US household debt hit a record $16.15 trillion in the second quarter of 2022. Mortgage debt accounts for 75% of the total; college debt another 10%. The rest is mainly motor vehicle and credit card debt. Rising household debt over the past two years is worrisome, and will become a greater problem as interest rates […]

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Guns were a ubiquitous part of my childhood. My grandfather, who had been a master sergeant in the army, had a small arsenal in his house in Mechanic Falls, Maine. He gave me a 2020 bolt action Springfield rifle when I was 7. By the time I was 10, I had graduated to a Winchester […]

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It has been three months since the last January 6th Committee hearing — a lifetime in the theater of politics — so it was only natural that members opted to use Day Nine to offer a refresher course on how Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election and end American democracy. In doing so, they finally […]

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Perhaps the frog wasn’t boiled after all. Maybe it was just exhausted. How else to explain the flaccid reaction this week to American conservativism’s casual normalization of anti-Semitism? It’s been two weeks since the former president blasted out his complaint about ungrateful Jews. The implicit threat got no points for subtlety. Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO […]

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On August 22nd of this year, the New York Times reported that a secretive Chicago industrialist named Barre Seid had transferred more than $1.6 billion into the control of Leonard Leo, to whom Donald Trump outsourced the packing of the U.S. Supreme Court. (For more on that court-packing, check out Jim Hightower’s piercing series on Leo.) That story by […]

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