Relevant and even prescient commentary on news, politics and the economy.

Who attacked us on 9/11: Speaking Clearly

Many thanks to all the coverage of the debates by my fellow bloggers. The GOP post-debate debate seems to be trying to say Kerry made some alleged 16 technical errors along the lines of how they attacked Gore four years ago. I have not seen this alleged list but I hear one of the alleged […]

Still At It

Last night’s debate was a fairly substantive discussion of genuine, significant policy differences (specifically: More of the same vs. Try to improve several bad situations around the world by making some changes). And I had actually been thinking that Bush might start campaigning on those policy differences after the debate. But I guess that was […]

DeLong on the Debate

Brad DeLong has the most thorough itemization that I’ve yet seen of statements that Bush made last night that are incorrect or deliberately misleading. There are eighteen of them. It’s worth a read. Kash

Best Debate Moments

Overall, Bush stuck heavily to a very few lines. As AB pointed out, one of his favorites was his rhetorical question: how can you be commander-in-chief if you say this was the “wrong war, wrong time, wrong place?” Bush used this exact phrase seven times times during the debate. And he used the phrase “mixed […]

Postcards from Old Europe – A perfect storm? The movie “The Perfect Storm” tells the story of a commercial fishing boat, the Andrea Gail, and its crew as it tries to battle through an awesome storm off the coast of Nova Scotia in 1991. The storm was massive because it was actually lethal combination of […]

Live Bloggin’

I’ve never done this, but here goes: – Whoa! Split screen. I thought the rules forbade that. Bush looks pissed as Kerry says he can do a better job of defending America. – About sentence three of his first statement before mentioning 9/11. Next question: Bush “doesn’t think that’s gonna happen [another attack if Sen. […]

Watching the Debate

I’ll be watching the debate when it starts in half an hour, and if I have any thoughts about it I’ll share them with you. Please feel free to do the same, particularly if you’d like to try your hand at some fact-checking along the way. Kash

Yikes! They Weren’t Kidding!

First, see this post from earlier today about last night’s Daily Show, then go take a look at this, complete with screenshots. Yet another thinning of the wall between journalism and parody. AB

Distributed Fact-Checking

You already know that tonight’s debate between Bush and Kerry (9:00-10:30pm EDT) could be important to the outcome of the election. Note that I don’t say “will be important” — I think there’s a reasonable chance that it will just be another forum for the recitation of familiar lines from campaign speeches, having little effect […]

August Personal Income

The BEA has just released its estimate of personal income in August. The headline figure is that there was a 0.4% increase in personal income during the month, which is roughly in line with economists expectations. But month-to-month reports like this are notoriously volatile, so I think that year-on-year comparisons are much more informative. The […]