The Angry Bear

Ross Douthat is evidently having trouble filling his column quota.  Or maybe he’s just confused about the role of public intellectuals and the nature of rational decision making. In two recent columns, Douthat suggests that Democrats are excessively worried about Republican attacks on voting and election and should just chill out.  He defends this “what, me worry?” approach to politics in two ways.  First, he argues that there is so much...

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, RI, has recently begun giving a series of speeches on the Senate floor in ref. dark money and the effect on the Supreme Court. The two so far have centered on Lewis Powell’s secret memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 just before his appointment to the US Supreme Court. The two speeches go a long way toward explaining the present makeup of the Court, how we got to this point, how capitalism works in America, southern...

April Trade Deficit Decreased 8.2% on Lower Imports of Consumer Goods and Automotives, Commenter and blogger RJS Our trade deficit was 8.2% lower in April, as our exports increased and our imports decreased . . . the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for April, incorporating an annual revision, indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit fell by a rounded $6.1 billion to $68.9...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 7: a Tale of Two Pandemics: the Vaccinated States vs. the Idiotic States The drive towards “herd immunity” via vaccination has slowed to a crawl. The slowing is almost entirely driven by Trump-voting States in the South and West. Those Idiotic States are continuing to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, while in the Biden-voting States of the Northeast, Midwest, and California, the pandemic has all but ended.Here...

Treasury Secretary Yellen Achieves A Victory  This is her getting the G-7 finance ministers to agree to a minimum 15% corporate tax. It is easy to sneer at this. Some of the nations involved may not pass it. There are many problems with details, such as whether the tax would be on gross or net income.  There are a lot of nations not in on this agreement, including especially large China. But currently many large corporations are paying zero...

#TangPing (“lying flat”) China’s new ‘tang ping’ trend aims to highlight pressures of work culture (from BBC) Young people in China exhausted by a culture of hard work with seemingly little reward are highlighting the need for a lifestyle change by “lying flat”. The new trend, known as “tang ping”, is described as an antidote to society’s pressures to find jobs and perform well while working long shifts. China has a shrinking labour...

 – by New Deal democrat Weekly Indicators for May 31 – June 4 at Seeking Alpha My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. On the one hand, it’s amazing just how positive the indicators are almost across the board – including long term Treasuries getting relaxed about the inflation scare. On the other hand, the surge in commodity prices looks like it’s about to bite corporate profits in the rear quadrant. Also, I’ve tried out...

Ross Barnett didn’t invent the big lie, but he was a practitioner. One might even say that Ross was to the manor born. The big lie had been a southern thing from the get go; comes with the turf. First you must lie to yourself, and so they did. Hitler appropriated, without acknowledgment, the concept in Mein Kampf, Chapter 10. That wasn’t all he appropriated from the American South; they had beaten him to a lot of the Nazi shtick. Joseph McCarthy...