Question The blog’s been taking a long time to open today because blogrolling.com, the site that maintains my blogroll is down (I’ve removed it for now.) The same thing happens whenever sitemeter is down, too. Is there some way to make the blog first load the background and the center table where the posts are, […]

PPI Data Today’s BLS release of PPI data for April show a 12-month increase in producer prices of 5.1%, thanks largely to higher energy prices. That’s the fastest annual PPI inflation that we’ve seen in a long time. (The one-month change in prices was 0.7%.) But I’ve said before that I think it’s more useful […]

Let’s Call It What It Is Take a look at the following opening sentence from an AP story on the crimes at Abu Ghraib: WASHINGTON – Fresh photos showing American soldiers brutalizing Iraqi prisoners with snarling dogs or forced sex left members of Congress angry and disgusted… Why beat around the bush? Why the careful […]

Campaign Fundraising The FEC is set to rule today on the legality of soft money-funded 527 issue groups that have been working to boost or blast one candidate or the other. Indications are that the FEC will decide to postpone their decision by another 90 days. Of course, that effectively means that they’re making a […]

The Abu Ghraib Prisoner’s Dilemma, Revisited If you will look to your right, you’ll see that I’ve added The Rumsfeld Wire, an application created by the DCCC that tracks blog posts relating to Abu Ghraib and/or removing Rumsfeld. Now, I think the Abu Ghraib scandal is a true scandal, and deserving of all the abhorrence […]

Read This Harsh C.I.A. Methods Cited in Top Qaeda Interrogations. The headline barely does justice to the content, about which you should be outraged (let Sen. Inhofe howl in outrage at your outrage.) AB UPDATE: Read this too, on Congressmembers’ reactions to seeing the still classified photos and videos from Abu Ghraib: “Hard on the […]

Data Roundup Some recent tidbits of economic data that I haven’t had time to comment on: The US trade deficit hit $46 billion in April. That’s a huge number. No one really knows how huge. I mean really, who actually can grasp how big a million is, much less a billion, much less 46 billion? […]

Now In Graph Form I thought the approval/disapproval numbers from the previous post might look nice in graphical form. Here is the result: Notice any trends? Interestingly, the recent sharp approval drop/dissaproval spike appears to be simply an acceleration of a pre-existing trend. AB

Waking Up and Smelling The Coffee But why did it take so long? President Bush’s overall approval rating has fallen to the lowest level of his presidency, 44 percent, in the latest CBS News poll, reflecting the weight of instability in Iraq on public opinion of Mr. Bush even as the economy shows signs of […]

Some Modestly Positive News Cisco is hiring: Cisco Systems’s announcement yesterday that it plans to hire 1,000 more workers is sure to bring throngs of out-of-work technology workers streaming into the city hoping that the company’s expansion, coupled with Google’s IPO, signals that the boom is officially on again. This is presumably an indication that […]