This Could be a Bad Day… …for Wall Street. Sharply higher US interest rates have spooked many markets around the world: NEW YORK (Reuters) – Stocks were set to sink at the open on Monday as fears the Federal Reserve (news – web sites) will raise interest rates as early as June weighed on markets […]
That Sinking Feeling Apparently more and more of the US military’s leadership has it. From today’s Washington Post: U.S. May Be Winning Battles in Iraq But Losing the War, Some Officers Say Deep divisions are emerging at the top of the U.S. military over the course of the occupation of Iraq, with some senior officers […]
Baghdad Art Mirrors Baghdad Life Submittted with only one comment: it “was fashioned two months ago“: We are living in an American democracy AB
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 […]