Bob Somerby has been having a field day with the “clownishly unprepared” cable reporters on the Swift Boat smears. This coverage of Hardball’s August 26 show had Pat Buchanan saying that the Swift Boats were not damaged on the day that rescued Jim Rassmann from the water. This is the day that Robert Lambert rescued […]

Via Daniel Drezner’s Headlines from the Future last Wednesday – Richard Ippolito’s How to Reduce the Cost of Federal Pension Insurance (Cato Policy Analysis No. 523). Dan thinks the PBGC is an arcane policy and Ippolito’s discussion of why there is an increasing likelihood that taxpayers “will eventually be called upon to provide a bailout” […]

A screenshot of MSNBC’s current Question of The Day: Via Marshall. AB

Maybe people reading my bearish post from last week was the cause of this: NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Consumer confidence plunged in August, hurt by worries about jobs, a research group said Tuesday, in a report that fell far below forecasts by private economists. The Conference Board, a business research group, said its confidence index […]

The WTO has just ruled in favor of the EU and against the US in a WTO dipute. The case involves the “Byrd Amendment,” otherwise known as the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act of 2000. This law directed the US government to distribute any tariff revenues received from anti-dumping duties to the most affected […]

The BEA released brand new figures on personal income and spending in July this morning. They show that income growth nearly stopped in July, after a slow June. This is consistent with the other signs that we have of a summer slowdown in the economy. The graph below shows the 12-month percent change in disposable […]

Here’s Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, speaking on Fox News Sunday: Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert – having already enraged some New Yorkers with his remarks about local office-holders’ “unseemly scramble” for federal money after 9/11 – yesterday opened a second front. On “Fox News Sunday,” the Illinois Republican insinuated that billionaire financier […]

… though it’s surely for reasons other than reading and commenting here. In any case, Barry R. was interviewed by Business Week on the subject of markets and the election: Q: Who do you think will win the election? A: I’m a numbers geek at heart, so I watch four quantitative factors that have had […]

Apparently, the team here at Angry Bear uses some big words, at least as counted by this survey conducted by The Adventures of Prometheus and Sabrina, which is based on something called Peter Schmies’s Word Classification Test. We were, not surprisingly, edged out by Digby, Dave Neiwert, and Atrios, but managed to nip TBogg. For […]

The BEA just released its first revision to its estimate of GDP growth in the April-June period of 2004. The estimate of GDP growth has been revised down to 2.8% from an initial guess of 3.0%. This is unequivocally slow growth. To put this in historical context, during the last expansion (1994-1999) only 4 out […]