Omnibus Spending Bill Passes From CNN: WASHINGTON (AP) — The Senate overcame Democratic delaying tactics Thursday and sent President Bush an overdue $373 billion bill financing a vast swath of government and bearing a bushel of victories for the White House. Senators approved the measure 65-28 a month after House passage. The bill finances agriculture, […]

Cheetos of Mass Destruction Well, not exactly. But Slacktivist does provide a great illustration of how the validity of a noun decreases with the number of adjectives appended to that noun. Patrick Hayden has another amusing take on WMDRPAs. AB

Health Savings Accounts Mark Schmitt has the definitive explanation of why HSAs are a bad idea: What the administration is doing, first with health savings accounts, which are now the law, and then with this [catastrophic insurance] proposal, is to confer enormous tax advantages on a type of insurance that is already advantageous, but only […]

More Then and Now Tonight’s Daily Show cited this quote from the 2002 SOTU (after 9/11 and, apparently, after there were already solid plans for invading Iraq): To achieve these great national objectives — to win the war, protect the homeland, and revitalize our economy — our budget will run a deficit that will be […]

Why Can’t I Come up With These? TBogg on Sen. Kennedy’s obvious disapproval of the SOTU: —Although I enjoyed Ted Kennedy and his head-shaking, I think making jerk-off motions with his fist while rolling his eyes would have been more effective. AB

Conservatives v. Bush, Part II So, some Republicans who are also fiscal conservatives have been reacting to the SOTU. This story contains some examples: WASHINGTON, Jan 21 (Reuters) – U.S. President George W. Bush faced open rebellion on Wednesday from some members of his fiscal conservative base for not laying out concrete plans to reduce […]

SOTU I didn’t listen to the entire SOTU, primarily because it pains me to hear the leader of the Free World say NU-CUE-LAR (yes, Carter did it too, but that doesn’t make it right). But of the parts I did hear, one passage really struck me: We’re seeking all the facts. Already, the Kay report […]

Employment Charts in Thirty Seconds I just came across a really cool application, Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey, at the Bureau of Labor Statistics web page. There, you can quickly assemble charts and graphs on a number of labor and economic measures collected by the BLS, broken down by a variety of […]

Iowa’s Effect on the Political Markets As I’ve mentioned before, the Iowa Electronic Market is a great place to see how events shape the perceived probabilities of each candidate winning the nomination. Here is today’s graph, showing the last night’s Iowa caucus results have affected the shares of all of the candidates. Note that Edwards […]

A Preview of the State of the Union: More Concealed Costs? Bush has made a specialty of proposing policies that are tremendously expensive without actually addressing their costs. Some examples include: Tax cuts. Stated cost by Bush before the fact: none. The claim was that they would boost the economy so much that tax revenue […]