EconoSpeak

The red death had long devastated the country. No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal -- the madness and the horror of blood. There were sharp pains, and sudden dizziness, and then profuse bleeding at the pores, with dissolution. The scarlet stains upon the body and especially upon the face of the victim, were the pest ban which shut him out from the aid and from the sympathy of his fellow-men. And the whole seizure, progress, and termination...

 It now appears that the Rose Garden ceremony on Saturday, Sept. 26, presenting SCOTUS candidate Amy Coney Barrett, who has the beadiest eyes I have ever seen on any human being in my life, has turned into a superspreader event of SARS-Cov2. Among those who may have become infected include the president and his wife, along with at least two members of the Senate Judiciary Committee (Lee of UT and Tillis of NC), the president of Notre Dame University where Barrett was a law school prof, as...

 People might have thoughts on the "debate" or anything.

The real story revealed by the New York Times Trump tax returns bombshell is not that Donald Trump paid no taxes in 10 out of 15 years or that he paid $750 in 2016 and 2017. The real story is that he doesn't have net income to service his debt. There is nothing inherently illegal about that. He did it before in the 1980s and when real estate prices stopped rising in 1990, his creditors were left holding the bag.Hyman Minsky wrote about Donald Trump's investment strategy in a 1990 talk, "The...

 Others may not see what I see when I look at a full-face photo of Amy Conet Barrett, but I see someone who looks like a fanatic to me, although that may be me reading in what I have heard of her views on things, she being Trump's nominee for the SCOTUS, with GOPsters in the Senate hypocritically ready to put her in there in time to help Trump steal the election.  I know we are not supposed to pick on people for their religious views, but she does belong to a weird cult, the Praise for...

It annoys me when people "comment" by pasting articles from the media that are unrelated to the original posts they are pasted to. The original post may get 500 or less visits and it is likely the irrelevant article is read by no one -- and certainly not by me. So here is a space for readers to paste articles from the media that they perhaps think no one else has seen. If it is successful in diverting irrelevant pasting, maybe I'll put up an open thread regularly.

 On the theory that one effective weapon against an Insane Clown Would-be Dictator is ridicule, here is something I wrote a while ago.The Second Coming “This is the greatest president for Jews and for Israel in the history of the world. Not just in America, Trump is the best president for Israel in the history of the world. And the Jewish people love him like he is the King of Israel. They love him like he is the second coming of God." –Wayne Allan Root “I take the gospel whenever it’s...

Democratic Despotism: "We find latent in their conception of law— and some have been publicly preaching this view— that law emanates solely from the will of the majority of the people, and can, therefore, be modified at any time to meet majority wishes. This doctrine is absolutely totalitarian, and is contrary to our basic conceptions of the source of law. We have seen that our political system is predicated on the doctrine that there are some immutable laws of nature and certain other...

 In a column in yesterday's Washington Post, Dana Milbank has written on "Trump has made our lives worse. Here's the proof."  He labels this apparent outcome the "Trump Effect."Since 1972 the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) at the University of Chicago has annually studied the nation's mood. They survey people to find out how they identify their level of happiness. As of this summer an all time record low of 14% declared themselves "very happy." This compares with 29% saying that at...

 I try to avoid these terms like "fascism," but it has become clear that Donald J. Trump actively seeks to become an at least authoritarian leader of the US, indeed openly arguing that the Constitution's limit of only two terms should not hold for him.  We face a clear danger of a contested election that may end up in the Supreme Court. If Trump can put a flunky into the court before the election we may have them putting him in despite a situation where he has clearly lost. And given his...