Letter to Sinclair Broadcasting From John McCain: I write to strongly protest your decision to instruct Sinclair’s ABC affiliates to preempt this evening’s Nightline program. I find deeply offensive Sinclair’s objection to Nightline’s intention to broadcast the names and photographs of Americans who gave their lives in service to our country in Iraq. I supported […]

Postcard Update The Easter edition of my column “Postcard from Old Europe” talked about the low level of entrepreneurship in Europe. The Blog “Small Business Trends” tackles the same question – I would highly recommend looking at the whole thing. An excerpt: The entrepreneurs who are successful in the US are often considered as heroes. […]

Postcards from Old Europe – Four elections and a constitution While much of the world has it’s eyes firmly fixed on the US election in the fall, this column looks at some of the developments coming up on the European political stage. June will see elections to the European parliament and another chance at agreeing […]

Something to Hide Bush, after today’s meeting with the 9/11 Commission: “If we had something to hide we wouldn’t have met with them in the first place. We answered all their question. I came away good about the session because I wanted them to know how I set strategy, how we run the White House, […]

Unimpressive GDP Numbers From today’s BEA release of the advance estimates of first quarter GDP growth: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2004, according to advance […]

The Testimony Will Not be Televised Nor recorded. Nor transcribed. But Bush and Cheney are meeting with the 9/11 Commission today. I think The Onion has the right take on this: Cheney Wows Sept. 11 CommissionBy Drinking Glass Of WaterWhile Bush Speaks AB

What’s Causing High Gasoline Prices? The US Senate Republican Policy Committee has spent some time and effort investigating the cause of rising gasoline prices. Yesterday they published a policy report explaining their findings. The conclusion: rising gasoline prices are largely due to Federal regulations, such as those established by the Clean Air Act. Among their […]

Today’s Howler Somerby reads David Ignatius so you don’t have to. Here’s Mr. Ignatius explaining why, despite the information being readily available from military experts, the press failed to predict that the Iraq War and subsequent occupation would be tough: The uniformed military privately had serious questions about the Iraq mission, but these only occasionally […]

Labor’s Share, Part II Following up on my post from the other day, I’m still thinking about the recent divergence between labor productivity and the income that labor gets. In the process of thinking about this, I’ve been looking at some more data. The table below shows labor productivity and labor compensation in several countries […]

More WTO Troubles for the US The US has apparently lost another ruling in the WTO. This one was against US agricultural subsidies in the cotton industry, in a case levied by Brazil. Brazil had argued that US cotton subsidies were excessive, and thus violated WTO rules. In a preliminary ruling, the WTO agreed. There […]