Tag Archives: politics

Ross Douthat is evidently having trouble filling his column quota.  Or maybe he’s just confused about the role of public intellectuals and the nature of rational decision making. In two recent columns, Douthat suggests that Democrats are excessively worried about Republican attacks on voting and election and should just chill out.  He defends this “what, me worry?” approach to politics in two ways.  First, he argues that there is so much...

Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, RI, has recently begun giving a series of speeches on the Senate floor in ref. dark money and the effect on the Supreme Court. The two so far have centered on Lewis Powell’s secret memo to the US Chamber of Commerce in 1971 just before his appointment to the US Supreme Court. The two speeches go a long way toward explaining the present makeup of the Court, how we got to this point, how capitalism works in America, southern...

April Trade Deficit Decreased 8.2% on Lower Imports of Consumer Goods and Automotives, Commenter and blogger RJS Our trade deficit was 8.2% lower in April, as our exports increased and our imports decreased . . . the Commerce Dept report on our international trade in goods and services for April, incorporating an annual revision, indicated that our seasonally adjusted goods and services trade deficit fell by a rounded $6.1 billion to $68.9...

Coronavirus dashboard for June 7: a Tale of Two Pandemics: the Vaccinated States vs. the Idiotic States The drive towards “herd immunity” via vaccination has slowed to a crawl. The slowing is almost entirely driven by Trump-voting States in the South and West. Those Idiotic States are continuing to suffer from an ongoing pandemic, while in the Biden-voting States of the Northeast, Midwest, and California, the pandemic has all but ended.Here...

Ross Barnett didn’t invent the big lie, but he was a practitioner. One might even say that Ross was to the manor born. The big lie had been a southern thing from the get go; comes with the turf. First you must lie to yourself, and so they did. Hitler appropriated, without acknowledgment, the concept in Mein Kampf, Chapter 10. That wasn’t all he appropriated from the American South; they had beaten him to a lot of the Nazi shtick. Joseph McCarthy...

Why the reference to the wings in re the two major political parties? Are we being asked to envision either of our two major political parties as a bird, an aircraft. If so, each would surely have two matching wings, one on either side of the body/fuselage. Maybe they meant to make an analogy with the sides of an aisle in a room, or the banks of a river as in rive gauche or rive droite, or to those seated on the far left hand side of the room or on...

MONTHLY CONSTRUCTION SPENDING, APRIL 2021, June 1, 2021Angry Bear Commenter RJS blogs at MarketWatch 666 and presents current economic market information. Estimates the impact of the February and March revisions on the 1st quarter GDP and is estimating the impact of this April report on 2nd quarter GDP (see below past Census reports. ___________________ The Census Bureau’s report on construction spending for April (pdf) estimated that the...

I would watch Elizabeth Warren pummel Jamie Dimon all day. pic.twitter.com/S1XPzMriZf— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) May 26, 2021Elizabeth Warren Slams JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon on Overdraft Fees – Rolling Stone I could watch this over and over. It is similar to when she put the spotlight on John Roberts in the Senate. This is a good take down of Jamie Dimon by Senator Elizabeth Warren. The Senator is relentless. It appears Chase was...

“Revised 1st Quarter GDP Report Still Shows Growth at a 6.4% Rate,” Marketwatch 666, Commenter RJS and analyst The Second Estimate of our 1st Quarter GDP from the Bureau of Economic Analysis indicated that our real output of goods and services grew at a 6.4% rate in the 1st quarter, unchanged from the 6.4% growth rate reported in the advance estimate last month, as upward revisions to growth of real personal consumption expenditures and to growth...

April Personal Income Down a Record 13.1%, Disposable Personal Income Down a Record 14.6%, Savings Falls 54.0%, Marketwatch 666, RJS The April report on Personal Income and Outlays from the Bureau of Economic Analysis reflects the partial unwinding of the March government stimulus in just about every metric it tracks except for prices, which are said to be “transitory“, influenced by temporary shortages and supply chain issues….as you’ll recall,...