While the recent news about real GDP growth has been pretty good, Lawrence Kudlow overstates the case again: If former President Clinton had overseen this economy, he’d have held daily Rose Garden news conferences to mark the occasion … Real GDP has grown at 3 percent or better for ten straight quarters, averaging 4.1 percent […]

Kash detailed the latest good news on U.S. real GDP growth. Eurostat provides a link entitled “Euro-zone and EU25 GDP up by 0.6%” (approximately 2.5% per annum) for the third quarter of 2005. It appears that Europe is also recovering from the global recession of a couple of years ago.

Senator Schumer is stunned that Samuel Alito wishes to chip away at a woman’s right to choose: WASHINGTON – As a Reagan administration lawyer in 1985, Samuel Alito made clear his hope that the Supreme Court would one day overturn a landmark ruling that established abortion rights. But Alito, now a Supreme Court nominee, argued […]

Some have argued that at least part of the rise in oil prices over the past two years is due to speculation, rather than fundamental changes in supply and demand. For example, a paper that I just finished reading by Antonio Merino and Alvaro Ortiz (“Explaining the so-called ‘price premium’ in oil markets“) calculated that […]

This morning the BEA released an updated estimate of GDP in the July-September period of 2005. 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 4.3 percent in the third quarter of 2005, according to preliminary […]

Kash has been doing a very good job of keeping us abreast of some real reporting on the sad state of affairs in Iraq. When I saw the title of this article, which was, “Bush, Rumsfeld: Iraq Strategy is Working”, I thought that it would be nothing more than the tired old White House talking […]

Froomkin also reminded me about this depressing tidbit out of Iraq: “Human rights abuses in Iraq are now as bad as they were under Saddam Hussein and are even in danger of eclipsing his record, according to the country’s first Prime Minister after the fall of Saddam’s regime. “‘People are doing the same as [in] […]

Dan Froomkin asks some good questions today: What does it say about the president of the United States that he won’t go anywhere near ordinary citizens any more? And that he’ll only speak to captive audiences? President Bush’s safety zone these days doesn’t appear to extend very far beyond military bases, other federal installations and […]

After a rise in long-term interest rates earlier this fall, they have fallen back down a bit over the past week or two. Meanwhile, short term rates have been on a steady upward march all year. The result is that there is now virtually no difference between long-term interest rates and short-term interest rates. The […]

Those of us living in California’s 48th Congressional District are suffering election fatigue. Our Representative, Christopher Cox, is the new SEC Chairman and his congressional seat is vacant. We will now be voting in our third election in just over two months: October 4th was the district primary and November 8th was the California statewide […]