The Angry Bear

“Republicans finally get “death panels,” Hullabaloo, Tom Sullivan, July, 26, 2020 Dr. Jose Vasquez, the health officer for Starr County, Texas located on the US-Mexico border “The situation is desperate.” At the only hospital in the county, over 50% of patients are testing positive for the COVID-19 virus — 40 new coronavirus cases were reported Thursday. Starr County Memorial Hospital in Rio Grande City made plans to set up a committee to decide which...

The 2020 Presidential and Senate polling nowcasts: we need more small State polling! For the past five weeks I have posted a projection of the Electoral College vote based solely on State rather than national polls (since after all that is how the College operates) that have been reported in the last 30 days, using the following formula: – States where the race is closer than 3% are shown as toss-ups. – States where the range is between 3% to 5% are...

Managing A Zoom Conference As of the end of this week, I completed chairing the 30th annual international conference of the Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology and Life Sciences, with 54 participants from around the world.  It basically went well, and it was kind of cool to make introductory remarks at 8 AM during EDT, with somebody on at 6 AM their time in Montana and someone else on at 10 PM their time in Sydney, Australia.  It can be done, and...

by New Deal democrat My Weekly Indicators post is up at Seeking Alpha. There was no significant change this week in any of the indicator time frames.  I expect that to change in a hurry once the pain of the ending of the supplemental $600/week unemployment benefits is felt. That was all going to spending, and that spending is going to very abruptly stop. As usual, clicking over and reading brings you up to the virtual moment on the economy, and rewards me...

New home sales roar back to pre-pandemic levels At some point – probably three or four months after Joe Biden takes the oath of office on January 20 of next year, G*d willing – the coronavirus pandemic is going to be brought under control in the US. At that point the long leading indicators are going to be very important in terms of the immediate direction of the US economy. And the news on that score is very good, as shown by new home sales for June,...

Dig Him Up! by Ken Melvin On our TV and computer screens we saw right-winged protesters armed with semiautomatic weapons displaying swastikas, nooses, and replicas of supposed confederate battle flags guarding the entrance and filling the chambers of Michigan’s State Capitol. How did they get by with this? Does the Second Amendment of the US Constitution give them the right to try to intimidate a duly elected Governor, government, with assault weapons and...

The short leading indicators and the 2020 Presidential election forecast As I pointed out on Sunday, polls and poll aggregations really aren’t forecasts, they are nowcasts. They tell you who would win and by how much *if the election were held today.* They don’t tell you whether or by how much that is likely to change over the next few months. Further, candidates, campaigns, and voters react to them, and so change the dynamics. And in the case of several...

Initial claims: a jolt of bad news, as Mitch McConnell and the GOP dawdle on an emergency benefit extension This morning’s report on initial and continuing claims, which give the most up-to-date snapshot of the continuing economic impacts of the coronavirus on employment, was a jolt of bad news, as claims increased by over 100,000 to the worst level in 4 weeks. The trend of slight improvement to “less awful” since the end of March was broken, and there...