appearing on CNN yesterday: But I would say that given the fact we’ve had nearly two dozen audiotapes and videotapes from bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the chain of custody of these tapes is one way you can definitely get back to them, to me it’s extraordinary that we haven’t been able to follow […]

I was going to write this Monday but the missing explosives story took off. And good thing I waited as I just saw the latest Bush-Cheney pathetic ad. Showing pictures of Carter and Dukakis to suggest Democrats can’t be tough with pictures of Reagan and Bush41 as if Republicans are always tough on the enemies […]

In terms of importance, this doesn’t quite rank up there with missing high-powered explosives, but since the administration seems to have definitively failed in its efforts to spin that story, we can move back to lesser questions like, What the heck was under the President’s coat durning the debates? Salon is still trying to find […]

Kash noted that the third quarter advanced estimate for real GDP, which appears to be only 3.9% higher than it was in the third quarter of 2003. Real Federal government purchases rose by 4.8% continuing the recent trend of increasing faster than real GDP – also noted by Kash. But nondefense Federal purchases fell by […]

Federal government purchases of final goods and services, as a share of GDP (two quarter moving average), including today’s new data: Remind me again exactly why someone who truly believes in reducing the size of the federal government should ever vote for the Republicans? Kash

The BEA has just released its advance estimate of third quarter GDP: Real gross domestic product — the output of goods and services produced by labor and property located in the United States — increased at an annual rate of 3.7 percent in the third quarter of 2004, according to advance estimates released by the […]

MSNBC ran this piece from Martin Wolk entitled Uncertainty over economy could help Kerry. Not a bad title and a good lead graphing the lackluster employment situation. But then his second graph has this caption claiming that “the unemployment rate has been falling”. But look at the graph. Unemployment did fall during the Clinton years […]

The Economist gives a somewhat lukewarm endorsement to Kerry: Many readers, feeling that Mr Bush has the right vision in foreign policy even if he has made many mistakes, will conclude that the safest option is to leave him in office to finish the job he has started. If Mr Bush is re-elected, and uses […]

China watchers should be enjoying thinking about the questions that this news raises: Oct. 28 (Bloomberg) — China’s central bank jolted global financial markets by raising its benchmark interest rates for the first time in nine years to cool the world’s fastest-growing major economy. Will this be effective in reducing inflationary pressures in China? Will […]

The largest economic change that Bush has wrought on the US is also one of the most harmful legacies that Bush will leave this country: his creation of large budget deficits that extend into the indefinite future. And he created this fiscal disaster this through specific tax and spending decisions, not because of historical accident […]