Earlier this week I was having dinner with a noted pollster when the topic turned (naturally) to Obama and the Democrats — how bad was November looking? I argued that the hype over the coming Democratic debacle was both totally premature and wildly overblown. Surprisingly my polling pundit agreed. We both understood two things about the electorate — they have very short memories (Bush’s approval ratings are back up!) and care almost exclusively about one thing: their pocket books. And so, November is a lot farther away than the …

Ummm. Haven’t we heard this before? The Treasury needs a ginormous wad of cash to bail out the financial system and it will explain just what it will do with all that money…later.
Yeah it’s deja vu in DC with Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner doing his best Hank Paulson imitation while announcing the Obama Administration’s $2.5 trillion plan to save the banks.
Come again? Two-point-five-what? Trillion? As in 1,000,000,000,000? Yes, $2.5 trillion.
The plan is to use the unspent half of the original $700 billion “Bush bailout” and then commit as much as …

I know you’re all waking up this morning talking about the stimulus football but I can’t let pass what happened earlier on Sunday without notice.
The US government is about to spend 800 billion or 900 billion or a trillion dollars on a stimulus “program” and that was, rightly, the topic of every one of the major Sunday political television talk shows. Shows that are the closest thing America still has to relatively thorough discussions of critically important issues. Ha!
This week ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox, and NBC showed just what they …

Facts? Who needs facts when you can have Republicans and Democrats trading misleading charges about the stimulus plan? Republicans say the $825 billion plan is just a vast waste of money, filled with non-essential items that Democrats want to push through under the over of “crisis.” They add it will take way too long to effect the economy.
Democrats have a different take, defending every dollar as critical to the recovery. House leaders defended money for contraceptives as necessary to help states (45 of which are now running budget gaps) offset …

This Sunday morning’s chatterfest was filled with deep and informed discussions about the relative merits of cutting taxes versus spending tax money as a way to get the economy on track.
OK I’m lying. From one gasbag to the next politicians and their economic enablers were allowed to make rather grand statements without worry of being confronted with any facts about what history has shown to be most effective.
On Fox News Sunday Senator John McCain said, “We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that …

“Gun Sales Thriving in Uncertain Times” read a Washington Post headline today. Earlier this month a New York Times headline provided a subtext: “Keeping Wary Eye on Crime as Economy Sinks”. And so it was no surprise that the Post and pretty much all those who picked up the story and ran with it today noted that “experts” suggested one reason for “booming” guns sales (Brian Williams) was the crappy economy and fear of crime.
To it’s credit the Post was quick to point out some hard facts:
Gary Kleck, a researcher …