Iraq and Al-Qaeda, part II A USA Today article makes a very nice follow-up point to some of Bush’s comments this morning about the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Picking up where I left off in the previous post, here’s some more of the statement that Bush made this morning about Al-Qaeda ties to Iraq […]

Bush Sticks Up For His Boss Bush was faced this morning with the prospect of either: (1)agreeing that the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions – reached after painstaking, non-partisan examination of mountains of evidence – about the non-existence of an Iraq link to Al-Qaeda are probably correct, while simultaneously admitting that Cheney was wrong when he insisted […]

Competition in Action So for the last few years, Yahoo mail has been basically unchanged. In fact, the only change was that they were shrinking the storage allocations of new accounts in order to encourage users to upgrade to paid accounts (a perfectly reasonable objective.) Enter competition from Google and things change direction. This is […]

Grover Norquist AFter 10 or so years of having his crazy statements go unchallenged, Republican strategist Grover Norquist must think he can just say anything and no one will call him on it. Least of all a CNN reporter. Here’s the latest, courtesy of The Daily Show‘s Lewis Black: BLACK: There’s a movement headed up […]

IP and Capacity Utilization The Fed released the figures for May this morning. Both industrial production and capacity utilization showed healthy increases. I have been particularly impressed by the increase in capacity utilization in manufacturing over the past few months. It has now clawed its way back to where it was during George W. Bush’s […]

What’s the Best Way to Change Interest Rates? This question came to me as I was reading this CNN/Money piece discussing possible Fed action on interest rates this year. The article basically poses the question of whether interest rates will have to rise a lot or a little over this year. But the title of […]

Productivity Up Productivity Output continues to soar, which is definitely a good thing in the long run, but in the near term will serve to keep the labor market soft: Output, not productivity, increased in May. In fact, the growth in hours worked in manufacturing exceeded the growth in output, meaning that productivity fell a […]

New CPI Data The figures for consumer prices in May have just been released by the BLS. They show a predictably large 0.6% increase in consumer prices thanks to the rise in the price of oil, but just a moderate 0.2% rise in the core rate (excluding energy and food). What does this mean? While […]

Medicare Drug Benefit Bush is on the road today selling his version of a senior drug benefit – the needlessly complex and poorly run Medicare drug card program. One thing that I bet Bush will not address, however, is why his Medicare drug benefit legislation forbade the importation of cheaper drugs from other countries. Bush […]

Cynicism Without Bound Kevin Drum sees the thread that I didn’t. It’s common knowledge that there’s been a lot of pressure — both from within and without — on the American Catholic Church to deny communion to pro-choice politicians (you should now say “John Kerry” in your best Subliminal Man voice.) Until now, I simply […]