This would qualify for investors as a "good day" (emphasis mine):

Google Inc. continues to confound the skeptics who thought the online search engine leader would sputter after striking it rich in a closely watched IPO last summer. The Mountain View-based company reported Tuesday that its fourth-quarter profit improved sevenfold from the previous year, much to Wall Street's delight. Investors appeared ready to push Google's stock to a new high when trading begins Wednesday on the Nasdaq Stock Market.

Google's likely to look at Microsoft's unveiled search engine less as a challenge than motivation to do better. I'm considering a slight investment.

You've got to try to not be tickled pink hearing this:

The U.S. economy grew at a 4 percent annual rate from July through September, faster than previously estimated, according to government figures that suggest the expansion may continue at a similar pace into 2005.

The final calculation of gross domestic product for the third quarter compares with an estimate last month of 3.9 percent, the Commerce Department said in Washington. The economy grew 3 percent in 2003.

Four percent is better than average, better than estimates and better than last year. When the American economy's current burst of growth started can be traced to late spring of 2003, just as President Bush's immediately effective, retroactive tax relief was made into law. Which is why the engineer has told his firemen to keep the firebox hot.

MEANWHILE, ON THE FAR SIDE OF THE MOON: Four out of ten Americans seem to have missed one year of 3% average GDP growth and a second of 4% growth.

Encouraged by a slew of positive firm and market reports, investors pushed the Dow Jones above its fifty-two-week high of 10,753 a short time ago.

EVEN BETTER: Today's peak was the best level since June 2001.

FORGOT TO CARRY THE 'TWO': Blue chips did well today, as did the NASDAQ. Standard & Poor's did, too, but both Bloomberg and Yahoo show a slightly different reading.

Pejman Yousefzadeh looks over the right's spoils of the ballot:

It is nice to see that self-identifying Republicans may now be more populous than Democrats, but none of that will mean anything until there is a genuine national consensus on policy issues that is based specifically on conservative and libertarian principles. It is still far too easy to propagate and embrace New Deal and quasi-New Deal policies as the basis for our social programs. To form a genuine national coalition, it should become just as easy — if not easier — to embrace and propagate the conservative and libertarian alternatives to those policies.

One asset to consider is the number of Americans who would describe themselves as Republicans if leftist-controlled popular culture hadn't conditioned them from an early age to believe that one can only respectably be a Democrat or an independent. What's in a name? New media entities, including weblogs, have and will continue to weaken this intellectual and associative blockade.

History books may tell us that George W. Bush beat John F. Kerry for President of the United States by an electoral count of 286 to 251. No, that doesn't add up to 538 — here's why. (Via the Kerry Geraghty Spot, which quips, "Remember this the next time someone calls the red states 'dumb.'")

Good economic news from the layman's vantage: November's industrial production rose by three tenths of one percent, one-tenth above consensus estimates. Industrial capacity utilization came in lower than expectations at 77.6%. As the 80-85% range of utilization brings with it a host of recessionary and inflationary fears, investors ought to be pleased with the Federal Reserve's economic pronouncements later today — especially on the heels of yesterday's upbeat November retail sales report, complete with a revision for October that quadrupled the initial figure.

WHY, YES!: Take it from the Fed:

The economy "appears to be growing at a moderate pace despite the earlier rise in energy prices and labor market conditions continue to improve gradually," the Fed said in a brief statement after the meeting.

But we knew that already, didn't we?

Rush tipped us off to this one:

As Democrats continue their post-election soul-searching, a new guru is emerging. He isn't an internet whizz-kid [sic] or a campaign strategist, but a bearded Berkeley linguist who says he knows why Republicans keep winning. George Lakoff says it all comes down to "frames" the mental structures people use when they think about words. Conservatives are masters of framing, using expressions such as "tax relief" to shape the debate to their advantage, he says. If Democrats could do the same, they would perform much better at the polls.

Yet another example of the left's peculiar habit for projection, like its revision of the 1990s as a time of "Clinton hatred" — not a modern era of destructive politics leaving a wake of damaged careers from the White House Travel Office staff to Kenneth Starr. We're to believe that Democrats have suddenly discovered the art of rhetoric: this from the party that euphemized abortion as "freedom of choice"; any deviance whatsoever as a "lifestyle choice"; the abdication of Christianity in public as "sensitivity"; socialized medicine as "universal health care"; rogue states as "states of concern"; the top half of wage-earners paying 95% of taxes as honoring a "fair share"; activist jurisprudence as addressing a "living, breathing document"; an evasion of the national security debate as a focus on "kitchen table issues"; fourteen months of Franco-Russo-rigged debate on top of twelve feckless, faithless years of diplomatic diddling as "a rush to war"; and a thirty-nation coalition as a "go-it-alone" strategy.

The Democratic Party suffered its most stunning defeat yet in a running series, and its leaders are flocking to a theorist who might as well have held a seminar on a revolutionary, flat, circular object that, when paired perpendicularly to a horizontal axle, aids the flatbed transport of people and goods. The denial of Republicans' growing appeal to America on substance and character alone dovetails with leftists' inability to honestly diagnose their own failures; it's part New Age, quick-fix medicine, part paranoid schizophrenic taking a course on abnormal psychology. This is a party going nowhere.

WAY BACK WHEN: Ed Driscoll adds a little background.

Nevada Senator John Ensign has joined Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman in demanding the resignation of United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan (colorfully narrated here).

Alongside Intel Corp.'s fattening goose is a November non-farm payroll report that is only half of expectations. Wall Street, however, appears to have found the glass half-full by interpreting the news as an incentive for the Federal Reserve to hold off on interest rate hikes.

As usual, the household survey of employment, criticized by some as less reliable but increasingly recognized to record job creation that payroll reports can't possibly identify, is bullish at 483,000 jobs created in November. Unemployment fell one-tenth of a percentage point to 5.4%, matching analyst expectations.

Rumors of Intel Corp.'s death are greatly exaggerated:

Intel Corp.'s fourth-quarter sales are on track to break a company record as demand for the chips that power computers was stronger than originally expected in the weeks leading up to the holiday buying season. Intel, the world's largest semiconductor company, estimated its sales will be between $9.3 billion to $9.5 billion for the three months ending Dec. 25. That compares with its previous fourth-quarter forecast, announced in October, of $8.6 billion and $9.2 billion.

And all this after a less-than-stellar revenue forecast in September. Investors are either lining up at the gangplank or pitching themselves over the side. Ever feel as if you're on a roller-coaster?