Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

The Perpetual Declining Unemployment Machine This week’s initial unemployment claims, in another report released this morning, were 386,000. Since the revised figure for last week is 391,000, headlines can justly read “Jobless Claims Drop,” even though last week’s initial estimate was 386,000. Interestingly, “Jobless Claims Drop” is exactly what the headlines also read last week, […]

GDP Shocker The GDP numbers were really impressive this morning. The preliminary estimate of overall level of GDP growth during the period July-September was 7.2%, which is the fastest rate of GDP growth since 1984. It’s worth checking out the original report for some details. What caused such rapid GDP growth? Surprisingly, it was pretty […]

Deeply Conflicted 4th Circuit Nominee Under questioning from Democrats yesterday, Claude Allen said he did not intend to insult homosexuals when as a campaign press aide to then-Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) he referred to “queers.” He also said he was “deeply conflicted” about a Helms filibuster against creation of a federal holiday for the Rev. […]

By The Current Metric… …things must be even better now than they were before. AB

Falsifiability and Pangloss First, you weren’t seeing enough of the good news. Now, the bad news is good news. Here’s President Bush, implying that the attacks are a sign that things are going well: “The more progress we make on the ground, the more free the Iraqis become, the more electricity that’s available, the more […]

Daily Howler Somerby is good today, if I bit more perturbed by the media than usual (“EXTRA! IT’S TIME FOR NAGOURNEY TO GO: Adam Nagourney needs to be fired for his work in this morning’s New York Times”). Why? Nagourney, whose work I often like, is faking quotes. Here’s what Nagourney has Clark saying (quote […]

MemoryHole.txt If you know what a robots.txt file is, take a look at the White House’s. Why would they do this [disable outside searching and archiving of White House material related to Iraq]? Here’s a tidbit from Google’s FAQ [emphasis mine]: Google takes a snapshot of each page examined as it crawls the web and […]

Conventional Distortion David Broder, alternatively heralded as the Dean of the Washington Press Corps or the Standard Bearer of Conventional Wisdom, is really stretching logic in his column in today’s Washington Post. It’s not quite an attack on Dean, but it’s a clearly intentional distortion of facts that’s fairly obviously intended to belittle Howard Dean’s […]

Un-Tubular A story in today’s Washington Post, Iraq Survey Fails to Find Nuclear Threat: No Evidence Uncovered Of Reconstituted Program, should put the final nail in the bogus aluminum tubes for uranium-enriching centrifuges claim. As the story makes clear, US experts opined before the war that the tubes were neither suitable for, nor intended for, […]

Dwight’s Back Making my regular visit to Wampum to skim this week’s Flashback Friday, I see good news. In addition to the usual top-notch material from MB, Dwight Meredith is now contributing to Wampum. He’s got a great post up on why Bush should lose, but may nevertheless win (no primary opponent; tons of cash; […]