Gray Davis and Spam If Gray Davis successfully ends spam in California by October 7th, I predict that he will win the recall election by a large margin. On the other hand, I’m not sure the law can do much about spam originating from outside of California, much less spam from Nigeria. AB

Compare and Contrast Here are two reports of the same incident yesterday in Iraq. First, from CNN, reporting from US headquarters in Baghdad: BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) — Coalition airstrikes killed an attacker early Tuesday after members of the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division came under fire near Fallujah, west of the Iraqi capital, the Coalition […]

Bush Economic Policy as Designed by Karl Rove I’ve written about the issue of the value of the dollar a few times before, but it keeps coming up in the news. Here are some bits from a Washington Post story on the front page of today’s business section: The Bush administration has embarked on a […]

Missed an Opportunity The initial reviews weren’t too bad, but the Times has a new story, Bush’s U.N. Speech Gets Scathing Reviews on Capitol Hill. Here are some highlights: Mr. Daschle, who is not running for president, continued: “He has now asked for $87 billion more. And I wish he would have made a stronger […]

UN Speech On balance, Bush’s speech was apparently not as aggressive as the advance billing suggested (as I previously) speculated would be the case. On the other hand, it wasn’t conciliatory either, and was sandwiched in between an obliquely critical speech by Annan (before) and a more direct critical statement by Chirac (after). Looking for […]

Another Great Deal I’m starting to detect a trend here: I put a book up in the right panel and within a few days, Salon starts offering a free copy of the book when you subscribe to Salon Premium. This time it’s a free copy of Ivins’ new book, Bushwhacked. AB

Hume and The Man Expect, insofar as people watched Brit Hume’s interview of Bush on Fox, Bush to get a bump in the otherwise southerly-trending polls. I watched only the last half hour, but Bush sounded about as smart and eloquent as I can imagine him ever sounding (note: this evaluation is relative to Bush’s […]

Real-world Howie should act more like semi-fictional Howie Howie Kurtz in a cameo in this week’s episode of K-Street: I’m not gonna launder your propaganda on this. And I thought laundering propaganda was his full time job. AB

Democratic Primary News First off, congrats to AB on hitting the 50,000 mark Monday! Second, here’s a piece of interesting and brand new Democratic primary news: Howard Dean’s campaign has put up “the bat” – i.e., their fundraising goal for the last 10 days of the quarter (which ends September 30). Their goal is pretty […]

Angry Bear Milestone If you look at the hit counter (it counts unique IPs per day, not page views) at the bottom of the left panel sometime between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. on Monday, you should see a number in the 50,000s! I’ve been a “Large Mammal” on N.Z. Bear’s Blogosphere Ecosystem for a while […]