What I missed at work, Vol. 1

As you may know by now, I work a twelve hour day three and four days a week. This leaves me little time for maintaining the blog. So rather than bore you with a number of posts of articles two, three and four days old, I thought I'd summarize some articles I could not get to without massive sleep debt.

First, Newsweek has an article about Porter Goss, Bush's nominee for the CIA, and more specifically a bill he introduced in Congress that would have allowed the CIA to become America's covert police department.

A new Pentagon report claims Halliburton has overestimated the cost of their work in Iraq to the tune of 1.8 billion dollars.

The Labor Department must be Modest Mouse fans as they released more good news for people who like bad news, announcing the biggest drop in exports in nearly three years and record imports. That of course, would lead to a huge jump in our trade deficit.

"It's extraordinary, I've never seen this big a swing in one month," Kevin Logan, an economist at Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein in New York, said of the worsening trade picture.

A report on Al Qaeda's seeming ability to grow in spite of the "War on Terror" has one senior counterterrorism official saying "[Al Qaeda's] resiliency and their ability to reconstitute is truly remarkable."

The Bush campaign spins, and Paul Krugman counters.(sorry it's a subscription link)

And finally, The New York Times on Saturday reports that while all the focus is on Iraq and terror, the Bush Administration quietly overhauls regulations, mostly for the benefit of big business.

Allies and critics of the Bush administration agree that the Sept. 11 attacks, the war in Afghanistan and the war in Iraq have preoccupied the public, overshadowing an important element of the president's agenda: new regulatory initiatives. Health rules, environmental regulations, energy initiatives, worker-safety standards and product-safety disclosure policies have been modified in ways that often please business and industry leaders while dismaying interest groups representing consumers, workers, drivers, medical patients, the elderly and many others.

Now we're both caught up.