We Really, Really Don’t Have to Mail Out Thousand-Dollar Checks
Earlier this morning I suggested we should ditch the idea of mailing out thousand-dollar checks to everyone. It would barely help the people who really need it, and it would be lousy macroeconomic stimulus to boot. Click and read for more details. I got a lot of pushback on this, almost all of it objecting…
Good News: The Federal Government Just Made It a Whole Lot Easier to Access Opioid Addiction Treatment
Boston Globe/Getty For the hundreds of thousands of Americans who have to visit clinics for daily doses of opioid addiction medication, social distancing is nearly impossible. But on Tuesday, the federal government eased some of its long-held restrictions in response to the coronavirus. That’s good news, because continual access to two primary treatment medications, buprenorphine…
Jared Kushner Once Controlled a Firm Now Running a Coronavirus Testing Website
Oliver Contreras/AP Jared Kushner, Donald Trump’s son-in-law and a top player in the White House’s coronavirus deliberations, several years ago controlled a family business that owned a health insurance company that is now marketing a website that aims to direct consumers to coronavirus testing locations. This firm, which is called Oscar, has often been described…
Joe Biden Looks Set For Another Landslide on Tuesday
In the face of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s almost easy to forget that we still have a Democratic primary race going on. But we do. So just for the record, here are the latest poll aggregates from 538.com for the four primaries being held tomorrow: Joe Biden is at 60 percent or higher in all…
When Your Primary Is in the Midst of a Pandemic
Jeffrey Greenberg/Universal Images Group via Getty Images For the last few months, Abby McEntee, a preschool teacher from the Chicago suburb of Western Springs, has spent each of her Saturdays and Sundays crisscrossing Illinois’ 3rd District to knock doors on behalf of Marie Newman, the former marketing executive making her second attempt at unseating Illinois Rep.…
We Shouldn’t Need to Explain Why Trump’s “Chinese Virus” Tweet Is Wrong. But Here We Are.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP As the coronavirus pandemic continues to grip the world, so does another contagion, this one spread by political profiteers, opportunists, and grandstanders cashing in on a familiar trade. Whenever a bodily virus hits, a cultural virus tags along: the impulse to scapegoat an entire race, ethnicity, or nationality. “They did it” is the…