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

Subsidizing private retirement accounts….

Via Demos comes this note on Our enormous retirment subsidies to the rich: …it behooves us to collectively recall just how much money the federal government is already devoting to subsidizing private retirement accounts. Those in policy circles tend to be aware of this stuff, but it largely escapes the glare of everyone else. Each […]

F 35

        Lifted from commnents in open thread in resonse to Tom Coburn’s comments on SSDI, by ilsm: Going after SSDI scalawags. The congress just added 4 more F-35 to the 2015 buy than Obama asked for. The F-35 is currently grounded because the engines tend to blow up and catch fire when […]

Flows From Unemployment to Employment & Extended Unemployment Insurance

I was not surprised to learn that conservatives assert that the recent increase in the growth of employment and reduction in unemployment are due to the failure to extend extended unemployment insurance. The headline labor force statistics have changed in the direction they predicted. Steve Benen noted the argument and linked to counter arguments by […]

Worth a Thousand Words

The title of the article is “Abused elephant rescued by Wildlife S.O.S.”  The caption under the picture of the elderly elephant with tears streaming from his eyes reads “Raju cried as he was freed from 50 years of cruelty; he was delivered to freedom to the Elephant Conservation and Care Centre at Mathura, India.” The […]

For anyone who’s interested …

I’m on roughly a zillion animal welfare organization email lists, and I received an email this morning, with a pic of a baby polar bear, from the Environmental Defense Fund, announcing a three-day extension, until midnight tonight, of two  charitable trusts’ matching of donations–one a tripling, the other a doubling. I thought I’d pass along […]

The President’s job in 5 words or less

The NPR radio show “Market Place” did an interview with President Obama last week.  As they do in such interviews he was asked to describe his job in 5 words or less.   This is what President Obama stated: My job is to: Keep the American people safe and to create a platform for hard working people to succeed. […]