The NY Times opens with an editorial on how
Harvard is trying to workaround Dubya's stupid stem cell ban. The second is on the maneuverings towards the
recall in Venezuela. The third is on
Dubya needs give more muscle to the committee investigating the intelligence failures that preceded the invasion of Iraq. Let me say, "Go, John, go!":
Now one of the panel's most respected members, Senator John McCain, is warning that if the commission is to do a believable job, it must have the muscle power to subpoena reluctant witnesses. "If you don't have it, you have no leverage," Mr. McCain told The Hill newspaper in describing how he had been rebuffed thus far by the White House.
The fourth is a bizarro piece on
skunk stink on a farm.
More summaries below.
Krugman has a
very short column, apparently to make room for a great graph:
The column may have been short, but it was to the point:
Economic forecasting isn't an exact science, but wishful thinking on this scale is unprecedented. Nor can the administration use its all-purpose excuse: all of these forecasts date from after 9/11. What you see in this chart is the signature of a corrupted policy process, in which political propaganda takes the place of professional analysis.
David Brooks blasts
Mitch Albom for writing "soft-core spirituality" books. Charlie Cook of the Cook Political Report shares how
Nader could again throw the election to Dubya:
In addition to Florida and New Hampshire, the two states that Mr. Nader handed to the Bush-Cheney ticket, think about how many others came close to going the same route. In 2000 Mr. Gore won Iowa by about 4,000 votes, with Mr. Nader receiving nearly 30,000 votes; the vice president carried Minnesota by just 58,000 votes, with Mr. Nader pulling 126,000. New Mexico had the narrowest margin in the country -- Mr. Gore prevailed by just 366 votes -- and Mr. Nader garnered 21,000. In Oregon, the Gore victory margin was 6,765 votes, with 77,357 Oregonians supporting Mr. Nader. In Wisconsin, Mr. Gore won by 5,700 and Mr. Nader's total was 94,000. And while the Bush margins over Mr. Gore exceeded the Nader vote in Washington, Missouri and Ohio, it wasn't by much.
I am glad that Ralph
told us that he is going to get "very few" of his supporters "from Democrats". A guest editorialists has a bunch of
mumbo-jumbo about marriage and concludes that gays shouldn't marry.
The first Post editorial advocates for two financial reforms the SEC is considering. The second discusses how the proposed procedure for evaluating the cases of Guantanamo detainees. No surprise - the proposal is long on window dressing but short on civil rights:
The boards, according to the draft, will assess "whether and to what extent each enemy combatant poses a threat to the United States or its allies," but the standard and burden of proof are far too vague...If this means, in practice, that a detainee must prove beyond a scintilla of a doubt that he poses not a scintilla of a threat, the review process will be a rubber stamp for long-term human storage.
The editorial also says that the review boards shouldn't be all military and the detainees should be given lawyers. The third approves of the Department of Health and Human Services announcing its intention to adopt some recommendations from the National Academy of Sciences on
monitoring "dual use" biological research.
The Posts has a guest editorial on the tension between the Saudi government and Saudi clerics on women's rights. David Ignatius offers up a novel excuse for why there are no new jobs despite a growing economy - it's all the terrorists and the SEC's fault for worrying managers. This brilliant theory ignores that gross private domestic investment has increased by 14.8% and 15.8% in the last two quarters respectively. If managers are confident enough to start major investments, they should be confident enough to hire some employees. E. J. Dionne has a wonderful piece on jobs. First, he demolishes Dubya's record on jobs:
Imagine if I told you that all the job growth in the country was explained by a rise in the number of people on government payrolls -- and that there had been no net increase in employment in the private sector. You might assume that those socialist Democrats were back in power and at it again, emptying the public till and expanding their patronage mills. But that would be wrong. The above is a description of the employment figures released last week after 38 months of a Republican administration insisting that large tax cuts for the wealthy would make the private sector hum and put everybody back to work. It hasn't happened. Last month, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, payrolls expanded by only 21,000 -- far less than most of the experts expected. If it hadn't been for public employment, there would have been no net job creation at all.
:
The unemployment rate of 5.6 percent sounds modest by the standards of the 1980s. But the number disguises the distress. Sen. Paul Sarbanes (D-Md.) points out that the long-term unemployed -- those seeking jobs for six months or longer -- have made up more than a fifth of the total unemployed for the past 17 months. That's the lengthiest stretch of long-term unemployment in 20 years. And the unemployment rate is artificially low, because many potential job seekers have become so discouraged that they've stopped looking for work. Last month 392,000 people dropped out. The labor force has contracted in six of the past eight months. "That's unprecedented this far into a recovery," says Bernstein. Such measures of unrelenting weakness in the job market, he adds, would normally be associated with unemployment rates of 8 to 9 percent -- numbers associated with the recession of the early 1980s.
He then calls for the Republicans to extend unemployment benefits to the long-term unemployed. Richard Cohen isn't
bothered by Dubya's use of images of 9-11 in his ads. He is bothered that Dubya won't cooperate with the 9-11 commission.
In his recent "Meet the Press" appearance, Bush said he would be glad to "visit" with a different commission -- the one created to investigate how everyone was so wrong about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. We will see what Bush means by "visit," but when it comes to the Sept. 11 commission it amounts to a drop-by. In the first place, the commission will come to Bush -- not he to them -- and, as with many White House events (treaty signing, etc.) seating is limited. In this case it's not the commission that's welcome but just the chairman and vice chairman, Thomas Kean and Lee Hamilton. What's more, this visit shall take no more than an hour, the president presumably being very busy -- what with exercising and the need to get the ol' head on the ol' pillow sometime before 10 lest he accidentally channel-surf onto adult programming.
Trouble is, an hour is not a lot of time. By the time Bush and Kean and Hamilton have finished asking about the wife and kids and that sort of thing, 10 minutes will be gone. But what will also be gone is the feeling, the sense, the appreciation, that this is a momentous investigation, something very important, something touching the lives of many thousands of people -- the families and friends of the deceased -- and all of us, every single one of us whose hearts momentarily stopped that day.
The Bush administration treats the Sept. 11 commission as something of a pest. It will not permit Rice to testify in public (she has in closed session), and even the vice president will donate only an hour of his time. Each concession -- the grand "visit," the offer of a whole hour -- has come only through negotiation and, sometimes, threats of subpoena. I understand, as do we all, that there are grave issues regarding separation of powers and precedent, but they pale compared with the enormity of the crime that day and the bucket of wormy conspiracy theories that are its consequence. Lyndon Johnson would not testify before the Warren Commission -- one reason its conclusions have been challenged ever since.
The Republican spin about the brouha on the use of 9-11 ads is that it helps Dubya because it reminds people on his strong leadership during that time. It seems to me that it is bringing to the forefront of political discussion Dubya's stiffing of his most basic responisibility to the American people - to tell the truth about what really happened leading to the greatest domestic catastrophe ever. The Chairman of the Swedish parliament's Foreign Affairs Committee points out that
Eastern Europe has moved further East. Because the recent EU expansion has included the countries that were formerly called Eastern Europe, the countries that are now outside of the political and economic structures of Western Europe are now Ukraine, Belarus and Moldova.
I have been on a little hot streak. I posted a diary entry arguing that "Dubya is in worse shape than you think" just hours before two new polls were released that showed that Dubya really is in bad shape. Then, Kos promoted my next diary entry to the front page.