The Angry Bear

The Senate is pretty much worthless. A dress code, you gotta be kidding me. What is this Omega Theta Pi? Dems really need to concentrate on the issues and lay into Repubs on their failure to pass a budget, etc. Why should Dems play nice when Repubs don’t. It is about time someone took a different stance. Fetterman is different than the normal arrivals in government. As far as Durbin, he gave a speech at Showdown in Chicago which I attended....

A bit of a rewrite on this commentary to make it clear and precise in what it is saying. What is occurring is the Insurance Companies and their CEOs are profiting off of our illness. Insurance Policy pricing keeps going up along with the healthcare insurance deductibles. Unless one can afford the insurance premiums, people rely on higher deductibles. The other issue is such profit taking by executives can leave a company at risk when the economy...

One of these things is not like the others. Fentanyl is killing about 70,000 Americans a year. The others are known to be useful in treating opioid dependency yet (in 2014 sorry will Google more) only half of private opioid use disorder treatment programs offered pharmaceuticals and less tha one third of patients actually received the drugs “The proportion of opioid treatment admissions with treatment plans that included receiving medications fell...

Weekly Indicators for September 18 – 22 at Seeking Alpha  – by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. With interest rates at or near multi-decade highs, and the existing home market completely seized up, the background financial condition have trended even worse. Meanwhile the shorter term indicators may be getting reading to peak. But their previous sharp increase has worked its way into most of the coincident...

US mother sentenced to two years in prison for giving daughter abortion pills, Backwoods and Out Houses USA, The Guardian This is not horrific. It is what happens to people when there is no way out. The horrific part is the state which forces people to take any means possible. ~~~~~~~~ Jessica Burgess, a Nebraska mother accused of helping her teenage daughter use pills to end her pregnancy, was sentenced on Friday to two years in prison....

“So a Democratic Senator is indicted on serious charges, and no Democrats attacking the Justice Department, no Democrats attacking the prosecutors, no Democrats calling for an investigation of the prosecution, and no Democrats calling to defund the Justice Department,” wrote former Republican representative from Illinois and now anti-Trump activist Joe Walsh.  “Weird, huh?” AB: More on this in the second half of Prof. Heather’s commentary . . ....

The Big Picture of the housing market, and its almost complete bifurcation, in 3 easy graphs  – by New Deal democrat I want to spend some time commenting on the broader issue of why the public perceives inflation is still rampant, even though almost all official measures show it rapidly decelerating, and even completely absent on a YoY basis currently by a few measures. A big part of that has to do with housing, and since I’ve discussed several...

September 23, 2023. A service celebrating the life of Dan Crawford Unitarian Universalist Area Church at First Parish in Sherborn, MA 11AM EDT A Link; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vA4drLWBurU

The myth of markets How is it that a market created by Madison Avenue becomes prescient? Omniscient? It doesn’t. It isn’t; never was. Like capitalism, the primacy of private healthcare and the myth of markets are a big lie.The planet is dying from our burning of fossil fuels, yet we hear ‘news readers’ demand that alternative energy needs to be competitive with fossil fuels. Like hell, it does. Markets may, probably do, have a place in an economy,...

With sales near 25 year lows, the huge divergence between the existing and new home markets continues  – by New Deal democrat The drastic bifurcation between the new and existing home markets continues. Existing home sales fell to 4.04 million annualized in August, the lowest level of the entire past 10+ years except for last December and January. In fact, with the additional exception of a number of months during the great home bust during and...