This is true: Basically everyone in Washington who spends a substantial part of his or her day sitting in front of a computer screen reads the Drudge Report. Drudge is great with breaking stories, political gossip, under-the-radar items, and generally, capturing the zeitgeist of things, usually better than the newspapers.

OK, but there's more of course. Drudge is weird, and I've never seen anything like this on the front page of the New York Times's website:

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 10:01 AM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The Club for Growth launches a nice redesign today. Andy Roth's weblog is now on the Club's homepage, where it belongs. Good work.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 03:43 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

The New York Times has an answer:

The Johnson Space Center, however, could have been built in any number of places, and sites around the nation were considered, said Christopher Kraft, who served as a flight director in the early days of the space program. The program had been managed from Virginia at first.

“The reason we came here was because Albert Thomas was head of the Appropriations Committee,” Dr. Kraft said.

There are good reasons, as the article explains, for launching from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, despite Florida's frequent bad weather and frequency of hurricanes. But not Houston, where the Johnson administrative facility is located. Nor the Michoud Assembly Plant, where the space shuttle's fuel tanks are made, which is in New Orleans.

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 12:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

Google Trends...er, actually, let's use their description: "With Google Trends, you can compare the world's interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they've been searched for on Google over time. Google Trends also displays how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and which geographic regions have searched for them most often."

Sounds neat. We tried "Federal Spending," which seems to have hit a peak just before the 2004 election, though there's been a lot of volatility of late--especially among news sources, which seem to have been turned onto the issue for the past 7 or 8 months. The top city is Washington, DC (yeah, right), followed by Reston, VA, and then Denver and Minneapolis.

Interestingly, while "national debt" seems to get far more search volume than federal spending, federal spending has been doing much better in the media. Dare we take this as a positive sign?

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 05:28 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)

We do not have a cat, and that means, unfortunately, that we cannot join in the blogophere tradition of posting pictures of one's beloved and respected feline on Friday afternoons.

But we're not going to give up so easily, either. So this week, let's try Friday afternoon Dan-blogging (Dan being Daniel J. Mitchell, Ph.D., McKenna Senior Fellow in Political Economy at The Heritage Foundation and author of a just-released paper on the President's American Competitiveness Initiative and a great survey from last year on the economic consequences of government spending):

So, what Heritage analyst should we feature next week?

Posted by Andrew Grossman at 03:17 PM | Permalink | TrackBacks (0)