Strippers Against Bush? Salon has an interesting report on Howard Stern’s ongoing anti-Bush campaign: The pioneering shock jock, “the man who launched the raunch,” as the Los Angeles Times once put it, has emerged almost overnight as the most influential Bush critic in all of American broadcasting, as he rails against the president hour after […]

Support John Kerry If you’ll look to your left, you’ll see a John Kerry button surrounded by the crucial word, “Contribute!” So do contribute. The Kerry campaign has set it up so that Kash and I can track how many contributions stem from this blog. Moreover, Kash and I both plan to make sizeable donations […]

Illinois Senate Update In this post last week, I asked why the press and bloggers aren’t talking about Illinois’ Senate race more — Illinois is a state where a Democratic gain (Peter Fitzgerald’s seat) seems rather likely. In any event, The Washington Post has a profile of the leading Democratic contender, Barack Obama: His father […]

The U.S. Current Account Balance in 2003 The BEA just released the figures from the last quarter (and thus the full year) of 2003 for the US current account balance. The grand total for the current account deficit in 2003 is $542 billion, meaning the US as a whole borrowed $542 billion from the rest […]

Global Income Inequality The new issue of The Economist has a good in-depth examination of global income inequality. A subscription is required to read the whole thing, but the main conclusions of the article are: it’s difficult to know what’s happened to inequality around the world, because data is so poor, and depending on exactly […]

And So It Begins… From today’s Washington Post: Just one week after launching a wave of positive commercials, President Bush went on the attack with a new ad yesterday, charging that Democratic challenger John F. Kerry would “raise taxes by at least $900 billion” and weaken the country’s response to terrorism and ability to go […]

Greenspan: Stop Cutting Taxes and Fund Education Well, actually, he didn’t say anything about how to pay for more education. But if it’s worth doing, it’s worth spending money borrowed from our children to do (because we know funding anything with taxes is evil): Congress needs to promote both the teaching of basics such as […]

I Doubt This Ad Will Resonate… And I rarely give the public at large too much credit. Via Ryan Lizza’s Campaign Journal: The ominous slow-motion footage comes about halfway through the 30-second ad. A female voiceover darkly warns about John Kerry’s agenda, charging, “On the war on terror: weaken the Patriot Act used to arrest […]

Bush’s ‘Manufacturing Czar’ From today’s WaPost: Bush Choice for Manufacturing Post in Question Six months after promising to create an office to help the nation’s struggling manufacturers, President Bush settled on someone to head it, but the nomination was being reconsidered last night after Democrats revealed that his candidate had opened a factory in China. […]

Horrible, Horrible A series of terrible terrorist attacks has hit Madrid, a city I love, and where my wife has spent several years, and where she and I lived together for over a year. It seems that close to 200 people have been killed. Now we face the awful task of tracking down all of […]