Fafnir on Torture Quoting Fafblog is becoming a regular feature here of late. They have a knack for exposing the fundamental absurdity of an issue: “But Fafnir I do not want to read about torture” you say because you are a lazy whining person. “I want to read about gumdrops an rainbows and Presidents who […]

Bush Administration fires another critic OK, this is just a new twist on an old theme on how this White House tries to conceal the truth but… WASHINGTON (CNN) — One day after she was fired, former U.S. Park Police Chief Teresa Chambers accused the Bush administration Saturday of silencing dissenting views in the rank […]

Tale of Two Cities: Edwards v. Frum Mario Cuomo’s July 16, 1984 address to the DNC is often compared to Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of Two Cities”. John Edwards is sounding similar themes as evidenced by this excerpt courtesy of David Frum’s Diary on July 7. Today, under George W. Bush, there are two Americas, […]

Thomas Brown advises against portfolio diversification James Glassman provides a review of “My Ten Rules” by Thomas K. Brown of Second Curve Capital. Apparently, these two are motivated by The Global-Investor Book of Investing Rules by Philip Jenks and Stephen Eckett. The passage in all this that has me wondering if I should even look […]

The CIA Did It Or, perhaps the CIA did a little of it and the White House did the rest, but we won’t talk about that until after the election, if ever. WASHINGTON (CNN) — In a highly critical report issued Friday, the U.S. Senate Intelligence Committee found that the CIA’s prewar estimates of Iraq’s […]

Kerry’s Health Care Proposals Krugman does a nice job of summarizing Kerry’s health care proposals in today’s column. He gives it fairly high marks; while Kerry’s plan is not perfect, it’s a lot, lot better than Bush’s alternative. Kash

Postcards from Old Europe – Reality Check I’ve found that it does one good to take a step back from the onslaught of data releases and to focus on what one could call the “big picture”. While decomposing the latest payroll data has its merits one should not forget that every figment of data is […]

Dude, Where’s My 9.4 Trillion Dollars? Ragout has the timeline of how we got from where we started out fiscally (2001: up $5 trillion over ten years) to where we are now (down $4.4 trillion over ten years). It’s a long, sad, tale. AB

Which Way the Dollar? The dollar has done pretty well this year, compared to what many people expected. The chart below shows the dollar against the euro over the past two years (expressed as euros per dollar). While the dollar fell throughout most of 2003, so far in 2004 it has mostly held steady, despite […]

The White House Response The White House has responded to all of the attention that the Democratic ticket of Kerry and Edwards has been receiving this week: WASHINGTON – The United States is tightening security in the face of a steady stream of intelligence indicating al-Qaida may seek to mount an attack aimed at disrupting […]