Why is George Bush President? Matt Yglesias asks this question today, with a follow-up from Kevin Drum. Specifically, he says: There was no reason whatsoever back in 1994 to think that George W. Bush was the best choice the Republicans had to run for governor of Texas — he was totally unqualified. His entire political […]

Food for Thought If Rumsfeld resigns heeds an urge to spend more time with his family, wouldn’t that mean that Paul Wolfowitz will, at least temporarily, be in charge of The Pentagon? Can Wolfowitz’s family preemptively ask him to spend more time with them? AB

A fish rots from the head down … … until it’s just a big, stinking, oozing pile of offal: The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of […]

Digby’s The Leviathan Digby: … It’s hard to tell who’s bad or good and it’s not enough to simply assert that one group is and one isn’t. We need systems and institutions to sort these things out in the most perfect way we can find and those systems and institutions are imperfect indeed. If we […]

Why TV Reporters Should Avoid Using Numbers From a Thursday story on Survivor: All-Stars by Dennis Cass, who “writes about television for Slate”: According to a “tribal tidbit” on CBS’s official Survivor site, 10 of the castaways (including all four sole survivors) have been voted out earlier than they were during their first time around. […]

The Bond Market Reacts Apparently the bond market was taken by surprise by this morning’s employment report. The interpretation clearly seems to be that this is a strong sign that the economic recovery is seriously gathering strength, so interest rates are set to rise. Here is the yield on the 10-year bond over the past […]

April Employment The BLS’s newly released employment report for the month of April showed that the unemployment rate fell slightly to 5.6%. More importantly, it showed net job creation in the US of 288,000 jobs during the month. According to CNN/Money, the average forecast was for 173,000 new jobs, so this comes as a positive […]

Capturing the US Media’s Attention It’s yet another a sad commentary on the state of the US media that (with rare exceptions, such as this and this) they completely ignored the stories of the crimes being committed in Abu Ghraib prison until there were pictures. The stories had been circulating for months, however. It seems […]

Kerry on Abu Ghraib Kerry: “As president I will not be the last to know what is going on in my command. I will demand accountability for those who serve, and I will take responsibility for their actions.” “And I will do everything that I can in my power to repair the damage that this […]

Oil Prices Keep Rising The price of crude oil hit a new high yesterday (for the year, at least) of nearly $40 per barrel. The price of gasoline rose in lockstep. Prices at the pump will keep rising as long as the price of crude oil does. Many analysts say that the price of oil […]