Watching the developments of the past week were surprising even to me. Were the up swelling of protests over the death of George Floyd and the corona virus pandemic totally unrelated?  Is Trump’s generally incompetent leadership a factor?  The mostly peaceful demonstrations have been occurring just as the turbulent restriction from the pandemic are being lifted.  Do people […]

Today there is a wealth of statistics being released including the ones that I have compiled here.  The official unemployment rate increased from 4.4% in March 2020 to 14.7% in April 2020.  The unofficial rate (which some call the true unemployment rate) rose from 8.7% in March to 22.8% in April.  The official rate counts […]

Usually for my anniversary posts I look at the web traffic statistics for the site.  This year I thought I would take stock of where the blog is and where it will go. Seven years ago I began the blog by conducting data driven journalism before I had even heard of the term.  This year […]

On Saturday, August 12, the there is a profile of me in the local Johnstown, PA newspaper (the Tribune Democrat) on my campaign for city council. I was hoping to push for a living wage ordinance for the city but the State of Pennsylvania, along with 24 other states, has a law preventing the city […]

Last year I wrote about Jon Stewart’s Sanity Rally and edited that post many times.  I asked about is what the sane thing to do is.  It all depends on the circumstances of course.  In times of crisis protests like Occupy Wall Street could be the most sane thing to do. This year the Arab […]

In these times of economic anxiety the political parties and the news media are playing a cynical poker game with our nation’s resources. The latest manifestation of this struggle is the battle over the debt ceiling which is the limit on the amount of money the federal government can borrow. At a healthcare meeting in […]

I was sent this good first hand account of the events in Madison, WI on Twitter which are on their 6th day and their similarities to those on the Middle East. I couldn’t have written it better.  He tells me he believes there will not be violence in Madison. The Worden Report: Protests in Wisconsin […]

In the last few weeks we’ve all seen the images of violent protests in Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen. Some pundits in the US have focused on fears that these uprisings are being driven by Islamic extremists somehow connected to the Islamic Brotherhood and by Al Qaeda’s #2 Ayman al-Zawahiri (an Egyptian) or fears that it […]