The Angry Bear

 – by New Deal democrat As usual, the month starts out with important data on manufacturing and construction. There was bad news and good news. The bad news is that both were negative. The relatively good news is that they were so slightly negative as to be essentially flat. First, the ISM report on manufacturing declined very slightly – by -0.2 – further to 48.5. This is the third month in a row that this index has been under the equipoise...

Struggling to sort out your feelings about the president? So am I. by Paul Waldman The Cross Section The purpose of this piece is not to convince you that Joe Biden should drop out of the race. In fact, I wrote it because I’m not sure if he should, and I think there are millions of people struggling with ambivalent and contradictory thoughts and emotions just as I am. So here are some things to keep in mind — some good, some not so good — as...

One of my favs for legal stuff. Supreme Court rulings on guns, abortion, Constitution: How originalism ate the law. (slate.com) by Dahlia Lithwick SLATE America is being led astray by a small handful of folks who are drunk-driving on originalism—and not in a funny Marx Brothers, spin-around-in-circles-and-all-fall-down sort of way. No, it’s in a children-murdered-in-their-classrooms, women-hemorrhaging-in-parking-lots,...

AB was off the internet. Just about the time I called our hardware computer company, we came back up again.

I put this in line for posting maybe today (Monday), asked Joel to look at it and offer an opinion on it, and was wondering if it had any consequence. By that I mean, the term fascism, fascist, etc. is becoming a popular term in people’s commentary, and is not a scary label when applied anymore. The not so supreme court decided today, our last president is immune from any prosecution for his criminal activities. For all intents and purposes, he...

Book proposal: Marx’s Fetters and the Realm of Freedom: a remedial reading — part 2.8 by Tom Walker Econospeak In “The Trinity Formula,” in chapter 48 of volume 3 of Capital, Marx returned to the contradiction between the forces and relations of production. This time, however, it was not to deplore or analyze the fetters but to examine the realm of freedom that would become possible when “socialized man, the associated producers, govern the...

Short answer: Lending, government deficits, capital formation, and holding gains by Steve Roth Originally Published at Wealth Economics I ended my last post with an apparent conundrum: “One person’s spending is another person’s income.” It seems to imply that spending and income must be equal. And since saving equals income minus spending, saving must be…zero? That’s obviously not the case. As I pointed out, other people’s spending is not...

Elena Kagan Is Horrified by What the Supreme Court Just Did. You Should Be Too. by Mark Stern SLATE Jurisprudence This is part of Opinionpalooza, Slate’s coverage of the major decisions from the Supreme Court this June. Alongside Amicus, we kicked things off this year by explaining How Originalism Ate the Law. The Supreme Court fundamentally altered the way that our federal government functions on Friday, transferring an almost...

The particular tactic used by trump has a name for it. Gish Gallop which is a technique, named after the creationist Duane Gish who employed it, whereby someone argues a cause by hurling as many different half-truths and no-truths into a very short space of time so that their opponent cannot hope to combat each point in real time. This leaves some points unanswered and allows the original speaker to try and claim his opponent lacks the...

When I was in junior high, most girls took home economics and most boys took shop. What I recall hearing about home ec is that it taught some cooking and sewing skills, and how to shop for food. It may have also taught how to balance a checkbook. I ended up learning those things on my own.Kevin Drum has a post over at jabberwocking.com summarizing a recent bill in California requiring a class in financial literacy for all high school students. Read...