By: Paul Krugman  

What game does the Bush administration think it's playing in Korea?

That's not a rhetorical question. During the cold war, the U.S. government employed experts in game theory to analyze strategies of nuclear deterrence. Men with PhD's in economics, like Daniel Ellsberg, wrote background papers with titles like The Theory and Practice of Blackmail. The intellectual quality of these analyses was impressive, but their main conclusion was simple: Deterrence requires a credible commitment to punish bad behavior and reward good behavior.

I know, it sounds obvious. Yet the Bush administration's Korea policy has systematically violated that simple principle.

By: Helen Thomas  

The Bush administration has it in for trial lawyers and is planning a big push for "tort reform".

The public should be wary of this new attempt to curtail consumer protection. And I hope Congress will slam the brakes on this White House maneuver to trample on the rights of citizens who seek recourse from doctors for malpractice and from big corporations for defective products.

The administration has co-opted the word "reform" to roll back progress and promote its goals of weakening government restraints in a variety of areas.

It's noteworthy that the administration has never pursued the corporate chieftains whose greed stunned the nation last year with the same energy that it goes after lawyers who are fighting for the consumer.

"Republicans are gambling that ordinary Americans are too numb or too dumb - either one works - to go beyond the 20-second sound bites to see who gets the meringue and who gets the filet mignon. They're gambling that John and Jane Q. Public won't comprehend a thinly disguised bailout of upper-income stock investors as another round of old GOP trickle-down economics."

- Kevin Phillips, from an article in the Los Angeles Times

Bush Administration Shifts Blame for N. Korea Crisis
Clinton-Era Agreement Signed in '94 With Pyongyang Is Called Flawed

By: Karen DeYoung & T.R. Reid  

A senior Bush administration official suggested yesterday that the nuclear crisis with North Korea was the predictable result of a flawed 1994 agreement signed by the Clinton administration with Pyongyang that "frontloaded all the benefits and left the difficult things to the end" - for the next President.

The comments marked a sharp change of direction from the administration's insistence in recent weeks that only North Korea was to blame for the crisis. As recently as last week, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell said he gave "great credit" to the Clinton administration for freezing North Korea's plutonium enrichment program with the 1994 Agreed Framework.

The new formulation of blame coincides with a spate of accusations, some from strong administration supporters, that President Bush may have antagonized North Korea by labeling it part of the "axis of evil" and helped provoke the crisis.

By: David S. Broder  

...As was quickly noted by the accounting industry, the Bush proposal entails complicated calculations for both business and individual taxpayers, adding further complexity to the tax code.

Moreover, it would not affect the mass of dividends that go into the 401(k) plans on which most working Americans depend for additional retirement income. Those dividends are not immediately taxed now, and the taxes due when the money is withdrawn would remain unchanged under the Bush proposal.

According to an analysis by the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution, 64% of the $364 billion in benefits from dividend tax elimination would go to the top 5% of taxpayers, the same people who are the main beneficiaries of the Bush tax cuts of 2001.

By: Ellen Goodman  

The Bush administration figures that the couple earning $40,000 who get a $1,333 tax cut won't begrudge a $10,244 tax cut to the couple earning $500,000. More to the point, they won't figure what they'll lose in federal programs. As for the folks too poor to pay taxes? These are, after all, the Americans that the Wall Street Journal called "lucky duckies".

Americans like thinking of "us", not "us and them". They believe in equality. They reject class and privilege. As DeMott says, that would be fine if equality were a guiding principle, something that required renewed commitment in every generation. But it's a scam if we think it's reality, a fanciful self-portrait that can't be criticized.

George W. describes himself as an opponent of class warfare. Well, of course he is. This plan would keep every, um, plutocrat in place. It's not peace at any price. It's peace at his price.

By: Ian Urquhart  

What Bush is proposing is so extreme, so unwarranted, so tilted to the mega-rich, so far from dealing with real problems that it simply leaves one's jaw in a freefall.

Is there no limit to the level of benefits considered appropriate to hand over to members of America's "regal class" who, according to former U.S. Labour Secretary Robert Reich, already enjoy "more wealth and income than any aristocracy has ever had"?

Is there no point at which fatigue - from continually helping themselves to an ever-larger slice of the pie - sets in?

Bush's 2001 tax cut delivered an average 10-year saving of $342,000 each to those in the top 1%. Roughly half the benefits of this year's proposed elimination of the dividend tax will go to that same top 1%. After a while, one's eyes start to glaze over at yet another statistic illustrating the enormity of the benefits going to the richest citizens.

It's hard to think of how to describe what's going on without resorting to words like "plunder"...

"This isn't a jobs program, it isn't stimulus. It is what it is, a restructuring of the tax system with a high proportion of the advantage going to people who are already doing well."

- Sen. Jon Corzine (D-NJ), as quoted in the New York Times

Cuts to a Senate Democratic spending blueprint might add up to $9 billion.

By: Nick Anderson  

With budgets for most federal agencies still in limbo, congressional Republicans are drafting a spending bill for the 3-month-old fiscal year that would slash billions of dollars for domestic programs the Senate approved when it was under Democratic control last year.

The bill will hew to the tight constraint of $385 billion that President Bush set for domestic spending after the Republicans gained full control of Congress in the midterm elections. As a result, lawmakers from both parties face battles over how to divvy up scarce dollars among their favorite programs.

Among the potential trade-offs: Should the National Institutes of Health get a big boost at the expense of education programs? Should the U.S. Customs Service sacrifice to make room for reforms in election procedures? And should the government scale back parks and public land programs to bolster homeland security?

Editorial from:  

The Bush administration has opened the possibility that up to 20% of the nation's wetlands - 20 million acres in all - could lose protections they currently enjoy under the Clean Water Act. This is a door that should have remained closed.

At issue is a controversial Supreme Court decision in 2001 in which the court ruled that the Clean Water Act did not protect isolated ponds and wetlands based solely on their value as habitat for migratory birds. Christie Whitman, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, said yesterday she intended to ask for public comment on whether the court decision required other changes in established rules that have saved these isolated wetlands from commercial development.

By: Roger Hickey  

...The Bush plan repackages old proposals to aid the wealthy (accelerate some of the tax cuts for the rich already passed) and newly fashionable ones (exclude dividend income from taxation), while throwing the rest of us only a few small sops like increasing the childcare credit and finally supporting extension of unemployment benefits to workers whose benefits recently ran out. Bush and his advisers are clearly attempting another neat bait-and-switch: providing more giveaways to the wealthy and corporations over future decades but selling the package as a quick economic stimulus that will help working Americans find jobs and economic security.

The Bush economic proposals are a sham. They make the tax system more unfair, they starve the public sector of resources for needed public investment and they will not revive growth, spur corporate investment, or create jobs. Progressives should say so loudly and clearly. But they must also make sure the Democratic Party's plan for jobs and economic growth offers a real alternative to the Bush program.

By: Jon Carroll  

So when a nation announces that it now feels free to act with force against perceived threats rather than waiting for actual attacks, we should pay attention. We should understand that the leader of the nation is now willing to bomb cities and deploy armies whenever and wherever he feels threatened. When the leader says he would not need "absolute proof" of the perceived threats, we should pay attention. We should not pretend that things are still the same when they are not still the same. We should not forget the lesson of Munich.

When a regime says it no longer rules out first strikes with nuclear weapons, we should do whatever we can to urge our allies to work against such a regime. The more powerful a nation is, the larger its armies, the greater the need for noise rather than silence, for remembering rather than forgetting, for courage rather than cowardice.

The leader whose policies I have been describing is George W. Bush...

By: Curt Anderson  

U.S. citizens overseas who take up arms against their country can be held as enemy combatants without the constitutional rights afforded other Americans, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

The decision by a three-judge panel of the 4^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, VA, affirms the government's authority to detain indefinitely American citizens captured in foreign battles or those who participate in terrorist attacks against U.S. interests.

Massive U.S. Military Buildup, Billions of Dollars, a Useless Enemy, and No One Seems to Know Why

By: Mark Morford  

...The U.S. buildup for war with Iraq is the biggest in decades. The Iraq operation, in the words of Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, will be "the most massive precision air campaign in history", because, well, because we can. Because we want to annihilate everything as fast and ruthlessly as possible, simply because the longer such an operation takes and the more expensive and obviously pointless it becomes, the more everyday citizens snap out of it and begin to say, wait, why are we doing this again?

Saddam's meager military, let us be reminded, is a tiny quivering fraction of what it was 10 years ago during Desert Storm, and even then it took U.S. forces less than four days to almost completely annihilate it.

Now it's even weaker, due to ongoing sanctions and U.N. oversight and a decade of continuous U.S.-led bombing raids on Iraqi targets you never read about. Hell, this time we should have those thousands of pesky Iraqi soldiers and innocent civilians dead and slaughtered in a weekend.

Requires (free D/L)

The United States is a country on the edge, lacking its customary self-confidence. And for that it can thank George Bush.

By: Will Hutton  

Under a different administration and with a more balanced political discourse, 11 September could have been the moment for a national coming-together, a trigger for a re-engagement with America's fundamental problems at home and abroad, and a moment to find ways of addressing insecurity in all its dimensions. But, instead, there is George Bush and Karl Rove, his Machiavellian political adviser.

There is no political advantage to American conservatism in lowering risks, including, now, that of terrorism. Fearfulness rallies Americans to the incumbent, and is exploited well; it opens more rather than less conservative opportunities.

"When they direct their tax programs to benefit the very, very, very few and eliminate the majority from any benefit of these tax cuts, it is class war."

- Sen. Harry Reid (D-NV)

Editorial from:  

Let's see if we have this right. President Bush plans to propose a stimulus plan the centerpiece of which will have little or no stimulative effect. At a time when some people badly could use help, Mr. Bush's tax cut mostly will help those who need it least. And while the President is warning Congress to restrain its spending on basics such as education and aid to the poor, the tax cuts will further inflate his growing budget deficit. No wonder that Mr. Bush, even before officially unveiling the plan tomorrow, waved his magic "class warfare" amulet, seeking to obscure the obvious - another tax cut for the rich - by preemptively accusing his accusers.

By: Robert B. Reich  

The President calls it a "jobs and growth" plan, but it's neither.

His latest round of proposed tax cuts won't create jobs and won't grow the economy. It will only do more of what his last round did - make the rich even richer.

The President's plan responds to the nation's two overarching economic problems - overcapacity and widening inequality - by worsening both. It's a remarkable achievement, made all the more remarkable by the utter cynicism with which it's being marketed.

It's not a plan for "growth and jobs". It's a plan for rewarding the rich when what the economy needs is more spending by people of modest means. And it further concentrates wealth and power at a time when wealth and power are already in fewer and fewer hands.

"You say we're headed to war in Iraq. I don't know why you suggested that. I'm the person who gets to decide, not you."

- pResident G.W. Bush, to a reporter who suggested that war with Iraq is inevitable

By: E.J. Dionne Jr.  

The President is proposing an economic "stimulus" plan that will certainly stimulate the very wealthiest Americans.

Its centerpiece will be an end to taxes on dividends, which will cost the government about $300 billion over the next decade. It happens, according to Citizens for Tax Justice, that roughly half that money would go to people earning more than $350,000 a year, to the top 1% of Americans. The 80% of households earning less than $73,000 a year will get less than 10% of this stimulant.

By: Paul Krugman  

Here's how it works. Faced with a real problem - terrorism, the economy, nukes in North Korea - the Bush administration's response has nothing to do with solving that problem. Instead it exploits the issue to advance its political agenda.

Nonetheless, the faithful laud our glorious leader's wisdom. For a variety of reasons, including the desire to avoid charges of liberal bias, most reporting is carefully hedged. And the public, reading only praise or he-said-she-said discussions, never grasps the fundamental disconnect between problem and policy.

And so it goes with the administration's "stimulus" plan.

By: Rebecca Knight  

Remember that refrain? Remember how the Republicans pounded the airwaves with that question regarding Clinton's indiscretion?

As I reflect upon the past two years and the possibilities that exist for the next two years, I wondered what the answer to that question would be today or two years from now.

By: Ruth Rosen  

These are scary times. Al Qaeda terrorists prepare to attack American civilians. A desperate and paranoid North Korea builds an arsenal of nuclear weapons.

And how does our government respond? The Bush administration declares an urgent need to invade Iraq.

Why Iraq? Because Saddam Hussein may have weapons of destruction, which he might use against some unspecified enemy some time in the future. Since we aren't all that sure, we must wage a pre-emptive war against a nation that, just by coincidence, happens to sit on the world's second-largest reserve of oil.

Follow that? If not, you're not alone.

By: Andrew C. Revkin  

Global warming is forcing species around the world, from California starfish to Alpine herbs, to move into new ranges or alter habits in ways that could disrupt ecosystems, two groups of researchers say.

The two new studies, by teams at the University of Texas, Wesleyan, Stanford, and elsewhere, are reported in today's issue of the journal Nature. Experts not associated with the studies say they provide the clearest portrait yet of a biological world driven into accelerating flux by warming caused at least in part by human activity.

Plants and animals have always had to adjust to shifting climates. But climate is changing faster now than in recent millenniums, and many scientists attribute the pace to rising concentrations of heat-trapping greenhouse gases.

From:  

The Environmental Protection Agency formally issued major changes to clean air rules for utilities, refineries, and manufacturers Tuesday, prompting a court challenge hours later from a coalition of New England and mid-Atlantic states.

"The Bush administration has taken an action that will bring more acid rain, more smog, more asthma, and more respiratory disease to millions of Americans", said Eliot Spitzer, New York's attorney general.

EPA's easing of certain requirements of the Clean Air Act's "New Source Review" program was published in the government's Federal Register, making them official. The program affects whether expensive new anti-pollution equipment must be installed when industrial facilities are modernized.

"...With all the time the President has spent clearing brush, how is it possible that there is still any brush left on his ranch? And what is he doing about North Korea's nuclear shenanigans?"

- Dana Milbanks, in the Washington Post, Dec. 31, 2002

Editorial from:  

We have several wishes for the new year. Nothing wildly ambitious, just a short list of familiar public policy ideas that have been waiting for the right person to make them real. They are not risk free, politically. If they were, they would not need leadership to move them along. But all are doable, and all would yield enormous, multiple benefits. In terms of payback-to-effort, they're our top priorities.

Take the question of American dependence on foreign oil. There are plenty of big, futuristic ideas around - developing a hydrogen-based economy, for instance - and plenty of bad ideas, like the notion that we can drill our way to energy independence. But one obvious response is to improve fuel economy standards, which have not been tightened since the Reagan years. At the very least, policy makers should require SUV's to meet the same standards as passenger cars.

"Republicans want to punish work and reward wealth; hence the high payroll tax and the low dividend tax. Said one Bush economic adviser: 'If we can't help wealthy investors and screw working people, what's the point in being a Republican?'"

- Paul Begala, on Crossfire

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