Sid and Hannity I Just heard about ten minutes of Sidney Blumenthal on Sean Hannity’s radio show, and now I have to give credit where it’s due…to Sean Hannity! First, for booking Blumenthal, and second for, in my judgment, giving Blumenthal plenty of time, not interrupting excessively, admitting when Blumenthal had a point, and overall […]

Hey, There are Books and Links to Your Right First anger. Yes, tomorrow is the long anticipated TCW-day; get the inside story from a Clinton Administration insider, Sidney Blumenthal. The story some call “The Story the Press Doesn’t Want You to Know“. Then insight. Read The Gifts of Athena, a book on the history of […]

The Economic News Sucks Today Look for a rate cut if all this stuff keeps happening. Note to Republicans: I mean “look for an interest rate cut”, not another “tax rate cut”. This on top of already bad news on jobs and bankruptcies. AB

Bill Gates: Evil Businessman or Philanthropist Extraordinaire? Mac Diva has an ongoing dialog on this topic with one of her frequent readers, Jim, as well as some other bloggers. First, a little side note about the blogsphere: I believe techies are distinctly more libertarian than the general public and also distinctly more anti-Microsoft (this observation […]

Blogging in the TImes I’ve seen a few bloggers linking to the NYT story, “Dating a Blogger, Reading All About It“, which is mostly focused on personal blogs. Also today, the NYT has another story, “As Google Goes, So Goes the Nation“, that talks a bit about blogging. Dave Winer, whose blog archives go back […]

Red vs. Blue, Revisited Atrios correctly pointed out that I should have weighted the data in computing the average net receipts from or payments to the federal government for the two categories of states. Because the data in the Tax Foundation Report reports “[Federal] Expenditures per Dollar of Taxes”, simply averaging the numbers by state […]

Media Handlers An it would be amusing if it weren’t disturbing story in the NYT today on how the White House stages events and lighting and backdrops to market the president. For example, “…On Tuesday, at a speech promoting his economic plan in Indianapolis, White House aides went so far as to ask people in […]

Red vs. Blue Atrios points out that Red states are stealing from blue states. So I went to the full report Atrios cites, added some color-coding, and made some graphs. While the subsidies are much larger in the Red states (those that in principle dislike government subsidizing anything), they are not quite as bad as […]

The ‘L’ Word Tapper is good today in Salon, and his theme segues nicely with Somerby here and here. AB

Stephen Moore CalPundit made a great catch, noting that Stephen Moore, president of the Club for Growth (a lobbying group devoted to Supply Side policies–Moore is on CNN, Fox, …, writes opinion pieces that appear in major newspapers, and gets quoted fairly often) can’t do simple math. This likely explains his devotion to Supply Side […]