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

Angry Bear is Now Fully Justified! I should leave it at that, but I’m actually referring to the slightly new look of Angry Bear, including fully justified text and a new right-hand sidebar where someday I may start asking you to buy stuff or give me money. If you visited late Friday night or early […]

More on the Distribution of Benefits Just for comparison, the following chart shows the average benefit for the bottom 80%, the median benefit for the bottom 80%, and the benefit for the top 1%, under Bush’s plan and under Grassley’s plan. As you can see, Grassley’s plan isn’t progressive, per se, but compared to Bush’s […]

More on the Dividend Tax Cut The picture first appeared in Henry Waxman’s study of Bush’s proposed dividend tax cut, then appeared on gorilla-a-gogo, which Off the Cuff then linked and copied, which CalPundit then also posted ,with attribution. If you still haven’t seen it, here it is (for those unclear on the regressive concept, […]

Plagiarism Since the topic is making the rounds in the blogsphere (Kieran Healy here; CalPundit here; Invisible Adjunct here; Yglesias here), I’ll toss in my two cents. Cent one: there are a lot of genuinely funny stories going around about students suddenly elevating their prose to Dostoyevskian levels, or their mathematical analysis to the level […]

Liberal Media in Action CNN Headline (from the front page): Alleged Chinese double agent indicted. Nowhere in the story did it mention that the spy in question, Katrina Leung, is a major Republican contributor; the word “Republican” is not even in the story. You have to go to the story, then notice the sidebar where […]

How was this for great timing? The dollar continues to fall against the Euro, likely due to some nefarious plan by the French to decrease the US trade deficit. On a personal note, it looks like I picked the ideal time in 2003 to visit Europe: AB

Credit Where it’s Due In this instance, to Sen. Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) who, given that a $350b tax cut is a fait accompli, actually came up with a pretty reasonable proposal on dividend taxes: Bush says his proposal to eliminate dividend taxes would boost stock prices and create jobs [on this point, see my earlier […]

Well Worth Reading… …and then buying. Salon has excerpts from Sidney Blumenthal new book, The Clinton Wars. Of course, why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free? (just kidding, I think). Now, if I could just figure out how to get the kickbacks from Amazon for the thousands of click-through sales […]

The Search for WMJ Many times over the last few years, current events brought a scene from the Simpsons to mind: Homer, reporting on the results of Springfield’s attempt to rid the town of bears: “There’s not a single bear in sight–the ‘Bear Patrol’ is working like a charm” “That’s specious reasoning,” Lisa retorts. “Thanks, […]

More Buffet As reported by Matt Stoller at ISTE, Warren Buffet recently came out strongly against the Bush tax cuts, going so far as to say “I don’t think enough of it [federal revenue] comes from people like me and too much comes from people who work in our shoe factories.” Is Buffet just some […]