Springsteen and the RNC Apparently Bruce Springsteen is saying no to those who want him to hold an anti-Bush concert in Giant’s Stadium during the Republican National Convention. But don’t worry. I have a suspicion that there will be plenty of other anti-Bush activities in New York in late August and early September for people […]

Keeping an Eye on Durable Goods Orders Today’s release of the data on durable goods orders for May showed a moderate drop of 1.6%, which is slightly surprising. Most economists had been expecting a solid increase, in keeping with the continued economic recovery. Of course, the absolute level of durable goods orders is still quite […]

Veep Kerry’s impending VP pick seems to be a hot topic of late (e.g., Digby, Atrios, CalPundit, Matt Y.). The opinions range from Gephardt’s ok because the VP choice doesn’t really matter to (exaggerating slightly) please, God, not Gephardt. I’m sympathetic with the former camp, but siding with the latter. Rather than spend time explaining […]

Why Do People Vote for Bush? UnFutz has a good candidate answer. Graph here; post here. AB

Conservative Hypocrites If you often think that Conservatives are hypocrites, blithely spouting whatever they think will make them popular at the moment,(+) without reference to any real core set of beliefs, then you should definitely check out this post by Dan Drezner. Now you might be thinking, “Dan Drezner … Chicago … Illinois … Hypocritical […]

Stock Market Predicts Kerry Win! Sort of. The sample sizes on things like this are necessarily small, equalling at most the number of presidents. And each election is unique. Still, this CNN story notes that Presidential elections are usually won by the incumbent party; in the past 104 years, in 26 elections, the party holding […]

My Life Update ABCNEWS: “My Life” was released throughout the United States with a first printing of 1.5 million. Barnes & Noble had estimated that between 90,000 and 100,000 copies would sell Tuesday in the United States, a record debut for a nonfiction book. On Wednesday, Borders also reported a record first day for nonfiction, […]

Echo Chamber? Asked whether blogs serve any purpose beyond merely telling like-minded people what they want to hear, most liberals respond with reference to the Trent Lott scandal, which was kept alive in blogs until it finally made it into the mainstream. Sure, Lott only lost his leadership position, but even that would almost surely […]

Ants Having Sex Richard Cohen in the Washington Post on how Bush and Cheney viewed, and continute to view, “ties” (or the lack thereof) between Saddam and al Qaeda: I’ll tell you a story. There was a man who went to see a psychiatrist. First, the shrink showed him a picture of crossed sticks and […]

Don’t Forget My Life: While it’s possible the book is terrible, you really, really, can’t trust the NYT reviewer, Michiko Kakutani. She’s been panning Clinton and Gore books since at least 1999. Of course, this is the same NYT that invented Whitewhater yet failed to cover the Robert Ray report exonerating Clinton, so that’s not […]