Voting Machines From everything I’ve read, I’m pretty sure that any election board, council, or panel would reach the same conclusion: California should ban the use of 15,000 touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems from the Nov. 2 general election, an advisory panel to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley recommended Thursday. By an […]

State Government Spending The CBPP has a new report out about the decline in state government expenditures during the Bush administration. It’s pretty striking – state spending has taken quite a tumble over the past few years, as the following chart shows. Source: CBPP. The CBPP report details many particular examples of state government services […]

Is Meet the Press Unbiased? Eric Alterman of the Center for American Progress does a side-by-side comparison (done New Yorker style) of Russert’s recent MTP interviews of Bush and Kerry. You probably won’t be surprised to find that Russert seems to save his difficult (and often unanswerable) questions for Kerry. Kash

The Master of Doublespeak Take a look at these headlines from two different news sources, reporting on the exact same speech by Alan Greenspan that he made today: From CBSMarketwatch: “Inflation no worry yet, Greenspan says… Greenspan remains unconcerned about inflation, suggesting that he is not in a hurry to raise interest rates from the […]

Why Didn’t Everyone Applaud Bush… …when he decided to reverse 20 years of US foreign policy and endorse Israel’s settlements in the West Bank? Here’s Bush’s explanation, from a speech that he gave today in Washington: The long-term strategy of this government is to spread freedom around the world. And I believe — I told […]

That’s Nice Pentagon Deleted Rumsfeld Comment: The Pentagon (news – web sites) deleted from a public transcript a statement Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld made to author Bob Woodward suggesting that the administration gave Saudi Arabia a two-month heads-up that President Bush (news – web sites) had decided to invade Iraq (news – web sites). […]

The AMT The Alternative Minimum Tax, or AMT, is the provision in the tax code that requires filers to calculate their taxes in two ways: the usual way, with the usual deductions and exemptions; and an alternate way that disallows most exemptions and deductions, but gives one big standard deduction instead. The idea is to […]

More of This, Please The Bush campaign raised a stink over Kerry’s not releasing his military records immediately after saying he would do so during Sunday’s Meet the Press interview. The records are out: “I fought under that flag and I saw that flag draped over the coffins of friends,” Kerry said. “I’m tired of […]

Is Your Family “Hardworking”? Tuesday, Brad DeLong explored the mystery of “Hardworking Individuals and Married Couples.” Who are these people? Mark Schmitt recently spotted them in a Treasury Department Press Release: Treasury didn’t use the standard categories that would go into a distributional analysis, such as income quintiles or households with income in certain ranges. […]

Higher Rates in Europe, Too? The markets took to heart Greenspan’s comments about the danger of deflation receding, and bond yields rose to their highest level in months. Some of Morgan Stanley’s European economists think that the same may be true for Europe – that we’re now definitely at the bottom of the interest rate […]