The Crusades, Alive and Well I just received an email letter that is currently making the rounds among the Republican faithful. The letter articulates the (apparently quite widespread) belief that the US is currently engaged in a religious war and needs national unity above all else. It’s long, but I thought I’d share some excerpts […]

Bush & Snow on June Employment Report Treas. Sec. Snow told CNNFN’s Market Call that he is looking more at the Household Survey because it supposedly picks up self-employed workers more effectively than the separate payroll survey of employers — an issue on which there is some debate among economists — and showed a gain […]

Death on the Fourth of July: The Story of a Killing, a Trial, and Hate Crime in America Orcinus proprieter Dave Neiwert’s new book is out: Dave summarizes his book in this post on the book release: The book on its surface is about an unusual homicide case that happened in Ocean Shores, Washington, four […]

The Public: Starting to Get It Ruy T. runs through the latest polls and finds that a majority of the public believes that Bush is doing a lousy job, the country’s not going in the right direction, the economy is still in trouble, the war wasn’t really worth it, the war hasn’t made us safer, […]

Has The World Gone Mad? Libertarian/Conservative blogger Eugene Volkh is defending John Kerry from somewhat liberal Slate (Volokh is right on the money, too). What’s next? Mark Kleiman defending Bush from The National Review’s Bruce Bartlett? AB UPDATE: See also this lukewarm endorsement of Kerry by Volokh contributor Jacob Levy.

Faith-Based Fertility Treatment Some of you may recall a purported study from a few years back claiming to demonstrate that remote prayer by strangers doubled the success rate of in-vitro fertilization among infertile women. The study, by researchers then employed by Columbia University, was published in the reputable-sounding Journal of Reproductive Medicine. Now, astoundingly, like […]

Job Growth Slows This is bad news, via the WSJ (subscription): The pace of job growth in the U.S. slowed for the first time in four months in June and fell short of expectations, catching Wall Street off guard. Nonfarm business payrolls grew by a net 112,000 jobs last month, raising this year’s total to […]

Postcards from Old Europe – A tale of two (central) banks The recent decision by the FOMC to hike the Fed Funds rate to 1.25% was widely reported and commented on. All the noise surrounding the Fed’s decision may have drowned out the fact that the European central bank, the ECB, decided to leave interest […]

Importing Drugs: Bad Medicine / Bad Economics? The conservative argument against importing pharmaceuticals from Canada claims to be one part science and two parts economics with Sally Pipes (Pacific Research Instititute on Public Policy) putting her own formulation to two of the three parts in “Say No to Foreign Drugs”. Pipes raises the safety issue […]

InstaAngryBear(*) Jesse qua Peggy Noonan: Unicorns with rocketpacks that urinate the fuel for cold fusion and whose hair is made of licorice… It truly is astounding that Noonan gets paid money to write. AB (*) The “Insta” prefix denotes the practice of merely excerpting other blogs and directing readers there, rather than coming up with […]