Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Milestone If you will look to your left and scroll down, you should see a number above 20,000. Whoohoo! But that’s page views, not unique visitors. On a typical day, page views are about 1.3 times unique visitors, so unique visitors will hit 20,000 by the end of the month, sooner if I get a […]

What Cave Does Will Rasberry Live in? See yesterday’s IncomparableTM Daily Howler for a good laugh as Washington Post Columnist William Rasberry calls outspoken lefty Arianna Huffington “an outspoken conservative”. Only it’s not funny, because it’s an example, albeit a particularly egregious one, of the laziness typical of lefties writing in the major OP-ED pages. […]

Disingenuity without Limit Tom Delay in the NYT: “To me, it’s a little difficult to give tax relief to people that don’t pay income tax.” First, in all the stories I’ve read, most of the excluded are low income people who do pay income taxes. The current excluded group includes families making $10,500 to $26,625–the […]

The End of Internet Explorer? For those who thought the Browser Wars were interesting, or for those who like reasons to complain about Microsoft, or for those who think the government sold out in the Microsoft settlement, ZDnet has an interesting story alleging that MS plans to stop offering Internet Explorer as a stand-alone browser. […]

Not sure what’s going on The Washington Post: Greenspan No ‘Major Evidence’ of Growth; Reiterates Concern Over the Threat of Deflation The NYT: Greenspan Sees Possible Turnaround in U.S. Economy AB

Transcript Wanted So Al Franken, Molly Ivins, and Bill O’Reilly walk into a bar appeared together on CSPAN2 over the weekend. Yes, it does sound like the start of a good joke, but it really happened–and by all accounts it was amusing to watch O’Reilly without his mute button handy. Unfortunately, I missed it, and […]

Whither WMD? Since I’m citing Orwell of late, here’s this from Josh Marshall: My God, when they say down the memory hole, they ain’t kiddin! There now seems to be a secret competition — perhaps it was announced and I just didn’t hear it — for the Iraq-hawk who can come up with the most […]

Liberalism and Growth

Liberalism and Growth Recently, I said I would try to make the case that liberalism causes growth. Certainly, correlations suggest that this is the case. For instance, income is substantially higher in Blue states than Red states. The inability of the Soviet Union to match the productive output of the United States is another example. […]

More on Priorities Earlier, in reference to the exclusion of some lower-middle class familes from the increased child tax credit, I said that “I’m sure we’ll hear that this was an inadvertent slip (right now, the House is blaming the Senate’s $350b “limit”), but inadvertent slips tell a lot about the priorities of those making […]

What he Said Former president Bill Clinton, speaking at the John F. Kennedy Library, said he “can’t find anybody with a straight face” to defend the tax package, whose advocates “compromise the future of our country.” Of the Republicans, Clinton said: “When ideological people find themselves in a hole, they ask for a bigger shovel.” […]