July 2003 Archives

The Sacramento Bee's Dale Kasler has discovered that some groups will come out way ahead in California's coming recall election.

But the contest will generate revenue, too, and leave a tidy windfall for television stations, newspapers, consultants and others that feed off the electoral process.

How else can we misuse California's Constitution to make some groups a quick buck?

Taegan Goodard's Political Wire links to an AP photo of President Bush signing his autograph on a U.S. flag. An act, as Goodard notes, that violates the law.

Congress yesterday finally passed a law seeking to deal with prison rape.

"It's been a long, strange battle, but I think everyone has come to understand that a prison sentence in the United States should not include rape as added punishment," said Rep. Frank R. Wolf, (R-Va.), a House co-sponsor of the bill, along with Rep. Robert C. "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.).

Wait a minute. You mean the House Republicans make a habit of acting like hypocrites? Who knew?

Christopher Lee reports on another example of how this White House fails to back up its nice words with real action:

The House denied $100 million sought for AmeriCorps yesterday, a move that backers of the program said would wipe out thousands of volunteers across the country and scuttle the community service efforts that President Bush says he supports.

We have seen just how effective this president can be when he choses to lobby for a priority. One wonders why he won't use those skills on anything but irresponsible tax cuts for the affluent and wars for which our country was unprepared to handle the aftermath?

Beyond the Homefront, a web log by the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, has a few recent items of great interest.

One item in particular deserves your attention. Does the White House retaliate against those who dare criticize this Administration? Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) thinks so, since he has been targeted.

Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) accused White House officials of spreading false rumors that he had disclosed classified information related to the flap over Iraqi uranium purchases. According to a Reuters account, Durbin said on the Senate floor, "Sadly, what we have here is a continuing pattern by this White House. If any member of this Senate ... questions this White House policy ... be prepared for the worst."

Those who disagree with the Bush Administration are unpatriotic traitors. Dissent is simply not tolerated.

Perhaps Senator Durbin will now not be as quick to give the Executive Branch broad powers without proper oversight and debate about their potential consequences.

California Insider Daniel Weintraub explains why Matt Drudge's "world exclusive" that Jack Kemp is considering a California recall gubernatorial run is a prediction that is not going to happen.

Foreign affairs columnist Daniel Sneider writes in the San Jose Mercury News about the growing closeness of the diplomatic relations between India and the United States.

Now there is an opportunity to turn a growing partnership into an alliance comparable to the one the U.S. enjoys with Japan.

It's about time. The divide between our two countries -- the world's two largest democracies -- has never made sense.

Richard Cohen makes the reasonable argument that it is time for CIA Director George Tenet to go.

Walter Pincus reports that the intelligence community thought Saddam posed the greatest danger to us if facing death or capture. Which makes one wonder why we attacked him before our defenses were ready. Pincus writes:

Last fall, the administration repeatedly warned in public of the danger that an unprovoked Iraqi President Saddam Hussein might give chemical or biological weapons to terrorists.

"Iraq could decide on any given day to provide a biological or chemical weapon to a terrorist group or individual terrorists," President Bush said in Cincinnati on Oct. 7. "Alliance with terrorists could allow the Iraqi regime to attack America without leaving any fingerprints."

But declassified portions of a still-secret National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) released Friday by the White House show that at the time of the president's speech the U.S. intelligence community judged that possibility to be unlikely. In fact, the NIE, which began circulating Oct. 2, shows the intelligence services were much more worried that Hussein might give weapons to al Qaeda terrorists if he were facing death or capture and his government was collapsing after a military attack by the United States.

The Chicago Tribune's Steve Chapman writes that George W. Bush's military and budget policies are quite comparable to Lyndon Baines Johnson's.

Our military is bogged down in a guerrilla war overseas, the federal government is spending way beyond its means, and a president from Texas has opened up a credibility gap. Is this 2003 or 1967?

This Washington Post editorial explains why large federal budget deficits matter.

As John P. Hoke notes, this is a foreign policy error the Bushies cannot even try to pin on President Clinton. New York Times reporters David Sanger and Thom Shanker outline the problem:

American and Asian officials with access to the latest intelligence on North Korea say strong evidence has emerged in recent weeks that the country has built a second, secret plant for producing weapons-grade plutonium, complicating both the diplomatic strategy for ending the program and the military options if that diplomacy fails.

Perhaps we should stop ignoring it.

Dana Priest reports:

The White House repeated a familiar retort last week to defend itself against allegations that President Bush used discredited information in his State of the Union speech about Iraq shopping for uranium oxide in Africa: "If we knew [then] what we knew today, we wouldn't have done it," as a White House official, demanding anonymity, said to a roomful of reporters Friday.

But recent revelations by officials at the CIA, the State Department, the United Nations, in Congress and elsewhere make clear that the weakness of the claim in the State of the Union speech was known and accepted by a wide circle of intelligence and diplomatic personnel scrutinizing information on Iraqi weapons programs months before the speech.

An excellent question. So, Mr. President...why not?

Hey, how dare you. This White House did not need permission or justification. The dangers Saddam presented to United States national security justified any means.

Or perhaps not. Dana Milbank reports:

The White House, in the run-up to war in Iraq, did not seek CIA approval before charging that Saddam Hussein could launch a biological or chemical attack within 45 minutes, administration officials now say.

The claim, which has since been discredited, was made twice by President Bush, in a September Rose Garden appearance after meeting with lawmakers and in a Saturday radio address the same week. Bush attributed the claim to the British government, but in a "Global Message" issued Sept. 26 and still on the White House Web site, the White House claimed, without attribution, that Iraq "could launch a biological or chemical attack 45 minutes after the order is given."

Taegan Goodard's Political Wire finds what is rightly described as the Photo of the Day.

Goodard links to a photo showing President Bush preparing for his State of the Union Address. The photo's caption sends, to say the least, an inconvenient message given recent news events.

David Lazarus sends a warning to America's baby boom generation:

About 77 million Baby Boomers will start retiring five years from now. That should scare the hell out of you.

Why? Because our footloose friends at the White House admitted Tuesday that the federal budget deficit will soar this year to a record $455 billion and then climb even higher in 2004.

Boomers will need to remember to thank President George W. Bush for making budget decisions that made this problem significantly worse than it already was when he took office.

The Houston Chronicle's Cragg Hines reminds us that President Bush does not have a sparkling history when claiming that he is "absolutely confident" about important subjects. He writes:

"Absolutely confident?" When Bush used the phrase last week it rang a little bell. Hadn't we, in fact, heard it before? The confluence of some eddying developments brought the contextual history of "absolutely confident" into focus. Internet search engines did the rest. The little bell became a loud, clanging gong.

On March 2, 2000, in a Republican primary debate sponsored by the Los Angeles Times, Bush was questioned about his support for the death penalty and its hyperactive implementation during his tenure as governor of Texas. Candidate Bush replied:

"And I'm absolutely confident that everybody who has been put to death is -- two things. One, they were guilty of the crime charged. And secondly, they had full access to our courts, both state and federal."

Hines suggests reading Alan Berlow's review of this troubling history in this important story from the latest issue of The Atlantic. Berlow read the memoranda written by legal counsel Alberto R. Gonzales about clemency cases coming before the then-Governor. Berlow summarizes his findings:

A close examination of the Gonzales memoranda suggests that Governor Bush frequently approved executions based on only the most cursory briefings on the issues in dispute. In fact, in these documents Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.

Robert Samuelson writes about the growing underfunded pension plan crisis. He writes:

The pension time bomb is ticking -- and could ultimately explode in a savings-and-loan-like crisis. An aging workforce and the collapse of the stock market have combined to create massive underfunding of traditional corporate pensions. The Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation (PBGC), the government agency that insures these pensions, estimates the underfunding at $300 billion, a total that was only $23 billion as recently as 1999.

I also would point out that while Social Security is not a pension system, many Americans think and act as if it were. The Social Security Trustees have been telling us for years that this important program is underfunded by several trillion dollars.

Private pensions are underfunded. Social Security (and Medicare) are unfunded. The national savings rate is virtually zero. The federal government is adding two billion dollars a day in new debt.

I wish our political leaders would see this situation for the obvious recipe of disaster it represents.

The Washington Post's Walter Pincus explains why some people in the White House fought to keep the African uranium allegation in the State of the Union speech:

In recent days, as the Bush administration has defended its assertion in the president's State of the Union address that Iraq had tried to buy African uranium, officials have said it was only one bit of intelligence that indicated former Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein was reconstituting his nuclear weapons program.

But a review of speeches and reports, plus interviews with present and former administration officials and intelligence analysts, suggests that between Oct. 7, when President Bush made a speech laying out the case for military action against Hussein, and Jan. 28, when he gave his State of the Union address, almost all the other evidence had either been undercut or disproved by U.N. inspectors in Iraq.

You might think Republicans would care about such embellishments. The GOP's strong demands for presidential candor, however, suddenly ceased to be operative on January 20, 2001.

The Concord Coalition released its latest Report on Fiscal Responsibility yesterday. Concord rightly gives our political leaders an F for their gross fiscal mismanagement. As Concord notes:

“The first six months of the 108th Congress were the most fiscally irresponsible in recent memory. The crux of the problem was a schizophrenic pursuit of small government tax policies and big government spending initiatives."

This fact, according to this reality-challenged White House, is "manageable." Which is an odd assertion given the fact that we are only five years away from the first baby boomers reaching Social Security's early eligibility age and beginning a unprecedented demographic shift. An aging of America for which we refuse to prepare.

Slate's Timothy Noah wonders why it is the yellow cake nuclear lie that has led to a media feeding frenzy instead of President Bush's other lies on subjects like weapons of mass destruction, the economy, tax cuts, and stem cells?

James Pinkerton notes how the Iraq war was brought to us by a group of theorists who:

Disregarding prudence, precedent and honesty, they went off - or, more precisely, sent others off - tilting at windmills in Iraq, chasing after illusions of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction and false hope about Iraqi enthusiasm for Americanism, and hoping that reality would somehow catch up with their theory. The problem, of course, is that wars are more about bloodletting than book learning.

Our troops do not have the resources or the training to act as peacemakers because of the war party's delusions. Pinkerton hopes that we someday hear the story of the war's aftermath. He writes:

My hope is that somewhere in Iraq today, an American in uniform is absorbing it all. And so maybe a novel will be written about men and women on a mission, confident in the righteousness of their cause, doing their best, but nonetheless blundering about. That book will be a comedy, in places, but mostly, it will be a tragedy, because there's nothing sadder than sincerity and earnestness misled and betrayed.

Thomas Oliphant writes that it is not just the nuclear lie in the State of the Union address that should concern Americans.

He reminds us that there are earlier statements by President Bush and his senior staff that made it appear that Saddam's nuclear program was an imminent threat.

Because if there was no imminent threat, we could have taken more time to prepare. Taken more time to get support from other nations based on Saddam's horrible rule. Taken more time to ensure we had the assets in place to deal with the aftermath. Oliphant argues:

It is possible - actually, probable - that the United States was not compelled to act virtually alone in Iraq, was not compelled to act last March, and therefore was not compelled to end up virtually on its own in the war's costly, deadly aftermath.

It is probable, to put it another way, that the United States should not have put itself in the position of spending taxpayers' money to hire cops in Baghdad when cops in America are being laid off.

That is why the issue of the embellishments - to steal House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi's elegant euphemism - put on US and foreign intelligence information about the Iraqi regime's unconventional weapons is so important. It bears on whether the threat was indeed ''imminent. ''

A well-deserved bad day for the Bushies as Nicholas Kristof and Paul Krugman write about the uranium lie used to help justify an immediate war on Iraq.

Kristof writes:

What troubles me is not that single episode, but the broader pattern of dishonesty and delusion that helped get us into the Iraq mess — and that created the false expectations undermining our occupation today. Some in the administration are trying to make George Tenet the scapegoat for the affair. But Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity, a group of retired spooks, issued an open letter to President Bush yesterday reflecting the view of many in the intel community that the central culprit is Vice President Dick Cheney. The open letter called for Mr. Cheney's resignation.

More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda. We have lost all credibility with allies who might have provided meaningful support; Tony Blair is still with us, but has lost the trust of his public. All this puts us in a very weak position for dealing with real threats. Did I mention that North Korea has been extracting fissionable material from its fuel rods?

How did we get into this mess? The case of the bogus uranium purchases wasn't an isolated instance. It was part of a broad pattern of politicized, corrupted intelligence.

Too bad.

President Bush and his economic team have figured out that all it takes to have it all now is the willingness to make the immoral decision to let future generations pick up the tab for today's selfishness. Jonathan Weisman reports:

The federal government will pile up $1.9 trillion in new debt over the next five years and will still be running an annual deficit of $226 billion by 2008, long after White House economists assume current war costs have subsided and the economy has recovered, the Bush administration projected today.

The White House Office of Management and Budget officially pegged the 2003 budget deficit at a record $455 billion, up sharply from $158 billion in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 2002. It is expected to rise to $475 billion in fiscal year 2004, even without additional costs for the occupation of Iraq. The deficit is then expected to dip swiftly to $213 billion in 2007 before rising again in 2008, the last year of the White House forecast.

Jules Witcover discusses a bill proposed by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), Sen. Russell D. Feingold (D-Wis.), Rep. Christopher Shays (R-Conn.) and Rep. Martin T. Meehan (D-Mass.) to make needed reforms to the Federal Election Commission.

It is an interesting idea. But, as Witcover explains, such reforms have no chance of passing in the near-term.

Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow Jim Gogek examines the alcohol lobby's efforts to keep our nation from embracing an anti-underage-drinking campaign. He writes:

By all accounts, alcohol is the most dangerous drug to young people. Far more than any illegal drug, alcohol is linked to the three main causes of teen deaths: accidents, murder and suicide. It kills 61/2 times as many American youths as all illegal drugs combined. So why do we have a national youth anti-drug campaign and not a national anti-underage-drinking campaign?

Simple: Alcohol has a better lobby.

Taegan Goddard's Political Wire points us toward an interesting Ronald Brownstein analysis of the Democratic presidential candidates.

The Democrats, Brownstein observes, continue to struggle with finding a tone that balances the need to criticize the Bush Administration in a way that plays well with the base but does not scare off independent and moderate voters so vital to victory. He writes:

Like all candidates challenging an incumbent, the Democrats face legitimately conflicting pressures. To convince the country to change course, they must make a forceful case against Bush's direction. But they might also remember that even most Americans who disagree with a president, any president, usually don't consider him malevolent or stupid, just wrong or ineffective.

One way, of course, to help solve this dilemma is to emphasize a positive message that outlines better solutions to the problems facing us. And we really, really, really, need to stop focusing on "Bush is stupid" comments or jokes. They play right into his strategy.

Former Senator Gary Hart makes makes some vital observations about the situation in Iraq and the (remember this?) war on terrorism. He writes:

But, it all has to be done because Saddam Hussein represented a clear and present danger to the security of the United States. He was trying to get uranium from Niger to complete his advanced nuclear weapons development program. He possessed “tons and tons” of biological and chemical weapons. He was nearing the time when he could deliver this elaborate arsenal in less than an hour. Saddam had close ties with al Qaida and an Iraq invasion was a major step in the war on terrorism. Except....

...except, none of this, at least six months later, is true. There was no uranium purchase program. There were no delivery systems. And we cannot find the “tons and tons” of weapons of mass destruction. No evidence connecting Saddam Hussein with al Qaida has been produced. So, we weren’t told the costs and the reasons for the war have disappeared. Instead, what we have is: “He was a bad guy, and we got rid of him” (except we didn’t). I find no precedent in American history to justify war on this basis.

No one can argue that Saddam was good for his people. But he remains a danger. (President Bush's boast that we know he is not trying to purchase weapons notwithstanding, since there is obviously no way we can know that for sure while Saddam remains at large.)

Of course, as Senator Hart notes, we have some experience with failing to neutralize enemy leaders.

Meanwhile, what happened to the vaunted “war on terrorism”? No Osama bin Laden, “dead or alive”. Almost two years after 9.11 our States and cities are not prepared for the next attack. The suddenly silent John Ashcroft is managing to make more and more Americans nervous. The CIA has, once again, been made the fall guy for an administration’s excesses. George Tenet accepts responsibility for not taking key words out of a presidential speech? That’s not the question. The question is: Who put those words in?

The American people have given the Bush administration great leeway to combat terrorism. So far they have given the President the benefit of the doubt. But our tolerance is being strained and our credulity sorely tested. I sense we’re reaching the “tipping point” where it all starts going south.

Is this the point where the American people awake from their collective nap and begin to question just how this White House has waged the war on terrorism, neglected our domestic security, and failed to ensure we have the resources needed to protect ourselves?

Perhaps. I hope that Senator Hart is correct that our national wake up call is near.

Anyone else uncomfortable reading reports about how U.S. authorities are seeking to control Iraqi media broadcasts? Or how U.S. authorities there have decided to issue constitutionally questionable gag orders even to those federal judges that have gone to Iraq to help rebuild that nation's judicial system?

(Links from the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press' Beyond the Homefront blog.)

Stanford Professor Lawrence Lessig is going on vacation next week. While he is away, Lessig has arranged for Howard Dean to fill-in as a guest blogger for the week.

It should be interesting to read what Dean has to write, especially if he chooses to discuss intellectual property issues.

Nathan Newman explains on his blog how a recent GOP pension reform plan represents yet another effort to provide a tax cut to the rich.

As Newman explains, it is the GOP that is engaging in class warfare. It is just on behalf of the rich at the expense of the poor.

Helen Thomas wishes outgoing Presidential Press Secretary Ari Fleischer a fond farewell.

The Washington Post's editorial writers today begin a three-part series on our nation's bioterror preparations.

Today's editorial examines whether we are ready to handle another anthrax (or similar bioterror) attack. What did we learn from the attacks sent through the mail in October 2001? What countermeasures have been implemented in response?

We unfortunately continue to lack good answers for those questions.

It is getting more difficult to accept the "its the CIA's fault" explanation offered by the White House to explain the inclusion of the faulty Nigeria-Iraq nuclear change in this year's State of the Union message. Walter Pincus and Mike Allen outline the latest discoveries made in this story:

CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials.

Tenet argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used because it came from only a single source, according to one senior official. Another senior official with knowledge of the intelligence said the CIA had doubts about the accuracy of the documents underlying the allegation, which months later turned out to be forged.

The new disclosure suggests how eager the White House was in January to make Iraq's nuclear program a part of its case against Saddam Hussein even in the face of earlier objections by its own CIA director. It also appears to raise questions about the administration's explanation of how the faulty allegations were included in the State of the Union speech.

But I am sure the White House's shameless pin-the-blame-on-someone-else game shall continue. If the subject were not so serious, I might enjoy this case study in how those who preach personal responsibility to others react when facing a difficult situation themselves.

Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-Ore.) and Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) have cowritten an important commentary about how redistricting problems are harming our political system. They write:

Despite the public perception that the drawing of legislative maps is an insider's game of no particular relevance, the health of American democracy hinges on how state officials approach the issue. If competitive elections matter — and to much of the world they are what America stands for — then redistricting also matters.

...

It is, however, a matter of profound importance to our system of government. A few partisans should not be allowed to manipulate the landscape of state and national politics by legislative line-drawing. But that's exactly what has happened.

Partisan redistricting, or bipartisan incumbent-protection redistricting, effectively disenfranchises millions of Americans by creating Congressional (and state legislative) districts that are uncompetitive. Such actions add to partisan gridlock by making moderates an endangered species in districts where only very conservative or very liberal candidates can win a party primary.

The solution? Rep. Leach's homestate provides the example. He and Blumenauer explain:

It doesn't have to be this way. Iowa, which has about 1 percent of the United States population and only five representatives in the House, saw as many competitive races in the last election as California, New York and Illinois combined. (For the record, those three states account for 101 seats in the House). Iowa is so competitive largely because it has an independent redistricting commission that is prohibited from considering where incumbents live when it draws new legislative maps.

Few political reforms would have as positive an impact on our Democratic Republic as the propagation of nonpartisan redistricting commissions. I think Leach and Blumenauer for making this case.

President George Bush told the American people in the State of the Union message he presented on January 28, 2003, that:

The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.

Finally.

This news should unnerve you. Laura Blumenfeld writes:

Tinkering on a laptop, wearing a rumpled T-shirt and a soul patch goatee, this George Mason University graduate student has mapped every business and industrial sector in the American economy, layering on top the fiber-optic network that connects them.

He can click on a bank in Manhattan and see who has communication lines running into it and where. He can zoom in on Baltimore and find the choke point for trucking warehouses. He can drill into a cable trench between Kansas and Colorado and determine how to create the most havoc with a hedge clipper. Using mathematical formulas, he probes for critical links, trying to answer the question: "If I were Osama bin Laden, where would I want to attack?"

As you might imagine, government and private sector officials are more than a little nervous to see all of this information in one place. It is, as a former White House official notes, a potential road map for any terrorist seeking to hurt the United States economy.

Perhaps you are one of those people who can read this story and still think that holding the line on domestic security spending while passing a series of irresponsible tax cuts makes sense.

I believe, however, that our nation's priorities are horribly misplaced.

The CIA says, as far as analysts can tell, that it is Saddam's voice on the tape broadcast last Friday by Al Jazeera. Thomas E. Ricks and Walter Pincus report:

The new tape has underscored the concern of some U.S. officials that it is essential to capture or kill Hussein to make more progress in stabilizing the country. It also appears to call into question pre-war assertions of some senior Bush administration officials that Hussein was incapable of participating in a guerrilla-style resistance campaign because he was accustomed to running a government, not an insurgency.

Daniel Weintraub takes a look at the California budget debate with a post on his California Insider blog. He suggests that the debate may have turned a corner because the Republicans have had a chance to bring forward their realistic plan to balance the state budget without any tax increases.

As Weintraub explains, the Republican budget plan is not a pleasant read.

Start with the proposal to bar 110,000 four-year-olds from kindergarten this fall. Whatever its long-term merits might be, this idea is a loser in the short term, both as policy and politics. Banning abortions for poor women? No matter what your position on that dicey issue, the fact is California’s Supreme Court has already ruled that the state must provide this service. How about cutting grants to the elderly and disabled by 6 percent? Withholding payments to poor blind people to feed their seeing-eye dogs? Ending burial subsidies to the families of foster children who die? Hundreds of millions more in cuts for the University of California and the state universities? All of this and much, much more, and still the budget deficit doesn’t go away. According to the Republicans’ own numbers, it would take another $7 billion in cuts next year and $3.6 billion the year after that to keep their budget balanced.

If California did not have the idiotic two-thirds vote requirement to pass a budget, there is little doubt that the State Legislature would have met the Constitutional deadline. But, a few Republican votes are needed to pass a budget measure. The standoff, therefore, continues.

This budget debate is but the latest sign that the state needs to pass something like the Budget Accountability Act to bring some sanity, and yes accountability, to the budget process.

Sacramento Bee political columnist Daniel Weintraub explains that the recall targeting California Governor Gray Davis (D) is only a first step. The ultimate goal is an attack upon the state's entire political system.

The Philadelphia Inquirer's editorial writers are not impressed with the games the Bush Administration continues to play with scientific reports:

Despite their constant talk about "sound science," Bush administration officials keep manipulating or suppressing scientific information for political reasons. This censorship limits the ability of Congress and the American people to make informed public-policy choices. It needs to stop.

Jules Witcover thinks that the rest of the Democratic frontrunners would do well to follow the example of former Vermont Governor Howard Dean and criticize with force President Bush's decisions.

Clarence Page wrestles in his latest column with the "Q" word and Iraq. He recalls that some people worried about whether our government had a realistic plan for what would follow our inevitable military victory in Iraq. Unfortunately, as Page explains:

...instead of dealing with such pragmatic questions, the Bush administration and its defensive defenders accused questioners of lacking patriotism or "forgetting" Sept. 11, or being, worst of all, "liberals" just for raising the question.

Now the bad news that many of us questioners wondered about is unfolding. Dozens of coalition forces, mostly American, have died since Bush stood on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln near a banner reading "Mission Accomplished" on May 1 and said that "major combat operations in Iraq have ended."

Those who ask "Have you forgotten Sept. 11?" also should ask, "Have you forgotten May 1?"

Thomas Oliphant adds his observations about President Bush's broken promise to expand national service.

Only in America could an explosion of patriotic interest in national service be met by a national administration whose indifference has been exceeded only by its incompetence.

What began this year as a laudable willingness by President Bush to support a major increase in support for the volunteers of AmeriCorps is for the moment barely treading water and may still face deep cutbacks.

The problem was caused by epic bungling on the part of Bush's National Service Corp. appointees, and it has been exacerbated all year by the president's failure to put an ounce or two of his clout on the line to fix it.

Remember, government budgets are not just about numbers. They are a reflection of priorities.

When it came time to pass an irresponsible tax cut, President Bush was there to spend some of his political capital. He has been notably absent, however, when it comes to fulfilling this promise.

I think that says much about this administration's horribly misplaced policy priorities.

President Bush is going to Africa. But will he continue to ignore problems there that could have a negative impact on our national security?

Perhaps I will be surprised. I worry, however, because reports about this upcoming trip make it appear that the president is not going to focus on the rebel wars that are destablizing the continent. Michael Hill, for example, writes about Liberia:

"There is a litany of reasons for why we should go in, moral and historic," says Professor Herbert Howe of Georgetown University. "And there is the self-interest factor. A stateless area, a region of collapsed states is a breeding ground for international criminality and terrorism."

Howe and others note that al-Qaida has been tied to money laundering, diamond smuggling and counterfeiting amid the chaos Taylor has unleashed in West Africa. "The major problem is what happens with the two rebel groups once Taylor goes," Howe says. "If we put troops on the ground we might be more committed to get Taylor out, but are we committed to stay the course?"

National Conference of State Legislatures Executive Director William T. Pound makes a sensible suggestion that would help the states deal with the worst fiscal crises they have faced in a generation.

The idea is simple in concept. The federal government should start paying for the mandates it imposes on state governments. Pound writes:

States are still funding billions of dollars worth of programs the federal government has ordered, but never paid its share for. Every year, states spend between $23 billion and $82 billion to comply with unfunded federal mandates, which include special education, election reform, homeland security and the No Child Left Behind Act. One New Hampshire study determined, for example, that compliance with No Child Left Behind costs states $7 for every $1 they get from Congress.

On the homeland security front, the National League of Cities and the U.S. Conference of Mayors say cities alone have yet to be reimbursed for at least $3 billion in expenses. States would surely stand on more solid financial footing if Congress bridged the gap between what it orders and what it provides in dollars to accomplish.

But one thing we have learned about our Washington-based political leadership: they love to pass along the cost of their decisions.

Which is bad policy, whether the costs are passed along to the states through unfunded mandates or to our children and grandchildren through ever-growing budget deficits.

A joint commentary written by the Brookings Institution's Henry Aaron and the Heritage Foundation's Stuart Butler makes an excellent point:

We believe it is time for those who disagree about how best to extend health insurance -- as we do -- to recognize that narrowed coverage is increasingly dangerous to the nation's social, economic and physical health.

Aaron and Butler propose a new joint partnership between the federal and state governments to try to reduce the rolls of the uninsured.

It is an idea worthy of additional discussion.

David Broder writes about important efforts to warn us about our continuing vulnerability to terrorism. Warnings, alas, we appear doomed to ignore:

We have been warned. Our country remains woefully unprepared to cope with another terrorist assault.

The warning comes not from some paranoid characters on the political fringe but from a sober set of experienced government officials -- one of whom, at least, was prescient about the dangers most of us discovered only when the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were attacked.

Our priorities make no sense. Is it really true that instead of funding domestic security we would rather have tax cuts? Why do we remain unwilling to provide police officers, fire fighters, and other first responders with the equipment and training they need to handle a terrorist strike.

What the hell is it going to take to wake up our political leaders -- and the American people -- to the severe risks our nation is taking by refusing to take the necessary steps to prepare?

Just how many people have to die?

Ah, another broken Bush Administration promise. Brookings Institution Senior Fellow Michael O'Hanlon explains:

After criticizing the Clinton administration for overdeploying and overusing the country's military in the 1990s, the Bush administration is now doing exactly the same thing -- except on a much larger scale. Hordes of active-duty troops and reservists may soon leave the service rather than subject themselves to a life continually on the road. Much more than transforming the armed forces or relocating overseas bases, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld must solve this problem before the Bush administration breaks the American military.

O'Hanlon's analysis shows that the deployment demands on the Army are roughly twice what is sustainable. These problems, of course, are made worse by the Bush Administration and its Republican Congressional allies who insist on cutting military benefits at the same time.

Mission accomplished?

Iraq still does not have reliable electricity, and the Washington Post's Rajiv Chandrasekaran reports that Iraqis are growing increasingly impatient with our failure to provide a basic and necessary service:

On Baghdad's streets, the blackouts are fueling a growing nostalgia for former president Saddam Hussein among people who only weeks ago cheered the fall of his government and welcomed the arrival of U.S. troops. "We figured the Americans, who are a superpower, would at least give us electricity," said Mehdi Abdulwahid, an unemployed oil engineer who now helps a friend sell drinks on a busy sidewalk. "Now we wish we had the old times back."

Hussein, Abdulwahid said with a sigh, "was a ruthless man, but at least we had the basics of life. How can we care about democracy now when we don't even have electricity?"

Some people warned that the military triumph could be lost if we were not adequately prepared to repair essential services quickly. Abdulwahid does not stand alone in his feelings.

I realize that this may prove too much to ask. But perhaps when President "Bring Em On" Bush is through taunting those who seek to kill our troops, he can turn his attention to providing the needed resources to win the post-war in Iraq?

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) peeks behind the unreasonable budget assumptions used by our government show us how much red ink we can expect in the future. Richard Kogan writes:

In March of this year, the Congressional Budget Office projected that large deficits in 2003 and 2004 would be followed by falling deficits thereafter, a budget surplus within five years, and large and growing surpluses within ten years. Even accounting for the recently enacted tax cuts and supplemental appropriations to fund the Iraq war, CBO’s projections imply steadily improving budgets. But such a conclusion would be considerably too optimistic: CBO’s figures omit as much as $4.4 trillion in costs over the next ten years, costs that result from legislation that Congress is likely — and in many cases, virtually certain — to enact.

The CBPP's analysis includes a helpful chart about other attempts at realistic budget numbers. The other analyses include:

Other Analyses Produce Similar Results Other analysts also conclude that the CBO baseline should not be used to infer likely future surpluses.  Making adjustments similar to those in this analysis, others find deficits of: $4.0 trillion over ten years: Peter G. Peterson (President of Concord Coalition), April  30, 2003. $4.0 trillion over ten years, $476 billion in 2013: Rep. John Spratt, Ranking Member, House Budget Committee, May 29, 2003. $4.1 trillion over ten years, $530 billion in 2013: this analysis. $500-$575 billion in 2013: Committee on Economic Development, March 2003. 4.5 trillion over ten years: Goldman-Sachs, June 17, 2003.

James Pinkerton continues his excellent analysis of the situation in Iraq by reminding us that the Iraqis, like other nations before them, may prefer disfunctional self-governance to our help. He writes:

Arabs might agree that they have problems, but they don't necessarily want to get their solutions from us. Manuel Quezon, the first elected president of the Philippines, made the same point seven decades ago when he declared, "I prefer a government run like hell by Filipinos to a government run like heaven by Americans." Worse, as Pinkerton reminds us, many Iraqis today do not think we are offering them heaven.

It turns out that President Bush did not deliberate much about death penalty appeals to his office while he was Texas Governor. There are likely several reasons for this unfortunate history.

But one extremely troubling cause lies with the fact that the man who could be his first Supreme Court nominee, Alberto Gonzales, did not provide Bush with important information about the cases under review. Derrick Z. Jackson explains:

On execution day in Texas, it was the job of Gonzales to give Bush a summary of the case. The summary was the last information standing between an inmate and lethal injection. Gonzales provided 57 summaries to Bush. Gonzales intended for the memos to be confidential, but author Alan Berlow obtained them under Texas public information law.

Berlow found that Gonzales routinely provided scant summaries to Bush. The summaries, according to Berlow, ''repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of crucial issues in the cases at hand: ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.''

I am not.

(Given how important Gonzales is to President Bush, people should read more about this subject. TalkLeft, for example, started writing about this information on June 10.)

David Broder says we should look beyond the fancy fonts and worn parchment we often see and focus instead on the words and phrases used to declare our nation's independence in 1776.

Broder explains that the principles contained within this Declaration should continue to resonate today. He wonders, however, whether they do. He reminds us of some of those important thoughts and writes:

"A decent respect to the opinions of mankind." Do we still have it? Or has this once marginal assemblage of colonies, out on the edge of the known world, become so captivated with its own power that we no longer feel the need to justify our actions to anyone?

"We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." Is our belief in equality truly self-evident? How does it jibe with the growing inequality of income and wealth and opportunity in this country? And is the pursuit of happiness, as now understood, wedded to the same sense of duty and responsibility that animated the men in Philadelphia?

"And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine providence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." Are we privileged Americans, enjoying all the blessings the vision of the Founders provided, willing to pledge something of equal value to our society and our fellow citizens in our time? Are we worthy of the gift we have been given?

Which is all the more reason for us to thank Broder for trying to remind us about them.

Federation of American Scientists President Henry C. Kelly warns that our nation is not prepared to deal with increasingly complex questions regarding biology and security.

In truth, it is possible to imagine a malicious use for virtually any biological research or production site. The difference between a lab for producing lifesaving vaccines and one capable of making deadly toxins is largely one of intent.

As molecular biology continues to advance, this problem will become only more acute. Within a few years it may be possible for an inexperienced graduate student with a few thousand dollars worth of equipment to download the gene structure of smallpox, insert sequences known to increase infectiousness or lethality, and produce enough material to threaten millions of people. Yet, perversely, all of the information and equipment needed to create such a "supervirus" would have been developed in the struggle to cure disease.

Do you think the new Department of Homeland Security should have a committee designed to provide effective oversight of its activities?

Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) and some of his GOP Congressional Committee Chairman apparently feel that such coordinated oversight is unimportant. The Hill's Hans Nichols reports:

House Republican leaders have signaled that they are disinclined to grant permanent status to the panel that will oversee the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

GOP aides say the political will and motivation are not there because making the Select Committee on Homeland Security a permanent panel would create a jurisdictional conflict that the leadership would prefer to avoid.

But some lawmakers, both Democrat and Republican, say that the committee's probationary status prevents it from discharging the full and vigorous oversight that the new requires.

James Pinkerton, who has been in Iraq, makes an excellent point about the situation there:

Because of the widening mismatch between rhetoric at home and observed results in Iraq. Put simply, if the White House keeps insisting we've won, even as Americans are still dying, the credibility canyon will eventually swallow Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Federal Election Commissioner Scott E. Thomas makes an excellent suggestion that would improve the public financing system presidential candidates can use.

Well, those candidates except for a certain Republican. One who is going to opt-out of the system since he is positioned to reap the campaign donation bounty from those plutocrats overjoyed with the results from his irresponsible tax cut policies.

The Center for Voting and Democracy's Steven Hill and Rob Richie have co-written an important commentary about the increasing perversion of the redistricting process.

The bipartisan incumbent-protection redistricting following the 2000 census was bad enough. It left many people effectively disenfranchised through the creation of uncompetitive Congressional and State Legislative seats. Now some odious people, led by House Majority Leader Tom "I Am The Federal Government" DeLay (R-Texas), want to turn what should be a once-a-decade process into something that can be revisited for partisan advantage at any time.

Hill and Richie explain the result of such shenanigans:

Power grabs and incumbent protection plans occurred in state after state, at both congressional and state legislative levels. The real losers were voters, left with overwhelmingly choiceless elections. The inevitable churning that comes with redistricting usually increases competition, at least for one or two elections. But more than 37 percent of state legislative incumbents were uncontested -- nearly as many as before redistricting. Voters booted out the incumbent party in half of gubernatorial races, but not a single legislative chamber came under new control except in the relatively few states where courts or commissions drew the lines.

The U.S. House of Representatives was no better: Only four challengers defeated incumbents, the fewest in history, while fewer than one in 10 races were won by competitive margins of less than 10 percent. Women and members of racial minority groups made little to no gain in representation, in stark contrast to dramatic increases in the post-redistricting elections of 1992.

Using sophisticated computers, polling and databases to draw the legislative lines with unprecedented precision, party leaders and incumbents essentially did away with elections. For the rest of this decade, the only choice most voters will have in House races is to ratify the nominee -- usually the incumbent -- of the party that was handed their district.

I have long argued for redistricting reform, perhaps along the lines of the nonpartisan commission model successfully used by Iowa.

We should not be surprised to see our electoral system failing as long as the process by which we create the foundation of it -- the drawing of representative districts -- remains broken and easily manipulated.

Washington Post reporter Anthony Shadid files a disturbing story from Baghdad:

To Staff Sgt. Charles Pollard, the working-class suburb of Mashtal is a "very, very, very, very bad neighborhood." And he sees just one solution.

"U.S. officials need to get our [expletive] out of here," said the 43-year-old reservist from Pittsburgh, who arrived in Iraq with the 307th Military Police Company on May 24. "I say that seriously. We have no business being here. We will not change the culture they have in Iraq, in Baghdad. Baghdad is so corrupted. All we are here is potential people to be killed and sitting ducks."

Remain calm. All is well. Right, Chip?

President Bush has unveiled a new economic strategy: it's Bill Clinton's fault.

Ah, revisionist history. President Bush certainly has a selective way of embracing that idea.

I guess we can conclude that all of those Republican lectures about being the party of personal responsibility are no longer operative.