Stock Market Predicts Kerry Win! Sort of. The sample sizes on things like this are necessarily small, equalling at most the number of presidents. And each election is unique. Still, this CNN story notes that Presidential elections are usually won by the incumbent party; in the past 104 years, in 26 elections, the party holding […]

My Life Update ABCNEWS: “My Life” was released throughout the United States with a first printing of 1.5 million. Barnes & Noble had estimated that between 90,000 and 100,000 copies would sell Tuesday in the United States, a record debut for a nonfiction book. On Wednesday, Borders also reported a record first day for nonfiction, […]

Echo Chamber? Asked whether blogs serve any purpose beyond merely telling like-minded people what they want to hear, most liberals respond with reference to the Trent Lott scandal, which was kept alive in blogs until it finally made it into the mainstream. Sure, Lott only lost his leadership position, but even that would almost surely […]

Ants Having Sex Richard Cohen in the Washington Post on how Bush and Cheney viewed, and continute to view, “ties” (or the lack thereof) between Saddam and al Qaeda: I’ll tell you a story. There was a man who went to see a psychiatrist. First, the shrink showed him a picture of crossed sticks and […]

Don’t Forget My Life: While it’s possible the book is terrible, you really, really, can’t trust the NYT reviewer, Michiko Kakutani. She’s been panning Clinton and Gore books since at least 1999. Of course, this is the same NYT that invented Whitewhater yet failed to cover the Robert Ray report exonerating Clinton, so that’s not […]

The Krugman-Summers 1982 Inflation Memo As members of the Reagan CEA, Paul Krugman and Lawrence Summers wrote a memo to Martin Feldstein and Willam Poole on 9/9/1982 with the first section entitled “The Inflation Time Bomb”. Don Luskin’s latest tirade at NRO links to it (alas, he links only to the first page of the […]

Record Foreign Investment and the Reagan-Bush Tax Cuts Let’s discuss two recent interpretations of the large current account deficits. First up is a good article from Reuters with the news that the current account ran a deficit equal to $144.9 billion over the past 90 days. WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. current account deficit widened […]

Good News, Everyone! The pseudonymous PGL, former Angry Bear guest-blogger, will be a regular contributor to the blog starting, I believe, today. His posts will be centered around Tuesday, but come as news breaks or the urge to write strikes. Kash and I will continue our mostly around-the-week coverage of news, politics, and the economy. […]

Tom Delay Lame Duck U.S. Rep. Chris Bell isn’t mincing words. He’s filed an ethics complaint against Tom Delay in the House and yesterday wrote an Op/Ed in the Houston Chronicle explaining why: DeLay undermines small ‘d’ democracy By U.S. REP. CHRIS BELL U.S. Majority Leader Tom DeLay is the most corrupt politician in America. […]

Playing Poker With Dick Cheney The Poor Man has a brilliant parable about his night of poker with Dick Cheny, including but not limited to this: Brit Hume: It seems like some people are still playing poker like it’s September 10th. Back then, you needed to have all your cards in order to claim a […]