Mary Beth for Maine State Representative! Wampum’s Mary Beth Williams is running for a seat in Maine’s state house. As the war-bloggers (and I) can attest, sitting around and typing about things that annoy you is fairly easy to do; actually doing something is tougher. Mary Beth will be a great progressive voice for Maine […]

Iraq After June 30th? This AP report is just depressing: Sunni politicians speak angrily of U.S. bias toward their Shiite rivals. Kurds are more outspoken in demanding self rule — if not independence. And someone — perhaps al-Qaida, perhaps Saddam Hussein (news – web sites) loyalists — killed more than 100 people in recent suicide […]

Political Implications of the Economy’s Structural Change Gallup has just released the results of a survey showing that of the people they interviewed last week, they encountered “the highest spontaneous mention of jobs as the nation’s top problem in over 10 years.” The article makes the extremely interesting suggestion that the November election may become […]

One Year Old Angry Bear turns one year old tonight. In that year, we’ve had 110,000 visitors, now reaching an average of 700-800 unique IPs per weekday, with about 400-500 on the weekends. On Monday, we had another first: a very brief mention in the Washington Post (citing and linking this post by Kash.) Part […]

US Exports in 2003 The BEA just released their estimates of US trade in December 2003, and thus for the entire year. The trade deficit was large, but that’s not the interesting part to me; that simply reflects the fact that as a country, the US is buying much more than it is producing, which […]

Continued Deficit Misdirection from the Bush Administration I’m amazed that they can continue to parrot this line: Treasury’s Snow blames war on terror for US deficit WASHINGTON, Feb 12 (Reuters) – U.S. Treasury Secretary John Snow said on Thursday that current budget deficits, while unwelcome, were necessary because the United States was pushed into a […]

Greenspan Gets Even More Explicit Greenspan elaborated further on his opinion regarding the deficit during continued testimony on Capitol Hill today. I suppose that he wanted to make it crystal clear to those who didn’t read my interpretation of his remarks yesterday that he is on the side of the tax-cutting Republicans in Washington: “In […]

Greenspan on the Deficit, Part II Greenspan’s testimony this morning to Congress indicated no regret about the Bush tax cuts. I was totally wrong when I implied in my morning lead-in post to his testimony that I thought he might come out against the Bush tax cuts. I have to say that I’m a little […]

Better Late Than Never Today, the Washington Post writes on Bush’s lie (“If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my watch, in the last year of President Clinton, discretionary spending was up 15 percent, and ours have steadily declined”): “If you look at the appropriations bills that were passed under my […]

Greenspan on the Deficit Back in 2001, Greenspan was a tentative supporter of tax cuts. In his now-famous (to fiscal policy wonks, anyway) remarks to the Senate Budget Committee of January 25, 2001, he basically said that he liked the idea of getting rid of the projected massive budget surplus through tax cuts – though […]