Friday, January 26, 2001

In Policy Change, Greenspan Backs a Broad Tax Cut But Mr. Greenspan passed up an opportunity to endorse Mr. Bush's proposal specifically. And while he did not say how big a tax reduction would be appropriate, he suggested that he was sympathetic to the concern expressed by many Democrats that a stampede to cut taxes could come back to haunt the nation if the surplus falls short of expectations. Surplus projections are little more than educated guesswork, he said, and Congress should view them with some skepticism, at least until economists have a better understanding of why the economy has been generating far more tax revenue than expected in recent years. Analysts have been grappling in particular with how much of the surge in tax revenue came from the run-up in stock prices in the late 1990's and what would happen if the market remained flat or fell in coming years. "With today's euphoria surrounding the surpluses, it is not difficult to imagine the hard-earned fiscal restraint developed in recent years rapidly dissipating," Mr. Greenspan said. "We need to resist those policies that could readily resurrect the deficits of the past and the fiscal imbalances that followed in their wake." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/26/business/26TAX.html?pagewanted=all

Thursday, January 25, 2001

This is Leadership?
Democratic Leader Assures Bush on Ashcroft Nomination Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader in the Senate, told President Bush today that he need not worry about getting confirmation for his cabinet choices, including John Ashcroft, the embattled nominee for attorney general, Mr. Bush's spokesman told reporters. "You will not be denied your choice on nominees," Ari Fleischer quoted Mr. Daschle as telling the president in a White House meeting, an account that Mr. Daschle's office did not dispute. Few people, Democrat or Republican, would quarrel seriously with that assessment of how the Ashcroft nomination will end, probably in little more than a week. But the fight over whether to confirm Mr. Ashcroft has taken on a different political contour in recent days. The discussions are now less over whether he will be confirmed than over such questions as how much of a unified front the Democrats can present in opposition and what that will bode for the level of partisan confrontation in the early months of the Bush administration. href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/politics/25ASHC.html?pagewanted=all">http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/politics/25ASHC.html?pagewanted=al

Sunday, January 21, 2001

A Time of Upheaval and Dramatic Events
The Year of the Snake
News Analysis: Tradition and Legitimacy Unlike most of his precursors � but like John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and a handful of other presidents past � Mr. Bush entered the White House without an unchallenged, universally accepted title to office. A half-million more Americans voted for Al Gore than for Mr. Bush, which counted for nothing in the legal sense but for something, at least, in the political sense. Mr. Bush became the first president since Harrison in 1888 to lose the popular vote but win in the Electoral College. Only the intervention of the United States Supreme Court, itself as deeply divided as possible, 5 votes to 4, tipped the Electoral College vote in Mr. Bush's favor. Arguments about the legitimacy of the Texas governor's victory have persisted even as the country accepted the fact that he had won. Thousands of the doubtful and disenchanted took to the streets of Washington today in angry protest. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/21/politics/21ASSE.html?pagewanted=all

This is, after all, the Year of the Snake
After the Ball Is Over George W. Bush seems like an earnest man. When he says he has come to Washington to "change the tone" and "unite, not divide," I don't doubt his sincerity. But so far his actions are those of another entitled boomer who is utterly blind to his own faults. He narcissistically believes things to be so (and his intentions pure) because he says they are. Change the tone? Hard as it is to imagine that anyone could choose an attorney general as polarizing as the last, Mr. Bush has outdone himself. With a single cabinet pick he has reproduced the rancor that attended the full Clinton legal troika of Reno, Hubbell & Foster. There's been much debate about whether John Ashcroft is a racist � a hard case to make against a man whose history of playing the race card to pander to voters is balanced by his record of black judicial appointments. But there has not been nearly enough debate about whether our incipient chief legal officer has lied under oath to the Senate. Perhaps his seeming fudging and reversals of his previous stands on Roe v. Wade and gun control can be rationalized as clever lawyerese. Perhaps some of his evasions can be dismissed as a politician's typical little white lies � and I do mean white � such as when he denies he knew that a magazine he favored with an interview, Southern Partisan, espoused the slaveholding views of Southern partisans. But it took a bolder kind of dissembling to contradict his own paper trail in public office. After he swore that the state of Missouri "had been found guilty of no wrong" in a landmark St. Louis desegregation case and that "both as attorney general and as governor" of the state he had followed "all" court orders in the matter, The Washington Post needed only a day to report the truth: A federal district judge in fact ruled that the state was a "primary constitutional wrongdoer" in the matter and threatened to hold Mr. Ashcroft in contempt for his "continual delay and failure to comply" with court orders. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/20/opinion/20RICH.html?pagewanted=allr