Wow Bush’s poll numbers keep sinking. From the latest issue of Newsweek: May 15 – As his administration grapples with the fallout from the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal, President George W. Bush’s approval ratings have dropped to 42 percent, according to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, a low for his presidency. Fifty-seven percent say they disapprove […]

Minor Changes I’ve moved most slow-loading scripts (e.g., sitemeter) to the right panel, which should mean that the page will load the center panel before running them (which sometimes causes the page to hang for a while before loading). If this works then you will be able to read the hot fresh content while the […]

New Data: Everything’s Up The CPI was up in April, with the core rate rising 0.3%. The 12-month change in the core CPI is therefore up 1.8%, another sign that the US inflation rate is still rising. Just a few months ago the 12-month core CPI inflation rate was only 1.25%. (By the way, the […]

Postcards from Old Europe – In debt we trust The FOMC’s recent change in the wording of their statement has clearly shown that the times of E-Z financing are coming to an end. The recent past has seen the Fed engineer a near-rational bubble in asset prices which has served to push household wealth up […]

Question The blog’s been taking a long time to open today because blogrolling.com, the site that maintains my blogroll is down (I’ve removed it for now.) The same thing happens whenever sitemeter is down, too. Is there some way to make the blog first load the background and the center table where the posts are, […]

PPI Data Today’s BLS release of PPI data for April show a 12-month increase in producer prices of 5.1%, thanks largely to higher energy prices. That’s the fastest annual PPI inflation that we’ve seen in a long time. (The one-month change in prices was 0.7%.) But I’ve said before that I think it’s more useful […]

Let’s Call It What It Is Take a look at the following opening sentence from an AP story on the crimes at Abu Ghraib: WASHINGTON – Fresh photos showing American soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners with snarling dogs or forced sex left members of Congress angry and disgusted… Why beat around the bush? Why the careful […]

Campaign Fundraising The FEC is set to rule today on the legality of soft money-funded 527 issue groups that have been working to boost or blast one candidate or the other. Indications are that the FEC will decide to postpone their decision by another 90 days. Of course, that effectively means that they’re making a […]

The Abu Ghraib Prisoner’s Dilemma, Revisited If you will look to your right, you’ll see that I’ve added The Rumsfeld Wire, an application created by the DCCC that tracks blog posts relating to Abu Ghraib and/or removing Rumsfeld. Now, I think the Abu Ghraib scandal is a true scandal, and deserving of all the abhorrence […]

Read This Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations. The headline barely does justice to the content, about which you should be outraged (let Sen. Inhofe howl in outrage at your outrage.) AB UPDATE: Read this too, on Congressmembers’ reactions to seeing the still classified photos and videos from Abu Ghraib: “Hard on the […]