Sparty

I agreed with yesterday’s Supreme Court ruling which struck down the District of Columbia’s gun ban.  Opponents argue it will increase gun crimes in the city.  I doubt the crime problem can get much worse.  The reason is the current gun ban is a farce.  In last month’s edition of Washingtonian magazine, there was an [...]

In the latest edition of National Review (the article was in the print edition, so a subscription is needed to read it online), Michael Knox Beran has a nice article about Senator John McCain.  In it he quotes Senator McCain at a campaign stop in Kentucky:
 
I am not the son of a coal miner.  I [...]

Robert Samuelson has a good article in today’s Washington Post regarding inflation.  I agree with him that there is the potential for higher inflation in the next year.  This is not due to higher oil or food prices but to the fact the Federal Reserve has kept interest rates too low for too long.  The [...]

I saw an article a couple of days ago where a President Barack Obama plans to invest $150 billion over the next ten years to create 5 million “green-collar” jobs—whatever those are.  My first thought is why not have the government invest $300 billion and create ten million new jobs.  Data from Bureau of Labor [...]

Sometimes I get the impression Senator McCain is trying to see how much he can annoy conservatives and have them still vote for him.  The other day he said he favored investigating so-called speculators in the oil markets—though he did redeem himself by advocating increasing offshore oil drilling.  Two other blogs—Discrete Entropy and Carpe Diem—give [...]

It looks like after eight years of sitting empty, the city of Detroit is going to finally tear down Tiger Stadium.  As someone who grew up a Tigers fan and having been to a number of games at the corner of Michigan and Trumball, it is sad to see it go.  On the other hand, [...]

Recently Congress has debated the idea of a windfall profit tax on the “excessive” profits of oil companies.  One member of the Senate—Chris Dodd (D-CT)—has been very vocal about it.  Yet are the oil company profits “excessive”?  Mike Perry at the blog Carpe Diem (scroll down the page to fine the article) has a list [...]

Last night I happened to catch the beginning of Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News.  In his opening “Talking Points Segment” he talked about the price of oil and what should be done about it.  It amazed me how naïve and uninformed O’Reilly is regarding economics.
 
His first rant was that Saudi Arabia pumps oil [...]

Who will Senator Obama pick as his running-mate?  If history is any indication he will choose someone from the U.S. Senate.  Since 1944 the Democratic nominee for president since has picked as his running-mate a sitting senator in all but one election—that is 15 out of 16 elections.  The exception was 1984, when Vice President [...]

Today I was reading the Metro section of The Washington Post and there was an article describing how Prince George’s County received an AAA-rating from Standard & Poor’s.  Normally I don’t care about the credit rating of Prince George’s County but what drew me to the article was a picture of people holding signs with [...]