Kathleen Geier

Over at Jacobin.com, Kurt Newman has written a really fascinating piece about the wage slaves of the E! reality television show, Fashion Police. The program, which stars Joan Rivers, is one the E! network’s most popular shows. And yet its writers, who work virtually full-time (30 to 40 hours per week), are paid a measly […]

You may have heard about a relatively recent player in the national debate over austerity-nomics. Fix the Debt portrays itself as a public interest group that is earnestly committed to fiscal responsibility and looking out for our children’s future (it always is about their touching concern for the children, isn’t it?) The group claims to […]

Kathleen Parker’s column in today’s Washington Post, which is about over-the-counter sales of Plan B birth control, is a small masterpiece of sophistry. It’s a virtual greatest hits collection of all those arguments by the anti-birth control reactionaries that sound superficially compelling, but immediately fall apart the second you hold them up to the light […]

The Raveonettes are an excellent band, and last year’s Observator was a fine album. This is one of that album’s best songs. In their live performance here, I’m impressed by closely they manage, with just two acoustic guitars, to reproduce an equivalent of their full, carefully layered studio sound.

Holy crap! The New York Times is reporting that the suicide rate is way up, particularly for people ages 35 to 64. From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. [Snip] The most pronounced increases were […]

The New York Times’ Thomas Edsall has written a fascinating piece that looks at a question I’ve been wondering about: is it really true that Democrats like Heidi Heitkamp of North Dakota, Mark Begich of Alaska, Max Baucus of Montana, and Mark Pryor of Arkansas had to vote against the background check gun control bill? […]

“There’s wrong, there’s very wrong and then there’s Niall Ferguson.” – economist John Aziz on Twitter Aziz tweeted that earlier this week, before Ferguson made yesterday’s instantly infamous homophobic attack on John Maynard Keynes at a talk for financiers: Harvard Professor and author Niall Ferguson says John Maynard Keynes’ economic philosophy was flawed and he […]

Salon’s Alex Seitz-Wald reports that a libertarian activist is organizing a march on Washington consisting of gun nuts illegally carrying loaded rifles: Libertarian activist and radio host Adam Kokesh is hoping to get 1,000 people to march on Washington on July 4 — armed with loaded rifles. The plan, launched with a Facebook group today, […]

Today’s morning music clip features the great country singer Lefty Frizzell. Lefty was a huge influence on many, especially Willie Nelson (who turned 80 this week) and the late George Jones. I remain continually thrilled and delighted that YouTube offers clips like this one — it’s a real Aladdin’s cave of cultural treasures. Pre-internet, the […]

Folks, sorry I didn’t get to post about Rogoff and Reinhart this weekend, but that will have to wait until next time. I need to wrap this up — it’s almost time for Mad Men! But before I go, I wanted to put up one last post. Let’s face it: the last two weeks have […]