Then Where Was He And What Was He Doing? Skippy catches a puzzling statement from Press Secretary McClellan: Q Scott, this morning, you said the President didn’t recall the conversation in the Situation Room on September 12th that Mr. Clarke said he had, where the President asked Dick Clarke three times to pursue links between […]

Swing State Summary This table summarizes the results of my analyses to date of the jobs situation in Swing States; details and a discussion are at The American Street. AB UPDATE: Table corrected so that the column 3 heading reads “Right/Left Vote” and the ordering in that column is made consistent: Bush’s % first, then […]

Jobs in Pennsylvania In the process of composing my post for The American Street tomorrow, I realized that I skipped over a very important swing state, Pennsylvania. While Pennsylvania voted for Gore in 2000, Bush nevertheless enacted steel tariffs in an effort to court voters in this swing state. I suspect that Pennsylvania residents are […]

Clarke and Cheney Update Josh Marshall has some key information on Cheney’s claim that Clarke was in cybersecurity, not anti-terrorism: Cheney frequently gets a pass for what his aides later portray as unintentional misstatements of fact. But there are two or three levels of dishonesty involved in this response. The key one is timing. It’s […]

White House Insiders Take Note Paul O’Neill’s use of White House and Treasury documents was not illegal, although “had [about 140 documents] been properly marked as “classified,” they would have been withheld. AB

Cyber-Terrorism? I’ve been curious about what the administration’s counter to Clarke’s book and interviews would look like. My best guess would be that it would center on Clarke being “disgruntled.” About an hour ago, Dick Cheney was on Rush Limbaugh’s show, advancing this story and adding a new one, that Clarke wasn’t in the loop […]

Richard Clarke The political fallout from Richard Clarke’s 60 Minutes interview should, if there is any justice in the world, be swift and devastating. Clarke came across as someone very well-informed on terrorism in general and al Qaeda in particular. His story is consistent with Paul O’Neil’s: from day one, before 9/11, the administration ignored […]

More Signs of Life? I didn’t have time to mention this yesterday: Jobless claims hit three-year low New weekly claims for unemployment benefits come in lower than Wall Street forecasts. NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – New jobless claims fell last week to the lowest level in more than three years, the government said Thursday, coming in […]

Postcards from Old Europe – Setting the Stage Dear readers, Angry Bear and Kash have invited me to guest blog here on a regular basis. AB and Kash are both economists – I’m not. I work in discretionary portfolio management for high net worth clients in a rather large European financial services company. You can […]

The Ad War Bush seems to have won the battle for the first half of March. From The National Journal’s Hotline on March 17: AD SPENDING, 3/3-14 ——————————————————————– BUSH-CHENEY Estimated spending: $8,197,514+ Spots aired: 8,071 States: AR, AZ, CA, FL, IA, ME, MI, MN, MO, NH, NM, NV, OH, OR, PA, WA, WI, WV, nat’l […]