Unable to find weapons of mass destruction, the Bush team has turned to weapons of personal destruction. It's bad enough that the administration hasn't come up with any plausible reason for not having uncovered any W.M.D., even as it's requesting $600 million more to find them; now it's practicing Crawford McCarthyism. At his office yesterday, a block from the White House that he has turned into Bleak House, Mr. Wilson was calm, even as Republicans continued to rip him. For Bush officials, who have wielded patriotism as a bludgeon on critics, you'd think that doing something as unpatriotic as outing Mr. Wilson's wife and endangering the lives of her C.I.A. contacts would be enough. Nah. The group that fights so ferally to keep everything secret, from the cronies who met with Dick Cheney to the identities of the people it has tossed into the brig at Gitmo, had no problem spilling the beans on its own spy when self-preservation was at stake. The issue is the administration's credibility, not Joe Wilson's. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/02/opinion/02DOWD.html

They imposed estimated annual costs of $1.6 billion to $2 billion, but produced estimated annual benefits of $2.4 billion to $6.5 billion.

Review of Environment Rules Finds Benefits Outweigh Costs The White House office in charge of reviewing federal regulations has reported that the benefits of some major environmental rules appear to exceed the costs by several times and that the net benefits may be even larger than previously acknowledged. In its annual review of the costs and benefits of regulations, the Office of Management and Budget examined a sampling of major rules and found that the total benefits, to the extent they can be measured, were at least triple the costs. In this report, which was described on Saturday in The Washington Post, the Environmental Protection Agency was found to have produced significantly greater net benefits than last year's report acknowledged. But the change was mainly due to accounting technicalities. In one change, the budget office expanded its review by looking back 10 years. This meant the latest report included the effects of the successful efforts of the 1990's to rein in the pollution that causes acid rain. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/politics/28COST.html

At Central Command, Death Gets an Online Demotion More than 300 American troops have been killed since the war in Iraq began. According to Pentagon records, more than 160 have been killed since President Bush declared on May 1 that major combat operations had ended. At least 70 of those deaths have been the result of hostile fire. Every week seems to bring more deaths. When the guns are silent, there are fatal traffic accidents, fires, even electrocutions. But as the death toll rises, it is growing less visible, at least to those who visit the Web site operated by the United States Central Command, which controls American troops in Iraq. Until early September, the Central Command official site, www.centcom.mil, posted press releases of American military deaths at the top of its home page, along with other releases. The result was a m�lange of good news and bad that reflected the gap between intention and outcome plaguing the United States-led occupation here. Earlier this month, for example, a visitor to the Web site would have seen "Coalition Offers Help With Water, Jobs, Public Safety," topped by a reference to deaths in the First Armored Division: "Two Soldiers Killed, One Wounded in Attack and 1AD Soldier Killed in Helicopter Accident." But about two weeks ago, the site began offering a different picture of the occupation in which death assumed a far less prominent role. In fact, the deaths of American soldiers were now nowhere to be seen on the home page. To find them, visitors had to scroll to the bottom of the page and click on a small link called "Casualty Reports." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/09/28/weekinreview/28ALEX.html