Dean Update I’m on Dean’s side on this one now: Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, turned to Mr. Sharpton and responded: “We’re not going to win in this country anymore as Democrats if we don’t have a big tent. And I’m going to tell you right now, Reverend, you’re right, I am not […]

Comment News Good news and bad. Haloscan is accepting new users, so I’ve switched comment providers to Haloscan–that’s the good news. More good news is that comments can now exceed 1000 characters. The bad news is that all the old comments are gone. I restore them by switching back when my old comment provider’s server […]

Political Compass While of questionable relevance, the politicalcompass.org survey is quick fun and it wasn’t way off the mark on where I’d place myself (my results are here). But I bet you’ve been wondering where all your favorite (and most-hated) bloggers lie on this spectrum. Tim Lambert has taken some time off from “stalking” the […]

No Comment Comments are down for a while. The problem was making the entire page load slowly so I took the comments out. I’ll check periodically until they’re back up. AB

Belated Congratulations To Mr. and Mrs. Kos on the birth of their son, Aristotle. AB P.S. Sorry about the extra $33,000 in “birth tax” debt young Ari will have to bear. I voted for the other guy.

Why Jamal Can’t Get a Job That’s the title of a story in the current issue of the Chicago Graduate School of Business magazine. The article summarizes the results of a novel study by the auspiciously named Prof. Marianne Bertrand of U Chicago and Senhil Mullainathan of MIT’s Economics department. Here’s their experiment: Between June […]

Digby on Dean Digby at Hullabaloo gives his take on the issue, which is similar to mine, but a bit more irate: I’m more pragmatic than I’ve ever been about presidential politics, and I know that he wasn’t actually endorsing the confederate flag, but antipathy to this symbol is embedded in the DNA of African […]

I’m 30% Poorer! Tomorrow I leave for a short trip to Europe for a conference. I just checked the latest exchange rates, and am now cursing Bush’s incompetently executed weak dollar policy. Take a look at the graph below of the euro/dollar exchange rate: The dollar has lost nearly 30% of its value against the […]

Explaining Hussein’s Thinking This morning’s Washington Post has a fascinating report on the results of a set of interviews with, among others, Tariq Aziz. The overarching theme of the interviews is: “What the heck was Hussein thinking???” Specifically: – Why didn’t Hussein didn’t fight back against the initial US invasion in March? Hussein concluded after […]

What did they know that we didn’t? Via Yahoo News: Last year the monkeys made their presence felt by hanging from window ledges and screeching at reporters arriving for a news conference with visiting U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. AB