I'm just about caught up with The New Yorker, finally reading many of the articles I told myself I would get around to later. One such article was Malcolm Gladwell's "Big Bad" in the Jan. 12 issue of the magazine. It appeared to be another critique of the SUV boom. I already dislike SUVs, for [...]

Spencer Ackerman of The New Republic has begun a new blog on that magazine's Web site. It's called Iraq'd — in a nod to Ashton Kutcher's MTV show "Punk'd." Ackerman, like TNR overall and most of the folks who write for it, was a staunch advocate of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq. He's now rethinking [...]

James K. Glassman had the misfortune of co-authoring a book titled Dow 36,000: The New Strategy for Profiting From the Coming Rise in the Stock Market. The book was published in 2000. Fortunately, Glassman is a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, home of "The Bell Curve," where one can apparently be spectacularly wrong without [...]

Via Atrios, I find this editorial from the (Minneapolis-St. Paul) Star-Tribune. Since the Strib has put in place the World's Most Annoying Online Registration scheme, I'll quote at length: Now Bush is proposing an investigation of U.S. intelligence that would go on until 2005. Hans Blix, the former chief U.N. weapons inspector in Iraq, had [...]

Here is Jim Hoagland in Sunday's Washington Post, arguing that the intelligence agencies are to blame for the false claims about Iraq's post-Gulf War I weapons capabilities: Bush and Blair accepted and actually believed the flawed intelligence that their spy bosses and senior aides provided, and then inflated it in their public speeches. Credulity, not [...]

If you're Kenneth Pollack or David Kay, it makes sense for you to point out now that you were not alone in vastly overestimating Iraq's alleged stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein's alleged capacity for making more. But once again they seem to be, well, overstating their case. It is true that [...]