Daddy, Where Do Republicans Come From? Seriously, I read something like this (and this) and I can reach only one conclusion: come November, if more than half the people who vote (roughly; see Florida, 2000) actually vote for George W. Bush then I’ll have to simply give up. Politics, sound policy, and the common weal […]

More From Gary Hart In Salon today: The U.S. Commission on National Security/21st Century, co-chaired by former Sen. Warren Rudman and myself, reported to President George W. Bush and his new administration in January 2001 that terrorists were surely going to attack the United States and that our country was woefully unprepared. We documented the […]

Indeed John Kerry, in Cincinnati: “There is nothing conservative about running up deficits as far as the eye can see, there is nothing conservative about piling debt on our children and building up the annual interest payments for that debt so we can’t fund education, health care.” AB

Hidden Cost Update Yesterday, I asked which official, “before the war, put the cost [of Iraq] in the low single-digit billions.” This is what I was vaguely recalling: On April 23, 2003, Andrew S. Natsios, head of the U.S. Agency for International Development, laid out in a televised interview the costs to U.S. taxpayers of […]

Bad Poll News for Bush From the latest Pew poll, via Yahoo: Still, a majority supports his decision to use military force in Iraq, says the poll released Monday. Four in 10, or 40 percent, approve of the way Bush is handling Iraq, while 53 percent disapprove. That’s down from six in 10 who approved […]

Operation Liberty and Justice for All Can we fire whoever it is that comes up with names for military operations these days? Afghanistan is “Enduring Freedom,” the Iraq War is codenamed “Iraqi Freedom,” and now the current operations in and around Fallujah are codenamed “Vigilant Resolve.” It’s a codename, not an explanation, statement of principal, […]

Urban Job Markets Under Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, and Bush II In a nice bit of work, G. Scott Thomas of American City Business Journals (a non-partisan straight news entity as far as I can tell) crunched the last 25 years’ job numbers; his results put last weeks’s good jobs news into context: • Nearly […]

Lies, Bribes and Hidden Costs Eric Boehlert has a good piece in Salon analogizing the Bush administration’s selling of the Prescription Drug Bill to the selling of the Iraq Invasion: hype the benefits and willfully suppress the true costs. In Iraq, the benefits were hyped primarily by promoting the WMD claims (thus creating the bogus […]

Tempest in a Blogspot For those who are curious, Angry Bear has no plans to start accepting ads. I do however, plan to keep the contribute to Kerry link up ($2175 raised so far!) until either the convention or I think Kerry has enough money, at which point I’ll probably switch it to fund-raising buttons […]

More Evidence Supporting Clarke This from a lengthy NYT piece: … The warnings during the summer [of 2001] were more dire and more specific than generally recognized. Descriptions of the threat were communicated repeatedly to the highest levels within the White House. In more than 40 briefings, Mr. Bush was told by George J. Tenet, […]