State Governments Saving Money Flush with tobacco settlement cash, going on eight years of a rapidly growing economy, and in many cases with newly elected Republican governors, many states slashed taxes around 2000. The crisis is probably worst in California (Democrat), but Texas (R) and New York (R) are not doing much better. Missouri has […]

Just because he’s cranky and once had a tree fall on him doesn’t mean he’s wrong It’s Friday afternoon, which means it’s the time the weekly What’s New updates from Professor Robert Park, of the University of Maryland and the American Physical Society (you can subscribe to his free and entertaining weekly newsletter at the […]

While I’m in a Linking Mood Read this CalPundit piece, where he talks about the lack of WMD discoveries in Iraq. Reasonable people might be tempted to say that it’s a big country and these things take time. Kevin sagely points out that pre-war we said we knew they had WMD, which should imply that […]

See Digby He’s got a great post on the merits of General Clark on either position in the 2004 Democratic presidential ticket. Here’s an excerpt, but read the whole thing: I believe that the best person to make the argument that Democrats are Americans too is someone who defies the phony liberal stereotype manufactured by […]

Bechtel So the NYT has a story on Bechtel winning the first major contract for construction in Iraq. Here’s one paragraph, in it’s entirety: Administration officials said it was important to give contracts to American corporations, essentially leapfrogging over international groups, as a way to demonstrate to the Iraqi people that the United States is […]

If you look to your left You’ll see that Instapundit is out now (his role and handling of the latest Lott affair knocked significant points off my impression of him as smart and witty if somewhat misguided), while Mac Diva is in. AB

Permalinks FUBAR The permalinks seem to go down a lot, so that if you follow a link here from another site, you don’t go to the right place. The solution seems to be to republish the archives after every post, but that’s a hassle. Anyone have any tips? AB

More on Taxes Matt Yglesias found the NYT article before I did. As he points out, the article basically says that under any model, whether traditional or “dynamically scored”, the result of the Bush Economic plan is bad for the economy. Conservatives renamed “Creationism” as “Intelligent Design”. What is “Dynamic Scoring”? It’s just the new […]

Lock-In and Number Portability What’s the big deal with number portability? Firms create ways to lock consumers in to their products all the time–loyalty programs such as frequent flyer miles are a common example. In the case of cell phones there are two or three sources of lock-in. The first is the physical phone itself: […]

See CalPundit My last post on the Tax Cuts is getting (for this site) a fair amound of discussion. Kevin Drum uses an inane Weekly Standard piece to frame his discussion of Republicans, taxes, and income inequality. And, Kevin includes a must-see graph that you should print out and keep in your pocket for future […]