Have We Passed the Cyclical Bottom? The CPI report for October was just released this morning. The core rate (which is the important rate to check if you want to understand the underlying trend in inflation) of consumer price inflation was up .2% last month. That means that the 12-month core CPI inflation rate edged […]

Bush to Comply with the WTO? Well, it looks like Bush may indeed lift the steel tariffs. Many (most?) of the relevant parties in the administration have wanted to lift them for some time, but now it may happen. To emphasize the point, Senator Charles Grassley (an unusually sensible Republican from Iowa who chairs the […]

Blogroll Down It looks like someone hacked Blogrolling.com to make it replace all links with a link to someone’s blog. To avoid promoting the hacker’s blog, links are now down until blogrolling fixes the problem. AB

Bush in the UK There’s surely lots of interesting stuff for bloggers of all stripes in Salon’s transcript of Bush’s interview with the BBC’s David Frost. But the following juxtaposition struck me as peculiar: On Iraq’s nonexistent biological weapons (page 2): “And David Kay found evidence of weapons programs. He found some biological weapons – […]

Clark 1, Russert 0 Appearing on Meet the Press with Tim Russert is basically mandatory for presidential candidates these days (though I think Bush will only do so again if he’s forced to do so by very close polls). Dean tried and didn’t do so well, though the attacks on his performance were largely unfair. […]

The Era of Big Government It’s been back since around early 2001, but here’s some more: Authors of the bill agreed to double the use of corn-based ethanol as a gasoline additive, a provision viewed as essential to building political support among farm state legislators. As part of that deal, producers of the additive MTBE, […]

Leader of The Free World Nice. In advance of his trip to London, the President found a publication worthy of an interview: Press secretary Scott McClellan broke the news yesterday with nonchalance. “Good morning,” he told reporters. “The president had his usual briefings this morning and just recently completed an interview with the Sun, for […]

Ketch-ing Up Or, Pouring Ketchup On An Over-cooked Campaign, or Ketchup Money to Help Campaign Catch Up, or some sort of bad pun involving Ketchup, money and catch up (bonus points if you can also work “kvetch” into the pun*): Unlike Dean and Bush, Kerry said he will put his own money into the campaign, […]

Those Partisan Relatives Relatives of people who perished in the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks say a federal commission accepted too many conditions in striking a deal with the White House over access to secret intelligence documents. The Family Steering Committee, a group of victims’ relatives monitoring the commission’s work, criticized the agreement announced late […]

Explanations for The Jobless Recovery Two of the world’s leading economists publicly discussed possible reasons for the jobless recovery in the past week. In a speech on November 6, Ben Bernanke, Governor of the Federal Reserve Board, articulated the argument that the main culprit is high productivity growth in the US. On the other hand, […]