Earlier this week, Kid Rock announced that he’s exploring a senate bid in his home state of Michigan, energizing conservative activists who believe Rock – real name Robert James Ritchie – would easily defeat incumbent Democrat Debbie Stabenow and go on to become the first Republican to hold her seat since 1998.
Two weeks after Italy reacted with anger to Austria's deployment of troops and armored vehicles to the border between the two nations, while reactivating border controls at the Brenner Pass over concerns that Italy will be unable to handle the roughly 85,000 migrants and refugees who have entered the country so far in 2017, the Italian government has threatened to retaliate in way that assures an imminent migrant crisis as well as an escalation of tensions between the two EU nations.
Last August, in a post that attempted to explain why public pensions are really about $8 trillion underfunded, as opposed to the $3-$5 trillion that you frequently see tossed around in the press, we described pensions in the following way:
You know the economics of your city are a bit distorted when a married couple earning roughly 3x the national median income can't even afford to put a roof over their head. Oddly enough, that seems to be exactly the case in San Francisco where the Board of Supervisors has just approved a piece of legislation that would allow couples earning up to $138,000 a year to qualify for "affordable housing." Per SFGate:
In what could very well end up being just another exercise in futility, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has just released a new version of a healthcare plan which, among other things, incorporates demands from Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) to allow insurers to sell low-cost, skimpier plans all in an effort to draw conservative support for the new bill.
Called the "Consumer Freedom Amendment," we highlighted the main points of the Cruz/Lee proposal last month: