Will Katrina really have a substantial negative impact on the US economy, or will its effects be minor and transitory? This week’s Buttonwood column gives both arguments: Supplies of oil and petrol are being released from emergency stocks, some limited refining is resuming in the Gulf of Mexico, and the price of crude has retreated […]

So I picked up The Curious Incident of The Dog in The Night-Time in the airport (it’s a story of the adventures of what to my inexperienced eye seems to be a high-functioning autistic teenager). Having enjoyed it thoroughly, I passed it on to Honey Bear, (btw, now my fiance’!). Her response, other than also […]

Lowry at first decries the finger-pointing: It is getting ugly. Not just in New Orleans, but in the debate over it. Take our poisonous partisan divide, add the finger-pointing that takes place after any calamity, then mix in noxious racial politics, and you have the formula for the coming Battle over New Orleans. But then […]

Bill Owens shows some fiscal leadership: Gov. Bill Owens, once touted in conservative Republican circles as presidential material, teamed with Democrats last spring in drawing up the proposals that will ask voters to give up as much as $3.7 billion in tax refunds over the next five years. This from a politician who used to […]

Even Jonah Goldberg understands that blaming the New Orleans poor for their lack of resources to flee the path of Katrina is misplaced: That said, it’s becoming increasingly less obvious that more first responders etc, would have made an enormous difference in the aftermath of this unfolding calamity. The disaster zone after 9/11 was less […]

Yes, I agree that there’s plenty of blame to go around. I’m sure that local authorities made some poor or slow decisions. But the Bush administration’s new coordinated effort to blame local authorities for the hundreds or thousands of deaths that have happened in Katrina’s wake is despicable: In public statements and even more bluntly […]

The Bush administration has finally put together a plan to deal with the Katrina crisis, reports the New York Times: White House Enacts a Plan to Ease Political Damage WASHINGTON, Sept. 4 – Under the command of President Bush’s two senior political advisers, the White House rolled out a plan this weekend to contain the […]

People needed help on Tuesday not this weekend. Help was slow in coming and criticism of our government was well deserved. Yet, folks like David Frum “criticize the criticism”, which for those who may have forget was what the Taliban spokesperson whined after 9/11. Maybe you don’t agree with me that David Frum has zero […]

We awaked this Saturday to see the good news – help has arrived to New Orleans. Eleanor Clift provides one explanation of why it took so long for the Federal government to get its act together: This has been a colossal failure of government. President Bush spent Tuesday, the day after Katrina struck, at a […]

The NRO econopundits are contradicting themselves once again on monetary policy. While Victor Canto is arguing for a commodity price rule, John Tamny seems upset that the market does not decide the money supply. And the funny part is that these two probably don’t even understand that their positions are inconsistent.