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 […]

Josh Marshall has the most thorough coverage of the story about the explosives that were looted in Iraq. Highlights: Okay, now we seem to have the White House’s third rendition of what happened at al Qaqaa. And we can find it in a nicely digestible form in this new piece from Fox News. …Down into […]

I have yet to call anyone at the Weekly Standard a liar even though on occasion, I have been quite tempted. But William Kristol’s Holbrooke: I Don’t Know the Truth is beyond the pale. His attempt to discredit the New York Times story about the missing explosives takes out of context a comment by Richard […]