BY MARTIN KICH Any budget number can be made to sound exorbitant if doing so serves a political purpose. But the scope of our governmental budgets, as well as the scope of our economy, has long exceeded the ability of most of us to grasp the numbers—both viscerally and intellectually—in any meaningful way. Given the…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Here is the opening of an article written by Jack Torry for the Columbus Dispatch: Sens. Rob Portman and Sherrod Brown objected to the government’s decision to prevent a Cleveland Clinic physician on a Sudanese passport from returning to the United States as part of President Donald Trump’s temporary ban on…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the NBC News website, Phil Hessel reports on the responses of universities to President Trump’s executive order prohibiting those from certain Muslim countries from entering the U.S.: “At a practical level, we are advising community members and visiting scholars from the designated countries to suspend plans for international travel,”…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH On January 18, the New York Times published a piece by Scott Shane titled “From Headline to Photograph, a Fake News Masterpiece.” The piece might have been given the title of this post or “Anatomy of a Piece of Complete Fiction”–with an ironic tip of the hat to the novelist Robert…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This is a follow-up to my December 29 post, “Court Blocks Mandatory Drug Screening at State College.” Given the substantial reductions in state support very recently announced for the state colleges and universities in Missouri, the pursuit of this appeal does not seem an especially prudent allocation of institutional resources. The…
BY MARTIN KICH Writing for the Seattle Times, Benjamin Woodard provides a timeline of events that occurred in the city on the day of Trump’s inauguration, events that culminated in the shooting of a man involved in a protest outside of a hall where Milo Yiannopolous was speaking. Perhaps it is simply a problem with…
BY MARTIN KICH One of the refrains over the past four to five years has been how many Americans are unemployed but uncounted in the “official” unemployment figures. The following chart does not suggest that chronic unemployment does not exist among certain demographic groups or in certain locations, nor does it suggest that a sizable…
BY MARTIN KICH What is being lost in the discussion of the loss of manufacturing jobs to Mexico and our trade deficit with Mexico is that a very large portion of what we are importing from Mexico is made by American corporations: A very large percentage of the first through third and the sixth categories…
POSTED BY MARTIN KICH This series covers the issues that surfaced in 2015. I had it done at the beginning of 2016, but I have been somewhat slow getting it posted. Southwest Asia, Part 2 Mohanalakshmi Rajakumar is an Indian-American who has lived in Qatar for more than a decade. Initially, she held an administrative…