misinterprets the essence of Sanders’s current criticism of Clinton as a fair-weather progressive in a way that I […]
New OECD tax agreement improves transparency — but the US doesn’t sign and the US press won’t tell you UPDATED
Last week 31 countries signed a new Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) agreement providing for country-by-country corporate information reporting and the automatic exchange of tax info between countries under the Multilateral Competent Authority Agreement (MCAA). Country-by-country reporting, the brainchild of noted tax reformer Richard Murphy,* is a principle that makes it possible to […]
Is it just me, or is the Clinton campaign’s take on how to appeal to African-American voters really demeaning?
It’s worth noting that Clinton has an interesting built-in advantage here. Clinton is campaigning as the candidate of continuity, at least in the sense that she is promising to build incrementally on the Obama agenda, while Sanders is implicitly arguing that the change of the Obama era has been woefully insubstantial when compared with the […]
FOMC Projections of Fed Funds rate
Here is the graph from FRED for FOMC Summary of Economic Projections for the Fed Funds Rate, Central Tendency, Midpoint. (link) 1.15% for 2016. 2.45% for 2017. 3.20% for 2018. LOL… lots of luck. “The projections for the federal funds rate are the value of the midpoint of the projected appropriate target range for the […]