EconoSpeak

[Able to get on here from my home laptop]Donald Trump has long had a record of doing things one finds not just unbelievable, but seriously outrageous.  However, we may now have seen him do so in a situation involving a really dangerous foreign policy situation, the threat of a war on the Korean peninsula, a war that could involve nuclear weapons and could involve not just thousands, but possibly millions of people dying. The DMZ that separates North and South Korea is the most heavily armed...

There has been much moaning and wailing and gnashing of teeth by many commentators and politicians over the failure of President Donald Trump to appoint people to fill numerous now vacant positions within the executive branch of government, with the State Department often being put forward as one of many agencies with many empty chairs in official positions.  However, the other night I heard Lawrence O'Donnell make an interesting point: those empty chairs are being filled in the meantime by...

And, sorry, but no, simply saying things one does not agree with does not justify in engaging in unprovoked violence.  This is directed at the recent events in Berkeley where it appears that masked and self-identified "anarchists," (not "antifa members" as Hannity called them), engaged in violence that was not in self-defense. I am not all that happy about people shutting others down from simply speaking publicly, but I am completely opposed to doing this by means of unprovoked violence...

Washington Post columnist and occasional novelist and diplomat, David Ignatius, is one of the best informed and wisest of commentators on Middle East affairs.  Thus it is with concern that in yesterday's Washington Post in a column titled, "A new chance for Middle East peace?" he seems to have fallen for third rate propaganda largely being pushed by the Saudi government, although also backed by the UAE ambassador (closely allied to Saudi Arabia in their anti-Iran and anti-Qatar escapades),...

The latest from Michael Boskin belongs on the National Review: So far, Trump has failed to deliver any major legislative policy achievements. Nonetheless, he has helped the economy by rolling back President Barack Obama’s damaging regulatory and administrative diktats in areas such as energy, education, finance, and labor law. He offers no evidence for this spin – just a lot of babble regarding Trump tweets or whatever. But what caught my attention as well as that of Brad DeLong with this...

First they coddled the white supremacists with false equivalency, and I didn't resign from the Trump Evangelical Council because those protesting the white supremacists didn't have a permit...

Donald Trump is no stranger to outrageous public poses and statements, but his refusal to condemn white supremacists post-Charlottesville has apparently struck a nerve.  Has he crossed some sort of new line?  Here are some dark, speculative thoughts about the events of the past few days.I believe Trump’s impeachment is an option that political and financial elites are holding in reserve.  They appreciate the vehicle that has brought the hard right to power, but they are ready to remove it if...

I agree with the senior Robert E Lee as well as his descendant, Robert E. Lee V, and also the great grandsons of Thomas L. ("Stonewall") Jackson, William Jackson Christian and Warren Edmund Christian, that Confederate monuments should be removed from public locations to either museums or other locations, much as was done in the former Soviet Union.In 1866, the senior Robert E. Lee wrote a letter to my collateral relative, Thomas Lafayette Rosser, last commander of the Laurel Brigade, who...

Who knew that neo-Nazi, KKK white supremacists and Trump supporters were liars, cry-babies AND hypocrites? The reasons for secession by the states of the Confederacy were not complex or ambiguous. They are not a mystery. They were proudly proclaimed by the Confederate states. The cornerstone of the Confederacy was slavery and the conviction of the racial superiority of the White man and the social, moral and political inferiority of Africans. This was stated unambiguously in the...

Jeet Heer has posted a timely and excellent essay at New Republic titled "Trump's Racism and the Cultural Marxism Myth." In his essay, Heer recounts much of the background to the Higgins memo that I have documented here, here and here. Heer credits William S. Lind as the major popularizer of the myth, as have I in my blog posts. What I'm posting here extends the analysis and reveals significant background about personnel and timelines to the story.In my most recent post, I started to probe...