circuit — Helicopter money: an operational view

Turner v. Seccareccia

Fictional Reserve Barking
Helicopter money: an operational view
circuit

Randy Wray — Presentation: Fiscal Cliffs, Debt Limits, and Unsustainable Deficits: Can the US Really Run Out of Dollars?

Slide presentation.

Fiscal Cliffs, Debt Limits, and  Unsustainable Deficits: Can the US Really Run Out of Dollars?
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, ,UMKC

Randy Wray — Krugman is Right about Simpson-Bowles: The Buzzards Circle the Fiscal Cliff

Randy on another tear. Bravo.

Make no mistake. The President as well as both houses of Congress are solidly aligned to gut these programs. That is what the Rube Goldberg machinery is all about.

It is time to get out the pitchforks to destroy the doomsday machine Washington is creating for us.

Economonitor — Great Leap Forward
Krugman is Right about Simpson-Bowles: The Buzzards Circle the Fiscal Cliff
L. Randall Wray | Professor of Economics, UMKC

(I suppose this is what Ted Cruz means by "communism.")

Peter Cooper — Inner Growth Requires Time to Self Reflect

I would say that in the area of economics I have only ever had three light-bulb moments : perceiving the source of surplus value (Marx) ; encountering the principle of effective demand (Kalecki, Keynes) ; and understanding the implications of monetary sovereignty (MMT). Each of these insights had a big impact on me and made sense of a lot of other things all at once.

In thinking about paths to a better society, the understanding of monetary sovereignty seems the most important of the insights. It makes clear that real resources are the only genuine constraint and that, regardless of what capitalists or ‘bond vigilantes’ might think of the matter, economic activity need not be for profit, growth is not compulsory, materialism is not the only alternative, and the wage-labor relation or income tied to labor time is not a law of nature. None of these things are necessary or inevitable for a monetarily sovereign society, if we so choose.

But what will we choose? Do we even know what we really want? As regular commentator jrbarch often points out most eloquently, to know what we really want, we have to know ourselves. Light-bulb moments in our inner lives require self-reflection.

heteconomist.com
Inner Growth Requires Time to Self Reflect
Peter Cooper

Bonnie Kavoussi — Americans To Washington: Delay The 'Steep' Sequestration Cuts

Politicians have said they may have no choice but to let automatic spending cuts kick in next Friday. But the American people say they better find a way out of it.

The government has scheduled $1.2 trillion in spending cuts, nicknamed the "sequestration," to take place starting on Mar. 1. But 54 percent of Americans support a plan to "delay steep cuts to give the economy a chance to continue recovering which would help reduce the deficit," according to a new Bloomberg poll....

Americans support delaying the sequestration even though 62 percent of Americans believe the budget deficit is growing, the poll found. In fact, the deficit is shrinking, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

The Huffington Post
Americans To Washington: Delay The 'Steep' Sequestration Cuts
Bonnie Kavoussi

Arthur Delaney — Tom Coburn: Obama Administration Exaggerating Sequestration Impact

A top Senate Republican said Sunday that the Obama administration is exaggerating the impact of looming cuts to federal spending.

The cuts, known as "sequestration," will shave $85 billion from the federal budget this year unless Congress strikes an unlikely deal to replace the cuts with something milder. The Obama administration has said many bad things will happen as a result of the cuts, including increased airport delays.

Sen. Tom Coburn (R-Okla.) told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace that the Obama administration is "absolutely" exaggerating the impact of the cuts.

"It is a terrible way to cut spending, but not to cut 2.5 percent over the total budget over a year when it is twice the size it was 10 years ago? Give me a break," Coburn said. "We see all these claims about what a tragedy it's going to be."

The Huffington Post
Tom Coburn: Obama Administration Exaggerating Sequestration Impact
Arthur Delaney

GOP shrugging of consequences of sequestration?

Joe McCarthy redux?

Senator Ted Cruz has responded to The New Yorker’s report that he accused Harvard Law School of having had “twelve” Communists who “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government” on its faculty when he attended in the early nineties. Cruz doesn’t deny that he said this; instead, through his spokesman, he says he was right: Harvard Law was full of Communists.

His spokeswoman Catherine Frazier told The Blaze website that the “substantive point” in Cruz’s charge, made in a speech in 2010, was “was absolutely correct.”

She went on to explain that “the Harvard Law School faculty included numerous self-described proponents of ‘critical legal studies’—a school of thought explicitly derived from Marxism—and they far outnumbered Republicans.” As my story noted, the Critical Legal Studies group consisted of left-leaning professors like Duncan Kennedy, who is a social democrat, not a Communist, and has never “believed in the overthrow of the U.S. Government.”

Among those who have taken issue with Cruz’s castigation of the Harvard Law School faculty are his former law professor, Charles Fried, who is a well-known Republican and former Solicitor General to Ronald Reagan. In his 2010 speech, Cruz had said there was only “one” Republican on the faculty, but his former professor, Fried, told The New Yorker there were at least four, including himself. A spokesman for Harvard Law School, Robb London, also described the school as “puzzled” by Cruz’s allegations.

The New Yorker
Ted Cruz Responds—And Still Sees Red At Harvard Law
Jane Mayer

Cruz makes allegations and refuses to name names, just like Joe. It was despicable then, and now?

I suppose Cruz thinks that President Obama came under the influence of "communists" when he was at Harvard Law School.

I wonder whether he wears a tin foil hat?

AFP — Ecuador’s president vows to push large-scale mining despite indigenous protest

So much for progressivism and environmentalism in Ecuador. Money talks and politicians walk. Indigenous leaders have already declared that any more enclosure of the commons will result in war. And, yes, they have seen Avatar, and they aren't waiting for a white savior either.

“To hurt the government, they are hurting the country, the poor, that Amazonian region,” Correa said, adding that “we are not with the multinationals, we are with the poor.”

“We cannot be beggars sitting in front of a bag of gold,” he said.

Yep, that old bag of gold gets 'em every time. There can be no accommodation with unbridled capitalism over either human rights or the environment, which is really the commons. Correa's calling himself a "socialist" is an oxymoron.

The Raw Story
Ecuador’s president vows to push large-scale mining despite indigenous protest
Agence France-Presse

Killer robots must be stopped, say campaigners

A new global campaign to persuade nations to ban "killer robots" before they reach the production stage is to be launched in the UK by a group of academics, pressure groups and Nobel peace prize laureates.

Robot warfare and autonomous weapons, the next step from unmanneddrones, are already being worked on by scientists and will be available within the decade, said Dr Noel Sharkey, a leading robotics and artificial intelligence expert and professor at Sheffield University. He believes that development of the weapons is taking place in an effectively unregulated environment, with little attention being paid to moral implications and international law.

The Guardian | The Observer (UK)
Killer robots must be stopped, say campaigners
Tracy McVeigh | The Observer

(h/t Andy Blatchford)

February Fiscal Flows Come Roaring Back

After posting a surplus of $20B in December followed by a $33B deficit in January, the government's fiscal injections of $NFA have swung around to recent highs through the 21st of February.

Through February 21st, net withdrawals from the Treasury account total $347B while net deposits are at $163B for a fiscal deficit ex-post result of $184B, again through just the 21st.  TTM data reports this deficit flow average at a bit under $90B per month so February is currently tracking towards a recent monthly high delta.

A highlight on the withdrawal side for February is the total for IRS Tax Refunds (Individual) of $76B which is contributing substantially to this months out-sized net withdrawals.  This large amount of seasonal $NFA  injection more than offsets the system level $NFA removal effects of the 2% payroll tax increase that went into effect January 1st; the effects of which are estimated at a cet par net removal of $10-12B per month.

Perhaps look for a short term increase in retail sales to close out February as any poor January results and early February warnings (such as that heard from Wal-Mart ) related to the recent 2% payroll tax increase may be counter-enabled by this strong seasonal tax refunding form of $NFA injection.

Short term, the system  is being supplied with $NFA at an adequate rate to prevent systemic instability and associated systemic liquidation.

Lord Keynes — World GDP versus Total Value of Financial Asset Market Exchanges

Any economic theory that ignores this type of spending and its sector of the economy (i.e., the secondary financial asset markets) is deeply flawed and liable to be missing something fundamental about modern market economies....

This type of spending is also a fundamental reason why Say’s law is one of the most ridiculous ideas ever formulated by economists. 

Social Democracy for the 21st Century
World GDP versus Total Value of Financial Asset Market Exchanges
Lord Keynes

Cathy O’Neil — Break up the megabanks already

For the past few months at Occupy we’ve been focusing more and more on having a single message and goal. That has been to break up the big banks.

What’s great about this goal is that it’s a non-partisan issue; there is growing consensus (among non-bankers) from the left and the right that the current situation is outrageous and untenable. What’s not great, of course, is that the situation is so easy to spot because it’s so heinous.

Yesterday another voice joined the Break-Up-The-Big-Banks chorus in the form of an editorial at Bloomberg (hat tip Hannah Appel). They wrote a persuasive piece on breaking up the big banks based on simple arithmetic involving bank profits and taxpayer subsidy. Even the title fits that description: “Why Should Taxpayers Give Big Banks $83 Billion a Year?”....

Occupy Wall Street Alternative Banking Committee
Break up the megabanks already
Cathy O’Neil | mathbabe.org

Not only is Occupy not dead or dead in the water, either, "occupy" as a strategy is going to happen. I don't have any idea when or under what circumstances but it is pretty obvious the present course in not sustainable and when enough people are hurt badly enough by it to get off their butts, then places are going to be occupied. But putting a clock on it is not possible now.

Andrew Simms — The four-day week: less is more

More free time, fewer carbon emissions and an answer to our economic woes. Why aren't we all working a four-day week?

The Guardian (UK)
The four-day week: less is more
Andrew Simms
(h/t Andy Blatchford via FaceBook)

Turns out this is a conservative idea originating in Utah, first tried at the city and county level and then instituted at the state level by then governor Jon Huntsman.

Michael Stephens — It’s Time to Shift the Focus of the Deficit Debate

The Congressional Budget Office’s latest report on the budget outlook revealed (perhaps unintentionally) that fixating on Congress and the President as the central players in the federal deficit drama is a mistake. According to the CBO, the path the federal budget deficit will follow over the next 10 years is just as much (if not more so) a question of Federal Reserve policy.

Multiplier Effect
It’s Time to Shift the Focus of the Deficit Debate
Michael Stephens

It's the interest rate, stupid. And that depends on the Fed's inflation target, since the interest rate is a policy variable.

Interest rates are a policy variable.  This growth in debt-service costs, in other words, represents a choice.  The question of whether or not it’s the right choice should receive a lot more attention in our popular discussions, alongside the obsession with “grand bargains” and the rest.  We’re often told (in a near inversion of the truth) that rising budget deficits are the biggest near-term threat to the US economy.  But if you look at what the CBO’s projection says about our collective priorities, what we see here is a decision to allow interest rates to rise at the expense of the deficit....

However, given some model of the interactions between unemployment, inflation, interest rates, and budget deficits, the question of what particular tradeoffs we are making, or should make, needs to be brought to the fore.  One issue raised by the CBO’s projection is the Fed’s apparent commitment to place a 2 percent ceiling on inflation.  Is maintaining this ceiling worth it, given the price that needs to be paid in terms of a more elevated unemployment rate and increased political pressure to reduce spending on essential government functions?  How harmful would inflation in the 3–4 percent range be, given the costs of trying to avoid it?  Whatever your answers are, these questions need to become a more routine part of the deficit debate, for the sake of better public understanding of the choices being made on our behalf. 

The Economic Maverick — BOLLOCKS! Moody's Downgrades UK debt for first time in history. Blames AUSTERITY!

What is most notable about the UK Debt downgrade is not the downgrade itself, but the text. Moody’s is NOT attributing their downgrade to the usual mantras from the austerity caucus such as “fiscal profligacy” and “bond market vigilantes.”Instead they are blaming “slow intermediate term growth” and, most importantly, blaming that slow growth on “the ongoing domestic public- and private-sector deleveraging process.”

Obviously, as the MMTers know too well, concerns of a technical default are misplaced because the UK, (like the US, Japan, Canada, Australia, Switzerland, etc) is an autonomous fiat currency issuer and therefore can’t default on its debt unless it chooses to do so. However, implied in the text are the exact concerns that non-austerians of all disciplines have been repeating incessantly: Austerity in a downtown [down time?] is counter-productive even to the goal of reducing public debt because it hinders growth and therefore impairs the capacity of the economy to generate revenue and repay the debt. This is doubly true after a credit bubble bust because the private sector is deleveraging in an effort to fix its own debt problems. Any efforts by the public sector to simultaneously deleverage will backfire.

The Economic Maverick
BOLLOCKS! Moody's Downgrades UK debt for first time in history. Blames AUSTERITY!

David Edwards — Gohmert: Voters need ‘at least 50 rounds’ in magazines to take out drones

Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) says constituents are telling him that high-capacity magazines should not be banned because people need “at least 50 rounds” to shoot down government drones.

The Raw Story
Gohmert: Voters need ‘at least 50 rounds’ in magazines to take out drones
David Edwards

Seriously? Next they 'll be clamoring for anti-tank RPG's.

And the funny thing is that they don't seem to get that drones shoot back and are armed with missiles. Oh, right, you are shooting from deep in your bunker in the bankyard.

Bill Mitchell — Unemployment and inflation – Part 4 and 5

Today I have had a major report to complete on “efficiency dividends” in government budgets (for a union), have a lot of travel ahead, and also want to progress my macroeconomics. Report complete except for summary, which I will finish on the plane tonight. So until then I am progressing the Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) text-book, which I am writing in liaison with my colleague and friend, Randy Wray. We are trying to get it completed for use in second-semester 2013 and so I am spending more time on it to meet that expectation. Today, I continue to develop the material on unemployment and inflation.

Remember this is a textbook aimed at undergraduate students and so the writing will be different from my usual blog free-for-all. Note also that the text I post is just the work I am doing by way of the first draft so the material posted will not represent the complete text. Further it will change once the two of us have edited it.



This is the continuation of the Chapter on unemployment and inflation – the series so far is:
▪ Unemployment and inflation – Part 1
▪ Unemployment and inflation – Part 2
▪ Unemployment and inflation – Part 3

I am now continuing Section 12.6 on the Phillips Curve …

Chapter 12 – Unemployment and Inflation

Bill Mitchell — billy blog
Unemployment and inflation – Part 4

Unemployment and inflation – Part 5

Bill Mitchell

Dimitri B. Papadimitriou — The Legends of the Greek Fall

Why has the world's premiere deficit-reduction laboratory produced such a dismal failure? European leadership still expects the painful über austerity measures imposed on Greece to result in a dramatic improvement of its debt to GDP ratio. But the experiment in endurance is not succeeding for an important reason: Austerity programs have been rooted in myths about what caused the crisis in the first place.

The Huffington Post
The Legends of the Greek Fall
Dimitri B. Papadimitriou | President, Levy Economics Institute; Executive Vice President and Professor of Economics, Bard College

Philip Pilkington: Kill The King – Why Are We So Scared of Fiat Money?

Money is just a token that we use to “keep score” of the debts we owe one another. It is just a unit of account that helps us keep track of who has given who what. Having a central quasi-governmental power in the form of a central bank simply helps us to do this and allows governments to extend deficit-financing in order to keep economic activity stable.

So, what accounts for the visceral reactions we see toward the system? Why do some bow down as if to a deity, while others recoil in horror as if confronted with a demon? The hint to this lies in the way we moderns relate to government and power. The fiat money system is an embodiment of arbitrary power and we in the modern world distrust this. Money is accepted largely by edict in that it is fiat money in which we can pay our taxes and it is also fiat money in which contracts can be legally settled.

Lying behind every dollar, euro and yen is a jailor and a judge who are ready to deprive us of our rights and our freedom should we choose not to play by the rules of the game. It is this aspect of the system that accounts for the strange reactions we see surrounding it. It is this aspect of the system that leads some to hide from themselves the reality of the system and imbue it with an auratic glow and leads others to hysterically attack it as a grave injustice and evil. To get to the heart of this matter we must understand better how we relate to political power today.

Naked Capitalism
Philip Pilkington: Kill The King – Why Are We So Scared of Fiat Money?

Jeff Cox — Who's Afraid of QE Ending? Not the Bond Market

..the stock market sold off at the slightest notion that the Fed might pull the plug.

"Equity markets seem to think of asset purchases as magic pixie dust," Cloherty said. "They just make everything fly. No one has a transmission mechanism for how that works, they just know it does."

The Standard & Poor's 500 lost 1 percent following Wednesday's Fed release and was on pace to add to that decline Thursday.
The bond market, though, was humming along even though a Fed exit from bond buying would seem likely to decrease demand and thus put upward pressure on yields.

Instead, yields fell and a popular exchange-traded fund, the iShares Barclays 20+ Year Treasury Bond fund, gained nearly one percent.

CNBC — US Markets
Who's Afraid of QE Ending? Not the Bond Market
Jeff Cox | Senior Writer

Battle for the Size and Direction of the US Public Budget Finally Getting Serious

commentary by Roger Erickson

Panetta: Supercommittee failure would ‘hollow out’ military's combat force.

Really? Yet the following is also true.
"the US plowed $689 billion into defense in 2011, more than the next 16 biggest military spenders combined, and 40% of total worldwide military spending. Number two China spent $129 billion, number three Russia a measly $64 billion."

Is the entire world really our enemy? Do we want to spend that much on defence? Or might we want to invest that much in broader-based innovation, general welfare of our people, and making friends with the rest of the world?

Plus, the bulk of the DoD budget is dedicated to tactical hardware, NOT to strategy!

For comparison, do we train chessmasters to think, or do we train them to constantly ask for more and bigger and badder pawns and other pieces on the chessboard? There are times to do both, but getting out of balance either way can be fatal.

Are we way out of balance on hardware, and ignoring strategic brilliance? There is no lack of current Pentagon budget reform insiders - dating back to efforts by John Boyd, Chuck Spinney, Winslow Wheeler and even Pres. Eisenhower - who have claimed for decades that the runaway MICC spending on tactical hardware has sucked all emphasis out of strategic thinking both within and outside the DoD, and has therefore done more harm to our nation than all the hardware can possibly be worth. All the hardware in the world is useless in the hands of people lacking strategic brilliance. History has proven that repeatedly.

We're gonna see a vote on those very questions, soon.

Edward Morrissey: What Uncle Sam could learn from the Catholic Church

Article at The Week here.  Author Morrissey misses the mark here in an article where he suggests that indeed we should have a concerned view towards "the poor"; and reject the Randian Objectivist/Libertarian synthesis, but suggests the true problem is a lack of "responsibility and sustainability" because of the typical moron view that somehow we don't want to pay for it.

Here is his warped analysis based on his own brand of a libertarian anti-authority view that our government does not possess absolute fiscal authority:

However, a couple of key elements are also necessary in this paradigm: Responsibility and sustainability. The problem facing the American welfare system and the European nanny states is that they are designed with neither in mind. Their fiscal structure pays more in benefits than it receives, a very basic form of irresponsibility and unsustainability. [Ed: It is only irresponsible and unsustainable to a stupid and blind libertarian who has no view of our government's absolute fiscal authority.]

That forces these systems to borrow massively against future production, which in essence means that these social systems pay benefits with someone else's money — the children or grandchildren to come. One could consider that theft, or at the least taxation without representation.  [Ed: What a dope.  Morrissey here literally asserts  that our fiscal agents in government have a time machine in which they have to travel into the future in order  to borrow our future society's "money" and carry these balances back to the present in order to account for our current production... what a moron.]

It's not difficult to argue that neither of the two philosophers would endorse such a system. After all, even St. Thomas Aquinas did math. Anyone with a calculator can figure this out; it doesn't take philosophers to tell us that we can't borrow money forever without risking collapse.  [Ed: Now this is especially indignation inducing to those of us graced with mathematical maturity, to see such a butchering of basic mathematics.  Who does this blind moron think our government is borrowing from?  Moron: Where does the "money" come from you dummy?  Sober up man!]

 Yet we hear nearly nothing from the political class about the true costs of these programs, or the responsibility for the bills to be paid properly when incurred.  [Ed: Who is not getting paid in all of this?  What is this moron even talking about?  What "bills" are not getting paid?  This guy is a disgraced  embarrassment.]

What can those other blind morons currently occupying positions of authority in our government learn from the Catholic Church?  How about simply first obtaining a foundational view of the inherent authorities of our (government) institution in the first place?

Perhaps the Catholic Church at least has a view of the authority present within it's own institution which is surely lacking in our current institution of government.

If our current blind and stupid occupants of positions of authority in our government would at least become able to see the authority present within their own institution, then perhaps we wouldn't have to be treated with statements such as "We're out of money!" and "we're borrowing from our grandchildren!" from the likes of the similarly blind and stupid libertarian Morrissey here.

Remember the words of the Centurion:  "For I also am a man set under authority..."  To which the Lord replied: "Verily, with no one in Israel so much faith did I find."

Harry Bradford — Waffle House Adds 20 Percent Surcharge To Cover Security Guard

America descending into chaos, or the Wild West?

The Huffington Post
Waffle House Adds 20 Percent Surcharge To Cover Security Guard
Harry Bradford

Reuters — Rising Taxes Are Hurting Low-Income Americans

* Payroll tax rise, pump prices crimp spending

* Wal-Mart, Burger King, Kraft already feeling the pinch

* CEOs warn two-speed economy not improving

Feb 19 (Reuters) - It's getting tougher again at the bottom of the food chain.

Rising taxes and soaring gasoline prices have combined to slash spending power at the lower end of the economy, according to executives from fast food chains, discount retailers and other companies that cater to budget-conscious consumers.

"Unfortunately, the loss of so many middle-class jobs in this country makes it tough," said Gary Rodkin, chief executive of consumer packaged foods company ConAgra Foods, in an interview on Tuesday.

"We've got a pretty good pulse on that 80 percent of the population that's still challenged and I would say there's not marked improvement yet," he added.

The good old 80-20 rule.

The Huffington Post
Fast Food Executives: Rising Taxes Are Hurting Low-Income Americans
Martinne Geller and Lucia Mutikani | Reuters

Robert Skidelsky — Rise of the robots: what will the future of work look like?

If one machine can cut necessary human labour by half, why make half of the workforce redundant, rather than employing the same number for half the time? Why not take advantage of automation to reduce the average working week from 40 hours to 30, and then to 20, and then to 10, with each diminishing block of labour time counting as a full time job? This would be possible if the gains from automation were not mostly seized by the rich and powerful, but were distributed fairly instead.

Rather than try to repel the advance of the machine, which is all that the Luddites could imagine, we should prepare for a future of more leisure, which automation makes possible. But, to do that, we first need a revolution in social thinking.

The Guardian (UK)
Rise of the robots: what will the future of work look like?
Robert Skidelsky

(h/t Kevin Fathi via email)

Unlearning Economics Misinterpretations in Mainstream Economics

It is my opinion that major areas of neoclassical economics rest on misinterpretations of original texts. Though new ideas are regularly recognised as important and incorporated into the mainstream framework, this framework is fairly rigid: models must be micro founded, agents must be optimising, and – particularly in the case of undergraduate economics – the model can be represented as two intersecting curves. The result is that the concepts that certain thinkers were trying to elucidate get taken out of context, contorted, and misunderstood. There are many instances of this, but I will illustrate the problem with three major examples: John Maynard Keynes, John Von Neumann and William Phillips.

Unlearning Economics
Misinterpretations in Mainstream Economics

Shamus Cooke — What the 1% Heard During Obama's State of the Union Speech

When President Obama speaks, most Americans hear what he wants them to hear: lofty rhetoric and a "progressive" vision. But just below the surface the president has a subtly-delivered message for the 1%, whose ears prick up when their buzzwords are mentioned. Obama's state of the union address was such a speech – a pro-corporate agenda packaged with chocolate covered rhetoric for the masses; easy to swallow, but deadly poisonous. 

Much of Obama's speech was pleasant to the ears, but there were key moments where he was speaking exclusively to the 1%. Exposing these hidden agenda points in the speech requires that we ignore the fluff and use English the way the 1% does. Every time Obama says the words "reform" or "savings,” insert the word "cuts.”

Z Space
What the 1% Heard During Obama's State of the Union Speech
Shamus Cooke

Yves Smith — Martin Wolf Misses the Real Reason the Eurozone’s Unhappy Marriage Has Not Broken Up Yet

The normally astute and blunt Martin Wolf is either having an uncharacteristic bout of circumspection or is managing to miss an important, arguably determining reason why the Eurozone persists in inflicting destructive austerity on much of its population.

Naked Capitalism
Martin Wolf Misses the Real Reason the Eurozone’s Unhappy Marriage Has Not Broken Up Yet
Yves Smith

Tim Murphy — 10 People You Didn't Realize Were Friends of Hamas

Pretty funny in a pathetic way. US politics has come to this?

Breitbart News editor-at-large Ben Shapiro created a bit of a stir last week when he alleged that Sen. Chuck Hagel, President Obama's nominee to be the next secretary of defense, may have ties to an organization called "Friends of Hamas."
On Wednesday, after reporters at mainstream publications could find no evidence of any such organization even existing, Shapiro* Breitbart News doubled down: "The mainstream media have ignored the fact that at least one prominent supporter of Hamas has donated money to an organization associated with former Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE)—namely, the Atlantic Council, which receives support from the Hariri family of Lebanon, whose most prominent member, former Lebanese prime minister Saad Hariri, publicly backs Hamas."

Do you know who sits on the Atlantic Council? Read on.

Mother Jones
10 People You Didn't Realize Were Friends of Hamas
Tim Murphy


"Friends of Hamas" Even Stupider Than You Thought
Kevin Drum

Nate Silver — Can Republicans Win the Senate in 2014?

The Big Picture 

Summing up the possibilities across all 35 Senate races yields a net gain of four to five seats for Republicans, just short of the six they would need to win back the majority.

However, the margin of error on the calculation is very high at this early stage. Keep in mind that in each of the last four cycles, one party (Democrats in 2006, 2008 and 2012; Republicans in 2010) won the vast majority of the competitive races. If Republicans swept all the “lean” and “tossup” races, they would gain a net of eight seats from Democrats, giving them a 53-to-47 majority in the 114th Congress. If Democrats swept instead, they would lose just one seat and would hold a 54-to-46 majority. Considering the uncertainty in the landscape, estimates from betting markets that Democrats have about a 63 percent chance of holding their majorityappear to be roughly reasonable.

One last factor to consider is that as difficult as the Democratic Senate map looks in 2014, Republicans could face an equally challenging one in 2016. In that year, seven Republican-held seats will be up in states won by Mr. Obama in 2012, while no Democrats will face re-election in states won by Mr. Romney.
Thus, as ridiculous as it might seem to look so far ahead, the most important reverberations from the 2014 Senate races might not be felt until 2016 and beyond. Republicans will need to make considerable gains next year to open up the possibility of a Republican-controlled Congress after 2016. If Democrats hold their ground, conversely, it would provide for the outside possibility of their holding a filibuster-proof majority after 2016.

The New York Times | Five Thirty Eight
Can Republicans Win the Senate in 2014?
Nate Silver