Month: December 2016

Reid: FBI director’s letter cost Democrats the election, Senate

He’s one guy gonna be missed, yeah? Wasn’t a dry eye in the house at his recent farewell party. Tears of joy, a wag commented.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid said Monday FBI Director James Comey was “heavily involved as a partisan” in the weeks leading up to the election and that Comey’s actions handed the presidency to Donald Trump.

How many ways can someone be a sore loser?

Source: Reid: FBI director’s letter cost Democrats the election, Senate – CNNPolitics.com

Speaker Madigan’s father was a ward superintendent — “in the aristocracy of city government”

Illinois House Speaker Michael Madigan, a paragon of blue-state success, was to the manor born. His father, also Michael Madigan, was “in the aristocracy of the city government,” a ward superintendent, per Chicago Tribune’s James Doherty in May of 1949 in his story, “A HALF HUNDRED IMPORTANT MEN –WHO THEY ARE: WARD SUPERINTENDENTS HAVE JOB SECURITY.”

These jobs may not be “political plums,” wrote Doherty, but “are the next thing to it,” he heard from other city employees. Ward superintendents “help keep the city clean” but they do not “push brooms” or “drive refuse trucks.” Rather, they “give orders” to those who do.

As civil service employees, they have job security, with pensions that allow retirement at $2,800 a year, are considered “men of influence” in the city hierarchy but “attract little attention. Their work is not spectacular, they get little publicity.”

Doherty listed them. Pay was $387 a month. “Several are on leave to take higher-paying jobs with the city or county.” The most senior of them had been on the job 40 years.

The elder Madigan was not high on seniority. To qualify, there was an examination, the last of which had been offered eleven years earlier, in June of 1938. The list which Doherty gave of those who passed was one that had been posted Dec. 1, 1939. So Madigan had passed the examination in 1938. He was to hold the position for 25 years, to 1963.

The family lived in a tidy bungalow belt house at 7146 S. Campbell, in the 13th Ward.

— more more more of work in progress about Speaker Madigan — 

Fast Action on U.S. Debt Could Reap Trillions In Savings Over Long Term – The New York Sun

Pay attention, please, to Larry Kudlow’s projections in view of a Trump presidency:

If President-elect Donald Trump’s economic growth plan — slashing business and personal marginal tax rates and rolling back costly business regulations — is achieved next year, the economy could break out with growth between 4% and 5%. That means much higher interest rates.

This rate rise will be growth-induced, a good thing. Higher real capital returns will drive up real interest rates. And inflation will likely remain minimal, around 2%, with more money chasing even more goods alongside a reliably stable dollar-exchange rate.

We’re already seeing some of this with the big post-election Trump stock rally occurring alongside a largely real-interest-rate increase in bonds.

It’s upbeat, and relatively understandable. But as for national debt, he likes long-term (less costly) bonds as a way to save money.

The average duration of marketable Treasury bonds held by the public has been [a low] five years for quite some time. Almost incredibly, Treasury Department debt managers have not substantially lengthened the duration of bonds to take advantage of generationally low interest rates. Hard to figure

Because if you lengthen maturities, you “save a bundle.” But Treasury managers have been “sleeping at the switch,” not locking in our historically low rates for much longer time. (Like the homeowner who renegotiates.)

The key point? Start issuing much longer bond maturities. Muchlonger. If possible, America should experiment with 50-year debt issuance, and maybe go out as long as 100 years.

And this better happen fast.

Other countries do this, including Mexico, which “has done three 100-year issues since 2010. The sizes were small, and the bonds were sold in foreign currencies. But it can be done.”

Using “some rough back-of-the-envelope calculations,” Kudlow sees “a $1 trillion savings on budget-interest expense over the ten-year horizon.”

I offer all this — and there’s more which you can read — as much to give myself a leg up on the issue as to tell you. You’re welcome

Source: Fast Action on U.S. Debt Could Reap Trillions In Savings Over Long Term – The New York Sun

Lukewarm to unfavorable review by Irish reviewer of series “Rebellion”

In the middle of it, the reviewer offers a neat categorization of one of its heroines, a tough dame — not the character pictured here, btw:

Speaking of Frances, she tells us that she’s now tasted freedom and can’t go back. Freedom which for her appears to be a taste for shooting men and kissing women. Not exactly the archetypal feminist stereotype but not far off.

I went looking for this having just read in The Oxford History of Ireland, ed. R.F. Foster, 1989 that only 15 rebels were executed by the brutal military commander, vs. this show’s dozens.

This show’s accuracy had been a bone of contention, the reviewer notes.

Arguments over historical inaccuracies became a Sunday night ritual over the last five weeks but the programme was never supposed to be a bullet-by-bullet account of Easter Week.

Nor firing-squad death for f-s death. We might have been warned. But it’s a lesson for us on what to take at face value when drama or more commonly melodrama goes all supposedly historical. Caveat lector.

Source: Rebellion came out fighting but in the end it went down in flames