Kash supports Proposition 77 and expresses his reasoning why this move may be good for Democrats. Mark Kleiman disagrees. Several leading Californian Democrats and Republicans were on show last night at the The Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles to debate the various propositions. All agree on two points. Reform of the redistricting process would […]

In my earlier post I made the argument that, whatever its other drawbacks and merits, the California redistricting proposal is unlikely to cost the Democrats seats, and may actually win them some additional ones. My reasoning, in brief, is that Democratic voters are already so highly concentrated into safe Democratic seats that redistricting can only […]

Writing in the Lowell Sun, Dan O’Brien reports that a number of towns in Middlesex County are reporting year-over-year median price declines. O’Brien provides details for Dracut and Lowell, and then writes: Other Middlesex County communities showing year-over-year price drops (among those with at least 20 sales) include Arlington, Hopkinton, Hudson, Lexington, Natick, Newton, Reading […]

Today’s Washington Post notes that both of the major initiatives to reorganize the way in which Congressional districts are drawn up, one in Ohio and one in California, look headed for defeat. In both states it seems likely that partisan gerrymandering will remain the process by which Congressional boundaries are drawn in those states. A […]

Michael Darda tries very hard to pack a lot of wisdom into an NRO op-ed but he writes too much: Consumer spending is driven by income growth, which is the function of employment, the capital-to-labor ratio, productivity, and wage and salary rates. These trends remain sound. So we can expect consumer spending to expand at […]

MaxSpeaks actually provides a partial defense of the President’s Advisory Panel on Tax Reform in regards the attacks from the right. In addition to a cool illustration of the wingnuts, Max writes: They are also crying because the Commission did not use “dynamic scoring.” This would have allowed the Commission to present revenue-losing/deficit-increasing proposals under […]

Dan Froomkin picks up on something that no one else seems to have noticed in yesterday’s broadcast of Morning Edition on NPR: an assertion by Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell (also a 31-year military veteran and former director of the Marine Corps War College) that there is […]

The President of Pakistan, Pervez Musharraf, could give the Bush administration some lessons in fiscal management, and in the unfortunate fact that facing reality sometimes means that you can not simultaneously have your cake and eat it: MUZAFFARABAD, Pakistan – President Gen. Pervez Musharraf suspended a major purchase of U.S. fighter planes, saying Friday during […]

As Kash notes the disappointing news about payroll employment growth, you might be wondering why the unemployment rate fell last month. So was I, so let’s check the news from the household survey. First of all, the household survey indicates employment fell by 17 thousand in September but then increased by 214 thousand last month […]

The creation of net new jobs in October was disappointingly slow. We were able to downplay September’s bad job report because they contained the large but temporary (we hope) negative effects of Katrina and Rita… but it’s a bit harder to brush off October’s weak job creation numbers. In fact, when one considers the fact […]