“It seems like the best report money can buy.”
Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Connecticut) on the internal General Motors investigation. The report found no top management personnel at fault and no deliberate cover-up of the ignition switch defect that caused deaths and injuries for over a decade.
“The darkest secret in the big money world of the Republican coastal elite is that the most palatable alternative to a nominee such as Sen. Ted Cruz of Texas or Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky would be [Hillary] Clinton, a familiar face on Wall Street following her tenure as a New York senator with relatively moderate views on taxation and financial regulation.”
Connecticut has become the first state to raise its minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.
Anyone think Fox News will cover it when the unemployment rate doesn’t go up?
Former NYC congressman and mayoral candidate Anthony “I’m not sure if that was my weiner” Weiner has joined Business Insider as a political columnist. The disgraced Weiner joins the disgraced Henry Blodgett, who has been banned from the securities industry for life.
But Weiner, unfortunately, hasn’t been banned from politics, and if you don’t think he still lusts after being mayor of New York, note that his new column is called Weiner!, just like the Broadway musical was called Fiorello!
“Because if you go back to 1933, with different words, this is what Hitler was saying in Germany. You don’t survive as a society if you encourage and thrive on envy or jealousy.”
Ken Langone, billionaire founder of Home Depot and huge Republican donor, on income inequality.
So if you hate carried interest and want to raise the minimum wage and extend unemployment benefits, well, heil to you, you despicable Nazi.
We’re going to give the Senate back to these people in November? Really? But of course they’re emboldened — they brought down our whole economy and no one went to jail.
“But it is both a relief and a disappointment that the new [job] numbers offer some assurance that the long-reliable pattern of adding a bit more than two million jobs a year continues apace. The 175,000 net jobs added in February extrapolate to a pace of 2.1 million jobs a year…. The jobs recovery in the United States is astonishingly consistent, astonishingly resilient and astonishingly underwhelming.”
Neil Irwin, NYT
Sources close to Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer say the Republican will veto that outrageous bill allowing people to refuse business services to gays based on their religious beliefs.
“I believe it’s immoral for this country to have as a policy extending long-term unemployment to people rather than us working on creation of jobs.”
Congressman Pete Sessions (R-Texas)
Um, Pete, this isn’t a case of “rather than” — you can, and should, do both. Because while you’re “working on” creating those jobs, people need to eat and pay their rent.
But the thing is, the GOP has shown no interest whatsoever in creating jobs because that might make the anti-Christ Obama look good and help the demon Dems in 2014. Your party is interested only in making the economy as stalled and sluggish as possible, which means making as many American families as possible suffer.
There’s a word for that. I believe it’s immoral.
Third-quarter GDP growth has been revised upward to 4.1%.
“The wrong turn we’ve taken in economic policy — our obsession with debt and ‘entitlements,’ when we should have been focused on jobs and opportunity– was of course, driven in part by the power of wealthy vested interest. but it wasn’t just raw power. The fiscal scolds also benefited from a sort of ideological monopoly: for several years you just weren’t considered serious in Washington unless you worshipped at the altar of Simpson and Bowles.
“Now, however, we have the president of the United States breaking ranks, finally sounding like the progressive many of his supporters thought they were backing in 2008. This is going to change the discourse — and, eventually, I believe, actual policy.”
Paul Krugman, “Obama Gets Real,” NYT
It’s been so frustrating to me that during and since the Great Recession, we’ve sacrificed growth by focusing too much on each year’s deficit and the national debt. Of course, deficits were going to spike when unemployment was so high and we were paying out so much more for unemployment benefits, food stamps, Medicaid, etc. and taking in so much less in revenues. But we behaved as if that was not just a temporary circumstance, but our long-term destiny, and thus prolonged and deepened that temporary state, weakening us as a country and cruelly crushing a whole lot of families unnecessarily. Keynes is (still) right, Paul Ryan is wrong, and Ayn Rand was a novelist, not an economist. It’s time for the Prez and the Dems to lead us out of this economic wilderness.
Embattled Farmers 