Banner Day for Bush

Record Deficit:
Government spending for the year ended September 30 rose 6.2 per cent to $US2.29 trillion, swamping income, which climbed 5.5 per cent to $US1.88 trillion, the Treasury Department said.
The result: the deficit mushroomed 9.5 per cent from the previous year to $US413 billion, equal to 3.6 per cent of total economic output, or gross domestic product (GDP).

Trade Deficit:
The Commerce Department said the August trade deficit in goods and services was 6.9 percent higher than a $50.5 billion imbalance in July. A small 0.1 percent rise in exports was dwarfed by a 2.5 percent jump in imports. For the year, America's trade deficit is running at a record annual rate of $590 billion, 19 percent higher than the previous record, last year's $496.5 billion imbalance.

Job Claims UP:
In a second economic report, the Labor Department said the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits rose by 15,000 last week to a seasonally adjusted level of 352,000. The four-week moving average of claims, which smooths out weekly changes, rose by 4,000 to a seven-month high of 352,000.

Treasury Dept. to use Enron Accounting to cover it's ass: Here too.
WASHINGTON, Oct 14 (Reuters) - The U.S. Treasury Department suspended investments in a federal employee pension fund on Thursday to keep the government below its borrowing limit, Treasury Secretary John Snow said in a letter to Congress.
Snow said payments to the $56 billion Federal Employee Retirement System's Government Securities Investment Fund, known as the G-fund, would be restored once Congress raises the $7.384 trillion debt ceiling.

Nukes flew out of Iraq. (Nice work...don't you feel safer?)
The United Nations nuclear watchdog told the Security Council this week that equipment and materials that could be used to make atomic weapons had been vanishing from Iraq without either Baghdad or Washington noticing.
"This process carried on at least through 2003 ... and probably into 2004, at least in early 2004," said a Western diplomat close to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which monitored Iraq's nuclear sites before last year's war.