Bernie was better than I expected him to be. Hillary was better than I expected her to be.. 

As Bernie said in his last remark  they were both better than anyone we've heard so far in the disgraceful  Republicans mud wrestles.

We're lucky to have two such high quality candidates.

As a commercial people should                                                                                                                   We have learned  no end of a lesson.                                                                                                            It will do us no end of good 

Kipling

and who cares?

According to one poll  

Trump 70%, Cruz 20,,Carson 2 Rubio  4, Jeb 0 (not actually 0 but so low it rounded to 0 which was also true of Kasich and Christie.

During Saturday's  Democratic debate  Martha Radatz asked Hillary why the annual cost increases have been higher.

They haven't been.

Check out today's TPM for the correct numbers.  

According to Comey's House testimony today we now know that in their pre marital electronic discussions they discussed dying in an attack  on behalf of Isis. No doubt  if we know this now we could have known it then.

it was on our Underground route into London from Stanford Rivers.  Pretty grim, but the Tube got you to where you were going. And safe, not that we gave that much thought. I told my friend Bob (son of the local police chief here) that the Brit police didn't carry guns and were almost never injured. . Eliciting the sour retort that London was safe for the police and the crooks.

http://www.juancole.com/2015/11/modern-raiding-pirate.html

Juan Cole may take a long time getting there but ends by saying Isis has to be wiped out.If the link doesn't work go to his blog "Informed Comment" , which it is.

And saying , and saying.

Brain Lehrer casually connected the dots the other day. The topic was the desperately sad increase in suicide rates among  non rich white americans  and Brian said, "of course ,caused by Nafta".

Which was exactly right. In his wise middle age Keynes abandoned his brilliant earlier defense of free trade and reached a position which can be pretty much summarized by two of his remarks: " The thing about tariffs is-they do the trick". And "Let all goods be homespun".

Our first child was autistic or to use the preferred characterization " a person with autism". The help available to us was considerably worse than useless. It was advice from Freudians-most of whom probably meant well-but whose underlying theory was so wrong that their suggestions could only be- not just of no use -but bound to make matters worse.

In the 60s that begin to change and in the forefront of those with changed views was a Brit psychologist  named Winnicott  who coined the useful phrase "The good enough mother".

One Monday morning he looked exhausted. He had been an economist in Havana now he was starting over as an accountant in San Juan. Avery good one. But today he looked as if he should just go home.

It was I was told, like this. On Friday afternoon he'd  left the office, for Eastern Airlines to Miami. Where his brother, a local gambler , met him and drove them to Key West.

Let us assume Kerry/Obama somehow ensured the Iran Agreement provided our Weapons Inspectors with carte blanche  Would that  have raised or  lowered the odds that it would have actually been honored?

Sure, when up to your ass in alligators it's sometimes  hard to remember just why you wanted to drain the swamp. But In this case clearly the object was to please not the John McCain's of the world  but the Iranians most able to increase the odds that what was supposedly agreed would be implemented

That was Minimax...

if the Court rules against the Administration  in King vs Burwell.

There are all sorts of estimates so let's make our own.

There are 10 million  Obamacare users who didn't have insurance before and they'll once again won't have insurance. Some of them are going to have a life threatening condition in the next two years that would have been treated but won't be now.

How many?Let's say 5%.

Some of those 500 K souls will scrape up the money somehow and get better. But lots of them won't .Maybe half.

In 1964 ,John Profumo, UK Secretary of Defense -and husband of the beautiful Valerie Hobson- was having an affair with the equally beautiful , lower class, 16 year old Christine Keeler,. Who was also having sex with a senior  Russian diplomat stationed in London!

When the Labour party leader ,Harold Wilson, disembarked at Heathrow he was mobbed by screaming reporters asking  for his comment.His entire reply was

"No comment........in technicolor"

Which  should be our reply if asked about Hastert  .Though I fear it won't be..

Definition: Things get made where it's cheapest.

Result. US workers don't make them.

Long term effect: they starve.

Well,the Government won't let that happen, you think.

".....I was at home in Newton on the morning of Sunday, March 20,2005, when I received notification that the House would convene later that same day to consider the case of a Florida woman named Terri Schiavo.Fifteen years earlier,she had fallen into a comatose state. Once it became clear  her condition would not improve, her husband asked the hospital to remove her feeding tube. This was in accordance with a wish he said she had expressed to him before she was stricken.

here by a very old and very wrong assessment of  Labour's  economic performance. Krugman-of course- and a few others rebut it but it's become the accepted story.

A short hand way to portray what was actually the truth is to look at the deficits- and occasional surpluses- of the two main UK parties.

They're essentially the same.

For example

Labour            Average Deficit          Tories   Average Deficit       

1975-78          (6)Billion    

                                                            1979-87       (9)

Time     Con    Lab    Lib  Scots   UKIP    Other                                                                              

12 40     145       157     6     52        1                         

12 49     154       166     6     53        1

12 55  '   165        174    6     53        1       12

1 10       179        180     6     53       1        12

1 15       191       187      6     54       1        12

When I got to my unit, we were still in tents waiting for the Russians to go back to barracks. Almost the first thing my battery commander told me was, "Truman forced through the integration of the Army. In the long run it'll be good for the country but right now it’s bad for the Army."

But as those integrated units actually went into combat later: in Vietnam or the Middle East, their integrated nature hasn't seemed to seriously degrade their effectiveness. Or at least not to the extent that anyone now advocates un-integrating them.

The Dagblog world has been essentially silent about the Laussane "agreement" and IMHO properly so. To some extent possibly because as always  the devil is in the details. But,perhaps even more,because in this case those of us who hang out here know that the remaining devil(s) may be lurking in the details that we don't know about because they haven't yet been agreed.