I was just in a Longs Drug Store to pick up a prescription and walked past a display which offered up 3-packs of Hanes men’s classic brief underwear. $9.59. $9.59?!? For basic white underwear? That’s a helluva markup, considering you can buy a package of seven of the things directly from Hanes for $8.99. Sheesh.
I saw the last Harry Potter film in the theater last week, and Friday night I watched Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 on DVD. Then, coincidentally, last night Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was on ABC, so I watched that after dinner. That movie has a run time of …
So Mr. Secession, Mr. Kill the Innocent, Mr. Slash Education, Mr. Kids Don’t Need Health Care has entered the 2012 Presidential race. Well, as the article says, there couldn’t be a clearer contrast between Obama and any other candidate. While Obama points to his universal health care law as a historic achievement, Texas is often …
A senior S&P executive said today that the cavalier attitude of some members of the Republican party towards national default contributed to the downgrade of the US credit rating: S&P senior director Joydeep Mukherji said the stability and effectiveness of American political institutions were undermined by the fact that “people in the political arena were …
Continue reading ‘“Yes, members of your party DID say that”’ »
Ah, Iowa. Home of early early political foolishness, and tonight the host to the first real Republican Presidential debate of the 2012 election campaign. Except, of course, that Governor Goodhair won’t be there. Nope, Texas Governor Rick Perry isn’t officially planning to announce his candidacy until Saturday. Perry is an opposition researcher’s dream candidate, what …
Yesterday I groused that the Fed was punting on the “full employment” part of its mandate in its statement yesterday. Maybe I was guilty of a snap judgment. Joe Gagnon thinks so. While it is not all I could wish for, I was very surprised by it and take much encouragement. To make a conditional …
The Fed, today: Consistent with its statutory mandate, the Committee seeks to foster maximum employment and price stability. The Committee now expects a somewhat slower pace of recovery over coming quarters than it did at the time of the previous meeting and anticipates that the unemployment rate will decline only gradually toward levels that the …
Continue reading ‘Kicking can down the road, Federal Reserve edition’ »
Ordinarily when there’s a stock market downturn investors bail out of stocks and go to cash or equivalents. The equivalents are usually US Treasury Bonds, Bills and Notes. This is often termed a “flight to quality.” But after S&P’s downgrade of the the US credit rating on Friday, where would investors go? Why, to US …
I quoted Drew Westen’s essay about Obama in my previous post. Now comes Jon Chait: Westen’s complaint against Obama is rooted primarily in a lack of factual understanding of what Obama has done. Westen castigates Obama for promising not to support entitlement cuts without higher revenue and then turning around and supporting a deal doing …
Drew Westen, an Emory U. professor of psychology and sometime consultant to Democrats, asks a pertinent question in today’s NYT: What Happened to Obama? Like most Americans, at this point, I have no idea what Barack Obama — and by extension the party he leads — believes on virtually any issue. The president tells us …