Truth v. Fantasy I still like Kash’s version better, but this latest chart from the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities is pretty good too (via Matt Yglesias): AB

Pretty Much Sums It Up The miserable failure that is the Bush administration’s Iraq policy can pretty much be summed up by this quote from an Iraqi in today’s Washington Post: “When the fighting is over in Fallujah, I will sell everything I have, even my home,” said a resistance fighter who gave his name […]

Bob Woodward’s Plan of Attack The book comes out Monday, but some claims and excerpts are coming out early: “Let’s get started on this,” Bush recalled telling Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Nov. 21, 2001, according to “Plan of Attack” by Washington Post assistant managing editor Bob Woodward, a Post account of the book says. […]

Just Plain Wrong Via Mark Schmitt: This whole thing is just disgraceful. To top it all off, every Treasury release now has the following useful public service announcement at the bottom: America has a choice: It can continue to grow the economy and create new jobs as the President’s policies are doing; or it can […]

More Consumer Confidence Surprises You’d think that, in the wake of the strong jobs report two weeks ago, surveys of consumer confidence would start showing some improvement. But no, consumer confidence continues to fall. We’ve already had a thorough discussion about the fact that this probably tells us little about consumer spending, but it’s still […]

Capacity Utilization Industry in the US seems to be struggling a bit in their battle to increase capacity utilization. The Fed just released data for March showing capacity utilization down a bit after several months of increases. As usual, I’ll repeat the caveat that one month of data doesn’t mean much – but it’s a […]

Postcards from Old Europe – New meets old We are only about two weeks away from one of the most important things to hit Europe this year. I am of course talking about the upcoming enlargement of the EU. May 1st will see 10 countries enter the European Union. As a result, the EU will […]

Shorter Angry Bear Fred Kaplan in Slate: Throughout that summer, we now well know, Tenet, Richard Clarke, and several other officials were running around with their “hair on fire,” warning that al-Qaida was about to unleash a monumental attack. On Aug. 6, Bush was given the now-famous President’s Daily Brief (by one of Tenet’s underlings), […]

Meetings and Battle Stations I’m beginning to better understand what Richard Clarke meant when he talked about the importance of high level meetings during high threat periods. The latest piece of this unforunate puzzle comes in today’s NYT: George J. Tenet and his deputies at the Central Intelligence Agency were presented in August 2001 with […]

Housing Bubble? Kevin notes a report that the “median [home] sale price [in Los Angeles is] up 29%, to a record $375,000, according to data released Monday” and says I don’t care what anyone says, including the happy talk analysts quoted farther down in the story: this kind of panic buying is a sign of […]