Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

A Little Late Hopefully, Mr. McGruder won’t mind. It’s the perfect final take on the Franken/O’Reilly debate on CSPAN. (click to enlarge) ( AB

Some Sanity? From the NYT today: Federal authorities said today that they planned to use stricter standards for identifying and locking up terrorist suspects in light of concerns raised in a recent report that hundreds of illegal immigrants were mistreated after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. U.S. Citizen Mike Hawash remains out of luck, however. […]

Libertarians I’m always looking to link more opposing but reasoned views, but it’s tough to do in good conscience with most of the righties. I’ve got Postrel, den Beste, Lileks, BusinessPundit, Jane Galt, Media Whores Online, OxBlog, Samizdata, and Volokh (one of these blogs is not the same). That’s about all the righties I can […]

Living History Even if you’re not interested in reading it, you should probably buy it, just to anger some Republicans. And it has a second important use: it’s a great wingnut-detector. Keep it on your coffee table when you have dinner parties and, by watching closely for visceral negative reactions, you’ll know which of your […]

Dislike Margaret Carlson? Or at least agree that she’s annoying. See Bob Somerby thoroughly and incomparablyTM shred her here and here. A sample: Some of her work is ugly and vicious, like her distortions regarding [Vincent] Foster. But most of her work is just numbingly stupid. Somerby then goes on to back this conclusion up; […]

Bad News for John Kerry Higher Costs Send Heinz Profits Tumbling. Actually, it remains unclear whether Kerry and his wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, plan to use some of Teresa’s $550 million in ketchup money–rumors swirled that she was leaning in that direction after Republicans used her to launched a few attacks at Kerry. On the […]

Declining Fortunes While the ongoing new jobless claims have not received much attention from the executive branch, this dour economic news surely will. Seriously, if regressive tax cuts come at the expense of growth (either directly or because they foreclose some alternative and more stimulative policy) then they don’t even help they rich. Or, more […]

Fare Thee Well It looks like Wampum is going on hiatus, possibly permanently. MB’s posts were always insightful, informative, and done with style. I will particularly miss the laboriously compiled Flashback Fridays series. MB was also the creative force behind It’s Still the Economy, Stupid!, a project that I’ve enjoyed being a part of and […]

Coral Calcium Update A while back, I commented on an amusing informercial in which the makers of “Coral Calcium” made this claim: “DNA can’t work unless it’s smothered in calcium”. Turns out, the FTC was reading Angry Bear: The Federal Trade Commission is asking a U.S. court in Chicago to shut down an operation that […]

Pathetic Democrats Previously, I speculated that the Republicans were adding an exta layer to the tax cuts by excluding the lower middle class. I wrote that “I figured the plan was to hit the $350 target, via the chicanery of sunsets, exclude popular taxes, and then force the Democrats and moderate Republicans to insist on […]