TruthOut has the article The New Financial Scam Driving Workers Deep Into Debt.

This new loan scheme is being promoted as a “service” by unscrupulous employers working in cahoots with predatory lenders. The employee can ask for an “advance” and the loan is included right in the paycheck. These loans are great for the lender because payments come straight out of the employee’s paycheck. The loans are terrible for the employee because payments come straight out of the employee’s paycheck.

Workplace loans have very high interest rates, as much as 165% per year, and are repaid directly out of wages. So far only about 100,000 workers are being offered these scams by their companies, but at least half a dozen companies are marketing this “service” to employers.

This article goes into much more detail about why these practices are so harmful.  However, I know of cases where friends who have above average educations in things financial are so desperate, that they go looking for loans for people with bad credit.  I even checked to make sure he understood what a bad idea it was.

It is so very tempting to offer help in such a situation.  However, I have also learned how you can get dragged down into situations you avoid by people who do not have the means to avoid them.

When I was a youngster, my parents actually explained to me what this song was all about. I guess I took it seriously.

The Rachel Maddow Show segment is labelled  The right presses on for welfare drug tests.

It is quite an interesting segment even though it has a lot of logical flaws. Let me point out a few that I can remember.

She probably spends more time touting what she says is starting to look like a success of Obamacare enrollments after a slow start than she does on the headline issue. She also compares the Obamacare enrollment record to that of Massachusetts’ experience with its law at start up. Massachusetts’ startup was even slower in its first three months. Part of the implication is that a measurement at three months is barely starting to show the possibilities.

When she finally gets to Florida’s experience with its drug testing law, she makes a big deal of its failure even while explaining that a court decision ended the implementation of the law after three months. No irony here.

She also makes the case for Florida’s failure that they have found that welfare recipients were found to be using drugs at one quarter the rate of the general population. I am at a little bit of a loss as to why this figure is so significant logically. Let’s say that someone thought that the general population were using drugs at a rate that was 1,000 times too great. Would it be a failure of common sense to want to stop part of the population that was “only” using it at a rate 250 times too great, when that was the population that you might have the most influence over? (1,000 and 250 were just numbers I picked to make a point. I make no claim that they represent any real situation.)

Perhaps I picked those numbers because of my experience buying low salt products in the grocery store. Most regular soups give you on the order of 900 mg of salt per serving. That is more than ⅓ of your total daily recommendation in one serving of a component of one meal. Low or reduced salt versions of these soups have as much as 600 mg of salt. That way you only get ¼ of your daily recommended amount from one component of one third of your meals. I think low salt is about 50 mg of salt per serving. So the store’s low salt is over 10 times as much salt as I consider low.

Rachel Maddow’s segment is a bit long. Perhaps she could have left out the easily attacked leaps in logic to make a more compact and more powerful indictment of the people she was ridiculing.

This may also be an example of why such “left wing” shows are not as popular among the “left” as the “right wing” shows seem to be among the “right”. Some of us on the “left” don’t really like defenses of our principles that are logically flawed, when in fact logically sound arguments could be made, and were made by Rachel Maddow.

The New York Times story US economy comparatively strong, study asserts begins with the following paragraph:

Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus, …

I am confused about which New York Times published this article.  Was it the one in New York City, The United States of America, The Earth?

I don’t think it is my planet where “Academic heavyweights have been debating whether the United States economy is so sluggish because of too much government stimulus,…”

I’d love to see a list of those academic heavy weights.  I  bet I can come up with a far longer list who think the economy is sluggish because of far too little government stimulus of the right kind.

Comparing this crisis to recoveries from similar crises may prove that we have done fewer idiotic things in response to this crisis than in previous ones.  It doesn’t necessarily show that we have done as many smart things as we could have.  Had we had less stimulus than we did, we might have followed more closely the paths after similar crises in which there was a double dip.The loss to the economy is not measured by how less badly we did than in the past.  The measure is how far below crisisless trend we are.  Where would we be if we had been able to avoid the crisis with proper government regulation, less insane deregulation, less political cow-towing to the ultra-wealthy, and less concerted efforts to suppress labor unions?

Firedoglake has the article Top 10 Proofs People Can Be Completely Manipulated Without Hypnosis.

1. Any article listing the top 10 of anything will be widely read.

I guess we have been had.  There are actually some interesting items, not that #1 isn’t true and interesting.

4. According to U.S.ians the greatest threat to peace on earth is a nation that hasn’t threatened any other, and hasn’t attacked any other in centuries, a nation that suffered horrible chemical weapons attacks and refused to use chemical weapons in response, a nation that has refused to develop nuclear weapons but been falsely accused of doing so by the U.S. government for decades. That’s right: a bit of laughably bad propaganda, regurgitated in variations for 30 years, and the smart critical thinkers of the Land of the Free declare a nation with a military budget below 1% of their own — Iran — the Greatest Threat to Peace.[4] Edward Bernays is cackling wickedly in his grave.

Although Iran’s reputed support for Hezbollah in Lebanon might be considered a threat to someone.  So I have to wonder who is being manipulated,  the people who believe that Iran is a threat or the people who believe #4 that Iran is not a threat?

I started out liking this article, but I must be waking up from my hypnotic trance. So maybe even the title is misleading.