Mission to Mars This NYT story must mean that Saddam hid the WMD on the Moon, the Red Planet, or perhaps both: Bush to Announce Ventures to Mars and the Moon, Officials Say. AB UPDATE: It looks like Calpundit came up with the same theory, but a bit earlier.

Another Koufax Nomination! Who knew that two constituted a “group”? Kash and I are now nominees in the “Best Group Blog” category in Wampum’s ongoing Koufax Awards. Once again, we are being resoundingly trounced, but it’s an honor just to be nominated (no, really, it is). AB

Giant, Happy-Fun, Credit Card Party Mark Kleiman points to and excerpts a piece, Sustained Budget Deficits: Longer-Run U.S. Economic Performance and the Risk of Financial and Fiscal Disarray, by Peter Orzag (Brookings), Robert Rubin (Citigroup), and Allen Sinai (Decision Economics). (Synopsis here; full paper here.) I could blather on about the importance of inflation expectations, […]

Compassionate Conservatism? What Army bureaucrat thinks that this is reasonable behavior for a civilized society? Amanda Bolduc on Wednesday was holding on tightly to her 3-month-old son, taking advantage of every last minute, memorizing his every feature — she won’t see him again for a very long time. The young mother, a 2nd Lieutenant in […]

Kash’s Call #1: China and the Yuan I’ve gone back and forth on this one a bit, but this is my first prediction: China will maintain the yuan’s peg to the dollar throughout 2004. Why? The key is China’s banking sector. I know, “the banking sector” sounds like an incredibly boring answer, but for better […]

The IMF Criticizes Bush’s Economic Policy Yesterday the IMF released a paper called “U.S. Fiscal Policies and Priorities for Long-Run Sustainability.” In it, the IMF delivers a surprisingly sharp criticism of the Bush administration’s fiscal policy. It’s the first time that I’m aware of that the IMF has criticized US policy in such strong terms. […]

Ready for 2004 I’m finally back at my desk, after a couple of weeks of some play and some more work. After clearing off enough mail so that I can now actually SEE it (my desk, that is), I’m now ready to write again. One of the first things I’ll be doing is giving you […]

Fester’s Last Guest Post I would like to thank Angry Bear and Kash for allowing me to guest blog for the past two weeks here at Angry Bear. I have had a wonderful time learning from your comments and reactions to my writing. I greatly appreciate the opportunity to write before such a large and […]

Whore of The Year I’ll admit that my first thought was “Tim Russert by a mile” for his idiotic performance with Dean back in August, his idiotic first interview with Clark, his idiotic interview of Hillary Clinton, and general hackery and whoreishness. But as Horse points out, David Brooks is making a strong if somewhat […]

TNR Jumps the Shark I can only hope that two of my favorite writers, two people rarely far off in their analysis of domestic policy, John Judis and Jonathan Chait, were not part of the “by the editors” group at The New Republic that today officially endorsed Joe Lieberman. This article by Chait suggests that […]