“GOP Rep. Ronny Jackson Throws Ridiculous Shit Fit Over the Prospect of Losing Gas Stove,” Vanity Fair, Bess Levin I can remember when someone else said something else along the lines of: I’ll give you my gun when you pry (or take) it from my cold, dead hands.” Charleton Heston In his own unoriginal words . . . […]

COVID endemicity: 100,000+ (mainly needless) excess deaths per year – by New Deal democrat I suspect these updates are going to be much less frequent from now on; for example, if a significant new wave is evident.  That’s because, as we start our fourth year of the pandemic, the good news is that it is […]

“Open Thread January 6, 2023,” Angry Bear, angry bear blog

by David Zetland (originally published at The one handed economist) I had heard of Douglass, but man oh man, I had no idea of his brilliance. His “Composite Nation” speech is full of wisdom and hope, offering a path to that “shining city on a hill” that Americans have had such a hard time reaching — mostly […]

And the news Media is waking up to this? In December 2022, NPR wrote, “Medicare Advantage plans overcharged Medicare by millions,” Health News : NPR, Fred Schulte and Holly K. Hacker Citing an April 26, 2016 example of US government auditors asked a Blue Cross Medicare Advantage health plan in Minnesota to turn over medical […]

Article Author April M. Short, an editor, journalist, and documentary editor and producer. Presently she is a writing fellow at Local Peace Economy, a project of the Independent Media Institute. Previously, she served as a managing editor at AlterNet as well as an award-winning senior staff writer for Santa Cruz, California’s weekly newspaper. Her work has […]

One reason politics is so hard is that our words are often heard by different audiences, and a message that is well-calibrated for one type of listener may work poorly for listeners with different roles, values, or interests. To illustrate:  Phillips O’Brien has a piece in the Atlantic with the headline “Time is on Ukraine’s […]

Weekly Indicators for January 9 – 13 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. One thing that comes with the territory of high frequency indicators is that they can be noisy. And at no time of the year can they be noisier as during and right after […]

“Peter Drucker Sets Us Straight,” January 12, 2004 (cnn.com), Peter Drucker and Brent Schlender This is an oldie from 2004 which still has relevance to what has occurred and is occurring in the world today. Any number of times I have found myself fixing supply chain operations globally for various companies of different countries. Ninety-Four […]

Real average wages and real aggregate payrolls for December 2022  – by New Deal democrat Now that we know December consumer inflation, we can see how the American working/middle class is “really” doing. Nominally, average wages for nonsupervisory workers increased 0.2%, while prices deflated by -0.1%, meaning that “real” average wages increased 0.3% for the […]