When it comes to the war on drugs, here are two awfully good reasons not to be a supply-sider:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The CIA obstructed inquiries into its role in the shooting down of an aircraft carrying a family of U.S. missionaries in Peru in 2001, the agency’s inspector general has concluded.
The inspector-general’s report said a CIA-backed [...]

This Wizard of Id cartoon is worth a thousand words about Obama’s domestic policy.

Obama has unveiled his healthcare plan, which is expected to cost $130 billion per year by 2018:
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President-elect Barack Obama’s plans to overhaul the U.S. health care system would cost the federal government $75 billion but would provide health insurance for 95 percent of Americans, consulting firm PriceWaterhouseCoopers said on Wednesday.
This works out [...]

I think Dan and pmm have fair points about Palin’s role in contributing to McCain’s unpopularity at this point, but in the end, I think Palin is mostly a distraction. If this election were a referendum on experience, Obama himself would be in trouble. What’s really at issue is judgment. Looking at polls on Iraq, [...]

Ordinarily, this would fall flat on its face, but these guys have accomplished a rare feat: repeating history first as farce, and second as tragedy:

Thank you. Quoth Samuelson: 
To: Voters Under 35
Subject: Your Future
Recommendation: Get Angry
You’re being played for chumps. Barack Obama and John McCain want your votes, but they’re ignoring your interests. You face a heavily mortgaged future. You’ll pay Social Security and Medicare for aging baby boomers. The needed federal tax increase might total 50 percent over the next 25 years. Pension and health [...]

Jacob Weisberg has an amusingly nasty hatchet job in Slate heralding the latest financial crisis and ensuing federal bailout as the death of libertarianism. His last lines are particularly funny and biting:
The best thing you can say about libertarians is that because their views derive from abstract theory, they tend to be highly principled and [...]

Also, does anyone else have the sense that the Post is burying the lede here?  Every day we hear another story about the federal government spending another several billion dollars.  But how often does anyone hear that 50 million people — one-sixth of the entire population of the United States, and one-fifth of the population [...]

I love how the Washington Post reports a 5.8% increase in Social Security benefits with no mention — not a one, in the whole article — about how much it’ll cost. Do we have money trees now?
This year’s 5.8 percent increase will take effect in January for about 50 million people who receive Social Security benefits, and at [...]

Paul Volcker says the U.S. economy is in a recession, that this financial crisis is unlike any of the many others he’s witnessed, and that large-scale government intervention is in order.

George Will had an insightful column this week, where he takes the opportunity to rip into both Teddy Roosevelt and John McCain, reserving an extra dose of spleen for TR. It’s hardly news that McCain reveres Teddy, and he’s hardly the first modern politician to do so.
TR is a curious figure. Neoconservatives revere him for [...]

Barney Frank and fellow Congressional Democrats think the federal government should spend more money in the interest of economic recovery, and it looks like Republicans do, too.

Oh, and there’s also the fact that for the first time in a decade, the President is talking about the G7 instead of the G8.  Any financial bailout would no doubt be largely a U.S.-U.K. endeavor, with only symbolic involvement from the other industrial powers, but this is a gratuitous kick in the groin to [...]

The federal government is going to spend a portion of the $700 billion it’s budgeted for a financial bailout to buy stock in ailing financial institutions. At this point, I think we’re all prepared to admit that we’re in uncharted territory. I don’t know what’ll come of all this, but the plan admits [...]

Voter fraud is a myth, designed to disenfranchise the poor. Right Dahlia? Right Matt? Right Nico?
Oh, wait:
The secretary of state’s office launched an investigation after noticing that names did not match addresses and that most members of the Dallas Cowboys appeared to be registering in Nevada to vote in November’s general election.
“Some of these (forms) [...]

Although written a few weeks ago, this USA Today article just came to my attention in a National Governors Association newsletter.
Hooray for movie locations outside Hollywood
According to the article,
While California retains a lion’s share of the industry (it spends $38 billion each year within its borders on film production, according to The Hollywood Reporter), 43 [...]

I can’t imagine why this SNL skit is being scrubbed from the Interweb series of tubes.

Robert McDonald of the Kellogg School at Northwestern (full disclosure: I once worked there) has an interesting take on the bailout:
The problem with commenting on the financial rescue plan is that Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson Jr. have not told us all that they know about the financial crisis. Specifically, we [...]

Campbell Brown at CNN thinks the candidates need to be more forthcoming about how they’d pare back federal spending, now that we’ve plunked down $850 billion on the bailout.
“Cut out the bull, prioritize your goals, and tell us honestly what you’re going to do,” Brown writes.
“Well it’s simple, Campbell,” says Senator Joseph Biden. “I’ve just [...]

Well, the die is cast. Here’s hoping for the best.