Cheese Monkey

NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF puts out 3 good ideas for improving the American democracy

2004-11-20T09:41:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Colmunist: No More Sham Elections:

"1. Have nonpartisan experts draw up boundaries for Congressional districts after each census. Both Republicans and Democrats have shamelessly drawn boundaries to serve their own needs, and that's one reason Congressional races are so uncompetitive. Normally, state legislatures do the redistricting, but Iowa and Arizona have handed the responsibility over to independent commissions.

2. Eliminate the Electoral College, so that the president is chosen by popular vote. This was seriously discussed as a constitutional amendment after the 1968 election, when George Wallace's third-party candidacy could have prevented Richard Nixon from receiving a majority of the electoral vote. And in this election, if just 21,000 voters had changed their votes in Nevada, New Mexico and Iowa, the electoral vote would have been tied and the choice of the president would have gone to the House.

'We don't run elections well enough to have clear winners that we all accept if it's really close,' said Rob Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy. 'I think if the winning side had been ahead by only 20,000 votes in Ohio, the losing side wouldn't have accepted it.'
It's time for America to develop the kind of full-fledged popular-vote democracy that is enjoyed by, say, the good people of Afghanistan.

3. Funnel campaign donations through a blind trust. The funkiest idea in politics is to make donations anonymous even to the recipient. Citizens would make contributions through a blind trust, so that candidates wouldn't know to whom they were beholden.

If officials don't know who their major contributors are, they can't invite them to spend the night in the Lincoln Bedroom or write tax loopholes. A donor might boast about having made a contribution, but special interests will realize they can save money by telling politicians that they have donated when they haven't, and then politicians will doubt these boasts."

Your Monkey thinks Joshua Micah Marshall says some very smart things

2004-11-15T17:36:00.000-05:00

Talking Points Memo: by Joshua Micah Marshall: November 07, 2004 - November 13, 2004 Archives:
"For years I've joked about Republicans who find themselves saying, wittingly or not, "Well, we've locked up the white racist vote. Now, if we could just get the blacks too, then we'd be cooking with gas!." As I wrote in an article in the late 90s, "The GOP's problem with minorities isn't incidental; it's fundamental. Any genuine effort to aid minorities or the poor would instantly alienate a substantial portion of the Republican base. It's an electoral bind, inexorable and fixed. The Republicans can't be the party of both black opportunity and anti-black resentment, no matter how big the tent. The Democrats tried it; it didn't work."

A similar logic applies to the urban vs. rural, modern vs. traditional cleavage that is so apparent in our politics today. I believe as fervently as anyone that the Democrats can't allow themselves to be seen as the party of irreligion. And Democrats must at least be competitive throughout the Midwest and Southwest, if not necessarily in the core states of the old Confederacy. But let's not be like the Jack Kemps of the GOP and forget the intensely dynamic nature of coalitional politics.

The Dems did not get 48% of the popular vote for nothing. They got it because of what they were clearly for and clearly against. 48% isn’t enough for the White House or enough to be the country’s majority party. But it’s nothing to sneeze at either. And many changes that would gain Democrats votes in the Red States would lose them votes or unity in the Blue ones.

This doesn’t mean Dems should just stand-pat or be satisfied with what they have. They shouldn’t; indeed, they can’t. It is only to say that there are real limits to how many positions and rhetorical styles Dems can ape to good effect. And it means having a little more respect for themselves, their voters and what they claim to believe in than to collapse into a puddle of self-doubt just because this election didn’t go their way."

BOB HERBERT on the pain of war

2004-11-12T22:28:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Death Comes Knocking: "As much as possible, the reality of war is kept at a distance from the American people, which is a shame. My own belief is that the pain of war should be much more widely shared. That would help guard us against wars that are unnecessary, and ensure a more collective effort in those that are inevitable."

2004-11-12T22:24:00.000-05:00

better late than never

Nothing, nothing, zippy zip to worry about these times!

2004-11-09T23:59:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF: Our Not-So-Free Press: "The Chinese government recently arrested Zhao Yan, a research assistant for The New York Times in Beijing, and the Bush administration has been very helpful about protesting the case. Maybe Colin Powell can work out a deal: the Chinese government will stop imprisoning journalists if the U.S. government will do the same.
Protecting confidential sources has been a sacred ethical precept in publishing ever since John Twyn was arrested in 1663 for printing a book that offended the king. Twyn refused to reveal the name of the book's author, so he was publicly castrated and disemboweled, and his limbs severed from his body. Each piece of his body was nailed to a London gate or bridge.
So, on the bright side, we have evidently progressed.
In May, Iran's secret police detained me in Tehran and demanded that I identify a revolutionary guard I had quoted as saying 'to hell with the mullahs.' My interrogators threatened to imprison me unless I revealed my source. But after a standoff, the Iranian goons let me go. Imprisoning Western journalists for protecting their sources was too medieval, even for them. Let's hope the U.S. judicial system shows the same restraint as those Iranian thugs. "

And W saw that all was well...

2004-11-05T22:42:00.000-05:00

If W Had Written the Declaration of Independence: "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and superior station to which the Laws of God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of Republican Christian U.S. citizens who are married heterosexually and who earn more than $200,000 a year requires that they should declare some of the causes which might possibly impell them to the separation or which might possibly trick the country and the world into supporting the separation."

Your Monkey also admits he was very wrong...

2004-11-04T22:45:00.000-05:00

James Wolcott: Anyone Know How to Make a Noose?: "It takes a big man to admit he's wrong, and although I'm not a big man, I can imitate one for purposes of this blog. I was wrong. Wrong in my hopes, my expectations, and my sense of where the country is. Writers I've mocked about the election and Bush's popular hold--Mark Steyn, Jonah Goldberg, Victor Davis In Excelsis Deo Hanson, et al--have earned their bragging rights, and they're welcome to them. No consolation was to be found last night and this morning. All of the exit polls, good omens (Red Sox winning the series), and previous indicators (such as the under-50-approval incumbent rule), and dramatic lifts (a recuperating Clinton hitting the campaign trail) meant a jot, whatever a jot is. Philip Roth's The Plot Against America is likely to seem like a documentary when the next four years are put through the wringer, and us with them. "

2004-11-04T18:26:00.000-05:00

More than a 1000 words...

Fafblog thinks I think the system is workin just fine.

2004-11-04T11:16:00.000-05:00

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.: "Silly Brad DeLong! This is a GREAT way to pick presidents! Presidents aren't sposed to be big smart compentent people who 'know stuff' and can 'solve problems'! The President is like America's Dad! He's there to comfort you on a stormy night when you've had a real bad dream, or be tough when your lunch money's been stolen by terrorists! When Osama bin Laden pushes you around during recess or a bully crashes a plane into the World Trade Center, you can always count on America's Dad to make you feel better by buyin you ice cream or by huggin a firefighter at Ground Zero!

A President is supposed to be a role model for the whole country, which is why he has to Uphold Family Values. Just like your dad, the President has to teach you right from wrong - 'Just Say No to drugs an sex an condoms in schools! Gay marriage? Not under my roof young man!' - which means the president needs strong moral fiber, which as nutritionists will tell you is plentiful in the South an the Midwest but is nowhere to be found in the barren an fiberless North.

That's why you wanna get a Southern governor! Southern governors have never been exposed to the evil corruption of Washington DC where nasty things like legislative an foreign policy experience would corrupt em an make em less American! Or a Midwesterner - they're made entirely of corn, which the most American thing ever!

Would you want your dad to be a grumpy ol Senator with borin ol Experience, or would you like him to be an inexperienced outsider with Good ol Heartland Values an whose wife bakes cookies for Jesus?"

General Glut translates GWB's acceptance speech

2004-11-04T11:04:00.000-05:00

General Glut's Globblog: "Thanks to our superior campaign tactics which have given the GOP not only the White House but an expanded margin in both the Senate and the House, we are entering a unique two-year window in which our party is for all practical purposes unaccountable and unassailable. Thus we'll continue with tax cuts. We'll eliminate the federal income tax and introduce a national sales tax in its place. We'll partially privatize Social Security. We'll continue eroding local control over public schools in favor of unfunded federal mandates. And we will pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage in all 50 states."

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN tells it like it is...

2004-11-04T10:00:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Two Nations Under God: "We don't just disagree on what America should be doing; we disagree on what America is.
Is it a country that does not intrude into people's sexual preferences and the marriage unions they want to make? Is it a country that allows a woman to have control over her body? Is it a country where the line between church and state bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers should be inviolate? Is it a country where religion doesn't trump science? And, most important, is it a country whose president mobilizes its deep moral energies to unite us - instead of dividing us from one another and from the world?
At one level this election was about nothing. None of the real problems facing the nation were really discussed. But at another level, without warning, it actually became about everything. Partly that happened because so many Supreme Court seats are at stake, and partly because Mr. Bush's base is pushing so hard to legislate social issues and extend the boundaries of religion that it felt as if we were rewriting the Constitution, not electing a president. I felt as if I registered to vote, but when I showed up the Constitutional Convention broke out.
The election results reaffirmed that. Despite an utterly incompetent war performance in Iraq and a stagnant economy, Mr. Bush held onto the same basic core of states that he won four years ago - as if nothing had happened. It seemed as if people were not voting on his performance. It seemed as if they were voting for what team they were on.
This was not an election. This was station identification. I'd bet anything that if the election ballots hadn't had the names Bush and Kerry on them but simply asked instead, 'Do you watch Fox TV or read The New York Times?' the Electoral College would have broken the exact same wa"

Kos urges Democrats to stay united in their fight

2004-11-03T13:31:00.000-05:00

Guardian Unlimited | US elections 2004 | Divide and rule ... for now: "The United States is a bitterly divided nation, at war with itself. Tuesday was merely one battle in a long-term war for the heart and soul of our nation. There will be the usual blather about unity and nonesuch, but the time for that is past. Bush has won himself four additional years to further inflict damage upon the world. Half of of the US public is not happy about that tonight.
In the meantime, we will be training our forces, re-evaluating our tactics, marshalling our strength, and, ultimately, keeping our eyes on the prize."

Brad DeLong thinks grown-up Repubs tried but failed to drag the Bush administration out of incompetence and ideology.

2004-11-02T18:02:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributors: The Revolution Will Be Posted: "Last winter a small group of moderate Republicans tried to dislodge Vice President Dick Cheney from the ticket. Reporters for The National Journal found senior Republicans trying to generate groundswells for Mr. Cheney's replacement by former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani of New York; Secretary of State Colin Powell; Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge; the national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice; or Bill Frist, the Senate majority leader.
The hope, I think, was that with Mr. Cheney out of the picture, Mr. Powell could then be the grand vizier for a 'reality-based' security policy, and somebody like the United States trade representative, Robert Zoellick, could then be the grand vizier for a 'reality-based' economic policy. Something similar had been accomplished in the 1980's, when James Baker, Howard Baker and George Shultz were given new responsibilities midway through the Reagan administration.
In the 1980's the moderate Republicans tried and succeeded. In 2004 they tried and failed. And with their failure died the chance to drag the Bush administration out of incompetence and ideology."

Back to the Civil War but why???

2004-11-01T16:00:00.000-05:00

Angry Bear: "I find the EV map above extraordinarily striking, for a reason wholly unrelated to the cautious optimism about a Kerry victory that it reflects. With the exceptions of Florida and Indiana (and maybe West Virginia), if my prediction is correct then we are essentially back in the US of 1860, politically: it's the Confederacy vs. the Union. Not being a political scientist, I'm unclear as to why those regional differences have reemerged again so clearly. I would have thought that after 100+ years of dramatic economic and demographic change the US could not be so simply divided along the exact same regional lines as it was during the Civil War."

Howard Dean was right

2004-11-01T15:51:00.000-05:00

Eschaton: "Ah, I remember when they jumped on Howard Dean for ruining their little party when he dared to point out that capturing Saddam wouldn't make the U.S. any safer. The more (but still hackish) honest pundits retreated to the criticism that 'well, sure, it may not make Americans at home any safer but it'll make our troops WHO ARE Americans [well, some aren't, but...] safer and how dare that nasty Hoho say otherwise.' Wrong again."

How desperate Karl Rove is...

2004-11-01T15:33:00.000-05:00

Via Kos: Yahoo! News - Misleading Calls Made to Michigan Voters: "In a recording of a phone call played for The Associated Press, a young woman says: 'When you vote this Tuesday remember to legalize gay marriage by supporting John Kerry. We need John Kerry in order to make gay marriage legal for our city. Gay marriage is a right we all want. It's a basic Democrat principle. It's time to move forward and be progressive. Without John Kerry, George Bush will stop gay marriage. That's why we need Kerry. So Tuesday, stand up for gay marriage by supporting John Kerry.' "

2004-11-01T13:13:00.000-05:00

"We create our own reality."

Fafblog! and Paul Krugman aggree

2004-11-01T12:45:00.000-05:00

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.: "'Is the revolution over?' says me. 'The people are gettin tired of it.'
'Nuts to the people!' says Giblets. 'They are counter-revolutionaries! They are fifth-columnists! They do not 'get' the revolution!'
'The revolution is tough to get,' says me. 'It's a pretty avant-garde revolution.'
'Very true,' says Giblets. 'All the more reason why it can only be run by us!'
'We haven't done such a bad job,' says me. 'Like everybody's always complainin about Central Food Rationing. But if we didn't do food rationin how else could we make people eat an eagle a day?'
'The central tenet of the revolution is freedom!' says Giblets. 'A whole eagle is like 100% of your recommended daily allowance of freedom right there!'
'An yknow cases of eagle-poisoning dropped a whole lot once we ran outta eagle!' says me.
'There ya go!' says Giblets. 'To say nothin of the great strength we showed in Operation Great Wall of Strength! Lesser revolutionaries would have defended the revolution by leavin the army at home. But we declared war on every country in the world before they could even decide they didn't like us!'
'My only complaint with that is that we didn't get enough allies on our side,' says me. 'If we had it to do over again I think we shoulda gotten a bigger coalition of other countries to invade themselves.'"

If that's not alarming, what is?

2004-11-01T12:42:00.000-05:00

The Revealer: If Hitler Was a Blogger: "What if you had a 'best blog contest' and Hitler won? Neo-Nazis will have to stick to wishful thinking and settle for second best: hate-spewing anti-Muslim blog Little Green Footballs won Washington Post's reader poll for 'best international blog' with bon mots about Palestinians and other Muslims such as 'I've been fond of transfer of these subhuman[s] for a while. Perhaps something more like targeted genocide... will become necessary' and 'How can these vermin have a country? How can these vermin be allowed to live?' It's a truism by now that liberals sling around Hitler accusations too loosely, but LGF quacks like a Nazi duck. Its win in the poll proves only that there was a campaign on its behalf, as there surely was for the all the 'liberal' blogs to the left of Goebbels. But the fact is that LGF is one of the most popular blogs on the web, one of the most popular conservative blogs, and stands unrepudiated by most other conservative bloggers. This is a big religion story, and it's a big political story, but it goes mostly unreported on the grounds that it's best to ignore raving wingnuts. That's fine -- until the wingnuts have gathered so many supporters that respectable conservatives are afraid to stand up to them. "

Karl Rove's nightmare

2004-10-29T09:57:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Paul Krugman: It's Not Just Al Qaqaa: "But worst of all from the right's point of view, Al Qaqaa has disrupted the campaign's media strategy. Karl Rove clearly planned to turn the final days of the campaign into a series of 'global test' moments - taking something Mr. Kerry said and distorting its meaning, then generating pseudo-controversies that dominate the airwaves. Instead, the news media have spent the last few days discussing substance. And that's very bad news for Mr. Bush."

Fafnir says there will be no draft

2004-10-20T14:12:00.000-05:00

Fafblog! the whole worlds only source for Fafblog.:
"Q: Is there an elephant in this room?
A: Of course not! How could we miss an elephant in the room? That's so crazy! You've been listening to crazy rumors about crazy elephants on the crazy internet, that's what we think.
Q: Then what's that huge gray animal in the corner with the large flappy ears and prehensile trunk surrounded by heaps of elephant feed, elephant dung, and a sign reading 'Do Not Touch The Elephant'?
A: That is an armadillo.
Q: An armadillo?
A: Armadillos can grow pretty big in the wild. You're probably used to seein the American armadillo, sometimes called the midget armadillo, which only grows to be about yea big. This is the African armadillo which keeps growin for most of its life.
Q: Well, it looks like an elephant.
A: Don't be silly! It's an armadillo! Here, look at this picture of an armadillo. Does that look like an elephant?
Q: That's a picture of an armadillo! It looks nothing like an elephant!
A: Well there you go! Now we're gonna go right over here an feed some elephant food to this armadillo."

Bush says that "we will not have an all-volunteer army."

2004-10-20T14:08:00.000-05:00

ShortNews - the News-Community

With opinion polls showing that most young voters think Bush would bring back the draft, Bush stated that voting for him is "the best way to avoid" it. Bush repeated that he opposes mandatory military service to an audience in Ohio.
Bush said: "We will not have an all-volunteer army. Let me restate that. We will not have a draft. The best way to avoid a draft is to vote for me." Bush accuses Kerry of playing politics with this issue and notes Kerry's vote against the $87 bill.
This weekend, Bush also showed up at a Florida stadium, wearing rock star clothing. As both candidates stump, lawyers on both sides are preparing to possible election challenges. A Bush lawyer says "days or weeks" could pass before we have a winner.

PK predicts the return of the draft...

2004-10-19T08:43:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Paul Krugman: Feeling the Draft: "[D]uring the third debate, Mr. Bush tried to minimize the issue, saying that the reservists being sent to Iraq 'didn't view their service as a backdoor draft. They viewed their service as an opportunity to serve their country.' In that case, why are they being forced, rather than asked, to continue that service?
The reality is that the Iraq war, which was intended to demonstrate the feasibility of the Bush doctrine, has pushed the U.S. military beyond its limits. Yet there is no sign that Mr. Bush has been chastened. By all accounts, in a second term the architects of that doctrine, like Paul Wolfowitz, would be promoted, not replaced. The only way this makes sense is if Mr. Bush is prepared to seek a much larger Army - and that means reviving the draft."

2004-10-18T21:44:00.000-05:00

Zoom me out!

MAUREEN DOWD at her best

2004-10-17T07:24:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Vote and Be Damned: "Mr. Bush derives his immutability from his faith. 'I believe that God wants everybody to be free,' he said in the last debate, adding that this was 'part of my foreign policy.'
In today's Times Magazine, Ron Suskind writes that Mr. Bush has created a 'faith-based presidency' that has riven the Republican Party.
Bruce Bartlett, a domestic policy adviser to Ronald Reagan and a Treasury official for the first President Bush, told Mr. Suskind that some people now look at Mr. Bush and see 'this instinct he's always talking about is this sort of weird, Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.' He continued: 'This is why George W. Bush is so clear-eyed about Al Qaeda and the Islamic fundamentalist enemy. He believes you have to kill them all. They can't be persuaded, that they're extremists, driven by a dark vision. He understands them, because he's just like them.'
The president's certitude - the idea that he can see into people's souls and that God tells him what is right, then W. tells us if he feels like it - is disturbing. It equates disagreeing with him to disagreeing with Him.
The conservative bishops' certitude - the idea that you can't be a good Catholic if you diverge from certain church-decreed mandates or if you want to keep your religion and politics separate - is also disturbing.
America is awash in selective piety, situational moralists and cherry-picking absolutists."

2004-10-15T15:26:00.000-05:00

Click on me too!

2004-10-15T15:18:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

Israel's Jaffee Center is shrill about Iraq's invasion

2004-10-15T12:22:00.000-05:00

Shrillblog: Israeli Think Tank Concludes Bush Administration Makes Terrorism Worse: "... Shlomo Brom, a retired Israeli army general, said the U.S.-led effort was strategically misdirected. If the goal in the war against terrorism is 'not just to kill the mosquitos but to dry the swamp,' he said, 'now it's quite clear' that Iraq 'is not the swamp.'
Instead, he said, the Iraq campaign is having the opposite effect, drawing Islamic extremists from other parts of the world to join the battle.
'On a strategic level as well as an operational level,' Brom concluded, 'the war in Iraq is hurting the war on international terrorism.' "

Why do they think "Dick Cheney's daughter is a lesbian" is shrill?

2004-10-15T12:09:00.000-05:00

Shrillblog: Eric Dezenhall Is Unclear On The Concept (A Plea For Tolerence And Understanding): "Were a major-party Presidential candidate to answer every debate question thus: 'Well, Bob, Aaaaaiiii. So, my fellow Americans, I say this to you now: ph'nglui mglw'nafh Krugman R'lyeh wagn'nagl fhtagn. Indeed, aaaiiiii. Aaaaiiii,' that would be 'very, very shrill.' But that didn't happen. True, some of John Khtherry's answers were shrillesque, some alluded to a certain shrillishness, and a few left the door open to ruinous speculation about black oceans of shrillness undulating madly in the putrescent bowels of his rotten and tenebrous soul. But the 'Mary Cheney's a lesbian' thing wasn't one of them. True shrillness derives from the mind- a soul-destroying contemplation of the mendacity, malevolence, incompetence and simple disconnection from reality of the Bush administration. I'm not sure what derives from a contemplation of Vice President Cheney's daughter's lesbianism, but it's got nothing to do with our dark order, that's for sure. "

And they say they want to spread democracy around the world...

2004-10-15T11:55:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Paul Krugman: Block the Vote: "Greg Palast, who originally reported the story of the 2000 felon list, reveals that few of those wrongly purged from the voting rolls in 2000 are back on the voter lists. State officials have imposed Kafkaesque hurdles for voters trying to get back on the rolls. Depending on the county, those attempting to get their votes back have been required to seek clemency for crimes committed by others, or to go through quasi-judicial proceedings to prove that they are not felons with similar names.
And officials appear to be doing their best to make voting difficult for those blacks who do manage to register. Florida law requires local election officials to provide polling places where voters can cast early ballots. Duval County is providing only one such location, when other counties with similar voting populations are providing multiple sites. And in Duval and other counties the early voting sites are miles away from precincts with black majorities.
Next week, I'll address the question of whether the votes of Floridians with the wrong color skin will be fully counted if they are cast. Mr. Palast notes that in the 2000 election, almost 180,000 Florida votes were rejected because they were either blank or contained overvotes. Demographers from the U.S. Civil Rights Commission estimate that 54 percent of the spoiled ballots were cast by blacks. And there's strong evidence that this spoilage didn't reflect voters' incompetence: it was caused mainly by defective voting machines and may also reflect deliberate vote-tampering.
The important point to realize is that these abuses aren't aberrations. They're the inevitable result of a Republican Party culture in which dirty tricks that distort the vote are rewarded, not punished. It's a culture that will persist until voters - whose"

THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN -Iraq war supporter- blasts GEORGE W. BUSH

2004-10-14T11:15:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Addicted to 9/11: "Lastly, politicizing 9/11 put a wedge between us and our history. The Bush team has turned this country into 'The United States of Fighting Terrorism.' 'Bush only seems able to express our anger, not our hopes,' said the Mideast expert Stephen P. Cohen. 'His whole focus is on an America whose role in the world is to negate the negation of the terrorists. But America has always been about the affirmation of something positive. That is missing today. Beyond Afghanistan, they've been much better at destruction than construction.'
I wish Mr. Kerry were better able to articulate how America is going to get its groove back. But the point he was raising about wanting to put terrorism back into perspective is correct. I want a president who can one day restore Sept. 11th to its rightful place on the calendar: as the day after Sept. 10th and before Sept. 12th. I do not want it to become a day that defines us. Because ultimately Sept. 11th is about them - the bad guys - not about us. We're about the Fourth of July."

The force of foresight is strong with Pauk Krugman

2004-10-14T00:01:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Checking the Facts, in Advance: "By singling out Mr. Bush's lies and misrepresentations, am I saying that Mr. Kerry isn't equally at fault? Yes.
Mr. Kerry sometimes uses verbal shorthand that offers nitpickers things to complain about. He talks of 1.6 million lost jobs; that's the private-sector loss, partly offset by increased government employment. But the job record is indeed awful. He talks of the $200 billion cost of the Iraq war; actual spending is only $120 billion so far. But nobody doubts that the war will cost at least another $80 billion. The point is that Mr. Kerry can, at most, be accused of using loose language; the thrust of his statements is correct.
Mr. Bush's statements, on the other hand, are fundamentally dishonest. He is insisting that black is white, and that failure is success. Journalists who play it safe by spending equal time exposing his lies and parsing Mr. Kerry's choice of words are betraying their readers."

Is there a significant difference between "not worried" and "not that concerned"?

2004-10-13T23:24:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Bush Lies Out of the Starting Gate...: "BUSH (October 13, 2004): 'I don't think I ever said I wasn't worried about Osama bin Laden. It's one of those... exaggerations...'
BUSH (March 2003): 'Well, deep in my heart, I know the man is on the run if he's alive at all.... [H]e's a person who's now been marginalized. His network is -- his host government has been destroyed. He's the ultimate parasite who found weakness, exploited it, and met his match.... So I don't know where he is. You know, I just don't spend that much time on him, Kelly, to be honest with you. . . . I truly am not that concerned about him."

Vive le First Amendement!

2004-10-11T18:17:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS | Technology | US seizes independent media sites: "The FBI has shut down some 20 sites which were part of an alternative media network known as Indymedia.
A US court order forced the firm hosting the material to hand over two servers in the UK used by the group.
Indymedia says it is a news source for the anti-globalisation movement and other social justice issues.
The reasons behind the seizure are unclear but the FBI has reportedly said the action was taken at the request of Italian and Swiss authorities."

2004-10-11T17:43:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

Economists flank Bush

2004-10-11T17:01:00.000-05:00

The times they are changin'

Angry Bear: "[T]he center-right British magazine, The Economist, sent surveys to 100 academic economists ('We chose their names, at random, from among the referees of the American Economic Review, one of the profession's more prestigious publications.') of their views of Bush's handling of the economy; 56 responded:

More than 70% of the 56 professors who responded to our survey rate Mr Bush's first-term economic policies as bad or very bad. Fewer than 20% give positive marks to Mr Bush's second-term economic agenda, and almost six out of ten disapproved. Mr Kerry hardly got rave reviews either, but his economic plan still fared better than the president's did. In all, four out of ten professors rated Mr Kerry's economic plan as good or very good, but 27% gave it negative scores."

2004-10-11T16:14:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

2004-10-10T20:48:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

Was the president wired during the first debate?

2004-10-10T19:40:00.000-05:00

Salon.com News | Bush's mystery bulge: "Was President Bush literally channeling Karl Rove in his first debate with John Kerry? That's the latest rumor flooding the Internet, unleashed last week in the wake of an image caught by a television camera during the Miami debate. The image shows a large solid object between Bush's shoulder blades as he leans over the lectern and faces moderator Jim Lehrer.
The president is not known to wear a back brace, and it's safe to say he wasn't packing. So was the bulge under his well-tailored jacket a hidden receiver, picking up transmissions from someone offstage feeding the president answers through a hidden earpiece? Did the device explain why the normally ramrod-straight president seemed hunched over during much of the debate? "

Political Wire: Bush's Bulge: "The Votemaster isolated a similar image: 'I obtained a copy of the debate video and the Red Hawk image intensification software (developed for NASA), which combines multiple images into a sharper image and then had the contrast enhanced with Photoshop. Other than cropping and resizing of the image, no other manipulation was done. I stand 100% behind the fact that this image was taken from the debate video, independently confirming the Salon.com photo, but interpretation is up to you.'"

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Daily Kos :: Was Bush wearing an earpiece?: "Note, the debate rules, at the Bush campaign's urging, specifically forbid shots of the candidates' backs. "

History will judge Bush and Blair harshly

2004-10-10T15:50:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Former UN arms inspectors slam Bush, Blair after weapons report: "In separate comments in The Independent on Sunday, Hans Blix, the former UN chief arms inspector until the US-British invasion in March 2003, and Scott Ritter, a senior inspector in Iraq from 1991 to 1998, backed a US official report concluding Iraq had no banned weapons before the war.
The authors of that report, although Bush appointees, 'have had to acknowledge that the reality on the ground was totally different from the virtual reality that had been spun', Blix wrote.
Charles Duelfer, who headed the Iraq Survey Group, said in the 1,000-page report released Wednesday that Saddam had destroyed most of his chemical and biological weapons after his 1991 Gulf War defeat and that his nuclear program had 'progressively decayed'.
Duelfer said the Iraqi leader had however hoped to renew his weapons quest if sanctions were lifted -- and both Blair and Bush have rushed to use that to argue their pre-emptive strike was necessary.
'This is the new straw to which the governments concerned have begun to cling', Blix wrote.
A former Swedish foreign minister who led the UN hunt for banned chemical and biological weapons in Iraq, Blix said that in fact 'the world succeeded in disarming Saddam (Hussein) without knowing it'.
He questioned whether, as the Duelfer report recommends, UN inspectors would be allowed to carry out their work 'in future cases, when supervision and verification will be needed, for example, in Iran, Libya and North Korea '.
Ritter, too, said Bush and Blair were "scrambling to re-justify" the war now that the banned weapons argument no longer held water, with claims they have made the world safer.
But Ritter charged that history would judge the leaders harshly for making the world a worse place by flouting international law and creating chaos in Iraq.
He said "the world's two greatest democracies" had undermined the legal framework of the United Nations (news - web sites) set up after World War II at exactly the time when the world needed multilateralism most, to fight a global war on terror."

W. didn't fix his father's screw-up, but he screwed up his father's fix...

2004-10-10T10:58:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > MAUREEN DOWD: Nuclear Fiction: "Even though his own report stated that U.N. sanctions had worked to defang Saddam, Mr. Bush decided to stand firm on nonsense, insisting in the debate Friday night that 'sanctions were not working. The United Nations was not effective at removing Saddam Hussein.'
When a questioner named Linda asked the president to give three bum decisions he had made in office, Mr. Bush took a pass. Lincoln could admit mistakes. J.F.K. could admit mistakes. But W. thinks admitting mistakes is for powder puffs. Of his decision to invade Iraq, he said: 'Sometimes in this world you make unpopular decisions because you think they're right.' Or you stick to them even after you know they're wrong.
The president's living in a dream world. He kept insisting that 75 percent of Al Qaeda has been 'brought to justice,' even though such a statistic is misleading, since counterterrorism experts say that the invasion of Iraq was a recruiting boon for Osama and that Al Qaeda has metastasized and spawned other terrorist groups.
Mr. Bush tried to pretend the devastating Duelfer report backed him up, noting after the report came out that Saddam 'retained the knowledge, the materials, the means and the intent to produce weapons of mass destruction and could have passed this knowledge to our terrorist enemies.'
W. should have followed his father's policy on hypotheticals. As Poppy Bush would say, when someone asked him to be speculative: 'If a frog had wings, it wouldn't bump its tail on the ground.' "

Is this a function of the age we live in or perhaps is it something more insidious?

2004-10-10T00:48:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > The Promise of the First Amendment: "So, unless an appeals court reverses last week's contempt conviction, Judy Miller will soon be sent to prison. And, if the government succeeds in obtaining the phone records of Ms. Miller and Mr. Shenon, many of their sources - even those having nothing to do with these two government investigations - will become known.
Why does all of this matter? The possibility of being forced to leave one's family and sent to jail simply for doing your job is an appalling prospect for any journalist - indeed, any citizen. But as concerned as we are with our colleague's loss of liberty, there are even bigger issues at stake for us all.
The press simply cannot perform its intended role if its sources of information - particularly information about the government - are cut off. Yes, the press is far from perfect. We are human and make mistakes. But, the authors of our Constitution and its First Amendment understood all of that and for good reason prescribed that journalists should function as a 'fourth estate.' As Justice Potter Stewart put it, the primary purpose of the constitutional guarantee of a free press was 'to create a fourth institution outside the government as an additional check on the three official branches.'"

The Libural Media

2004-10-09T20:19:00.000-05:00

ScrappleFace: Radio Station Conglomerates Ban Kerry Songs: "Big media companies today ordered hundreds of their radio stations to drop all songs by Sen. John Kerry from their playlists.

In a move reminiscent of the ban on Dixie Chicks music, Cox Communications and Cumulus Media sent a memo directing their stations to 'cut Kerry now.'

The command comes just hours after the Sen. Kerry, who has served as a Vietnam Vet for three decades, implied that the President Bush is lying to troops, allies and the American people."

2004-10-09T16:17:00.000-05:00

Kayti Didriksen's Man of Leisure, King George

Orwellian times

2004-10-08T08:57:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > By PAUL KRUGMAN: Ignorance Isn't Strength: "How did the occupation of Iraq go so wrong? (The security situation has deteriorated to the point where there are no safe places: a bomb was discovered on Tuesday in front of a popular restaurant inside the Green Zone.)
The insulation of officials from reality is central to the story. They wanted to believe Ahmad Chalabi's promises that we'd be welcomed with flowers; nobody could tell them different. They wanted to believe - months after everyone outside the administration realized that we were facing a large, dangerous insurgency and needed more troops - that the attackers were a handful of foreign terrorists and Baathist dead-enders; nobody could tell them different.
Why did the economy perform so badly? Long after it was obvious to everyone outside the administration that the tax-cut strategy wasn't an effective way of creating jobs, administration officials kept promising huge job gains, any day now. Nobody could tell them different.
Why has the pursuit of terrorists been so unsuccessful? It has been obvious for years that John Ashcroft isn't just scary; he's also scarily incompetent. But inside the administration, he's considered the man for the job - and nobody can say different.
The point is that in the real world, as opposed to the political world, ignorance isn't strength. A leader who has the political power to pretend that he's infallible, and uses that power to avoid ever admitting mistakes, eventually makes mistakes so large that they can't be covered up. And that's what's happening to Mr. Bush."

What this election is really about...

2004-10-08T00:33:00.000-05:00

The Independent Weekly: With trembling fingers by HAL CROWTHER: "I don't think it's accurate to describe America as polarized between Democrats and Republicans, or between liberals and conservatives. It's polarized between the people who believe George Bush and the people who do not. Thanks to some contested ballots in a state governed by the president's brother, a once-proud country has been delivered into the hands of liars, thugs, bullies, fanatics and thieves. The world pities or despises us, even as it fears us. What this election will test is the power of money and media to fool us, to obscure the truth and alter the obvious, to hide a great crime against the public trust under a blood-soaked flag. The most lavishly funded, most cynical, most sophisticated political campaign in human history will be out trolling for fools. I pray to God it doesn't catch you. "

What kind of complete idiots does Cheney think Americans are?

2004-10-07T22:33:00.000-05:00

Angry Bear: "MIAMI - Vice President Dick Cheney asserted on Thursday that a finding by the chief U.S. weapons inspector in Iraq that Saddam Hussein's government produced no weapons of mass destruction after 1991 justifies rather than undermines President Bush's decision to go to war.

The report shows that 'delay, defer, wait wasn't an option,' Cheney told a town hall-style meeting."

More good news!

2004-10-07T16:22:00.000-05:00

Eschaton: "

AP says Kerry ahead:

Among 944 likely voters, the Kerry-Edwards ticket led Bush-Cheney 50 percent to 46 percent. The Oct. 4-6 survey had a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.

...

Bush and Kerry are considered equally likable, after Bush's ratings went down and Kerry's went up for an 11-point swing. "

2004-10-07T13:44:00.000-05:00

Power to the People - John Lennon

The Floridazation of America

2004-10-07T10:56:00.000-05:00

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The Washington Monthly: "Check the box for John Kerry, and it's really a vote for George Bush.
Of course, this is made up for by the fact that Kerry is going to receive all of David Cobb's votes.
Plus the fact that lots of Bush voters are just going to be completely confused.
So is Michigan the new Florida? Will this end up hurting Kerry or Bush the worst? And will whoever approved this ballot get fired?"

How can all this be Clinton's fault?

2004-10-07T10:52:00.000-05:00

The Poor Man: Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before ...: "I know this is about the billionth time these same stories have been reported as news. I know how annoying this is to keep hearing this, as if we didn't all know this a year ago. Believe me, I know. But just try to imagine how annoying this is for Bush supporters. Imagine how annoying it is to, yet again, have all your beloved myths - the ones you really believed, the ones all your mosted trusted bloggers and talk radio hosts and FOX News personalities assured you were the God's honest truth, the ones which you whipped yourself into a righteous fury in defense of so many times - exploded on the front page of every newspaper in the land. Again. Imagine what it must be like to be in a position like that, realizing that Cheney and Hannity and Wing Commander Reynolds all their little patsies are just lying to your face, and playing you for a total chump, again. There's only so much cognitive dissonance that the human mind can take before it rebels. There's got to be point which it just becomes too much - too much humiliation, too much hypocrisy, too much dishonesty. And when that point is reached, they are all going to take a step back, and look with new eyes on themselves, and on the world, and really, really, really start trying to figure out how this is all Clinton's fault."

Business Professors are Shrill about Bush's record on the economy

2004-10-06T14:51:00.000-05:00

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MaxSpeak, You Listen!: BUSINESS SCHOOL
PROFESSORS TO BUSH:
YOUR POLICIES STINK: "Sensible and farsighted economic management requires true discipline, compassion, and courage - not just slogans. Given the tenuous state of the American economy, we believe that the time for an honest assessment of the problem and for genuine corrective action is now. Ignoring the fiscal crisis that has taken hold during your presidency may seem politically appealing in the short run, but we fear it could ultimately prove disastrous. From a policy standpoint, the clear message is that more of the same won't work. The warning signs are already visible, and it is incumbent upon all of us to pay attention."

Brad DeLong puzzled by our libural press...

2004-10-06T11:19:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: The Administration Process: "How does something like Richard Cheney's totally false declaration that he had never met John Edwards before happen? And how does it happen that this morning--a could nine hours after it is widely known that Cheney's statement is false--Bush Campaign Manager Ken Mehlman's can write that his very favorite moment of the debate was when Cheney said, 'I'm up in the Senate most Tuesdays when they're in session. The first time I ever met you was when you walked on the stage tonight'?
There seem to be three possibilities for the first mistake:
Cheney ad-libbed it: it seemed like a good idea at the time, and his memory for faces was never particularly good and is not what it once was.
Cheney said it in practice, but nobody thought, 'Hmmm. This is one of the 150 most powerful people in Washington. It's unlikely Cheney has never met him. Let's check this out via Google.'
Cheney said it in practice, and people thought about checking it out, but decided, 'Hmmm. If I bring Cheney the bad news that he has met Edwards, I'll get blasted. Better to be quiet here.'
For Mehlman's mistake, there are only two possibilities:
Nobody told Mehlman that Cheney made a big mess on the carpet--either because nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news or nobody thinks of keeping Mehlman in the loop.
Mehlman decided that the press corps is supine enough that the best strategy is brazening it out.
In none of these cases would one be likely to have confidence in the ability of this crew to organize a latrine-cleaning task force... "

Bush's lead narrowing a lot - 2 debates to go!

2004-10-06T11:16:00.000-05:00

Prez track 2004: "Tuesday October 05, 2004--The latest Rasmussen Reports Presidential Tracking Poll shows President George W. Bush with 48% of the vote and Senator John Kerry with 47%."

Hilarious!

2004-10-06T10:04:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.:

"Cheney urged the audience to go to FactCheck.com to get the 'truth'.
Turns out that FactCheck.com is a George Soros site.
He probably meant FactCheck.org, which is a non-partisan site. But even if he meant that, look at the top headline from the site:

Bush Mischaracterizes Kerry's Health Plan
Bush claims Kerry's plan puts 'bureaucrats in control' of medical decisons, 'not you, not your doctor.' But experts don't agree with that."

Even better news about uncommitted voters

2004-10-05T22:56:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Edwards-Cheney: General Reactions: "*** PRELIMINARY RESULTS - UPDATES TO COME ***
CBS News tracked the reactions to tonight's vice-presidential debate of a nationwide panel of 169 uncommitted voters - voters who could change their minds before Election Day. Here are the initial results. This scientific poll has a margin of error of plus or minus 7 percentage points:
* By 41% to 29%, uncommitted debate watchers say Edwards won the debate tonight. 30% say it was a tie.
* 31% of these uncommitted voters say their opinion of Cheney has changed for the better as a result of the debate. 14% say they have a lower opinion of the Vice President after tonight. 55% did not change their views of Cheney.
* 48% of these uncommitted voters say their opinion of Edwards has changed for the better as a result of the debate. 15% say they have a lower opinion of Edwards after tonight. 36% did not change their opinion of Edwards."

Yet an other point eaten back...

2004-10-05T22:53:00.000-05:00

Daily Kos :: Political Analysis and other daily rants on the state of the nation.: "ABC News:
ABC News poll, 509 interviews +/- 4.5
Who won?
(among debate viewers)
Cheney 43%
Edwards 35%
Tie 19%
Vote preference among debate viewers
Before the debate After the debate
Bush/Cheney 51% 50%
Kerry/Edwards 48% 49%
Nader/Camejo <1% 0%

Party ID of debate viewers
Democrats 31%
Republicans 38
Independents 27

This poll may have given Cheney the edge, but his ticket lost support. "

Brad DeLong calls Pfizer, Merck, Tommy Thompson and Mark McClellan liars

2004-10-05T14:56:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: Importing Drugs From Canada: "If you listen to drug companies like Pfizer or Merck or to Bush administration health policy officials like Tommy Thompson or Mark McClellan or to congressional leaders like Bill Frist, you will hear that it is absolutely necessary to ban drug imports from Canada in order to protect Americans from adulterated or poisoned medicines.
They are lying.
Tony Pugh of Knight Ridder Newspapers asked the Food and Drug Administration for examples of Americans who had been harmed by pharmaceuticals imported from Canada. 'I can't think of one thing off the top of my head where somebody died or somebody got put in the hospital because of these medications. I just don't know if there's anything like that,' Tom McGinnis, the FDA's director of pharmacy affairs, told him.
Health Canada reported that it 'does not have any information that would indicate that any Americans have become ill or have died as a result of taking prescription medications purchased from Canada.' Even Peter Rost, Pfizer's vice president for marketing, says he is tired of hearing colleagues say drug imports from Canada are unsafe: 'The safety issue is a made-up story,' he said. "

2004-10-05T12:30:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

Incompetence or Lies?

2004-10-05T12:27:00.000-05:00

Angry Bear:

"Paul Bremer, July 2003, on Meet the Press:

Tim Russert: Have you asked Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld for more American troops?

Ambassador Paul Bremer: No, I have not. I expressed --

Tim Russert: Do we need more?

Ambassador Paul Bremer: I do not believe we do. I think the military commanders are confident we have enough troops on the ground, and I accept that analysis.

Paul Bremer, October 2004:

We never had enough troops on the ground."

Edward's mission tonight

2004-10-05T08:43:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > PAUL KRUGMAN
: The Falling Scales: "In tonight's debate, John Edwards will surely confront Mr. Cheney over that task force, over domestic policies and, of course, over Halliburton. But he can also use the occasion to ask more hard questions about national security.
After all, Mr. Cheney didn't just promise Americans that 'we will, in fact, be welcomed as liberators' by the grateful Iraqis. He also played a central role in leading us to war on false pretenses.
No, that's not an overstatement. In August 2002, when Mr. Cheney declared 'we now know Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons,' he was being dishonest: the administration knew no such thing. He was also being irresponsible: his speech pre-empted an intelligence review that might have given dissenting experts a chance to make their case.
So here's Mr. Edwards's mission: to expose the real Dick Cheney, just as Mr. Kerry exposed the real George Bush. "

Gaps In Bush's Service - When Humor is more Informative than most of the Press

2004-10-04T16:43:00.000-05:00

The Onion | Documents Reveal Gaps In Bush's Service As President: "We originally invoked the Freedom Of Information Act to request material relating to Bush's spotty record while in office,' CIS director Catherine Rocklin said. 'But then we realized that the information was readily available at the corner newsstand, on the Internet, and from our friends and neighbors who pay attention to the news.'
According to Rocklin, the most damning documents were generated at roughly one-day intervals during a period beginning in January 2001 and ending this week. The document's sources include, but are not limited to, the U.S. newspaper The New York Times, the London-based Economist magazine, and the well-known international business and finance record, The Wall Street Journal.
'Factual data presented in these publications indicates that Bush took little or no action on issues as widely varied as the stalled economy, increasing violence in post-war Iraq, and the lagging public education system,' Rocklin said. 'The newsprint documents also reveal huge disparities between the ways Bush claimed to have served Medicare patients, and what he actually did.'
Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards said he was not surprised by the report."

The hatefest effect is over...

2004-10-04T16:25:00.000-05:00

Bloomberg.com: Top Worldwide: "Overall, 49 percent of the 725 registered voters who watched the debate said in the Los Angeles Times poll that they would cast ballots for Kerry, and 47 percent would choose Bush. In the Newsweek poll, 47 percent of 1,013 registered voters said they would pick Kerry if the election were held now and 45 percent said Bush. "

2004-10-04T12:35:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

Why did Kerry leave out Poland?

2004-10-04T12:27:00.000-05:00

Channelnewsasia.com: "Poland said that it aims to withdraw all of its 2,500 troops from Iraq during the course of next year, a major disappointment for Washington which sees Warsaw as one of its staunchest allies in Iraq.

Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski said Monday after talks in Paris that no firm date to complete the withdrawal had been decided yet, but that Poland hoped 'to finish our mission at the end of 2005.'

Poland is the fourth largest troop contributor to the US-led coalition in Iraq, but there is strong popular opposition at home to the deployment."

Bush vs. Reality

2004-10-04T11:22:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > BOB HERBERT
: "Mr. Bush got his big bounce in the public opinion polls from the Swift boat nonsense and the mocking, nonstop criticism of Senator Kerry at the Republican National Convention. Those were distractions from the real world. But reality cannot be kept at bay indefinitely. Readers of The Washington Post got a disturbing dose of it yesterday from a front-page article about the strain being put on the overloaded systems of veterans' disability benefits and health care by the thousands of American troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan with physical injuries and mental health problems.
The article noted that 'President Bush's budget for 2005 calls for cutting the Department of Veterans Affairs staff that handles benefits claims.'
A staff sergeant who was paralyzed in a mortar attack near Baghdad was quoted as saying: 'I love the military; that was my life. But I don't believe they're taking care of me now.'
The real world is President Bush's Achilles' heel. He can't keep his distance from it forever. "

What's causing the degeneration in George W. Bush's speaking ability?

2004-10-03T17:59:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: James Fallows Is Puzzled: "There appear to be four possible theories to explain Bush's deterioration--both long run (since 1994) and short run (since 2000):
George Lakoff's theory: it's deliberate--these daya George W. Bush wants to sound more like John Wayne.
Kate O'Beirne's theory: George W. Bush is out of practice, because nobody has dared contradict him to his face for four years.
The 'worried man' theory: George W. Bush knows he has messed up badly, and is scared, and it shows.
The 'organic brain damage' theory: something is going badly wrong inside George W. Bush's brain--perhaps the result of lots of substance abuse in his youth.
A quick bounce-back next debate would be evidence in favor of (1) or (2). A similar extremely poor performance would be evidence in favor of (3) or (4). "

Bush's application to the Ancient Order of the Shrill rejected when obvious error discovered.

2004-10-02T10:45:00.000-05:00

Shrillblog: "Bush's application to the order was accidentally processed but subsequently rejected when the obvious error was discovered. We apologize to Mr. Bush for raising his hopes only to dash them--but rules are rules and we here at the processing division of The Order have to abide by the edicts set forth since time immemorial. You don't get to be a venerable organization steeped in ancient tradition by letting things slide even a little bit. We feel sure that he understands, but we ask that he please accept our deepest regrets. We now return to your regularly scheduled impenetrable Lovecraftian incantations. "

2004-10-01T14:37:00.000-05:00

Any resemblance with how the pundits are judging Kerry's outstanding performance...

Paul Krugman makes a prediction

2004-10-01T10:11:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: America's Lost Respect: "What we need is an effort to regain our good name. What we're getting instead is a provision, inserted by Congressional Republicans in the intelligence reform bill, to legalize 'extraordinary rendition' - a euphemism for sending terrorism suspects to countries that use torture for interrogation. This would institutionalize a Kafkaesque system under which suspects can be sent, at the government's whim, to Egypt or Syria or Jordan - and to fight such a move, it's up to the suspect to prove that he'll be tortured on arrival. Just what we need to convince other countries of our commitment to the rule of law.
Most Americans aren't aware of all this. The sheer scale of Mr. Bush's foreign policy failures insulates him from its political consequences: voters aren't ready to believe how badly the war in Iraq is going, let alone how badly America's moral position in the world has deteriorated.
But the rest of the world has already lost faith in us. In fact, let me make a prediction: if Mr. Bush gets a second term, we will soon have no democracies left among our allies - no, not even Tony Blair's Britain. Mr. Bush will be left with the support of regimes that don't worry about the legalities - regimes like Vladimir Putin's Russia. "

Even Andrew Sullivan thinks Kerry won this debate

2004-10-01T00:23:00.000-05:00

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www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "KERRY'S MANNER: It was, as I hoped, an enlightening debate. No, it didn't include any real logical breakthrough and on the issues, I found myself agreeing more with Bush than Kerry. But from the very beginning, Kerry achieved something important. In tone and bearing, he seemed calm, authoritative, and, yes, presidential. I watched the C-SPAN version on a split screen, and in that context, it was particularly striking. In stark contrast to the Bush-Gore debates, it was Bush who was grimacing, furrowing his brow, almost rolling his eyes and at the very beginning, looking snippy and peevish. He seemed defensive throughout and because his record was front and center - and Kerry's long record in the Senate almost unmentioned - he was actually on the defense. He seemed physically smaller and more mobile than Kerry - and more emotionally alive. Their voices were contrasts too. I can see now for the first time why Kerry has a good reputation as a debater. It wasn't, I think, because he debated well. In fact, he debated poorly. He failed time and again to go in for obvious kills, failed to do what he really should have done, which is skewer Bush's conduct of the war, not his decision to launch it in the first place. But his tone was strong, clear, unwavering. And in some ways, this was critical to undermining Bush's constant assertion that Kerry is weak, vague and inconstant. In fact, Kerry didn't have to prove logically that this was the case (which would be hard to do); he undermined it merely by his tone and manner. For many people, who have only heard of Kerry from Bush ads or sound-bites or from droning campaign speeches, it will be the first time that Kerry seems strong. In the simple, symbolic man-versus-man contrast, Kerry often seemed bigger. That strikes me as a big deal. "

The even Andrew Sullivan series continues

2004-10-01T00:10:00.000-05:00

www.AndrewSullivan.com - Daily Dish: "JUST ONE THING: (Much, much more soon). No president who has presided over Abu Ghraib should ever say he wants to put anyone on a leash. That's all. Stay tuned."

Unpaid Advertisement

2004-09-30T16:35:00.000-05:00

The Onion | America's Finest News Source: "Report: Iraq War Keeping Thousands Out Of Unemployment Line
WASHINGTON, DC-A Department of Labor report praised the positive effect the Iraq War has had on the strained U.S. job market, Secretary of Labor Elaine Chao said Monday. 'A whopping 140,000 U.S. citizens are gainfully employed as military personnel in Iraq,' Chao said. 'The war is not just keeping these young men and women out of the unemployment lines, but it's also teaching them such valuable skills as operating radar equipment, driving an M1A1 Abrams battle tank, or bagging and tagging bodies.' Chao said that most troops won't need to look for new work for another four to seven years."

John Eisenhower has joined the Ancient Order of the Shrill

2004-09-30T16:26:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Son of GOP President Supports Kerry: "'The fact is that today's 'Republican' Party is one with which I am totally unfamiliar. To me, the word 'Republican' has always been synonymous with the word 'responsibility,' which has meant limiting our governmental obligations to those we can afford in human and financial terms.
'Today's whopping budget deficit of some $440 billion does not meet that criterion,' Eisenhower wrote.
Eisenhower, a former U.S. ambassador to Belgium and author, was a registered Republican for 50 years � until the Bush administration's decision to invade Iraq 'as a maverick,' he wrote.
'Recent developments indicate that the current Republican Party leadership has confused confident leadership with hubris and arrogance,' he wrote.
Eisenhower scolded the Republican leadership for embracing a tax code that 'heads us in the direction of a society of very rich and very poor.'
'Senator Kerry, in whom I am willing to place my trust, has demonstrated that he is courageous, sober, competent, and concerned with fighting the dangers associated with the widening socio-economic gap in this country,' he concluded. "

The Bushies Outdo the Onion

2004-09-30T12:21:00.000-05:00

Yahoo! News - Lynne Cheney Jokes About Kerry's Tan: "DULUTH, Minn. - Something about Sen. John Kerry's darker appearance has caught Lynne Cheney's eye.

During a campaign stop with her husband, a group of volunteers moved into the crowd with microphones for the question-and-answer period. Vice President Dick Cheney told supporters to look for the people with dark orange shirts.
When Cheney paused as if searching for the words to describe the shade of orange, Lynne Cheney said, 'How about John Kerry's suntan?'
The remark drew a big laugh from the crowd and the vice president.
Responding to her comments, Kerry campaign spokesman Bill Burton said, 'Is Mrs. Cheney jealous considering how hard it is to get sun in the undisclosed location with her husband Dick? Or is she distracted over how red-in-the-face George Bush should be considering his failed presidency?' "

2004-09-30T08:54:00.000-05:00

Click on me!

2004-09-29T21:00:00.000-05:00

Child prodigy wows NY (BBC)

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Child art prodigy wows New York: "A four-year-old girl is wowing the New York art world with paintings that are drawing comparisons with Jackson Pollock and Wassily Kandinsky. "

Israel will never seize to puzzle your monkey

2004-09-29T20:56:00.000-05:00

Uri Avnery's News Pages: " The Interior Ministry lists 140 recognized nations which its officers can register. This includes not only established nations ("Russian", "German", "French" etc.) but also "Christian", "Muslim", "Druze" and more. The "nation" of an Arab citizen of Israel, for example, may be recorded as "Arab", "Christian" or "Catholic" (but not "Palestinian" - the Interior Ministry is not yet aware of the existence of such a nation.)
Most Israeli inhabitants carry, of course, identity cards saying "Nation: Jewish". This has now become a subject of debate.
A group of 38 Israelis have asked for the cancellation of their registration as "Jewish" and its replacement with "Israeli". The Interior Ministry refuses, saying that no such nation appears on its list. The group has petitioned the High Court of Justice to instruct the ministry to register them as belonging to the "Israeli" nation. This week, the case came before the court.
The 38 include some of the most eminent professors in Israel (historians, philosophers, sociologists and the like), well-known public figures and others (including my humble self). One of the initiators is a Druze. They are far from belonging to one political camp - indeed, they include both leftists and rightists. One of them is Benny Peled, former commander of the Air Force, a very right-wing person, who died after the petition was submitted."

On the Virtues of Changing the Mind

2004-09-29T15:47:00.000-05:00

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Informed Comment : 09/01/2004 - 09/30/2004: "It is depressing for me to see George W. Bush on the stump doing a stand-up comedy routine about John Kerry, parroting the predictable line that Kerry has had more than one opinion about Iraq. Serious news reporters who have gone back over the record find that Bush's charge is without merit, and that Kerry has been consistent on his Iraq position.

The thing that most worries me is not when a politician's thinking evolves on a subject and he changes his mind. It is when a politician refuses even to consider changing his mind. Such inflexibility is almost always a sign of rigidity, which can be catastrophic in the most powerful man in the world."

2004-09-29T12:39:00.000-05:00

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Be John Kerry!

2004-09-28T22:41:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS | Americas | Game players can be John Kerry:

"A US computer games firm is offering subscribers the chance to re-enact John Kerry's role in his controversial Vietnam Swift Boat mission.
Kuma Reality Games says it has created the first-ever re-enactment of the events surrounding the Democrat presidential candidate's Silver Star-winning action.

[...]Based on the navy's records of the encounter on 28 February 1969, players who subscribe to the Kuma\War service can take the role of John Kerry and lead three Swift Boats though the small tributaries deep in the Mekong Delta. As the boats come under fire from Viet Cong hiding in the nearby brush, it is up to the player to decide a course of action.

Keith Halper, chief executive of Kuma Reality Games, told BBC News Online the game would 'bring clarity' over the nature of Mr Kerry's mission.
'It is not our goal to make a political statement with the mission, but to present a lens with which to view the event, and the tools to enable people to make an informed decision. "We hope people who experience the mission will come away with a deeper appreciation of Kerry's service and the service of all Swift Boat Veterans in Vietnam.

"For years, the military has used simulation tools to gain an understanding of complex events. We think it's time that civilians had access to the same tools."

When asked whether the company had any plans to bring out a mission involving the Texas National Guard, Mr Halper said: "We'd like to get a deferment on that question."

2004-09-28T10:30:00.000-05:00

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Flop. Flop. Flop.

2004-09-28T09:17:00.000-05:00

Dear Mr. Bush,

Which of these 10 positions that you, your family and your cabinet have taken over the years represents your CURRENT thinking:

1983-88: WE LOVE SADDAM. On December 19, 1983, Donald Rumsfeld was sent by your dad and Mr. Reagan to go and have a friendly meeting with Saddam Hussein, the dictator of Iraq. Rummy looked so happy in the picture. Just twelve days after this visit, Saddam gassed thousands of Iranian troops. Your dad and Rummy seemed pretty happy with the results because The Donald R. went back to have another chummy hang-out with Saddams right-hand man, Tariq Aziz, just four months later. All of this resulted in the U.S. providing credits and loans to Iraq that enabled Saddam to buy billions of dollars worth of weapons and chemical agents. The Washington Post reported that your dad and Reagan let it be known to their Arab allies that the Reagan/Bush administration wanted Iraq to win its war with Iran and anyone who helped Saddam accomplish this was a friend of ours.

1990: WE HATE SADDAM. In 1990, when Saddam invaded Kuwait, your dad and his defense secretary, Dick Cheney, decided they didn't like Saddam anymore so they attacked Iraq and returned Kuwait to its rightful dictators.

1991: WE WANT SADDAM TO LIVE. After the war, your dad and Cheney and Colin Powell told the Shiites to rise up against Saddam and we would support them. So they rose up. But then we changed our minds. When the Shiites rose up against Saddam, the Bush inner circle changed its mind and decided NOT to help the Shiites. Thus, they were massacred by Saddam.

1998: WE WANT SADDAM TO DIE. In 1998, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and others, as part of the Project for the New American Century, wrote an open letter to President Clinton insisting he invade and topple Saddam Hussein.

2000: WE DON'T BELIEVE IN WAR AND NATION BUILDING. Just three years later, during your debate with Al Gore in the 2000 election, when asked by the moderator Jim Lehrer where you stood when it came to using force for regime change, you turned out to be a downright pacifist:

2001 (early): WE DON'T BELIEVE SADDAM IS A THREAT. When you took office in 2001, you sent your Secretary of State, Colin Powell, and your National Security Advisor, Condoleezza Rice, in front of the cameras to assure the American people they need not worry about Saddam Hussein. Here is what they said:

2001 (late): WE BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US! Just a few months later, in the hours and days after the 9/11 tragedy, you had no interest in going after Osama bin Laden. You wanted only to bomb Iraq and kill Saddam and you then told all of America we were under imminent threat because weapons of mass destruction were coming our way. You led the American people to believe that Saddam had something to do with Osama and 9/11. Without the UN's sanction, you broke international law and invaded Iraq.
2003: WE DONT BELIEVE SADDAM IS GOING TO KILL US. After no WMDs were found, you changed your mind about why you said we needed to invade, coming up with a brand new after-the-fact reason -- we started this war so we could have regime change, liberate Iraq and give the Iraqis democracy!

2003: MISSION ACCOMPLISHED! Yes, everyone saw you say it -- in costume, no less!

2004: OOPS. MISSION NOT ACCOMPLISHED! Now you call the Iraq invasion a "catastrophic success." That's what you called it this month. Over a thousand U.S. soldiers have died, Iraq is in a state of total chaos where no one is safe, and you have no clue how to get us out of there.

Mr. Bush, please tell us -- when will you change your mind again?

I know you hate the words "flip" and "flop," so I won't use them both on you. In fact, I'll use just one: Flop. That is what you are. A huge, colossal flop. The war is a flop, your advisors and the "intelligence" they gave you is a flop, and now we are all a flop to the rest of the world. Flop. Flop. Flop.

Click on me!

And you have the audacity to criticize John Kerry with what you call the "many positions" he has taken on Iraq. By my count, he has taken only one: He believed you. That was his position. You told him and the rest of congress that Saddam had WMDs. So he -- and the vast majority of Americans, even those who didn't vote for you -- believed you. You see, Americans, like John Kerry, want to live in a country where they can believe their president.

That was the one, single position John Kerry took. He didn't support the war, he supported YOU. And YOU let him and this great country down. And that is why tens of millions can't wait to get to the polls on Election Day -- to remove a major, catastrophic flop from our dear, beloved White House -- to stop all the flipping you and your men have done, flipping us and the rest of the world off.

We can't take another minute of it.

Yours,

Michael Moore
www.michaelmoore.com

Mike Turner, ex-Pentagon planner, is shrill

2004-09-27T20:58:00.000-05:00

MSNBC via Shrillblog:

"Two thirds of America's combat brigades are now tied down in this war which, under present conditions, is categorically unwinnable. Having alienated virtually every major ally who might help, our troops are simply targets. If Bush is re-elected, there are only two possible outcomes in Iraq:

Four years from now, America will have 5,000 dead servicemen and women and an untold number of dead Iraqis at a cost of about $1 trillion, yet still be no closer to success than we are right now, or
The U.S. will be gone, and we will witness the birth of a violent breeding ground for Shiite terrorists posing a far greater threat to Americans than a contained Saddam.

To discern the truth about Iraq, Americans must simply look beyond the spin. This war is not some noble endeavor, some great struggle of good against evil as the Bush administration would have us believe. We in the military have heard these grand pronouncements many times before by men who have neither served nor sacrificed. This war is an exercise in colossal stupidity and hubris which has now cost more than 1,000 American military lives, which has empowered Al Qaeda beyond anything those butchers might have engineered on their own and which has diverted America's attention and precious resources from the real threat at the worst possible time. And now, in a supreme act of truly breathtaking gall, this administration insists the only way to fix Iraq is to leave in power the very ones who created the nightmare"

Q: How does George W. Bush change a lightbulb?

2004-09-27T17:24:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog:
"A: John Kerry says that the light bulb needs to be changed. Flip-flopper. We do not need to change the lightbulb! We need to stay the course! "

FT.com site : GOP = American Nationalist party

2004-09-27T10:13:00.000-05:00

Shrillblog : Anatol Lieven Is Shrill: "In Europe, this belief in an absolutist version of capitalism combined with the radicalism and dogmatism of the old European left to produce many of the great disasters of modern European history. Refusing compromise with moderate leftwing forces, capitalists in parts of Europe in the decades before 1945 preferred instead to make alliances with the forces of radical nationalism.... The unreconstructed nature of important strands of American capitalism is reflected in the contemporary character of the Republican party. If today one were to seek a name for the Republicans that would situate them accurately in a wider historical and international context, it would be the American Nationalist party.... [The] Republican political, social and economic mixture is reminiscent of the classic positions of past rightwing nationalist movements in Europe and elsewhere.... [B]y bringing American capitalism closer to the norms pursued elsewhere in the developed world, a Kerry administration could even help to restore the idea of the west. "

Even the WaPo is starting to get it.

2004-09-27T10:07:00.000-05:00

Daily Kos :: Endgame:

"As Iraq descends into something resembling chaos, it's hard to remember how grand, even orderly, the plans for its future once were. I had a glimpse of those plans last January in Baghdad as I interviewed L. Paul Bremer in his dusty office at the center of Saddam Hussein's old Republican Palace. I asked Bremer, who was then midway through his tenure as America's viceroy in Iraq, whether what he was attempting was unprecedented. Perhaps it was, he said, but the model he was using was the resurrection of post-Hitler Germany....
Americans must begin to penetrate that silence by reckoning with some grim realities about the Iraqi endgame. The first is that there is no prospect of 'winning' in Iraq, at least none that even remotely resembles the administration's rhetoric. The German model has become part of what Nebraska Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Republican critic of the war, has called the 'grand illusion' of Iraqi progress. Indeed, far from following the path of America's postwar triumph in Germany, the administration's approach on the ground is closely tracking one of America's greatest foreign policy follies: Vietnamization. That was the name for President Richard Nixon's disastrous policy of handing off the war to the ill-prepared South Vietnamese army and a thinly legitimate government in Saigon, so that U.S. troops could come home. Now the Bush administration is hanging its hopes on Iraqification, the propping up of equally unprepared Iraqi forces in hopes that we can ready them in time to forestall defeat long enough to withdraw."

2004-09-27T09:23:00.000-05:00

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Powell says resistance 'black cloud' over U.S. efforts in Iraq

2004-09-27T09:20:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Columnist: Powell, Then and Now: "Secretary of State Colin Powell, discussing the Iraq war during an appearance at The Times on Friday, did not have the crisp certitude of the general who assured us in 1991 that the first gulf war was going almost precisely as planned[...] He had every reason to be brash. The U.S.-led coalition went into the first gulf war with a coherent plan, extensive international support and overwhelming military superiority, including more than half a million American troops.
Last Friday, surrounded by reporters and editors, Secretary Powell had a decidedly different message. He refused to paint a rosy picture of the current war's progress. 'We've got a tough road ahead of us,' he said. He acknowledged that the resistance encountered by American troops was stronger than the administration had anticipated, and he added, 'I'm not going to underestimate or understate the seriousness of the insurgency.'
The resistance, he said, is a 'black cloud' over U.S. efforts in Iraq.
Mr. Powell's candor was refreshing. But what we're not getting from the Bush administration is any sense of where we go from here with this war that never made sense, has cost more than 1,000 American lives, has further destabi"

2004-09-27T08:59:00.000-05:00

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The Downfall hits German screens

2004-09-26T00:15:00.000-05:00

TIME Europe Magazine: Sympathy for the Devil -- Sep. 27, 2004: "Eichinger, who has produced English-language films The Name of the Rose and The Never Ending Story, says the film isn't intended to make the Hitler generation feel guilty about the war, but to help younger Germans come to terms with the reality of their past - a reality in which one human being led a nation of other human beings to commit incomprehensible atrocities. 'This film is made for my generation, for future generations,' he says, 'to help find answers.'"

If you break it, return it to sender

2004-09-26T00:01:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > MAUREEN DOWD: Dance of the Marionettes:

"Rummy suggested last week that a fractional democracy might be good enough. 'Let's say you tried to have an election, and you could have it in three-quarters or four-fifths of the country, but some places you couldn't because the violence was too great,' he said at a hearing on Capitol Hill, adding: 'Nothing's perfect in life.'
At a Pentagon briefing on Friday, Rummy also blew off Colin Powell's so-called Pottery Barn rule that if we broke Iraq, we own it. "Any implication that that place has to be peaceful and perfect before we can reduce coalition and U.S. forces, I think, would obviously be unwise, because it's never been peaceful and perfect," he said. "It's a tough part of the world."

As he said after the early looting in Iraq: "Stuff happens."

Jon Steward on the Bushies

2004-09-25T23:07:00.000-05:00

TIME.com: 10 Questions for Jon Stewart -- Sep. 27, 2004: "CAN I ASK WHO YOU'RE GOING TO VOTE FOR IN NOVEMBER? I'm really concerned about this Administration. Now, does that mean that they've completely lost any chance? Not really. Things could change drastically. But let me put it this way: they've put themselves in a giant hole, as far as I'm concerned. And as far as I'm concerned, their best argument for election is, Yes, I drove us into a brick wall. But I didn't blink!"

The battle to loose all hearts and minds continues

2004-09-25T15:04:00.000-05:00

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Falluja hit by deadly US air strikes:

"The US military said it targeted a meeting place for fighters loyal to terror suspect Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, blamed for masterminding many attacks.
'Intelligence sources reported that terrorists were using the site to plan additional attacks against Iraqi citizens and multinational forces,' a US military statement said.
The statement added that no civilians were reported in the area at the time.
However, a doctor at Falluja's general hospital told the Associated Press that civilians had been killed.
Dr Dhiya al-Jumaili said at least eight people were killed and 15 wounded, including women and children.
Reuters Television pictures showed rescuers pulling survivors, among them two women and a young child, out of a destroyed building."

Matthew Yglesias: Why Do They Hate Us?:

"Why Do They Hate Us?
Possibly because we keep killing them. [...] Operations by U.S. and multinational forces and Iraqi police are killing twice as many Iraqis - most of them civilians - as attacks by insurgents, according to statistics compiled by the Iraqi Health Ministry and obtained exclusively by Knight Ridder."

KR Washington Bureau | 09/25/2004 | Iraqi civilian casualties mounting:

"At al Kimdi Hospital, Dr. Mumtaz Jaber, a vascular surgeon, said that three months ago, his 3-year-old nephew, his sister and his brother-in-law were driving in Baghdad at about 9 p.m. when they saw an American checkpoint. His nephew was killed.
'They didn't stop fast enough. The Americans shot them immediately,' Jaber said. 'This is how so many die.'
At the Baghdad morgue, Dr. Quasis Hassan Salem said he saw a family of eight brought in: three women, three men and two children. They were sleeping on their roof last month because it was hot inside. A military helicopter shot at them and killed them: 'I don't know why.' "

Mr. Bush's fantasies

2004-09-24T12:17:00.000-05:00

The New York Times > Opinion > PAUL KRUGMAN: Let's Get Real: "Mr. Bush claims that Mr. Kerry's plan to secure and rebuild Iraq is 'exactly what we're currently doing.' No, it isn't. It's only what Mr. Bush is currently saying. And we have 18 months of his administration's deeds to contrast with his words.
The actual record is one of officials who have refused to admit that their fantasies about how the war would go were wrong, and who have continued to push us ever deeper into the quagmire because of their insistence that everything is going according to plan."

UPDATE:

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog:

"QUESTION: Why haven't U.S. forces been able to capture or kill al-Zarqawi, who's blamed for much of the violence? And what's your answer to General John Abizaid's statement that, 'I think we will need more troops than we currently have'?

BUSH: If that's what he says -- he was in my office this morning, he didn't say that to me. But if he were to say that, I'd listen to him. Just like I've said all along that when our commanders say that they need support, they'll get support, because we're going to succeed in this mission.

The first part of the question was how come we haven't found Zarqawi? We're looking for him. He hides. He's got an effective weapon and that is terror.
We can't find Abu al-Zarqawi because 'he hides?' No wonder the president seems confused about whether or not he can win the war on terrorism. What was Bush expecting the terrorists to do -- turn themselves in? Besides, it's not as if Zarqawi's all that well hidden. He's in Falluja. We just can't get him because we don't control Falluja. And we don't control Falluja because Bush is manipulating the military strategy for political purposes. Besides that, we don't have enough troops. Which brings us to John Abizaid. (Matthew Yglesias)"

2004-09-24T08:51:00.000-05:00

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No Tree Left Standing

2004-09-23T23:22:00.000-05:00

political satire humor news: "'But,' Bush warned,
'as long as there is one square foot of this country - or any other country - that is off-limits to development, we still have work to do. I regard every tree left standing as a product left unbuilt, and that is an insult to every businessman and woman in this room.'
Bush also announced that in his second term, the EPA would be renamed the Exploitation Production Agency, 'a force for the benefit of mankind instead of what it is today - an impediment to wealth and progress." (via MaxSpeak.)

Karsten's worldview sounds reasonable

2004-09-23T20:50:00.000-05:00

CurryBlog: "The statement on policy accommodation ('will be removed at a measured pace') is unchanged so we should see another 25bp hike in November. The only thing that could derail this policy is massive weakness in payrolls over the next two months.

Against the backdrop of my worldview things work out like this: Barring a complete disaster we'll get another hike in November. The economy will continue to lose momentum until then, which will in turn lead the Fed to take a break from raising rates."

Deja vu...

2004-09-23T15:20:00.000-05:00

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Eschaton: "Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage alleged Friday that insurgents have stepped up their deadly assaults in Iraq because they want to 'influence the election against President Bush,' a statement that drew a sharp condemnation from the campaign of Democratic challenger Sen. John Kerry.

It is apparently the first time that a Bush administration official has linked the escalating violence in Iraq to an effort by insurgents to help defeat Bush in November."

DeLong thinks Mankiw is not doing his job

2004-09-23T15:15:00.000-05:00

Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Weblog: "Greg is trying to reassure me that George W. Bush does understand that it is not low tax rates but low spending and balanced budgets that have beneficial supply-side effects on economic growth. Forgive me for not being reassured.
You see, George W. Bush *talks* about the importance of balanced budgets but does not *act*. Bush appears to know that he needs to talk about the importance of a balanced budget. But Bush appears not to know that it is important to balance the budget. Bush shows no sign of knowing that a reduction in current taxes coupled with a spending increase is not a tax cut, but is instead a tax shift and a tax *increase*--an increase in average taxes over the long run coupled with a shift in taxes from the present to the future.
Bush appears not to know that the overall tax increase bigger spending has set in motion will have bad supply-side effects on growth. He does not appear to know that the tax shift will have further (and in all likelihood much larger) destructive effects on growth: the borrowing to bridge the gap between the present taxes not collected and the future taxes collected would crowd-out capital formation and reduce productivity; the fact that the higher future taxes that will be levied one way or another (through the inflation tax, if all else fails) are uncertain makes investment for the future much more risky, and further diminishes investment and productivity. "