The Great Questions of Blogging Brad DeLong may have stepped into a hornet’s nest. No, not in this post on Kerry’s health plan, but in this post on punctuation. Brad takes exception to the title of a recent book on punctuation, “Eats, Shoots and Leaves,” writing First of all, there definitely needs to be a […]

Navel-Gazing at The NYT Many other blogs are covering the Times‘ ongoing mea culpa process for basically accepting and reprinting White House spin on WMD in the run-up to the Iraq War. For example, in his latest bit, Editor Daniel Okrent writes To anyone who read the paper between September 2002 and June 2003, the […]

Kerry’s Campaign Now you don’t have to just take my word for it that Kerry’s playing it smart. Bill Clinton thinks so too: May 28, 2004 | New York — Former President Clinton said Thursday that Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is smart not to comment daily on every development in Iraq because “he recognizes […]

Personal Saving Personal income headed in the right direction in April — up 0.4% in real terms according to today’s BEA report. This is not particularly surprising, since we already know that employment growth was strong in April, but it’s good news nonetheless. Interestingly, consumers did not spend all of this increase in income. In […]

Comparing 2004 and 1994 In 1994 two of the three branches of government in the US were led by Democrats. Their position as the minority opposition party united the Republican party like never before, under the leadership of Newt Gingrich. Conservative voters were furious about Democratic initiatives in 1993 and 1994, and mobilized in an […]

Poetic This is why a subscription to Salon.com is not a bad idea. In addition to the article on the media’s culpability in the Iraq war that AB mentioned below, Sydney Blumenthal has an excellent piece in Salon.com about the Chalabi story. In it Blumenthal writes some beautiful poetry about the justice slowly being wrought […]

Gmail and Drunken Nixon I’ve been using Gmail for about a week and I really like the interface, which is substantially different from Hotmail and Yahoo — as it needs to be if Google is to induce people to give up their old email addresses. And apparently the free market agrees: Gmail accounts are selling […]

Worth a Day Pass James Moore in Salon on the media’s eager swallowing of the neocon/Chalabi tale, hook, line, and sinker, with a particular emphasis on the New York Times’ extraordinary gullibility: When the full history of the Iraq war is written, one of its most scandalous chapters will be about how American journalists, in […]

Declare Victory and Go Home That seems to be the US’s new doctrine in Iraq. First, the US faced a rebellious Falluja, and decided to use force to put the city back under US military control and bring the people responsible for the death and mutilation of the 4 American contractors to justice. After a […]

Stagflation? Irwin Kellner of CBSMarketwatch.com says stagflation is coming back: HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. (CBS.MW) — Don’t look now, but just as inflation is speeding up, the economy is slowing down. Can you say stagflation? …One way to measure inflation psychology is to compare the yield on the regular 10-year Treasury note with the yield on the […]