January 2004 Archives

So, now we learn that the Bush Administration had reason to believe that the cost estimates for the new Medicare prescription drug plan were not correct. That the program's cost was going to be higher.

Much. Higher.

Instead of letting us in on those concerns, President George W. Bush and his team decided we did not need to know.

Passing a flawed bill for pure political reasons, after all, is far more important than candor.

This from the party that lectured us for years about how important it was to level with the American people. You remember those lectures about truth, right?

Of course, as we all know, the Republicans' preoccupation with the truth, disclosure, and candor suddenly went on hiatus on January 20, 2001.

I doubt future generations, who are being left the bill for this program and this Administration's other seemingly endless array of irresponsible fiscal policies, will be as willing to forgive.

Paul Krugman decides to expose the fallacy of those conservatives who blame spending alone for the irresponsible deficits being recorded by the federal government.

Is domestic spending really exploding? Think about it: farm subsidies aside, which domestic programs have received lavish budget increases over the last three years? Education? Don't be silly: No Child Left Behind is rapidly turning into a sick joke.

In fact, many government agencies are severely underfinanced. For example, last month the head of the National Park Service's police admitted to reporters that her force faced serious budget and staff shortages, and was promptly suspended.

A recent study by the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities does the math. While overall government spending has risen rapidly since 2001, the great bulk of that increase can be attributed either to outlays on defense and homeland security, or to types of government spending, like unemployment insurance, that automatically rise when the economy is depressed.

Why, then, do we face the prospect of huge deficits as far as the eye can see? Part of the answer is the surge in defense and homeland security spending. The main reason for deficits, however, is that revenues have plunged. Federal tax receipts as a share of national income are now at their lowest level since 1950.

The lowest level since 1950. Before Medicare. When Social Security was still an infant program.

Yes, there is too much pork spending. And our political leaders all too often add major benefits (like the Medicare prescription drug benefit) without explaining from where the money will come to pay for them.

But no one should fail to recognize that tax revenues have fallen to their lowest level when compared to GDP since 1950. President Harry Truman's administration.

Our country is a bit more complicated now than it was then. As long as Republicans insist upon their tax-cuts-only policy platform, we will only complicate the future for ourselves and generations to come.

Thomas Oliphant talks with two young New Hampshire voters and wonders why our government insists upon putting up so many obstacles on their road to becoming teachers. He writes:

Each also faces the additional obstacles of a political culture that claims to value the teaching of children but belies that claim every day in nonsensical, stingy policies that are major elements of the load these remarkable young people must shoulder.

Sandra Swiechowicz and Allison Cappella remind political wise guys what today's New Hampshire primary is supposed to be about -- voters seeking a president with some awareness of their lives and some ideas that are relevant to them. At their level, the noisy madness of presidential campaigns becomes personal -- as it should be.

Robert Scheer asks a reasonable question: will there be any consequences for the misrepresentations told by the Bush Administration in the build up to our Iraq invasion?

The maddening aspect of all this is that we haven't needed Kay to set the record straight. The administration's systematic abuse of the facts, including the fraudulent link of Hussein to 9/11, has been obvious for two years. That's why 23 former U.S. intelligence experts — including several who quit in disgust — have been willing to speak out in Robert Greenwald's shocking documentary "Uncovered." The story they tell is one of an administration that went to war for reasons that smack of empire-building, then constructed a false reality to sell it to the American people. Is that not an impeachable offense?

After all, the president misled Congress into approving his preemptive war on the grounds that our very survival as a nation was threatened by Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We were told that if we hesitated, allowing the U.N. inspectors who were in Iraq to keep working, a mushroom cloud over New York, to use Condoleezza Rice's imagery, might well be our dark reward.

We must not forget what President George W. Bush and his officials really argued. And we should hold him accountable.

Since there will not be an impeachment, we should take advantage of this November's election to send a message that we will not tolerate being duped about matters of this importance.

The Congressional Budget Office today released its latest Economic and Budget Outlook today.

It is not a happy story. Bush Administration officials may claim that the president is "serious about the deficit," but his record and his insistence upon making his irresponsible tax cuts permanent despite these troubling signs contradict that rhetoric.

The nonpartisan Concord Coalition commented on the new CBO report today. Since the points it makes are so important, I have chosen to reprint its media release in its entirety below.

WASHINGTON -- With today's new projections by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) showing that the nation's fiscal outlook continues to plunge downward, The Concord Coalition called on Congress and the Bush Administration to make deficit reduction a top priority item on this year's agenda. As detailed in CBO's report, the projected 10-year deficit of $1.9 trillion could explode by another $5.4 trillion if all expiring tax cuts are made permanent and discretionary spending continues to go up by the same rate it has for the past five years.

"Failure to rein in the fiscally irresponsible combination of big spending increases and big tax cuts that characterized 2003 will result in a decade of ballooning debt at exactly the wrong time -- just as the huge fiscal consequences of the baby boomers' retirement and health care benefits begin to hit. The responsible thing to do is to prepare for that known challenge by getting our fiscal house in order, not by making a bad situation even worse with an explosion of debt," said Concord Coalition Executive Director Robert L. Bixby.

"Any wishful thinking on the part of politicians that economic growth alone will avoid the need to make hard choices should end with today's CBO report. Large deficits persist even though CBO now assumes a very strong economic recovery. While much attention has been understandably paid to the record deficit projected for 2004, the growing likelihood that sizable deficits will persist long after the economy has fully recovered is what politicians need to focus on. Whatever the merits or necessities of short-term deficits, there is little doubt that permanent deficits pose a threat to the economy -- particularly with the need to find resources for the unfunded retirement benefits of the baby boomers." Bixby said.

Concord highlighted the following facts from the CBO report:

Deterioration in the budget outlook since August: -- $986 billion

Deficit excluding the Social Security surplus FY2005-2014 -- $4.3 trillion

Cost of making all tax cuts permanent -- $2.2 trillion

Savings from 10-year freeze on appropriations at 2004 level -- $1.3 trillion

The Concord Coalition is a nonpartisan, grass roots organization dedicated to balanced federal budgets and generationally responsible fiscal policy. Former U.S. Senators Warren Rudman (R-N.H.) and Bob Kerrey (D-Neb.) serve as Concord's co-chairs and former Secretary of Commerce Peter Peterson serves as president.

Bob Herbert makes a strong case that high-technology job outsourcing should be considered an economic and national security issue.

You would think that given its import, it would come up more often in this presidential election season.

Of course, it is early. Perhaps one of the candidates will make a point to sound a call about the danger.

The Philadelphia Inquirer once again offers an excellent editorial criticizing the Bush Administration for its continuing attacks against science.

While jabbering about "sound science," President Bush has packed advisory panels with ideological appointments, censored reports, and gagged government scientists.

Now, an obscure administrative power grab, camouflaged as a scientific gold standard, will likely result in giving politics even more control over science.

The White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) is tarnishing "peer review," a respected process routinely used by academic journals and government agencies. In peer review, knowledgeable scientists evaluate the soundness of one another's research.

The Bush Administration's trashing of science for ideological reasons is nothing new. The Washington Monthly's Nicholas Thompson outlined the growing divide between the Bush Administration and science in an important commentary published in the magazine's July/August 2003 issue.

One would think some Democrats might want to hold President George W. Bush accountable for this dangerous turn.

I guess we will see.

The Los Angeles Times editorializes:

Baby boomers smugly contemplating a happy retirement unfortunately risk getting snared in a numbers game that won't add up — for them or their kids. Two recent developments — financial troubles at the U.S. agency that guarantees pensions for 45 million Americans and a sobering report on disappearing retiree medical benefits — should smack them in the face about their prospects for a tranquil old age. Factor in this nation's spendthrift practices and failure to save, plus the ticking time bomb that is Social Security, and just when will the country start to come to grips with the reality that the dream of a carefree retirement looks increasingly like a nightmare?

The retirement funding hole we are digging gets larger and deeper with each passing day. The baby boomers are going to retire. Whether we are prepared for it or not.

Does this really seem the best time to make permanent, as President George W. Bush argues, the irresponsible tax cuts enacted under his presidency?

Clarence Page reminds us of the unfulfilled promises President George W. Bush made during his 2003 State of the Union message so that we can put in better perspective the promises made in his 2004 SOTU speech this past week.

As Page explains, Bush makes these promises in the hopes that we all are too busy to notice whether he actually makes good on them.

Rep. Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.) writes in favor of a plan that would help people build wealth from birth. He writes:

New Deal and Great Society programs have had great success reducing poverty. But these programs are not oriented toward wealth accumulation. To renew America's tradition of upward social mobility, we have to find new ways to help those living on modest incomes save and invest.

The president's plan focuses on creating new tax shelters for existing wealth. A wiser policy is to help more people become investors. For $40 billion over the next 10 years -- less money than the president's plan -- we can build upon the British model and establish an "American Stakeholder Account," seeded with $1,000, for every child born in America. Children living below the poverty line could start with $2,000. Additional contributions would reward children for performing community service and completing high school. Upon graduation, the young adult could use accumulated savings tax-free to pay college tuition, purchase a home, start a business or invest for retirement.

Giving more Americans ways to build wealth shall prove increasingly necessary as the baby boom generation's retirement places great stresses on our senior entitlement programs, the federal budget, and the U.S. taxpayer.

Ford deserves credit for picking up the standard for this excellent idea. We need to build wealth and increase national savings. The KidSave idea would start the process of achieving both of these goals.

Now this story is simply outrageous. The Associated Press' Matt Gouras writes:

The school honor roll, a time-honored system for rewarding A students, has become an apparent source of embarrassment for some underachievers.

As a result, all Nashville schools have stopped posting honor rolls, and some are also considering a ban on hanging good work in the hallways -- on the advice of school lawyers.

After a few parents complained that their children might be ridiculed for not making the list, lawyers for the Nashville school system warned that state privacy laws forbid releasing any academic information, good or bad, without permission.

We need to celebrate academic achievement. We need to provide positive reinforcement like this as an incentive for children to succeed.

And, yes, we should provide our schools all the resources they need to give every child as good an education as they will accept.

It appears that at least some in the Bush Administration have come to a conclusion that was obvious to independent observers of the Iraq situation long ago.

As negotiations over the transition to a new Iraqi government continue, the Washington Post's Robin Wright and Anthony Shadid report that everything is on the table except the June 30 deadline for the power transfer. They write:

Yet in a sign of how much control the United States has lost since the Nov. 15 accord, U.S. officials concede that the most important calculations in ending the political crisis will be the positions of two players excluded from the original agreement: the United Nations and an aging ayatollah who has not left his home in six years.

The U.S.-led coalition needs U.N. help to give the process credibility and Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani's approval to pull off the transition and meet its deadline, U.S. officials say.

The fact that this was ever a question speaks volumes about just how messed up the post-war planning was.

The Bush Administration better get rewrite on the line. Reuters' Tabassum Zakaria reports:

David Kay stepped down as leader of the U.S. hunt for banned weapons in Iraq on Friday and said he did not believe the country had any large stockpiles of chemical or biological weapons.

In a direct challenge to the Bush administration, which says its invasion of Iraq was justified by the presence of illicit arms, Kay told Reuters in a telephone interview he had concluded there were no Iraqi stockpiles to be found.

"I don't think they existed," Kay said. "What everyone was talking about is stockpiles produced after the end of the last (1991) Gulf War, and I don't think there was a large-scale production program in the '90s," he said.

I also remember when Republicans said they could not tolerate distortions and lies from their political leaders. Isn't it interesting how that principle appears to have gone on hiatus as of January 20, 2001?

Matt Miller does an impressive job of analyzing this week's President George W. Bush's State of the Union address in his latest column. He writes:

You expect a salesman to emphasize the positive attributes of whatever he's peddling and to downplay the downside. But even by extreme standards of political salesmanship, the rhetoric-reality gap on display in President Bush's State of the Union shows the White House has taken cynicism to impressive new levels.

Indeed, it's hard to pick the single area in which the president's shading of reality departs most cynically from the facts - the competition is so fierce!

Miller goes on to provide many examples of Bush's cynical approach. At some point, I would like to see Bush called to account for his distortions.

The Concord Coalition took their message about the national debt and generational responsibility to New Hampshire's capital yesterday.

Concord leaders, members, and the organization's traveling national debt clock were present as part of the nonpartisan organization's efforts to make the deficits and national debt an issue in the 2004 political campaigns. The Manchester Union-Leader reports:

Phil Smith, national grassroots director for the 200,000-member organization, said that as federal spending soars and tax revenues sink, the nation’s debt is rapidly becoming a vital issue in this year’s Presidential race.

“Politicians are leading us to believe that debt is a free alternative to taxes, and a free pass for unlimited spending.” He said, “Young people should take notice, your economic future is on the line.”

The press conference took place at the State House, and sought to illustrate the amount of debt that Americans owe. In its final 2004 New Hampshire stop, the Coalition displayed the giant electronic scoreboard, mounted on a 25-foot trailer, ticking off the growth of our national debt at nearly $20,000 per second. The clock also shows each family’s share of the debt, currently about $96,000.

I am pleased that Concord continues to spread this vital message. I wish, however, that we had not witnessed such irresponsible fiscal policies over the past three years, policies so bad that they make Concord's efforts necessary once again.

Does Vice President Dick Cheney think that if he just keeps repeating the unsubstantiated assertion that Saddam Hussein had ties to Al Qaeda it will somehow prove true?

It sure sees that way, since the Vice President decided to trot out this "theory" again on National Public Radio this morning.

The Center for American Progress this helpful analysis of the Vice President's statement. Cheney continues to argue that there were ties even when Secretary of State Colin Powell, among others, have admitted that there is no evidence to substantiate the link.

The Vice President should be an issue in the 2004 presidential campaign. His numerous political sins should provide months of examples of why a change is needed in the White House.

Let's see if one of the Democratic contenders has the guts to make the self-selected veep an issue. We should not tolerate this misinformation campaign.

President George W. Bush in his State of the Union address tonight made the following assertions:

We have faced serious challenges together - and now we face a choice. We can go forward with confidence and resolve - or we can turn back to the dangerous illusion that terrorists are not plotting and outlaw regimes are no threat to us.

This is, alas, just a continuation of this president's pathetic equation of dissent with supporting the terrorists.

What are your priorities, Mr. President? Tax cuts or homeland security? Tax cuts or inspecting cargo containers? Tax cuts or anti-missile defense systems for our commercial airline fleet? Tax cuts or a larger military, better paid, and with programs in place that allow our nation to live up to our obligations to them?

President Bush and his allies may question the patriotism of people who hold views similar to mine.

I'll just continue to question his policies.

Now the hate-the-government wing of the Republican Party will not like this idea. But George Kenney, a diplomat in the first Bush Administration, makes a wonderful and sensible suggestion: it is time to increase the size of the United States House of Representatives.

There are currently 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. In a country of 290 million people, that means that each congressional district has nearly 670,000 people. That is ludicrously large — and it is not the way the House was intended to work.

In the 1st Congress, the 65 House members each represented about 60,000 people. Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, as states were added and subtracted, and the population grew, the House frequently resized itself. In 1913, the 63rd Congress jumped from 391 to 435 seats — and a district still only included about 200,000 people.

But that's when it stopped. The general confusion and displacements during World War I, the Depression and World War II made the censuses of 1920, 1930 and 1940 seem provisional, and there were no increases. The calmer 1950s would have been the time to resume regular increases, but the House opted to go on doing nothing. Meanwhile, the population kept growing.

Kenney suggests increasing the House by five-fold. That goes too far in my mind. We should roughly triple it, returning to a ratio of 250,000 people per member of Congress.

While I am at it, California State Senate districts are even larger than Congressional Districts, with nearly 850,000 residents per district. Assembly Districts are half that size.

Do you think there could be a connection between these overlarge districts and California's history of a political uninvolved citizenry? I do.

The Washington Post's Fareed Zakaria writes about one of the serious and growing problems facing our nation in Iraq today as our government seeks to transfer sovereignty to the Iraqis:

There really should be no contest.

On one side is history's most awesome superpower, victorious in war, ruling Iraq with nearly 150,000 troops and funding its reconstruction to the tune of $20 billion this year. On the other side is an aging cleric with no formal authority, no troops and little money, who is unwilling to even speak in public. Yet last June, when Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani made it known that he didn't like the U.S. proposal to transfer power to Iraqis, the plan collapsed. And last week, when Sistani announced that he is still unhappy with the new U.S. proposal, L. Paul Bremer rushed to Washington for consultations. What does this man have that the United States doesn't?

Legitimacy.

My prediction earlier today was a bit off. While Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) won in Iowa, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.) finished ahead of former Gov. Howard Dean (D-Vt.) for second place. Rep. Richard Gephardt finished fourth, and reports are that he will drop out of the presidential race tomorrow.

There are now, in my mind, four potential nominees left. Retired General Wesley Clark joins Kerry, Edwards, and Dean as the frontrunners entering New Hampshire.

Kerry's win was important. Edwards was the biggest winner of the night, however, and it will be interesting to see if his second-place finish and strong positive message resonate in New Hampshire.

Dean may have taken a body blow tonight, but he is far from out of the race. He has money, organization, and committed supporters. But his speech tonight was a huge mistake, at least on television. He has time to right his campaign, but he needs to get back on message quickly.

Dean can blame negative attacks all he wants, but when two Senators who supported the Iraq war resolution (Kerry and Edwards) get more anti-war support than Dean ended up winning, the Vermonter's campaign must realize some correction to its strategy is needed to avoid further disappointments.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies' Edward N. Luttwak makes a good case for scrapping the color-coded terrorism alert system. He writes:

The greatest of all costs, however, is domestic and cumulative. The successive warnings of ill-defined threats are achieving the very aim of the terrorists. Their purpose is to create fear, in the hope that this will induce Americans to accept terrorist demands.

Homeland Security's color-coded alert system is utterly inappropriate, even for small embattled countries, let alone for the United States. The department is happy with the alert system, but perhaps our new bureaucrats should pay more attention to the practices of those far more experienced in countering terrorism. The Israelis have never seen a need to broadcast alert levels to the general public, not even when at war. Nor did the British see any advantage in acting as if the United Kingdom was "Battlestar Galactica" when under attack by the bombs of Irish terrorists.

Nothing prevents the implementation of the security measures associated with each threat level, without any need to broadcast frightening yet meaningless warnings to the public. In the past, the British contacted police forces by telex and telephone, as did the Israelis, who also used messengers to mobilize each neighborhood's reservists. Nowadays with the Internet, one keystroke can alert our thousands of different police forces and other security professionals.

I am not sure that we can scrap the system entirely. But some sort of regionalism is absolutely needed -- and we should remember that, as Luttwak argues, our public safety resources can be activated without an upgrade to an orange color.

I figure I should go on the record with a prediction about tonight's Iowa Caucus results.

My guess for the top four?

1. John Kerry
   
2. Howard Dean
   
3. John Edwards
   
4. Richard Gephardt
   

No one can be sure about who is going to make the trek of one of nearly 2,000 public meetings tonight. Which candidates are going to pick up the most second-choice votes after the first round winnows out candidates that do not meet the threshold for support?

It is going to be an interesting night. If my results are correct, then we have a four-way race among Kerry, Dean, Edwards, and Wesley Clark. Gephardt has to win today to remain a viable choice.

Clarence Page would like to know what ulterior motives might lie behind the Bush Administration's new space policy. He writes:

Every time I see one of this highly secretive administration's "big ideas" lead back to the coffers of their old corporate cronies, I hear echoes of an Illinois politician I used to cover. He would say, "I can smell the meat a'cookin'," whenever someone introduced a "fetcher," a bill that could attract large campaign donations and other forms of bribery--legal and otherwise--from interested parties.

NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe seems to be well aware of the problem. In a briefing after Bush's speech, he promised that space officials will keep an eagle's eye on how much Bush's exploration program is "industry-driven."

That's comforting, but I'd like to see Congress, which has yet to fund Bush's space dreams, play an active role in that scrutiny too.

But somehow I think Halliburton has the better chance of winning some additional government pork.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.) highlights some of the Bush Administration's dishonest arguments from the months before the Iraq war in an op-ed from today's Washington Post.

But the most important point is not the dishonesty, it is not Karl Rove's advocation of the political use of warfare, it is the idea that this Iraq adventure has turned our focus away from Al Qaeda and the war on terror. He writes:

Hussein's brutal regime was not an adequate justification for war, and the administration did not seriously try to make it one until long after the war began and all the false justifications began to fall apart. There was no imminent threat. Hussein had no nuclear weapons, no arsenals of chemical or biological weapons, no connection to Sept. 11 and no plausible link to al Qaeda. We never should have gone to war for ideological reasons driven by politics and based on manipulated intelligence.

Vast resources have been spent on the war that should have been spent on priorities at home. Our forces are stretched thin. Precious lives have been lost. The war has made America more hated in the world and made the war on terrorism harder to win. As Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said in announcing the latest higher alert: "Al Qaeda's continued desire to carry out attacks against our homeland is perhaps greater now than at any point since September 11th."

But as Kennedy notes, no Administration that plays politics with warfare, and American lives, deserves four more years in office.

I just made the following post at the Political State Report.

With California Democrats gathered in San Jose for this year's State Convention, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) received some good news in the latest nonpartisan Field Poll. Boxer enjoys a comfortable lead (between 13-23%) over her potential challengers. Former State Secretary of State Bill Jones (R), meanwhile, is well ahead in the race for the GOP's nomination to take on Boxer in the general election.

You can read more by clicking here.

The Associated Press' Alan Fram reminds his readers of the dramatically different (and worse) fiscal situation our federal government finds itself in today as opposed to when President George W. Bush presented his first budget.

Our nation has gone, after all, from projections of $5.6 trillion in surpluses over the decade to something far more bleak. Fram writes:

How things have changed. The most recent estimates from the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) are for 10-year deficits totaling $1.4 trillion. Private groups say the shortfalls could exceed $5 trillion if fresh tax cuts and spending increases are enacted, as many analysts expect.

Which is immoral and generationally irresponsible. We owe future generations much better than this fiscal treatment.

The Concord Coalition is once again going to take its national debt clock to the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary.

This is a wonderful thing.

Concord is going, as the press release notes, "to put our rapidly growing $7 trillion national debt – and what to do about it – onto the agenda of voters and candidates." Precisely where it needs to be.

Concord staffers will be distributing the organization's latest Key Questions Voters Should Ask Candidates About the Budget, Social Security and Medicare brochure (link to pdf file).

This is a vital undertaking. One that I hope proves successful in making fiscal responsibility a prime issue for the American people to consider.

Allow me a personal story, which will also double as a disclaimer. Eight years ago I was a volunteer Maine state co-director for the Concord Coalition. I took a week off to head to New Hampshire for the primary. Our group worked very hard that week, taking the national debt clock up and down the state, putting our "Balance the Budget" signs in every camera shot we could find.

We even made a trip to Dixville Notch for the first-in-the-nation primary voting just after midnight. My colleague Phil Smith (who is still with Concord and heading to New Hampshire again next week) had one of our Balance the Budget bumper stickers at Dixville Notch and held it in front of the C-SPAN camera for 20 minutes after those initial votes were cast. It served as quite a backdrop for the follow-up viewer call-in segment!

(I have especially warm feelings about that trip because I ended up starting the process that led to my joining the Concord staff a few weeks later during those trips.)

So, I am happy to see that Concord's national debt clock is headed to Des Moines, Iowa, and Concord, N.H., the next week for a variety of reasons. If you are in either state, head to the state capital and say hello to the Concord staff and volunteers who are out there seeking to inform the public and the politicians about the dangers created by this fically irresponsible age.

The Brookings Institution earlier this week hosted an important forum and released a new report explaining why our current huge budget deficits matter and what must be done to stem the tide of red ink.

Pointing out that less than three years ago the federal budget was running a surplus of $127 billion, the report explains that the bonanza is over. The authors blame the Bush administration tax cuts, a weak economy, government spending increases and a lack of concern for fiscal discipline.

If it weren't for surpluses in Social Security, Medicare and federal retirement programs, the final deficit estimate would exceed $1 trillion in 2014.

I care. It is wrong to tax future generations for tax cuts and a lack of fiscal responsibility today. Having responsible policy for generations -- and not just political posturing for the next election -- should be a top consideration of every political leader.

Most Republicans used to claim to understand this idea. Now that they do not, I hope the American people will remind them at the ballot box this November of its importance.

Newsday is not impressed with the current Administration's decision to outline plans to expand space exploration without explaining how we will pay for it after running up such a fiscally irresponsible record. The editorial explains that:

The White House has been unnervingly sanguine about this ocean of red ink. It has blithely pushed huge tax cuts into law while insisting that the deficit is manageable, even though the cost of Social Security and Medicare will skyrocket when the huge baby-boom generation begins to retire. Not to worry, the White House says: Economic growth and spending restraint will halve the red ink in five years. A half-billion dollar a day deficit is better than $1 billion a day.

But that's a best-case scenario, and it isn't all that good. Even the International Monetary Fund weighed in recently, alarmed that sustained federal deficits will lower national savings, fuel inflation globally and crowd out private investment. The eventual cost? Lower global productivity and income growth.

It is shocking how most Republicans now accept this shockingly irresponsible fiscal record without complaint.

The Boston Globe's Cathy Young thinks it is about time for people to stop demonizing their opponents by comparing them to Hitler unless certain conditions are met. She writes:

How about a belated New Year's resolution for 2004? No more Nazi or Hitler analogies to describe policies or politicians you dislike. Unless, of course, those policies include actual mass murder and torture, or those politicians who engage in such acts.

Kevin Phillips in his column today provides a brief taste of his latest book:

Dynasties in American politics are dangerous. We saw it with the Kennedys, we may well see it with the Clintons and we're certainly seeing it with the Bushes. Between now and the November election, it's crucial that Americans come to understand how four generations of the current president's family have embroiled the United States in the Middle East through CIA connections, arms shipments, rogue banks, inherited war policies and personal financial links.

Robert Novak writes about GOP fears that Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor may now have the reason she needs to join a 5-4 majority to overturn GOP redistricting schemes in Texas and Pennsylvania.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay's (R-Texas) overtly partisan redistricting effort illuminated the need for national redistricting reform. A Supreme Court ruling striking down partisan redistricting plans (and both Republicans and Democrats are guilty of them) would set into motion a most beneficial reform movement.

The So-Called Liberal Media are at it again. It is amazing how the media are seemingly working with the Republican National Committee to publicize the MoveOn.org advertising controversy.

(And let there be no doubt, comparing George W. Bush with Hitler is just stupid. At all levels.)

But, the media's -- and the RNC's -- outrage is just a bit selective. As Eric Alterman writes:

Grover Norquist compares inheritance taxes to Hitler. New York Post and National Review columnist Ralph Peters compares Howard Dean to Goebbels. And yet somehow, the Anti-Defamation League—working hand in glove with the flacks of the Republican Party, are upset only about two of 1500 amateur advertisements that Moveon.org has already repudiated. What would it be like to have a genuinely liberal media, I wonder. Anyway, Times coverage of this burning issue is here.

More important than the hypocrisy of this little moment, however, is that the GOP continues to succeed in pushing their "political hate speech" meme, a fairly transparent effort to delegitimize criticism of the administration by waving around a meaningless piece of jargon.

But the moral of this story is that we who oppose George W. Bush should not fall into this trap. Bush is not Hitler. Bush is not worse than Saddam Hussein. We are not going to convince a majority of Americans if we insist on arguing that he is either.

The Center for Voting and Democracy's Steven Hill and Rob Richie have written a commentary pointing out how we have failed as a nation to make accurate vote counting a priority. They write:

The manufacture and selling of voting equipment shouldn't be just another business. There is something special about our electoral infrastructure that cries out for a federal system with national standards and regulations. After Sept. 11, 2001, we moved to have federal workers monitoring airport security. But after Election 2000, we did nothing comparable for our elections.

Imagine an alternative reality, in which the federal government used its immense resources to invest in developing voting technologies that were truly cutting-edge and secure, with open-source software, voter-verified paper trails, national standards and the public interest incorporated without resistance. Imagine national voter registration that better ensured clean lists and a big increase in the barely two-thirds of American adults now registered to vote.

But no. Instead we are stuck with the shadowy vendors and decentralized hodgepodge that lately have made U.S. democracy a laughingstock around the world. Call it democracy on the cheap.

Priorities, you know.

Robert Samuelson's latest column is a must read:

Just for the record, the Congressional Budget Office recently issued a report telling us what everyone already knows: The federal budget is drifting into a future of unprecedented tax increases, huge deficits or both. This is no secret, because the great driving force of change is the impending retirement of 77 million baby boomers and their heavy claims on federal retirement programs. But in Washington, the CBO's irrefutable conclusion won't produce any noticeable reaction, because there's already a clear bipartisan policy concerning the future: Forget about it.

To leaders of both parties, offending today's voters with unpopular solutions to future problems makes no sense. Indeed, Republicans and Democrats will gladly worsen tomorrow's problems to win more of today's votes. President Bush did precisely that in successfully advocating a new Medicare drug benefit. Although Democrats criticized him, their complaint was that the new benefit isn't generous -- aka expensive -- enough.

The Bush Administration deserves much of the blame for the short-term fiscal irresponsibility, and over $2 billion a day in new national debt. The failure to prepare for the baby boomers inevitable retirement, however, is shared by both parties.

Former Chicago Cubs second baseman Ryne Sandberg was snubbed for the second year in Baseball Hall of Fame voting announced yesterday. He received 61 percent of the vote -- 75 percent is required to earn induction into the Hall.

The other 39 percent of the voters should be fired by their respective newspapers and magazines immediately because they apparently do not know anything about the sport of baseball.

Perhaps they can write obituaries or something while they just fill mark the days before qualifying for their pensions. After all, if they cannot figure this out, they are not paying attention to the game anyway.

Can any of you explain to me how a player with the following credentials (and more!) has been denied a place in the Hall of Fame for the second straight year? As Jason Stark wrote last year:

From 1982-92, he led all second basemen in average, homers, RBI, runs, extra-base hits, OPS, fielding percentage and 500-assist seasons. What else is there that matters? Tonight Show appearances?

Sandberg hit more home runs than any second baseman ever (277). He owns the highest fielding percentage (.989) of any second baseman since 1900. He
started nine straight All-Star Games -- and the only middle infielders in history who ever started more in a row were Cal Ripken and Ozzie Smith."

First Ron Santo, now this. It makes me cranky.

Anyone who now claims that the problems our nation has encountered in Iraq were unforseeable should be forced to read Jackson Diehl's excellent column today.

Because, as Diehl notes, it is not that our leaders were not warned. They just chose to ignore those who dared dissent with the optimistic neoconservative line. Diehl writes:

The Bush administration has been hammered for failing to anticipate or plan for the many problems of postwar Iraq or to set aside the money to pay for them. Its spokesmen insist, as they did before the war, that there was no way of knowing in advance what challenges might come up and what it might take to meet them.

Yet, looking back at what Washington's foreign policy community expected from an intervention in Iraq, it's striking how much of the trouble the U.S. mission now faces was accurately and publicly predicted.

On my desk is a pile of more than a dozen studies and pieces of congressional testimony on the likely conditions of postwar Iraq, prepared before the invasion by think tanks of the left, center and right, by task forces of veteran diplomats and area experts, and by freelancing academics.

The degree of consensus was remarkable: Iraq's reconstruction would be long and costly, violence was likely and goodwill toward the United States probably wouldn't last for long.

But it did not fit within the neoconservatives' neat little ideological box. So they were ignored.

Something for which I think we should hold the Bush Administration accountable.

On December 31, 2003, the national debt of the United States of America topped the $7 trillion barrier for the first time.

The national debt topped $6 trillion for the first time on February 26, 2002.

That's right: it took less than two years to add $1 trillion to the national debt. Even I am stunned by the enormity of the sheer fiscal irresponsibility such a record represents.

Joshua Micah Marshall nails Victoria Toensing for her partisan flip-flop on how serious leaks to the media can be. He writes:

A few days ago the Post's Mike Allen got Victoria "typical Washington talk" Toensing to let us in on the Plame perps' 'we didn't know she was covert' legal strategy. Well, it seems Victoria was a little more hard core on the leak front before her friends (or clients?) got their hands caught in the cookie jar.

Back on September 9th 2001 she penned a piece in Post called "They Call It a Leak. I Call It a Crime."

"The leak must be investigated fully," Toensing bellowed, "if the law has any meaning. If that requires subpoenaing a reporter's phone records, so be it."

With the federal budget battle gearing up, Mark Schmitt has provided this excellent primer about how you should read President George W. Bush's budget and interpret the political events to come.

If you care even a little about the federal budget process, read Schmitt's post. It is time well spent.

Tom Burka on his "Opinions You Should Have" blog has written an excellent commentary in response to White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card's recent comment that questions about whether the Bush Administration lied about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are a "moot point."

Clarence Page gets it. He writes:

Democrats, by contrast, seem to relish the circular firing squad.

For example, even when Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) was embroiled in a heated battle with Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries, McCain never resorted to questioning Bush's electability.

Lieberman, by contrast, charged a few days before New Year's Eve that Dean will "melt in a minute" under Republican attacks if he becomes the nominee. He also said it was "outrageous" of Dean to suggest that Democratic National Committee Chairman Terry McAuliffe step in and shield Dean from growing criticism by his rivals, like Lieberman. Dean had cut into McAuliffe with snippets like: "If we had strong leadership in the Democratic Party ..." and "If Ron Brown were chairman, this wouldn't be happening," referring to the late DNC chairman.

Dean has since spoken with McAuliffe to clear the air, Dean's representatives said.

But attacks against "Washington Democrats" have been a standard Dean mantra on the campaign trail. While governors, including 2000 presidential candidate George W. Bush, often take jabs at Washington "insiders," Dean goes further, targeting his own party's insiders.

Now.

Thomas Oliphant argues that despite all of the Democratic candidates' efforts, this presidential election's major issue is whether or not to reelect President George W. Bush. He writes:

It is not just or even mostly about them [the Democratic candidates]. The country's post-World War II history demonstrates that "reelection elections" -- when there is a sitting president's name on the ballot -- are first about the condition of the country and secondarily about the record of that sitting president.

The identity, character, and record of his opponent have traditionally come in a distant third in the minds of the voters, as they should where the issue is really whether to toss the incumbent or stick with him.

The issue on most voters minds is going to be George W. Bush and his performance. I think he has done a poor job and pursued misguided economic, anti-terror, and foreign policies.

That should be the issue for the Democrats. Many Democratic opinionmakers, alas, seem unable to understand this.

George F. Will's column today comes as close as he can come to penning a journalistic love note about a non-Republican.

He cannot bring himself to give Rubin too much credit for the 1990s economy, but Will does note that:

At this moment of discredited rules, Rubinomics is fiscal policy as psychotherapy. Rubin believes that a key predicate of the 1990s boom -- America's longest uninterrupted expansion -- was the mild Clinton tax increase of 1993. The income tax increase affected only the top 1.2 percent of income earners but reassured markets that Washington was disciplined.

The measurement of, and, even more, the manufacture of "confidence" is an uncertain science. But because Rubin so stresses the prevalence of a state of mind -- uncertainty -- it is not surprising that he thinks fiscal policy should aim to produce a countervailing state of mind: confidence. Policy should minimize government borrowing, thereby minimizing the danger of its "crowding out" borrowing for private investment.

Rubinomics is more Republican than Republicans have recently behaved. In 2003, the first full year since 1954 that Republicans controlled the appropriations process at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, the result, Rubin notes dryly, was not parsimony.

Rubin deserves the praise. The policies he advocated helped to create a policy foundation for strong economic growth, job gains, and balanced budgets. Thankfully Rubin is still fighting for fiscal sanity, including as a Board Member for the Concord Coalition.

This is great news! The Washington Post's Kathy Sawyer reports:

The U.S. spacecraft Spirit survived a hazardous passage through the Martian skies Saturday and bounced successfully into Mars's Gusev Crater shortly after 11:35 p.m. EST.

The lander was the first emissary from Earth to survive the notoriously treacherous approach to the Martian surface since NASA's 1997 Pathfinder wowed earthlings.

For what little it may be worth, Pat Robertson told the Associated Press that God has supposedly revealed to him that President George W. Bush will be reelected in a blowout.

In my mind, a blowout win requires accumulating at least 400 electoral votes and/or 55 percent of the popular vote. Since I do not think Bush will win reelection, I am happy to predict that Robertson is wrong. Bush will not win in a landslide or a blowout.

(Thanks to Taegan Goodard's Political Wire for the link.)