Showing posts with label Joe Biden 2018. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Joe Biden 2018. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 4, 2018

Camille Paglia: So far the Democrats have no one to run against Trump


Kamala Harris = ruthless inquistor without crossover appeal
Elizabeth Warren = screechy representative only to the upper middle class 
Kirsten Gillibrand = a wobbly mediocrity
Cory Booker = has all the gravitas of a cork
Andrew Cuomo = yapping puppy with a muddy tail
Bernie Sanders = old and creaky
Joe Biden = creaky and old
Hillary = damaged goods, stumbling, hacking and shop-worn

Thursday, October 11, 2018

You know, Obama didn't follow the so-called Biden Rule in 2016, but Mitch McConnell sure did

You can listen to Biden in 1992, here, when he said Bush should refrain from nominating anyone if a vacancy occurred on the Supreme Court in that election year.

Biden also said the Senate should refrain from holding hearings on any nominee if Bush happened to nominate anyone anyway against this advice.

Well, fellow Democrat Obama ignored the Biden Rule in 2016, an election year, by nominating Garland, which goes little remarked.

But even more little remarked is that the Republican McConnell acted in agreement with the rule in 2016, and refused to conduct hearings on Obama's nominee.

The Executive and the Legislative act as they please in these matters, as is their right. They make their own rules, no matter how much the partisans of this world may try to constrain them.

Elections have consequences.

Thursday, March 1, 2018

Story in The Atlantic cherry picks data about senior poverty

The Census Bureau's new (since 2011 but fiddled with again in 2013) Supplemental Poverty Measure (SPM) shows senior poverty in slight retreat since 2009, but you wouldn't know that from the story here (you'd have to look at the chart to the left here) which says it's up between 2015 and 2016, which it most certainly is, but hey, c'mon. The fact is, the "official" measure shows that senior poverty has dropped big time since the mid-1960s when the rate was knocking on the door of 30%, stabilizing in recent years in the 8, 9 and 10% range:

The problem is growing as more Baby Boomers reach retirement age—between 8,000 to 10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, according to Kevin Prindiville, the executive director of Justice in Aging, a nonprofit that addresses senior poverty. Older Americans were the only demographic for whom poverty rates increased in a statistically significant way between 2015 and 2016, according to Census Bureau data. While poverty fell among people 18 and under and people 18 to 64 between 2015 and 2016, it rose to 14.5 percent for people over 65, according to the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, which is considered a more accurate measure of poverty because it takes into account health-care costs and other big expenses. “In the early decades of our work, we were serving communities that had been poor when they were younger,” Prindiville told me. “Increasingly, we’re seeing folks who are becoming poor for the first time in old age.”