The Daily Howler The Daily Howler really is a must-read information source. Bob Somerby’s been doing for years what Media Matters’ David Brock just got a two million dollar grant to do: monitor the media and point out the inanities therein. It’s dirty work and every once in a while I wonder if (when?) Somerby […]

Kerry’s proposed $7 minimum wage John Kerry is proposing setting the minimum wage at $7. This graph provides a nice time series of the nominal v. real value of the minimum wage over time with real done in terms of 1999$ (this series ends in 2001). With the price level in 2003 being 8% higher […]

Postcards from Old Europe – Policy Traction Last week’s installment saw me try to do some Fed-watching, this week sees me hop back to the other side of the Atlantic to briefly examine the differing effects of monetary policy in Europe and the US. The difference revolves around the efficacy of the so-called monetary policy […]

Were They Wrong? In a semi-apologia for backing the Iraq Invasion titled Were We Wrong?, The New Republic editors write But saying he was a threat does not mean he was a threat urgent enough to require war. We lack John Kerry’s confidence that waiting to confront Iraq would have produced a broader coalition for […]

Another Inflation Indicator Ticks Higher Regarding this morning’s PPI report: WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A bigger-than-expected rise in U.S. producer prices in May, the largest in 14 months, and falling jobless claims last week provided fresh evidence Thursday of strength in the world’s largest economy. Prices received by farms, factories and refiners shot up a hefty […]

Iraq and Al-Qaeda, part II A USA Today article makes a very nice follow-up point to some of Bush’s comments this morning about the link between Iraq and Al-Qaeda. Picking up where I left off in the previous post, here’s some more of the statement that Bush made this morning about Al-Qaeda ties to Iraq […]

Bush Sticks Up For His Boss Bush was faced this morning with the prospect of either: (1)agreeing that the 9/11 Commission’s conclusions – reached after painstaking, non-partisan examination of mountains of evidence – about the non-existence of an Iraq link to Al-Qaeda are probably correct, while simultaneously admitting that Cheney was wrong when he insisted […]

Competition in Action So for the last few years, Yahoo mail has been basically unchanged. In fact, the only change was that they were shrinking the storage allocations of new accounts in order to encourage users to upgrade to paid accounts (a perfectly reasonable objective.) Enter competition from Google and things change direction. This is […]

Grover Norquist AFter 10 or so years of having his crazy statements go unchallenged, Republican strategist Grover Norquist must think he can just say anything and no one will call him on it. Least of all a CNN reporter. Here’s the latest, courtesy of The Daily Show‘s Lewis Black: BLACK: There’s a movement headed up […]

IP and Capacity Utilization The Fed released the figures for May this morning. Both industrial production and capacity utilization showed healthy increases. I have been particularly impressed by the increase in capacity utilization in manufacturing over the past few months. It has now clawed its way back to where it was during George W. Bush’s […]