Mozilla Firebird 0.6 is out. Not only is it a spiffy lightweight browser, but it’s also the future.

I don’t really understand economics particularly well (other than the simple stuff), and some days, I don’t think anybody in the world really understands economics particularly well. That said, as the economy continues to founder, I become more and more interested in how macroeconomics affects my day to day microeconomic prospects. In a perfect world, we wouldn’t need to understand the relationship of inflation to unemployment, deflation, or liquidity traps, but in today’s world, we certainly do. I really appreciate that there are economists out there with weblogs who are doing a decent job of giving their impressions of what’s going on. The two I read without fail are Brad DeLong’s Semi-Daily Journal and Zimran Ahmed’s winterspeak.com. There are a bunch of other economists with weblogs as well, but those are the two I read without fail.

Update: Scott Rosenberg weighs in with a post about the economy as well today.

I’m glad to see Ari Fleischer has tendered his resignation. Not just because he is so loathesome, but also because it should spawn a boatload of “Ari’s greatest hits” articles that should be good for a laugh or two.

Update: Timothy Noah says Fleischer may be leaving because he’s losing his knack for lying. Jake Tapper also has a Fleischer recap.

Now that the situation in Iraq no longer merits blanket coverage, it’s hard to tell what’s really going on. The stories that are coming out seem to indicate that things are really bad and could rapidly become much worse.

One thing that’s obvious to anybody who’s been paying attention is that the Bush administration has been telling a lot of lies about the economy and its plans to fix them with a tax cut. Spinsanity has done a nice job of cataloging the lies, and plenty of other people have been talking about them as well. Despite that, President Bush’s road show over the past couple of weeks did a great job of bolstering public support for his tax cut, at least based on the poll numbers. What this tells me is that for some reason, Bush has a lot of credibility with the voting public, in spite of the fact that his administration basically lies about everything, from the economic effects of his tax cut, to why we went to war with Iraq, to the reason why he pulled the airplane stunt on the USS Abraham. I just don’t see the Democrats being able to put on a campaign that will enable them to correct the public’s perception of Bush’s credibility in time to win in 2004.

The French claim that the executive branch has been running a disinformation campaign against them. Judge for yourself.

As you guys know, one civil rights issue that really bugs me is drug testing in schools. My number one problem with it is that it teaches kids that they really have no expectation of privacy. Well, unsurprisingly, studies seem to indicate that it also doesn’t reduce drug use among students, either. Unfortunately, I doubt the practice will end because it seems like it should work, even if it doesn’t.

The big Microsoft news this week is that Microsoft has a bank account that can be tapped on to subsidize the purchase of Microsoft products by customers that are considering Linux as an alternative. The bottom line here is that if antitrust laws don’t prohibit a monopolist from paying customers to take their products over those offered by the competition, there’s really no reason to have antitrust laws at all.

This has nothing to do with Jessica Lynch, who served her country, was wounded in combat, and was, for a brief time, a prisoner of war in Iraq, but rather with those who would exploit her story to further their own agenda (or stuff their wallets). The story, as originally told, is a bunch of hooey. Salon has a story today that confronts the lies, albeit in a format that’s pretty lame. There’s also this Guardian story, but it discusses fewer of the inaccuracies than the Salon article.

Michael Kinsley decries President Bush’s fascination with small business, but doesn’t explain why it exists. As I learned from Fast Food Nation, small business owners are some of the most dedicated Republican donors you’ll find. Republicans really are the party of small business — they fight against unions, they work to keep the minimum wage as low as possible, and they pass all sorts of bogus incentive plans that enable small businesses to get tax breaks for cycling through low wage employees. Obviously the tax cuts that are currently being proposed benefit the extremely rich, but they’re going to be extremely rich regardless of whether or not the tax cuts pass. The people who really stand to benefit are people who are just wealthy, like successful small business owners. Promoting and pandering to small business pays big dividends for Republicans.