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

Bush in the UK There’s surely lots of interesting stuff for bloggers of all stripes in Salon’s transcript of Bush’s interview with the BBC’s David Frost. But the following juxtaposition struck me as peculiar: On Iraq’s nonexistent biological weapons (page 2): “And David Kay found evidence of weapons programs. He found some biological weapons – […]

Clark 1, Russert 0 Appearing on Meet the Press with Tim Russert is basically mandatory for presidential candidates these days (though I think Bush will only do so again if he’s forced to do so by very close polls). Dean tried and didn’t do so well, though the attacks on his performance were largely unfair. […]

The Era of Big Government It’s been back since around early 2001, but here’s some more: Authors of the bill agreed to double the use of corn-based ethanol as a gasoline additive, a provision viewed as essential to building political support among farm state legislators. As part of that deal, producers of the additive MTBE, […]

Leader of The Free World Nice. In advance of his trip to London, the President found a publication worthy of an interview: Press secretary Scott McClellan broke the news yesterday with nonchalance. “Good morning,” he told reporters. “The president had his usual briefings this morning and just recently completed an interview with the Sun, for […]

Ketch-ing Up Or, Pouring Ketchup On An Over-cooked Campaign, or Ketchup Money to Help Campaign Catch Up, or some sort of bad pun involving Ketchup, money and catch up (bonus points if you can also work “kvetch” into the pun*): Unlike Dean and Bush, Kerry said he will put his own money into the campaign, […]

Those Partisan Relatives Relatives of people who perished in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks say a federal commission accepted too many conditions in striking a deal with the White House over access to secret intelligence documents. The Family Steering Committee, a group of victims’ relatives monitoring the commission’s work, criticized the agreement announced late […]

Explanations for The Jobless Recovery Two of the world’s leading economists publicly discussed possible reasons for the jobless recovery in the past week. In a speech on November 6, Ben Bernanke, Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, articulated the argument that the main culprit is high productivity growth in the US. On the other hand, […]

Winning More Hearts and Minds in Iraq The Guardian has these quotes about the CIA’s assessment of the Iraqi resistance: One military intelligence assessment now estimates the insurgents’ strength at 50,000. Analysts cautioned that such a figure was speculative, but it does indicate a deep-rooted revolt on a far greater scale than the Pentagon had […]

Warren Buffett’s Interesting Solution for the Trade Deficit Note that I call it an ‘interesting’ solution, rather than ‘sensible’ or ‘good’. I like Buffett – he seems like a decent guy (for a billionaire) and his priorities are basically in the right place, in my opinion. But this idea has some serious problems. In an […]

Bush Takes Advice from France From today’s NYTimes: WASHINGTON, Nov. 12 — The Bush administration, moving up its timetable for self-government in Iraq and yielding to its own handpicked leadership there, has decided to try to hold elections in the first half of next year and turn civilian authority over to a temporary government before […]