Ad for an Imaginary Democratic Candidate Who Wasn't Running From Obama
"By the numbers, the economy's doing really well."The unemployment rate is below 6% for the first time since before the crash. Even with the crash, the economy under Obama has created more jobs than in...
View ArticleObama and Ebola
God, that guy irritates me!We were recently treated to Republicans around the country running scare ads about Ebola and how it's some sort of failure by Obama. There was a failure of leadership by...
View ArticleComment on the Agreement with China About Climate Change
This seems huge to me, at least five minutes after reading about it. What strikes me about it is how it cuts the legs out from under Sen. Inhofe, Rush Limbaugh and all the other "hoax!"-criers. I mean,...
View ArticleNote on Charlie Baker
All this nattering about how the Democrats lost so big that even Massachusetts elected a Republican governor... it's coming from people who don't know anything about Massachusetts. First, before the...
View ArticleIf "the Democrats' Real Problem" Is Insoluble...What Then?
Writing shortly after the midterm elections, Josh Marshall had an article in TPM about "the Democrats' Real Problem." He agrees with those who say that the Democrats should have run on the economy,...
View ArticleRepublicans Parody Themselves
If you're a Republican politician, what's the stereotype you struggle against? That Republicans are out of touch with ordinary people and only care about rich people and corporations.So when...
View ArticleDept. of Naming Things: Inequality
A story in today's New York Times about how people have lost faith in the American Dream has this interesting passage:“I don’t know what you mean by an unequal distribution of wealth,” said Robert...
View ArticleThe Thirdworldization of America Continues
As I remarked some time ago, the Republican vision for America seems to be to make it the world's richest Third World country. Consider, I said, these frequent characteristics of Third World...
View ArticleThe Israeli Elections I: What's With the Arabs?
Israeli Arabs were pretty excited about this election, but not because there were unusual issues. A change in the election law had raised the vote threshold for representation in the Knesset (Israel's...
View ArticleHow To Solve the California Water Crisis
The California water crisis is all over the national news, thanks to Gov. Jerry Brown's imposition last week of mandatory cuts in urban water use averaging 25%. This has resulted in a lot of...
View ArticleThe Israeli Elections II: Bibi's Last Rabbit?
Benjamin Netanyahu used to be known in Israel as "The Magician," and there did seem to be something paranormal about how he saved himself in last month's election. Trailing by four seats in the polls...
View ArticleOn the Question "When Does Human Life Begin?"
When does an oak tree's life begin? I am not asking this frivolously.I would say: An oak tree begins life as an acorn.But an acorn is not the same thing as an oak tree. Then when does an oak tree...
View Article"Dzhokhar Tsarnaev"
The trial is now in the penalty phase, and I can't think of anything to say. So I'll talk about linguistics and orthography.Looking at his name, you can tell he's from a country in the former Soviet...
View ArticleThe Myth of the "Ten Commandments"
The Ten Commandments have been in the news again; the Christian right has been saying silly things in their effort to convince people that the Founders intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation. There...
View ArticleQuestion for Ted Cruz and Rick Perry
"Q: The 2014 Platform of the Republican Party of Texas says, 'Homosexuality is a chosen behavior that is contrary to the fundamental unchanging truths that have been ordained by God in the Bible,...
View ArticlePolice Killings and Racial Bias
The Guardian newspaper, which has been keeping count, announced Wednesday that fatal shootings by police in the U.S. in 2015 had reached 500, and that's only through the end of May. That seems like a...
View ArticleSouthern Crybabies Start War; Slaughter Ensues
As you may have noticed, there has been a lot of public discussion of the Civil War recently. One point that has been made often is that yes, the cause the South was fighting for really was slavery...
View ArticleGood News About the Good News: It's Real
If you're not a regular reader of The New York Times, you may have missed this column by Nicholas Kristof. It makes a startling point: The world has gotten dramatically better, and most Americans don't...
View ArticleWhy I'm Voting for Hillary, and Why I'm Not Voting For Bernie
Why I'm Voting For HillaryThe reasons to vote for Hillary are pretty clear, once you get through all the supposed reasons to vote against her. She has a long record of supporting progressive causes;...
View ArticleComments on the Democratic Debate in Miami
This was truly the most bizarre debate I've ever seen. The level of questioning from the three interviewers, two from Univision, a Spanish-language network, and one from the Washington Post, was beyond...
View ArticleNote on Methodology
Start at Table 1, the first column, "Top 1%".Take "Number of Returns" (first row) and multiply it by $466,950 , which I got from here, as the boundary for the top marginal rate. Fortunately, it's very...
View ArticleHow Much Could We Raise Income Taxes on the Rich? Actually, A Lot.
Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez really set the cat among the pigeons with her recent remarks about taxation. Asked how she would pay for everything in the proposed marks about taxation. Asked how she...
View ArticleWhat Should the Democrats Stand For? I: Equality
A party as large and varied as the Democrats needs some core that people can use as a shorthand for what the party stands for, and that make sense out of a welter of policy positions. I'll be making...
View ArticleCNN Debate Math
The Democratic debates on July 30 and 31 were a little less than 3 hours long each. A conservative estimate would be 150 minutes.150 minutes /10 candidates = 15 minutes/candidateNow if you were CNN,...
View ArticleThe Twelve Days of Christmas: An Analysis
There was a funny piece on the radio about the song "The Twelve Days of Christmas," imagining the woman's response to all those gifts. She starts out thrilled and touched by her partridge in a pear...
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