The Angry Bear

Will The “Impeachment Charade Fade Quickly”? We have not yet had all the final speechifying where GOP senators attempt to justify their votes to make this the first US federal impeachment trial in history (there have been 15, mostly of judges) not to have any witnesses, as well as the foregone acquittal.  But the battle over how it will be viewed in both the short and medium and long runs is already going on.  A sign of this is a column in yesterday’s...

December 2019 real personal income and spending Real personal income and spending are both coincident indicators. They don’t tell us where the economy is going, but they do give us a snapshot of how ordinary Americans are doing. In December, real income declined by less than -0.1%. Real spending rose by less than +0.1%: Figure 1 Real personal spending excluding government transfer payments is one of the four indicators used by the NBER to determine if the...

Via Matt Grossmann, a new paper by Patrick Fisher: Contemporary American politics is marked by an unusually substantial generation gap. This has important implications for the future of American politics as an overwhelmingly white and conservative generation, the Silent Generation, is being replaced in the electorate by much more diverse and liberal generations: the Millennial Generation and Generation Z. To project potential partisan changes in the...

She’s the reporter who asked Secretary Pompeo “Did you retaliate against NPR?” and what sort of message that sends to countries “whose governments routinely suppress press freedoms?”. I was already impressed that the US secretary of state was getting a lesson on respect for the free Press in Kazakhstan whose dictator used to be the general secretary of the communist party of the Kazakh Soviet Socialist Republic (and has been in office ever since and...

Live-blogging the Fifteenth Amendment: January 27, 1869 (1) I have gotten a little behind in this project. Congressional activity picked up considerably in the last week of January 1869. Rep. Charles A.Eldridge (D-Wisconsin) addressed a civil rights bill by Massachusetts Representative Buckalew under the 14th Amendment as well as the proposed 15th Amendment: I have not the vanity to suppose that anything I say will cause them to hesitate or consider....

Via Noah Smith . . . A relative of mine from China just sent me this. Rows of police surrounds her residential block where a positive #coronavirus case was found. It was someone who returned from #wuhan. Now their entire family has been taken away. The whole block is now sealed off until 16th Feb. pic.twitter.com/N3GulTWDlh — Maree Ma (@maree_jun) February 2, 2020

Elizabeth Warren Listen or read, your choice. This is presidential material for our troubled nation. WOW. Chief Justice John Roberts just had to read aloud Sen. Elizabeth Warren's question…about whether he loses credibility for presiding over a trial without witnesses or evidence. https://t.co/vG08pjmhZH pic.twitter.com/G79ZdRljZj — Heather Monahan (@HeatherMonahan_) January 30, 2020 While other senators were throwing questions at opponents, Warren...

Senate to emerge from impeachment trial guilty of extreme partisanship, Paul Kane The absolute need to balance blame for Republican partisanship with false claims about Democrats overcame Mr Kane’s interest in elementary logical consistency. He wrote none of the rank-and-file senators made a single real effort to negotiate their own compromise on witnesses. “Nope. I’ve made phone calls, I’ve sent emails,” Sen. Christopher A. Coons (D-Del.) said Friday....