The first NY Times editorial cheers
the cancellation of the Comanche helicopter, but says more need to be cancelled and supports Kerry's idea for two more divisions. "The country's revenues have been so hollowed by President Bush's tax cuts that they simply cannot sustain all of the weapons programs on the books, much less the changes the military needs to make." "The most urgent need is to provide fast relief for America's overstretched ground forces. The extended deployment of Army divisions in Iraq and the heavy use of the reserves strongly suggest the need for two additional active-duty divisions." The second calls for
holding accountable "not just abusive [Catholic] priests but also the bishops and cardinals who covered up their crimes." The third was the one I was hoping to see. It blasts
Dubya for using 9/11 images in his ads. "When we think of 9/11, we think of loss, and of the heroism of average people who reached out in ways great and small to help their fellow men and women. Any political candidate who attempts to piggyback onto those emotions deserves to be shunned by the electorate." The fourth is on
NASA's chief scientist probably being forced to change his opinion on Hubble. "He has become a defender of NASA's recent, and wrongheaded, decision to cancel the next servicing mission, thereby sentencing Hubble to a slow death. Suddenly, the mission he deemed worth the risk of his own life has to be canceled for safety reasons, as he explained yesterday in a letter in The Times....The only question is whether he is speaking from the heart, as he clearly was last July, or is simply a good soldier ordered to front for the premature curtailment of a great instrument." I think the Times has figured out that the Administration demands total loyalty to its political decisions.
More summaries below.
Krugman has a good counter to George Will's doom and gloom column yesterday on
Social Security and Medicare. "First, two words - 'and Medicare' -- make a huge difference. According to the Treasury study, only 16 percent of that $44 trillion shortfall comes from Social Security. Second, the supposed shortfall in both programs comes mainly from projections about the distant future; 62 percent of the combined shortfall comes after 2077. So does the Treasury report show a looming Social Security crisis? No." Bob Herbert reports the latest efforts by the state of Florida to
deny poor children healthcare. A guest editorial challenges the logic of
demanding that Disney CEO Eisner be fired. She thinks that Eisner should have been fired 5 years ago, but has done a decent job over the last year. A second guest editorial warns
that soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan will soon be faking psychiatric conditions. Another guest editorial advocates
Kerry creating a "shadow cabinet".
The first Post editorial is on the latest rage among Republicans - creating charities to glorify themselves and then shaking down lobbyists to donate to them. The second rips President Chavez of Venezuela for dragging his feet on a recall referendum. I don't know much about this, but my guess is that dirty tricks by our government are involved. The third talks about Cheney's recent comments on the economy. The opinion piece talks about recent inflationary pressures and how "the Bush administration has justified its irresponsible budget deficits by pointing to the need to stimulate a sluggish economy. It was never a good argument, but the return of inflationary pressure has made it an even worse one." However, it fails to make a more important point - that the Republicans have been consistently wrong about the effects of economy policy for years. They said that Clinton's tax raises in 1993 would cause the economy to go under, and instead there was an unprecedented economic boom which reduced unemployment to levels previously unimaginable. Dubya has consistently marketed his tax cuts for the rich as creating jobs, but the economy has lost over 2 million jobs under his administration. Billmon has a graph here on how accurate the administrations job projections have been.
Harold Meyerson writes about the recent supermarket strike in Southern California. Charles Krauthammer writes Yet-Another-Review-Of-Gibson's-"Passion". David Ignatius gushes over the recent compromise constitution in Iraq. David, the only reason the parties compromised is that none of them wanted to delay the handover of control from the Coalition. Robert Samuelson has a piece the future of the welfare state that I can't make heads or tails of. E. J. Dionne praises John Edward's stump speech.
Revisiting some earlier posts
I posted on 2/26 my thoughts on Nader's candidacy:
If Nader campaigns on the issues he brought up when announcing his campaign - on "corporate subsidies", "energy", the "Medicare bill", "the Patriot Act", "big brother and surveillance", "Congress increasing their pay regularly", "softness on corporate crime", "the Enron thing" and "deficits that are growing" - then it will benefit the Democratic party to have an independent voice denouncing the Republican behavior that is so dangerous to our country. However, I don't think Ralph is going to campaign on that. Why? Because if he admits that Dubya has done far more damage to the country that Gore would have done, then he is saying his whole 2000 campaign was wrong, that there is a difference between the two parties. So, if Nader does denounce the policies of Dubya and the Republican party, he has to then say the Democrats would do the exact same thing if they were in power. If Ralph was serious about addressing the problems he listed, it would be as a supporter of the Democratic nominee, not as a competitor.
Based upon this
story:
Nader did acknowledge that he "would prefer the Democrats to win, because they're not as bad as the Republicans. Their grade is a D-plus, while the Republicans get a D-minus - but they're both flunking." He said the Clinton/Gore administration did little or nothing either to help working people or to protect the environment, and that the only response of Democrats to that charge has been, "Do you know how bad the Republicans are?" "A party that defines itself by the worst," said Nader, "will never bother to become the best."
I would say that my prediction was correct.
On 3/2, I wrote this about a David Brooks editorial:
David Brooks says that Edwards is wrong when he says the poor need more money - they just need the right attitude. "For decades welfare programs funneled money to the disadvantaged, but families dissolved and poverty rates remained stubbornly high. Then the nation switched tack in the mid-1990's, embracing policies that demanded work." Brooks ignores that the new policies only worked because the Clinton job boom meant that there were jobs for the poorly educated to take and that the increases in the Earned Income Tax Credit effectively subsidized their wages.
The Decembrist has a more thorough, Brad Delong-approved
analysis:
The problem is, there's nothing "Marxist" about the idea that poor people need more money. Hello? What is it they need more? Prayer cards? Abstinence education? The only way a poor family becomes not-poor is with money.The question is how best to increase the income, assets and prospects of poor families, without fostering the sort of dependence that we all understand that traditional welfare -- no-strings attached income transfers -- can create. What is the combination of education, hard and soft skills training, tax and other incentives to "make work pay," minimum wage increases, union organizing rights, child care, localized economic policies to create jobs, macro-economic policies to create jobs, health care, and safety net programs to ease transitions that will most effectively reduce the hardship of the poor and near-poor?
:
Edwards wasn't advocating a negative income tax, or some raw transfer of income from the wealthy to the poor. He was calling, in some detail, for exactly the "support programs" that Brooks calls for, for exactly the mix of education, health care, child care, macro policies, job-creation incentives, organizing rights and other things that I talked about above.