krebscycle

  • How the New York Times helps elect Republicans

    How the New York Times helps elect Republicans

    [from 2016] The NYTimes will, most likely, endorse the Democratic nominee for President but their News Desk is and has always been working full time to elect the Republican mostly by reinforcing the Republican brand. Most people do not vote based on issues papers, but on their impressions of the…

  • Movement Progressives have learned nothing

    As we collapse into election 2016, it’s clear that  Movement Progressives, many of whom have coalesced around Bernie Sanders,  have learned nothing. The author of this 2010 blog post just cited it as evidence that his complaints about President Obama were well justified – and the dense material of often…

  • The New York Times love for Jeb!

    Everyone “knows” the New York Times is liberal so when they call Jeb Bush a “cerebral policy maven” despite his apparent lack of any ideas and ignore his record of sleaze and incompetence, their puffery is taken as “reporting”. The same goes for the Times hostility to Hillary Clinton – and…

  • Mainstream Economics is Laughable Right Wing Trash

    On page 4 of Nobel Prize winning economist Tom Sargent’s paper on Latin American Hyperinflation you can find the following statement that, on the surface, looks like a scientific claim: The two fixed points are on different sides of the peak of the Laffer curve, so increases in the deficit…

  • The right wing “progressive” finance bubble

    During the financial crisis, the progressive and left media was dominated by “experts” who told a story that was totally false and dangerously reactionary. The truth, still unknown to most Americans, is that the Federal Reserve Bank and President Obama’s TARP bailouts saved the economy and made money for the…

  • The Greek Bailout was another EU bank bailout.

    In 2009  Greece owed €250 billion for bonds which it could not pay or even keep up with and €45 billion in other loans .  The bonds had been sold in the free market to investors (mostly banks) that believed the higher interest rate on Greek bonds justified the higher risk.…

  • Jon Chait’s forced gullibility

    I have argued, controversially to some on the left, that it is important to grapple with ideas on their own terms before merely analyzing their motivations. American conservatism is historically intertwined with white racism in such a way that nearly any conservative idea could plausibly be understood as an appeal…

  • The Greek debt crisis in short story form.

    Once upon a time, a small, poor and poorly run country called Greece borrowed a whole lot of money, most of it from giant banks in Northern Europe, although some also went to banks in Spain. The weaknesses in the Greek economy were well known and the corruption of its…

  • Dear Jon Chait: 2+2 is not equal to 5.

    Jon Chait wrote: “conservatism is geared toward localism and views national-level government as inherently more oppressive.” Is it true that conservatism is based on this view? The conservative Bush administration doubled the size of the Federal Government, authorized torture, pushed through the vast expansion of Federal police powers in the…

  • Rhetoric 101 and President Obama

    Obama’s famous speech in which he says there are no red states, no blue states, just the United States,  and his other pleas for unity are incessantly derided by people who appear not to have basic language skills. Here’s the last paragraph of President Lincoln’s speech at his first inaugural.…