Two New Studies Further Debunk The Harvard Austerians That Provide Intellectual Cover For Ryan, Cantor & Irrational Teatard Debt Fetishes

  HUFFINGTON POST: The debunking of Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff continues. The Harvard economists have argued that mistakes and omissions in their influential research on debt and economic growth don’t change their ultimate austerity-justifying conclusion: That too much debt hurts growth. But even this claim has now been disproved by two new studies, which suggest the opposite might in fact be true: Slow growth leads to higher debt, not the other way around. In a post at Quartz, University of Michigan economics professor Miles Kimball and University of Michigan undergraduate student Yichuan Wang write that they have crunched Reinhart […]

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CONTEST: Win Tix To See The Dandy Warhols

  The fascinating 2004 documentary Dig! chronicles the roller coaster existence of two indie bands who who go from friends to rivals – The Dandy Warhols and The Brian Jonestown Massacre – as they try to survive and thrive in a messed up, backwards-assed music world. The Dandy Warhols look like proper rock stars should, but they come across as relatively normal, and seem poised to achieve stardom via their chameleonic music – a catchy, ersatz re-write of whatever is trending at the moment — and frontman Courtney Taylor’s elegant cheekbones. In contrast, The Brian Jonestown Massacre are darker and […]

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RADIOHEAD: Q&A w/ Wiretap‘s Jonathan Goldstein

  BY JONATHAN VALANIA Jonathan Goldstein is the creator and host of public radio’s Wiretap, which The (Montreal) Gazette aptly described as “something between borscht-belt comedy and Franz Kafka,” heard locally on Thursday nights at 9 pm on 90.9 FM WHYY. Goldstein is sort of the Woody Allen of the Airwaves — if Woody Allen was an aging Canadian Gen Xer with a punk pedigree and sociopathic-yet-loveable friends. Either way, he’s hilarious and Wiretap is a gas, gas, gas. He’ll be at the Free Library tonight to promote his new book, I’LL SEIZE THE DAY TOMORROW which is kinda like […]

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Philly PoPo Gun Down 7 People In 7 Days; 4 Died

  HERE AND NOW: Residents in the Philadelphia neighborhood of Germantown are trying to make sense of yet another police shooting — the seventh time police have shot a suspect in Philadelphia in the past week. Four of the shootings have been fatal, including one yesterday. A bullet also grazed a two-year-old boy. The latest shooting came hours after Philadelphia Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey asked federal investigators to look into the department’s use of force. New York City and Las Vegas have conducted similar reviews of police practices. But what has been going on in Philly this week? MORE RELATED: […]

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WORTH REPEATING: A Spy In The House Of Lies

SALON: People would often ask me about how Fox pushes a message. And I would always tell them the message isn’t so much pushed as it is pulled, gravitationally, with Roger Ailes as the sun at the center of the solar system; his vice presidents were the forces of gravity that kept the planet-size anchors and executive producers in a tight orbit; then all the lesser producers and PAs were moons and satellites and debris of varying sizes. […] The bottom line is that each show had one person — be they anchor or producer or whoever — who was […]

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AMEN: Michelle Bachman Will Not Seek Re-Election

NEW YORK TIMES: Representative Michele Bachmann, the Minnesota Republican who made an ill-fated run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2012, announced Wednesday that she would not seek a fifth term in Congress next year. She made the announcement just six months after being re-elected in what was her most challenging Congressional campaign since she was first elected to the House in 2006. Her announcement also comes as her former presidential campaign faces inquiries into its fund-raising activities. “I have decided next year I will not seek a fifth Congressional term,” she said in a video on her campaign Web […]

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CINEMA: God Only Knows

  THE DAILY BEAST: One of the most hotly anticipated films at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, running from May 15-26 in the south of France, is Only God Forgives. The crime-thriller reteams Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn with his star, Ryan Gosling, and is Gosling’s last film before his self-imposed hiatus from acting. Gosling plays Julian, an American running a Muy Thai boxing club in Bankok, Thailand, that’s a front for a drug-smuggling operation. When his brother, Billy (Tom Burke), is killed in an act of revenge after murdering an underage prostitute, the two boys’ mother, Crystal (Kristin Scott […]

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