Tag Archives: politics

Degeneration of Bipartisan Blog Sites: Econbrowser This is probably just a whiny complaint of well-known and long running issues.  Indeed for a long time most blog sites (not to mention most twitterspheres and Instogram Idiotspheres) have been mono-partisan in those who participate in their discussions/debates. This has been true for a long time for most sites in the Econoblogosphere, including this site, which clearly tilts “left,” even though we have...

Pledging Zero Carbon Emissions by 2030 or 2050: Does it Matter? We now have two responses to the climate emergency battling it out among House Democrats, the “aggressive” 2030 target for net zero emissions folded into the Green New Deal and a more “moderate” 2050 target for the same, just announced by a group of mainstream legislators.  How significant is this difference?  Does where you stand on climate policy depend on whether your policy has a 2030...

Donald Trump addressed a rightwing crowd (Turning Point USA) in Washington on Tuesday. The audience roared in support of the president standing in front of the Presidential Seal. Now take a close look at the seal. It had been doctored to include a two-headed eagle – the same as the Russian seal and in place of arrows in one of the eagle’ talons – there was golf clubs. Click on the image for better detail. ...

https://twitter.com/pbump/status/1154042744702029824?s=20 Also the MSM noticed. Bump is a Washington Post reporter. The point is that this implies that Mueller thinks Trump was guilty and that he would have a reasonable chance of convincing a jury that there is proof beyond reasonable doubt of Trump’s guilt. The other answer was “that was a sufficient reason to not indict Trump which doesn’t imply that it was a necessary condition. As written in the...

Everyone is waiting for tomorrow to see what Mueller will tell the House. I am going to say it will be nothing other than what has already been said verbally. No one is going to read the text version and see what was really said by Mueller. Only a few of us will and I have yet to find a place to place it in my bathroom. In Michigan in May, Congressional Representative Justin Amash had a townhall in his district to explain why he called for the...

Is Michael Gerson. My dad likes David Brooks (please no comments on this). I don’t, but also I am quite sure that Brooks isn’t really a conservative anymore. I think he just plays one on TV. He has a column in the New York Times based on their affirmative action conservative quota. There would be no reason to pay any attention to him if he weren’t a relatively reasonable conservative. I think he is, in fact, a remarkably vacuous centrist. It may...

How today’s Democratic ‘Squad’ is a direct ideological descendant of the original 1850s Republicans Nothing is ever really “new.” Today’s ‘Squad’ of young Democrats is the direct ideological descendant of the original 1850s Congressional Republicans. That is one of the important lessons of Joanne Freeman’s “The Fields of Blood,” about the increasing threats of, and actual incidents of, violence in the US Congress between the 1830s and the Civil War. Just...

Mankiw Misrepresents a Story on Senator Sanders Campaign Worker Negotiations Greg Mankiw reads this story and writes: Staffers in the Sanders campaign, who are working on salary, complain that they are paid less than the $15 per hour that Senator Sanders advocates for the minimum wage. So Sanders raises their hourly wage. Does that increase their income? No, because he raised the hourly wage by cutting the number of hours they work! Of course, if a...

Hannity Calls For/Predicts War With Iran OK, sorry if this is just over the top, but this evening Trump’s close pal, Sean Hannity, has gone over the top both predicting and clearly supporting a full blown attack on Iran, “take out all their nuclear facilities.”  Curiously a sign of how over the top this is was given by one of his guests, a colonel, warned that it would take nuclear weapons by the US to fully take out the most deeply buried  Iranian...

(Dan here… Via Real News Network, Bill Black discusses the what-ifs of President Trump’s policies in a spectacular contrast to current expectations…providing. a jumping off point from what we expect from the way it is framed now. I assume the complex interalationships of the wealthy elites (let us see how the Epstein case unwinds for another aspect) plays an important but not so well known role in this drama.  I find his thought his conclusions dismaying...