Tag Archives: politics

Take Back ICE U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) was established 15 years ago: ICE was granted a unique combination of civil and criminal authorities to better protect national security and public safety in answer to the tragic events on 9/11. Leveraging those authorities, ICE has become a powerful and sophisticated federal law enforcement agency. My link was for a 2013 discussion of its laudable achievements during its first ten years. As a...

In his editorial “Say Hello to Your Boy. A Special Guy,” Josh Marshall at TPM had this to say: “When I first read the Times story I wasn’t sure whether the younger Kennedy (Justin), whose title was Managing Director and Global Head of Real Estate Capital Markets, would have been someone to actually make loans to someone like Trump as opposed to overseeing more complex or synthetic efforts like mortgage backed securities and such. But it turns out he...

Immigration Politics In Europe Versus Immigration Politics In The US Immigration politics in both places has gotten very ugly, but it strikes me that in Europe it may be worse than in the US.  We may be about to see the fall from power this weekend of Angela Merkel as Chancellor of Germany over the issue of immigration, with her having been for some time the leading political figure in Europe supporting more moderate policies towards immigrants, even as...

The Mezzogiorno Problem Revisited I have recently returned from participating in a conference in Naples, Italy on “The Economy as a Complex Spatial System” where there many papers and much discussion about the longstanding poverty problem in southern Italy, long labeled “the Mezzogiorno problem.”  Mezzogiorno literally means midday or noon, but has long been applied to southern Italy because it is sunny, and middays are supposedly sunny.  Unfortunately...

Anthony Kennedy will retire July 31. This gives Trump and Republican Senators a chance to nominate and confirm a fifth hard right justice. Already the Court has become extremely ideological and activist. Today it declared that Unions couldn’t require employers to pay the union a a fixed amount per worker, because that allegedly violated the first amendmenr rights of workers in unionized workplaces which disagree with the union leadership. This is...

“I have rarely seen so much inconsistency and even hypocrisy from the Supreme Court as in its decision to uphold President Trump’s travel ban.” On the Colorado SCOTUS Decision A few weeks ago, the court found that members of the Colorado Civil Rights Commission had expressed impermissible hostility to religion because of relatively mild statements that every business in Colorado should serve all customers regardless of the owner’s religion, and that...

The ACLU’s Ría Tabacco Mar reviewed a recent SCOTUS decision in the NYT. South Dakota is being allowed to murder a man rather than commit him to a life time of hell in a natural life sentence . Charles Rhines was convicted of murdering a man while robbing a Dunkin Donut store he used to work at and was fired from a couple of weeks earlier. The jury in deciding Charles Rhines fate in deliberation sent questions to the judge asking; Would Rhines have a...

What to Do about Conservative Rationality in Addressing Climate Change? Two business-friendly conservatives, both former senators, Trent Lott and John Breaux, have an op-ed in today’s New York Times announcing the formation of new group, Americans for Carbon Dividends.  Now out of office, they recognize climate change as “one of the great challenges of our generation.”  To counteract it they propose a bipartisan coalition to institute a carbon tax, with...

by Bradford DeLong   (originally published at Grasping Reality with Both Hands) THE DAMNATION OF THE PROFESSIONAL REPUBLICAN POLICY INTELLECTUALS I have long known that the thoughtful and pulls-no-punches Amitabh Chandra has no tolerance for fuzzy thinking from Do-Gooder Democrats. He is one of those who holds that not even a simulacrum of utopia is open to us here, as we muck about in the Sewer of Romulus here in this Fallen Sublunary Sphere. ”There are...

“Deeply Disturbing” It’s not a crime if you brag about it on T.V. In fact, it’s hardly worth mentioning. What is this about? “We don’t know the answer, but we hope the inspector general will find out.”