Tag Archives: Journalism

The promise of a “final” end to lockdowns in the spring of 2021 is the kind of hyperbole we have come to expect about new products and policies. The Oxford University vaccine may work; it may even be delivered effectively. Meanwhile, Covid-19 is still around, the UK government is extending lockdown for large parts of the country and effective protections are still being ignored, at grave cost. From the start of the pandemic, the policy choice in Europe has been presented as a trade-off...

The furlough and the business support schemes, started in March, would end in October to coincide with the reopening of the economy. This meant that the UK economy would be much the same -give and take some minor “scarring”- in 2021 as it was in 2019: a year’s growth lost, but that was the limit of the damage. The expectation of a fourth quarter bounce-back was always unrealistic: severely damaged economies never “bounce back” unaided. The Chancellor’s response to the “second wave” of...

Via Truthout comes this thought: In 2016, the big takeaway was that 53 percent of white women voters cast their ballots in favor of Donald Trump, according to exit polls, helping cement his victory. But, in 2020, white women voters surpassed their 2016 levels of support as, according to exit polls, 55 percent of white women turned out to vote for the president… Via the New York Times exit poll reporting reflects this impression from the Edison Research...

November 13 2020Even if a successful rollout of a new COVID-19 vaccine causes the current health crisis to recede by next spring, the unemployment crisis will remain. That is especially true in the United Kingdom, where fiscal stimulus is urgently needed to avert a lost decade – if not a lost generation – of growth. EDINBURGH/LONDON – In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, both the US and European economies are gearing up for large-scale job creation. US President-elect Joe Biden has...

Barkley Rosser, Econospeak Blog, “Is Trump Going To Attempt A Coup?” I realize that Joe Biden just held a press conference where he basically dismissed the refusal of Trump and a lot of other Republicans to concede the presidential election to Biden as “embarrassing,” laughing at Secretary of State Pompeo who earlier today talked about a transition to a second Trump term, and said it will all be over and fine by Jan. 20. Maybe, but I am somebody who has...

Peter Dorman, Economics professor at Evergreen State College has been posting at Angry Bear blog from time to time. His latest “The Language of Slavery” was published at Econospeak, November 9, 2020. Peter’s commentary draws from a NYT  article – “Alexander Hamilton, Enslaver?”  which differentiates between slave owner and enslaver as a “part of the larger movement to make politics a matter of individual responsibility.  Slavery was a horror, and this...

Of Australian descent singer Helen Reddy passed on September 29, 2020 largely unnoticed, at least by me an old coffee house Marine. Helen’s song “I am Woman” was the 1972 anthem and soundtrack of the women’s movement, with the opening lyrics of “I am woman, hear me roar . . . In numbers too big to ignore” turning her into a feminist icon. In 2011, Billboard named her the number-28 adult contemporary artist of all time (number-9 woman). In 2013, the...

Did The Hunter Biden Laptop Come From China?  The election season is nearly over, thank heavens, but I guess I shall throw one more story for it out there, one I really did not expect and find plenty weird, but with two different sources pushing it, well.  As it is, I must say that given how totally lacking in any credible support this whole Hunter Biden story was from the get go, I found it hard to believe that the Russian GRU was behind it. I think...

Steve Hutkins at Save The Post Office In response to several inquiries from members of Congress, the Office of Inspector General has issued a report on “Operational Changes to Mail Delivery.” The report discusses the Postal Service’s plan to eliminate 64 million work hours — the equivalent of 33,000 jobs — by implementing 57 cost-cutting initiatives. As discussed in this previous post, the plan represents one of the largest downsizing efforts in the...

An examination of the Framers’ arguments as to how the US Supreme Court would function: The Federalist Papers No’s. 78, 79, and 81 This is a follow-up on yesterday’s post regarding the history of the Judiciary under republics. In that post I pointed out that the concept of an independent judiciary is a modern one that started in the era of Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688, and was radically expanded by the US Constitution. How the framers...