Tracking Al Qaeda and Misery Indexes Love Company

Hey Bell Curve,

RE: What to do about Al Qaeda without being overly state-centric.
We need to do what we did in Afghanistan (more or less) up until the invasion of Iraq. We need to find out how Al Qaeda raises, banks and spends its money. We need to find out how they communication amongst themselves, we need to track down their leaders, and we need to do what we can to limit their recruiting and training ability. Invading Iraq didn't help accomplish any of those goals, it sucked resources (human and financial) away from the efforts in Afghanistan, and it will cost us enormously in terms of lives and money.

RE: The Misery Index
Why should reporting data on the effect of the economy on the middle class be a bad idea. Granted one should approach these kinds of things with a reasonable amount of scepticism. But one shouldn't throw the baby out with the bath water. One could argue that reporting this kind of index about the economy is at least as good as Kerry getting up and saying, "Gee, the economy stinks and everybody knows it."
I'm sure this misery index tells us something, it just not be some sort of universal truth about economics in general. If you look at Kerry's website and check out the numbers for each president, you'll see that Democrats always make it better and Republicans always make it worse. Why? The answer is in the factors that contributed to the index. Kerry included things like health care costs and college tuition costs both of which get bigger subsidies under Democrats than under Republicans. The index gives all these factors equal weight too. The methods section of the website didn't explain that too much but my experience with social science stats makes me think that the equal weight thing is part of "where the rabbit goes in the hat" as we say. That is, I suspect that weighting college tuition equally with home ownership (something likely to go up under Republicans?) is probably giving college tuition too much weight.
I think this misery index probably tells us something useful about Kerry's policy preferences. He has a strong preference for lower health care, college tuition, and gasoline prices. In the end that's all he's really trying to convey here.
FYI: Just heard on the news somewhere (I forget what source) that coffee prices are spiking too. Higher prices for gasoline and coffee could cause a lot of head aches!