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Did you know there is an "official arbiter of when recessions begin"? It's called the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER), a "private, non-profit, non-partisan," organization. It boasts that 16 of the 31 American Nobel Prize winners have been researchers there.

The president of NBER announced on March 15 that we are now officially in recession. "It will last longer and be deeper than the last two recessions, which lasted only 8 months from peak to trough. It could well be longer and deeper than the recession in the early 1980s that lasted 16 months."

The reality - for ordinary people - is that the economy has actually been in recession since 2001. It began with an official recession. Which officially lasted but eight months. Then there was a "recovery."

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BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG
by Mark Karlin
Editor and Publisher

May 5, 2008

John McCain and Hillary Clinton are spouting a "summer gas tax relief" in the same way that Marie Antoinette cried out, "Let them eat cake."

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It briefly was time for Microsoft's guys
To get tough & begin to hector;
I heard Bill Gates even put brass knuckles
Inside of his pocket protector.

VERSE CASE SCENARIO

Tony Peyser provides daily poems and weekly cartoons for BuzzFlash and also writes the BuzzFlash column, "Blue State Jukebox." He was a daily cartoonist for the L.A. Times from 1994 to 1997. You can e-mail Tony at tonypeyser@yahoo.com.

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_{picture courtesy of me. I took this picture.}

I spent the weekend wandering Indiana, focusing on the Obama-Clinton matchup. There were many good stories from the Hoosier state. This is one of them. -- Chad

It was a nice spring day in South Bend, Indiana. Sunny and warm can be the ticket to spending the day doing a number of activities. But Jesse Cao was standing outside in downtown South Bend all day in an eagle costume holding an Obama sign. All day.

I drove by about 4-5 times, seeing him out there. Finally, I had to ask what his reason for standing out there.

Cao told me his son, a 1st Lieutenant, died in Iraq 3 years ago. And he was out there to work to being his friends home from the war. He said we should focus on Afghanistan.

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_{both pictures courtesy of me. I took these pictures.}

I spent the weekend wandering Indiana, focusing on the Obama-Clinton matchup. -- Chad

I wondered as I wandered Indiana whether I was in a time warp. No, not because the heartland is at a slower pace than the big cities. But I felt like I was going back in time to the 1990s.

I attended events for Clinton and Obama, and talked to many Hoosiers on both side of the Democratic Party fence. When I talked to Clinton supporters, asking them why they liked the senator from New York, they eagerly spoke of going back to the 1990s. "Things were great in the '90s" was a popular saying this past weekend. When I talked to Obama supporters, asking them why they liked the senator from Illinois, they spoke of the future.

Bill Clinton spoke in Plymouth, Indiana on Saturday about bringing back tax rates from the 1990s on the wealthy. One of the buttons I saw asked, "Do you Miss Clinton? Vote for Mrs. Clinton '08."

Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano, a fervent supporter of Obama, spoke in Mishawaka, Indiana on Sunday about how you reinvent the economy and reform education for the workforce of the future. Napolitano also spoke at the end about finding the best candidate to move the country forward in a new direction.

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BARBARA'S DAILY BUZZFLASH MINUTE

More reason to end this war and bring our sons and daughters home! "Staff Sergeant Ryan Maseth stepped into the shower on January 2nd at his base in Baghdad, turned the water on and died. The 24-year-old combat veteran was electrocuted by a short and a water pump... 12 service members the military says have been electrocuted in Iraq since 2003, most by improper grounding of electrical systems... Kellogg, Brown and Root, the largest American contractor in Iraq, had the job of maintaining the shower building and may have known about the electrical problems... PAT CAVANAUGH, FAMILY ATTORNEY: In Ryan Maseth's building, they, in fact, knew about it, reported it, were funded in excess of $3 million to fix it, and for whatever reason, did not fix it."

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The Clintons and their surrogates love to talk about "counting all the votes," "popular vote totals," "caucuses don't count," "Florida and Michigan should," and etc., all aimed at "influencing the superdelegates to do what is best for the party, giving it/us the best chance of winning in November." Of course those popular vote totals, as well as exit poll results, are possibly skewed by some totally indeterminate, undetermined, and undeterminable amount in those states, such as Indiana,

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