Sunset Magic An editorial in the Washington Post’s business section, by Newsweek’s Wall Street editor Allan Sloan, compares the purported $1.4 trillion 10-year deficit (which assumes that all sunsets actually do sunset) to the much more likely outcome in which Congress extends or makes permanent the various tax cuts currently scheduled to expire between 2008 […]

John Kerry I didn’t hear the whole speech, but CNN played excerpts from the parts of Kerry’s speech where he scathingly attacked Bush’s execution of the war in Iraq. At least in the excerpts, Kerry didn’t pull any punches. At one point, Kerry said that half of the names on the Vietnam Memorial were there […]

Bad News? I just overhead a reporter on CNN citing poll results indicating that 2/3 of Americans polled could not name a single Democratic presidential candidate. I’m not sure I believe that figure, but that’s what they said. If true, it’s moderately bad news I suppose. However, a larger portion of the half of Americans […]

Rice Watch Day 42 It’s been a while, so long that I almost abandoned the watch. Friday’s Slate has an interesting piece, Condi’s Phony History: Sorry, Dr. Rice, postwar Germany was nothing like Iraq, attacking the credibility of Rice’s comparison of Germany and Japan’s reconstruction to Iraq’s (“The Rice-Rumsfeld depiction of the Allied occupation of […]

Bush Quotes Forbes has a collection of Bush quotes about September 11th, starting on 9/11 and continuing to last week. For example, this quote: Sept 17, 2001 – “When I was a kid I remember … the ‘wanted’ poster. It said, ‘Wanted, Dead or Alive.’ All I want and America wants is to see them […]

Open Source Politics Kevin A. Hayden of ReachM High emailed me about a new 44 blogger blog called Open Source Politics. I’m traveling, so I haven’t had time to check it out yet, but with 44 bloggers there should be a steady stream of new content. It sounds like an interesting project, though there does […]

A Warning, Not a Manual Someone in the Office of Presidential Infallibility apparently doesn’t grasp the point of Orwell’s 1984. To wit, the revisionist insertion of “major” before the phrase “combat operations”; Rice’s incessant statement of facts that were known to be true before 1991 as if they were true in 2003; the “Program” program […]

Only a matter of time… I almost missed this little detail from the Washington Post: North Korea startled international diplomats yesterday by threatening to test a nuclear weapon in response to perceived hostility from the Bush administration, a U.S. official said after the second day of six-nation talks in Beijing on North Korea’s nuclear program. […]

Uh Oh… An article in this week’s Economist (subscription required to read the entire article) suggests that China may actually be getting closer to the point of revaluing the yuan than I thought when I wrote about this issue last week: Time to worry about China’s strong economy, not just its weak currency WHEN John […]

Iraq WMD Exaggerations: Casualty #1 It looks like Tony Blair’s right hand man (people call him Blair’s Karl Rove) is the first major political casualty of the Bush/Blair WMD exaggerations: LONDON (AP) — Prime Minister Tony Blair’s powerful communications chief, Alastair Campbell, a central figure in the controversy over whether Britain exaggerated Iraq’s weapons threat […]