Tours of Duty Just heard on NPR that some reservists tours will last for one year, rather than six months. AB UPDATE: Here’s a link to the story.

Democratic Ranks Swelling in Texas Not really, but there are now or will soon be ten more Democrats in Texas than there were last week: The runaway senators had vowed to stay out of Texas until another redistricting session was called and a quorum established on the Senate floor. However, Ms. Van de Putte said, […]

Talking Points Memo This is a good example of why Josh Marshall is one of my favorite political writers. AB

2004 Projected Deficit Now Over Well Over $500 Billion Way back on 8/24 the projected deficit was $480 billion (see this post). Now it’s $525b and counting. That’s another $45 billion in 15 days–deficit projections for the next year are growing by $3 billion per day. If current trends continue then by New Year’s Eve, […]

More Christianistanity Can we, based on the worthless jackasses in the top picture, now say that the entire Right is composed of diversity-hating, first-responder-hating, and freedom-hating morons–much in the way the entire Left is held to account whenever ANSWER does something stupid? No, you say? Well then quit blaming “Liberals” when Chomsky says something goofy. […]

Christianists Jesse has a great series of posts on those who would like to see this country become a theocracy–Christianists(*). It starts here with a Phillis Schlafly smackdown, but keep scrolling up to see more. Why do they insist on defying the Constitution? Are they Enemies of Freedom? AB (*) I believe Dave Neiwert coined […]

Bold or Foolish? Edwards Says He Won’t Run for Re-Election ABC News – 3 hours ago John Edwards said he’ll stick to one term in the US Senate, convinced his presidential campaign is going well enough to bow out of the 2004 race for his seat. There’s still a lot of time before the election, […]

Deficits I got a hit today from someone Googling this: economy’s budget deficit graphs that do not start at 0 and have good artwork to deceive the public I wonder who the Googler thinks is likely to issue misleading deficit graphs? In Lying Liars, Al Franken has two graphs that illustrate the point about scaling […]

Bush Tax Cut Jobs Scoreboard Mike at The 18½ Minute Gap has a nice graph showing the jobs promised by Bush and the jobs delivered, with the former category consisting of positive numbers and the latter consisting of only negative numbers so far. The predictions are plotted through 12/04 while the results only go through […]

Subliminal Programming, or “Strategic Ambiguity”? No one should underestimate the power of the Bush administration’s subtle but persistent efforts for the past two years to link Iraq to 9/11: The Washington Post: Nearing the second anniversary of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, seven in 10 Americans continue to believe that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein had […]