Tag Archives: politics

2018 – The Year of the Complicated Suburb, Amanda Kolson Hurley, CityLab In the past several years, a much more complex picture has emerged—one of Asian and Latino “ethnoburbs,” rising suburban poverty, and Baby Boomers stuck in their split-levels. 2018 really drove home the lesson of when Americans say they live in the suburbs (as most do), the suburbia they describe are vastly different kinds of places where people of every stripe live, work, pray,...

On the government shutdown, Pelosi should go maximalist It’s pretty clear that the House GOP has decided to simply punt the government shutdown into the new Democratic House majority’s laps. That new House Democratic majority will have two basic options: (1) go accomodationist; or (2) go maximalist.  I am here to write in support of option #(2). To recap, before the government shutdown, the Senate had passed a stopgap measure by 100-0. When RW...

The author of this post which was published in April 2018 on Save The Post Office is Mark Jamison, a retired North Carolina Post Master. From time to time, I have featured both Marks and Steve’s post office advocacy on Angry Bear. Steve is a literature professor who teaches “place studies” at the Gallatin School of New York University. One of these days I will visit Mark in the mountains of North Carolina. “If they can get you asking the wrong questions,...

by Joseph Joyce Global Networks and Financial Instability The ten-year anniversary of the global financial crisis has brought a range of analyses of the current stability of the financial system (see, for example, here). Most agree that the banking sector is more robust now due to increased capital, less leverage, more prudent balance sheets and better regulation. But systemic risk is an inherent feature of finance, and a disturbance in one area can...

Real Military Pay Donald Trump lies about everything including military pay: Trump Brags To Troops About A Fictional Giant Pay Raise He Got Them – The president told military personnel in Iraq that they’ll get a raise of over 10 percent, their first in a decade. But it’s 2.6 percent, and they get a hike every year. Dave Jamieson even notes that Bill Kristol has called out Trump on this whopper. But to me this is not the story. The real story is that...

Barack Obama just won Gallup’s man most admired by US adults poll for the 11th straight time. Also, in spite of the Republicans’ determined efforts including elimination of the mandate, Healthcare.gov signups are only 4% fewer than last year’s. Finally, I am thinking about “eleven dimensional chess”. This was a joke about Obama and Obamaniacs who ascribed his amazing luck to brilliantly subtle strategy. To be honest I was thinking of Hillary Clinton...

(Dan here…lifted from Robert’s Stochastic Thoughts) Paul Ryan wouldn’t recognize a free market if one bit him Robert Costa and Mike DeBonis wrote an excellent retrospective on the career of Paul Ryan‘He was the future of the party’: Ryan’s farewell triggers debate about his legacy They are quite harsh, but not, I think, quite harsh enough. My comment: This is an excellent article. Tough but fair with no sugar coating but also no discourtesy. However,...

The Last Adult In The Room Walks Out Over ISIS Yesterday President Trump announced that he was removing all US troops from Syria over the next 30 days.  Today, “Mad Dog” Jim Mattis, the US Secretary of Defense and widely viewed as “the last adult in the room” among the Trump national security team, announced his resignation effective at the end of February.  This is not a coincidence, although his letter makes it clear that he had been thinking about...

“WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—Capping an extraordinary 2018, Donald J. Trump announced on Thursday that he had been named Man of the Year by the terrorist organization known as ISIS. Trump made the announcement after receiving the news from the leader of ISIS, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, whom Trump called ‘a terrific, fabulous guy.’ ‘I got along great with him, and he said a lot of nice things about me,” Trump said. “He said ISIS didn’t even consider anyone...

Neoliberalism as Structure and Ideology As someone who has looked at the world through a political economic lense for decades, I am restless with the “cultural turn”.  Once upon a time, it is said, the bad old vulgarians of the left believed that economic structure—the ownership of capital, the rules under which economies operate and the incentives these things generate—were everything and agency, meaning culture and consciousness, were nothing.  The...