Missed an Opportunity The initial reviews weren’t too bad, but the Times has a new story, Bush’s U.N. Speech Gets Scathing Reviews on Capitol Hill. Here are some highlights: Mr. Daschle, who is not running for president, continued: “He has now asked for $87 billion more. And I wish he would have made a stronger […]

UN Speech On balance, Bush’s speech was apparently not as aggressive as the advance billing suggested (as I previously) speculated would be the case. On the other hand, it wasn’t conciliatory either, and was sandwiched in between an obliquely critical speech by Annan (before) and a more direct critical statement by Chirac (after). Looking for […]

Another Great Deal I’m starting to detect a trend here: I put a book up in the right panel and within a few days, Salon starts offering a free copy of the book when you subscribe to Salon Premium. This time it’s a free copy of Ivins’ new book, Bushwhacked. AB

Hume and The Man Expect, insofar as people watched Brit Hume’s interview of Bush on Fox, Bush to get a bump in the otherwise southerly-trending polls. I watched only the last half hour, but Bush sounded about as smart and eloquent as I can imagine him ever sounding (note: this evaluation is relative to Bush’s […]

Real-world Howie should act more like semi-fictional Howie Howie Kurtz in a cameo in this week’s episode of K-Street: I’m not gonna launder your propaganda on this. And I thought laundering propaganda was his full time job. AB

Democratic Primary News First off, congrats to AB on hitting the 50,000 mark Monday! Second, here’s a piece of interesting and brand new Democratic primary news: Howard Dean’s campaign has put up “the bat” – i.e., their fundraising goal for the last 10 days of the quarter (which ends September 30). Their goal is pretty […]

Angry Bear Milestone If you look at the hit counter (it counts unique IPs per day, not page views) at the bottom of the left panel sometime between 9:00 and 11:00 a.m. on Monday, you should see a number in the 50,000s! I’ve been a “Large Mammal” on N.Z. Bear’s Blogosphere Ecosystem for a while […]

Texas Democrats: What Next? Charles Kuffner is collecting posts: Today a group of progressive Texas bloggers are all posting on the subject “What Texas Democrats Should Do Next”. The following is a link to everyone’s post for today’s blogburst, which will be updated through the day as they come in. Please take the time to […]

Repeat Formula In his latest budget, Bush proposed $8 billion in tax incentives aimed at domestic energy producers. The incentives take the form of accelerated depreciation and deferred taxation on new oil and gas exploration and pipeline capacity. While I’m ambivalent about the wisdom of that, there is at least a reasonable argument in favor: […]

Update on Steel Tariffs I’ve taken a close look at the ITC’s newly-released report on the impact of Bush’s steel tariffs (see my earlier post for more). Here are some selected bits of information that I’ve drawn from the report: – Since the tariffs caused the price of their biggest input (steel) to go up, […]