From the NY Times:
Stating the Obvious
By PAUL KRUGMAN

"The lunatics are now in charge of the asylum." So wrote the normally staid Financial Times, traditionally the voice of solid British business opinion, when surveying last week's tax bill. Indeed, the legislation is doubly absurd: the gimmicks used to make an $800-billion-plus tax cut carry an official price tag of only $320 billion are a joke, yet the cost without the gimmicks is so large that the nation can't possibly afford it while keeping its other promises.

But then maybe that's the point. The Financial Times suggests that "more extreme Republicans" actually want a fiscal train wreck: "Proposing to slash federal spending, particularly on social programs, is a tricky electoral proposition, but a fiscal crisis offers the tantalizing prospect of forcing such cuts through the back door."

Good for The Financial Times. It seems that stating the obvious has now, finally, become respectable.

It's no secret that right-wing ideologues want to abolish programs Americans take for granted. But not long ago, to suggest that the Bush administration's policies might actually be driven by those ideologues — that the administration was deliberately setting the country up for a fiscal crisis in which popular social programs could be sharply cut — was to be accused of spouting conspiracy theories.

Yet by pushing through another huge tax cut in the face of record deficits, the administration clearly demonstrates either that it is completely feckless, or that it actually wants a fiscal crisis. (Or maybe both.)

Here's one way to look at the situation: Although you wouldn't know it from the rhetoric, federal taxes are already historically low as a share of G.D.P. Once the new round of cuts takes effect, federal taxes will be lower than their average during the Eisenhower administration. How, then, can the government pay for Medicare and Medicaid — which didn't exist in the 1950's — and Social Security, which will become far more expensive as the population ages? (Defense spending has fallen compared with the economy, but not that much, and it's on the rise again.)

The answer is that it can't. The government can borrow to make up the difference as long as investors remain in denial, unable to believe that the world's only superpower is turning into a banana republic. But at some point bond markets will balk — they won't lend money to a government, even that of the United States, if that government's debt is growing faster than its revenues and there is no plausible story about how the budget will eventually come under control.

At that point, either taxes will go up again, or programs that have become fundamental to the American way of life will be gutted. We can be sure that the right will do whatever it takes to preserve the Bush tax cuts — right now the administration is even skimping on homeland security to save a few dollars here and there. But balancing the books without tax increases will require deep cuts where the money is: that is, in Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security.

The pain of these benefit cuts will fall on the middle class and the poor, while the tax cuts overwhelmingly favor the rich. For example, the tax cut passed last week will raise the after-tax income of most people by less than 1 percent — not nearly enough to compensate them for the loss of benefits. But people with incomes over $1 million per year will, on average, see their after-tax income rise 4.4 percent.

The Financial Times suggests this is deliberate (and I agree): "For them," it says of those extreme Republicans, "undermining the multilateral international order is not enough; long-held views on income distribution also require radical revision."

How can this be happening? Most people, even most liberals, are complacent. They don't realize how dire the fiscal outlook really is, and they don't read what the ideologues write. They imagine that the Bush administration, like the Reagan administration, will modify our system only at the edges, that it won't destroy the social safety net built up over the past 70 years.

But the people now running America aren't conservatives: they're radicals who want to do away with the social and economic system we have, and the fiscal crisis they are concocting may give them the excuse they need. The Financial Times, it seems, now understands what's going on, but when will the public wake up?

From the NY Times:
Dancing With the Devil
By BOB HERBERT

Let's see. Who's less patriotic, the Dixie Chicks or Dick Cheney's long-term meal ticket, the Halliburton Company?

The Dixie Chicks were excoriated for simply exercising their constitutional right to speak out. With an ugly backlash and plans for a boycott growing, the group issued a humiliating public apology for "disrespectful" anti-Bush remarks made by its lead singer, Natalie Maines.

The Chicks learned how dangerous it can be to criticize the chief of a grand imperial power.

Halliburton, on the other hand, can do no wrong. Yes, it has a history of ripping off the government. And, yes, it's made zillions doing business in countries that sponsor terrorism, including members of the "axis of evil" that is so despised by the president.

But the wrath of the White House has not come thundering down on Halliburton for consorting with the enemy. And there's been very little public criticism. This is not some hapless singing group we're talking about. Halliburton is a court favorite. So instead of being punished for its misdeeds, it's been handed a huge share of the riches to be reaped from the reconstruction of Iraq and U.S. control of Iraqi oil.

A Democratic congressman, Henry Waxman of California, has raised pointed questions about the propriety of rewarding Halliburton with lucrative contracts as part of the U.S. war on terror when the company has gone out of its way to do business in three nations that the U.S. has accused of supporting terror: Iraq, Iran and Libya.

In an April 30 letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Mr. Waxman wrote:

"Since at least the 1980's, federal laws have prohibited U.S. companies from doing business in one or more of these countries. Yet Halliburton appears to have sought to circumvent these restrictions by setting up subsidiaries in foreign countries and territories such as the Cayman Islands. These actions started as early as 1984; they appear to have continued during the period between 1995 and 2000, when Vice President Cheney headed the company; and they are apparently ongoing even today."

According to Mr. Waxman, a subsidiary called Halliburton Products and Services opened an office in Tehran, Iran, in February 2000, has done work on offshore drilling projects and has asserted, "We are committed to position ourselves in a market that offers huge growth potential."

Shareholder complaints since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, particularly from the pension funds of the New York City Police and Fire Departments, have prompted Halliburton officials to agree to reevaluate their operations in Iran.

The federal government has been well aware of Halliburton's shenanigans. In his letter to Secretary Rumsfeld, Mr. Waxman noted that "Halliburton was fined $3.8 million in 1995 for re-exporting U.S. goods through a foreign subsidiary to Libya in violation of U.S. sanctions."

The fine was not enough to stop the company from dancing with the devil. It still has dealings in Libya.

Now, with the U.S. takeover of Iraq, Halliburton has hit the jackpot. It has only recently been made clear that an "emergency" no-bid contract given in March to the Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg Brown & Root covers far more than the limited task of fighting oil well fires. The company has been given control of the Iraqi oil operations, including oil distribution.

"It's remarkable there's been so little attention paid to the Halliburton contracts," said Mr. Waxman. In addition to doing business in countries that have sponsored terrorism, the congressman said, Halliburton has been accused of overcharging the U.S. government for work it did in the 1990's. And last year the company agreed to pay a $2 million settlement to ward off possible criminal charges for price gouging.

"Their reward for that terrible record," said the congressman, "was a secret no-bid contract, potentially worth billions, to run Iraq's oil operations."

Halliburton and its subsidiaries are virtuosos at gaming the system. It's a slithery enterprise with its rapacious tentacles in everybody's pockets. It benefits from doing business with the enemy, from its relationship with the U.S. military when the U.S. is at war with the enemy, and from contracts to help rebuild the defeated enemy.

Meanwhile, the flag-waving yahoos are hyperventilating over nonissues like the Dixie Chicks.

Are the United States and the world safer since Saddam's regime toppled?
By Bill Gallagher

05/20/03: (Niagara Falls Reporter) DETROIT -- Are the United States and the world safer since Saddam's regime toppled? Have the occupation of Iraq and the relentless search for weapons of mass destruction there made our nation more secure? Has Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda been dealt a serious blow with the fall of his "ally" Saddam Hussein?

No. No. No. And more no.

The terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia and Casablanca last week underscore a frightening truth lost in the triumphalism of the war in Iraq and the fall of the largely capitulating Iraqi army.

Watching Saddam's statue come down, the crowds dancing in the streets and the president's aircraft carrier "hail to the conquering hero" speech divert attention from a menacing reality.

Beating Saddam has nothing to do with thwarting a real threat -- al-Qaeda. Saddam and Iraq had nothing to do with Sept. 11. I have to mention that repeatedly since more that half the American people believe they did. That's the result of the president's intentionally misleading rhetoric and the willingness of most of the American media to be parrots for those propaganda lies.

The truck bombing at the residential compounds for foreign workers in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and the suicide bombings in Casablanca, Morocco couldn't be more clearly the work of al-Qaeda. The planning, coordination and ruthless execution of the terrorist attacks have al-Qaeda written all over them. Osama bin Laden might just as well have left his business card.

Of course, the Bush administration has been assuring us that "al-Qaeda is on the run." A couple of weeks ago, President Bush boasted confidently, "That group of terrorists who attacked our country is slowly being decimated. They're not a problem anymore." Oh, yeah.

A British think tank, the International Institute for Strategic Studies, says flat-out that al-Qaeda is "more insidious and just as dangerous" as before Sept. 11.

The case can be made that the invasion of Afghanistan and the cooperation of the Pakistani government in rooting out al-Qaeda operations there have disrupted some of bin Laden's murderous crews plotting other terrorist attacks.

The Germans have done more than any other nation in breaking up true, authentic al-Qaeda cells, arresting members and actually successfully prosecuting them, including one accomplice in the Sept. 11 attacks.

I say authentic as opposed to Attorney General John Ashcroft's show prosecutions and shameless bragging about what a great job he's doing in fighting terrorism. Those stupid, scared and misguided kids from Lackawanna were hardly the threat they were made out to be.

Four men are now on trial in Detroit, accused of providing substantial aid to terrorists. When they were rounded up a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the Justice Department portrayed them as al-Qaeda operatives, ready to strike at everything from Disneyland to a U.S. air base in Turkey.

The government case is built on the sketches in the day planner of a mentally ill man who committed suicide and the testimony of a "star" witness who's cut a deal to spare his hide from any terrorist charges.

At very least, the behavior of Justice Department lawyers and FBI agents during the trial has been despicable. Their conduct merits a criminal investigation.

They have been caught on numerous occasions withholding FBI reports from defense attorneys, engaging in wholesale misrepresentation of evidence and, in perhaps the most egregious incident, intimidating a witness.

Omar Shishani was in federal custody in an unrelated case, with a cell right next to the government's star witness, Youssef Hmimssa. In sworn testimony, Shishani said Hmimssa told him he didn't know if the defendants were terrorists, he just wanted to "get revenge because they had stolen from me."

When Shishani announced his willingness to testify for the defense, the U.S. Attorney's Office withdrew a plea bargaining agreement with him that provided a reduced sentence in a false securities documents case. Federal prosecutors deny the plea agreement was withdrawn "solely" because Shishani testified at the terror trial. Sure.

The attacks in Saudi Arabia and Morocco look like a loud message from bin Laden that he and his band of killers are alive and well.

The Saudis, while at first denying they neglected repeated warnings to provide better security for Americans and other foreign workers, now admit they did and promise to do better.

The president says he's on a mission to bring democracy to the Middle East, with Iraq as the laboratory for that noble experiment. Maybe it's time George W. and his daddy have a little sit-down with their intimate pals from the Saudi royal family.

The Saudis breed Islamic rage in two ways.

First, they allow the fanatic Wahhabi sect of Islam, the royal family's own religious tradition, to foster hate for America and the West that's actually taught in their schools.

Second, now that Saddam is gone, the Saudis have the distinction of being the most antidemocratic and repressive regime in the region. The population is exploding, unemployment is high and the fabulous wealth from oil has been used to line the pockets of the privileged few. Little has been used to help the poor. People outside the royal family really have no political rights. The women in Saddam's Iraq had much better status than their Saudi sisters.

The Bush boys both should hop aboard Air Force One, visit their Saudi friends and lay it right on the line. End the denial. Show us a road map for democratic reform or we are going to organize economic and political pressure to make you do it.

Don't worry about oil prices. Where do you suppose the Saudis are going to sell their oil if we don't buy it?

The Bushes don't like to talk tough with their pals, but the time is now. Too many more people will die if they don't.

The war on terrorism is also seriously flawed on the domestic front. A congressional report finds the Department of Energy is seriously lagging in efforts to secure hundreds of thousands of sources of low-level nuclear material -- the kind of stuff terrorists could use to make "dirty bombs."

The material is used in things like gauges in commercial manufacturing and oil exploration and even in heart pacemakers. Congress had mandated a permanent facility for disposing of the radioactive materials and a better system of tracking it. The Bush administration has done neither.

The 7-year-old Canadian kid who slipped over the Whirlpool Bridge into Niagara Falls without going through a border check points to a wider problem -- border security. The administration talks a big game about homeland security, but coming up with the the money to do the job is another story altogether.

State and local governments on the front lines of homeland security desperately need help, and the federal government is offering little.

Let's look at nuclear reactors, huge container ports, chemical plants, oil refineries, bridges, tunnels and dams. What measures are the Bush administration taking to pay to protect them from terrorist attacks? So far, next to nothing.

The Republican House and Senate are now quibbling over tax cuts. The House wants $550 billion, the Senate $350 billion. Let's split it down the middle, but instead of a tax cut, we should raid the Treasury for $450 billion to be spent on antiterrorism measures.

Some of it could be for broad infrastructure improvements that are ready to go, but the states just don't have the money to fund the projects.

Remember, national defense was how the interstate highway system was built. The infusion of money for local construction projects would create far more jobs than the tax giveaways and do it in a hurry.

It might even help the president's re-election campaign.

From the NY Times:
Alone and Ashamed
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia
We in journalism tend to write about scoundrels, but today let me instead hail a saint for our age.

Dr. Catherine Hamlin, 79, is an Australian gynecologist who has spent the last 44 years in Addis Ababa, quietly toiling in impossible conditions to achieve the unimaginable. She has helped 24,000 women overcome obstetric fistulas, a condition almost unknown in the West but indescribably hideous for millions of sufferers in the poorest countries in the world.

It typically occurs when a teenage girl cannot deliver a baby because it is too big for her pelvis. After several days of labor without access to a doctor, the baby dies and the girl is left with a hole between her bladder, vagina and sometimes rectum. The result is that urine and sometimes feces drip constantly down her legs. In some cases, she is also left lame from nerve damage.

Women with fistulas stink and leave a trail of urine behind them. They are often abandoned by their husbands and driven out by other villagers.

Take Mahabouba Mohammed, whom I met here in Addis Ababa. She had been sold into virtual slavery at the age of 8, raped by her master at 12 and then sent out into the bush at 13 to deliver the baby on her own. After a long labor, she delivered the dead baby herself but suffered crippling internal injuries, including a fistula.

Ms. Mohammed crawled back to the village, but the baby's father was horrified by her smell. He confined her in a faraway hut and removed the door — so that hyenas, attracted by the odor, would tear her apart at night.

This girl fought off the hyenas and crawled for a day to reach an American missionary, who eventually brought her to the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital that Dr. Hamlin heads. Dr. Hamlin was able to repair her fistula, and now Ms. Mohammed is a confident young nurse's aide at the hospital here.

These tales are common. Dr. Hamlin's hospital treats 2,500 women annually in Ethiopia, but each year 8,500 Ethiopian women develop new fistulas. In Nigeria, the Ministry of Women's Affairs estimates that some 800,000 women have unrepaired fistulas. In most countries, no one bothers to estimate the number of sufferers.

"These are the women most to be pitied in the world," said Dr. Hamlin. "They're alone in the world, ashamed of their injuries. For lepers, or AIDS victims, there are organizations that help. But nobody knows about these women or helps them."

Last year President Bush, upset by abortions in China, cut off all $34 million in U.S. funds to the U.N. Population Fund, which sponsors programs to prevent fistulas. That was unconscionable, yet my point today is not to complain again about that, but to hail those like Dr. Hamlin who have stepped up to the plate. Dr. Hamlin is known even to cynical aid workers as a saint and has been mentioned for a Nobel Peace Prize, which she richly deserves (her hospital's Web site is www.fistulahospital.org).

Meanwhile, two American women began the "34 Million Friends" campaign last year to get people to donate $1 each to make up the money that President Bush cut. They've just reached the $1 million mark — the first half of which will go to preventing and treating fistulas in 13 countries (see www.unfpa.org).

Then there's the tireless Dr. Lewis Wall, an American who has repaired fistulas across Africa and is now begging for funds to build a fistula hospital in West Africa (see www.wfmic.org).

I know why most African governments have done nothing to help fistula sufferers: those women are the poorest, most stigmatized, voiceless people on the continent. But since it is difficult to imagine a more important women's issue in the third world than maternal health, I don't understand why most feminist organizations in the West have never shown interest in these women either.

Perhaps it's because Westerners can't conceive of the horror of obstetric fistulas (Americans haven't commonly suffered fistulas since the 19th century, when a fistula hospital stood on the site of today's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in Manhattan). Or perhaps the issue doesn't galvanize women's groups because fistulas relate to a traditional child-bearing role.

But talk to the shy, despondent outcasts who are reborn in the Fistula Hospital here — and you'll realize there is no higher mission, and that Dr. Hamlin is the new Mother Teresa of our age.

From the NY Times:
Paths of Glory
By PAUL KRUGMAN

The central dogma of American politics right now is that George W. Bush, whatever his other failings, has been an effective leader in the fight against terrorism. But the more you know about the state of the world, the less you believe that dogma. The Iraq war, in particular, did nothing to make America safer — in fact, it did the terrorists a favor.

How is the war on terror going? You know about the Riyadh bombings. But something else happened this week: The International Institute for Strategic Studies, a respected British think tank with no discernible anti-Bush animus, declared that Al Qaeda is "more insidious and just as dangerous" as it was before Sept. 11. So much for claims that we had terrorists on the run.

Still, isn't the Bush administration doing its best to fight terrorism? No.

The administration's antiterror campaign makes me think of the way television studios really look. The fancy set usually sits in the middle of a shabby room, full of cardboard and duct tape. Networks take great care with what viewers see on their TV screens; they spend as little as possible on anything off camera.

And so it has been with the campaign against terrorism. Mr. Bush strikes heroic poses on TV, but his administration neglects anything that isn't photogenic.

I've written before about the Bush administration's amazing refusal to pay for even minimal measures to protect the nation against future attacks — measures that would secure ports, chemical plants, nuclear facilities and so on. (But the Department of Homeland Security isn't completely ineffectual: this week it helped Texas Republicans track down their Democratic colleagues, who had staged a walkout.)

The neglect of homeland security is mirrored by the Bush administration's failure to follow through on overseas efforts once the TV-friendly part of the operation has come to an end. The overthrow of the Taliban was a real victory — arguably our only important victory against terrorism. But as soon as Kabul fell, the administration lost interest. Now most of Afghanistan is under the control of warlords, the Karzai government is barely hanging on, and the Taliban are making a comeback.

Senator Bob Graham has made an even stronger charge: that Al Qaeda was "on the ropes" a year ago, but was able to recover because the administration diverted military and intelligence resources to Iraq. As former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, he's in a position to know. And before you dismiss him as a partisan Democrat, bear in mind that when he began raising this alarm last fall his Republican colleagues supported him: "He's absolutely right to be concerned," said Senator Richard Shelby, who has seen the same information.

Senator Graham also claims that a classified Congressional report reveals that "the lessons of Sept. 11 are not being applied today," and accuses the administration of a cover-up.

Still, we defeated Saddam. Doesn't that make us safer? Well, no.

Saddam wasn't a threat to America — he had no important links to terrorism, and the main U.S. team searching for weapons of mass destruction has packed up and gone home. Meanwhile, true to form, the Bush team lost focus as soon as the TV coverage slackened off. The first result was an orgy of looting — including looting of nuclear waste dumps that, incredibly, we failed to secure. Dirty bombs, anyone? Now, according to an article in The New Republic, armed Iraqi factions are preparing for civil war.

That leaves us facing exactly the dilemma war skeptics feared. If we leave Iraq quickly it may well turn into a bigger, more dangerous version of Afghanistan. But if we stay for an extended period we risk becoming, as one commentator put it, "an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land" — just the recruiting tool Al Qaeda needs. Who said that? President George H. W. Bush, explaining his decision not to go on to Baghdad back in 1991.

Massoud Barzani, the Kurdish leader, isn't afraid to use the "Q" word, worrying that because of America's failure to follow up, "this wonderful victory we have achieved will turn into a quagmire."

The truth is that the pursuit of televised glory — which led the Bush administration to turn its attention away from Al Qaeda, and to pick a fight with a regime that, however nasty, posed no threat — has made us much less safe than we should be.

Letter Sent to the Editor, Los Angeles Times
Dear Editor:

I’m glad meat producers are taking steps to improve conditions for the animals they raise and kill (“Killing Them Softly,” April 29), but much work remains to be done.

For five years, I worked at a chicken slaughterhouse in Arkansas that supplies KFC. I watched my fellow employees tear the legs and wings off live birds, run them over with forklifts, and maliciously stomp them to death. Workers who deliberately abused and killed birds were never reprimanded.

One day, my supervisor instructed us to turn off the electric stun bath, which is supposed to render chickens unconscious before their throats are cut and they go into a vat of boiling water to loosen their feathers. Because the line moves so quickly, the knife misses many birds—all of these went into the scalding water fully conscious, screaming and kicking. Birds came out the other end with broken bones and disfigured and missing body parts because they struggled so much in the tank.

When the plant slaughtered bigger birds, some workers simply broke the chickens’ legs in order to force them to fit into the shackles instead of adjusting them. Chickens awaiting slaughter were routinely left without any water and died by the hundreds.

I decided to speak out because I wanted to see something done about this cruelty. It’s not pleasant to think about, but people need to know that if they eat meat, this is what they are supporting.

Sincerely,
Virgil Butler

From the NY Times:
Man on Horseback
By PAUL KRUGMAN

Gen. Georges Boulanger cut a fine figure; he looked splendid in uniform, and magnificent on horseback. So his handlers made sure that he appeared in uniform, astride a horse, as often as possible.

It worked: Boulanger became immensely popular. If he hadn't lost his nerve on the night of the attempted putsch, French democracy might have ended in 1889.

We do things differently here — or we used to. Has "man on horseback" politics come to America?

Some background: the Constitution declares the president commander in chief of the armed forces to make it clear that civilians, not the military, hold ultimate authority. That's why American presidents traditionally make a point of avoiding military affectations. Dwight Eisenhower was a victorious general and John Kennedy a genuine war hero, but while in office neither wore anything that resembled military garb.

Given that history, George Bush's "Top Gun" act aboard the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln — c'mon, guys, it wasn't about honoring the troops, it was about showing the president in a flight suit — was as scary as it was funny.

Mind you, it was funny. At first the White House claimed the dramatic tail-hook landing was necessary because the carrier was too far out to use a helicopter. In fact, the ship was so close to shore that, according to The Associated Press, administration officials "acknowledged positioning the massive ship to provide the best TV angle for Bush's speech, with the sea as his background instead of the San Diego coastline."

A U.S.-based British journalist told me that he and his colleagues had laughed through the whole scene. If Tony Blair had tried such a stunt, he said, the press would have demanded to know how many hospital beds could have been provided for the cost of the jet fuel.

But U.S. television coverage ranged from respectful to gushing. Nobody pointed out that Mr. Bush was breaking an important tradition. And nobody seemed bothered that Mr. Bush, who appears to have skipped more than a year of the National Guard service that kept him out of Vietnam, is now emphasizing his flying experience. (Spare me the hate mail. An exhaustive study by The Boston Globe found no evidence that Mr. Bush fulfilled any of his duties during that missing year. And since Mr. Bush has chosen to play up his National Guard career, this can't be shrugged off as old news.)

Anyway, it was quite a show. Luckily for Mr. Bush, the frustrating search for Osama bin Laden somehow morphed into a good old-fashioned war, the kind where you seize the enemy's capital and get to declare victory after a cheering crowd pulls down the tyrant's statue. (It wasn't much of a crowd, and American soldiers actually brought down the statue, but it looked great on TV.)

Let me be frank. Why is the failure to find any evidence of an active Iraqi nuclear weapons program, or vast quantities of chemical and biological weapons (a few drums don't qualify — though we haven't found even that) a big deal? Mainly because it feeds suspicions that the war wasn't waged to eliminate real threats. This suspicion is further fed by the administration's lackadaisical attitude toward those supposed threats once Baghdad fell. For example, Iraq's main nuclear waste dump wasn't secured until a few days ago, by which time it had been thoroughly looted. So was it all about the photo ops?

Well, Mr. Bush got to pose in his flight suit. And given the absence of awkward questions, his handlers surely feel empowered to make even more brazen use of the national security issue in future.

Next year — in early September — the Republican Party will hold its nominating convention in New York. The party will exploit the time and location to the fullest. How many people will dare question the propriety of the proceedings?

And who will ask why, if the administration is so proud of its response to Sept. 11, it has gone to such lengths to prevent a thorough, independent inquiry into what actually happened? (An independent study commission wasn't created until after the 2002 election, and it has been given little time and a ludicrously tiny budget.)

There was a time when patriotic Americans from both parties would have denounced any president who tried to take political advantage of his role as commander in chief. But that, it seems, was another country.

From the NY Times:
The Faces of Budget Cuts
By BOB HERBERT

PORTLAND, Ore.
Cheryl Asbell was fidgety, anxious. She compulsively adjusted the soft-brimmed bucket hat that she wore during the interview in her living room. Now she stared at me, her eyes wide.

"I'll tell you what's going to happen," she said. "I'm going to be dead. That's what's going to happen."

Ms. Asbell, tall, thin and middle-aged, described herself as deeply depressed and paranoid. Her periodic descents into psychosis, she said, are becoming more and more difficult to handle.

She tried to commit suicide in January and ended up in a hospital for 10 days. "I stopped breathing, but they brought me back," she said. "I feel a little better now."

During one psychotic episode she removed the metal plates from all of the switches and outlets in the apartment. "I thought there were cameras in there," she said.

She pointed to a tiny hole in the living room ceiling. "I thought there was a camera in there, too. I thought there were people outside the house watching me. I called the police and they came by and said everything was all right."

Doctors have prescribed a long list of medications to ward off the worst manifestations of Ms. Asbell's illness. But she can't afford them. She has been dumped from a state program that paid for the medication and for sessions of much-needed psychotherapy. Now she gets some medication in the form of samples from doctor's offices. The rest she does without.

Ms. Asbell is one of thousands of Oregon residents who are seriously in need of medical care but are being cut from essential (and even life-saving) programs because of the state's budget meltdown.

Last month The Oregonian reported on the case of Douglas Schmidt, a 36-year-old epileptic who lost his prescription drug benefit because of budget cuts. The benefit paid for his anti-seizure medication. Eight to 10 days after his supply of pills ran out, Mr. Schmidt suffered a massive epileptic seizure. He has been in a coma ever since and is not expected to recover.

Last week I interviewed Rose Spears, who is 50, has had thyroid cancer and is disabled from diabetes. She lives alone in a one-bedroom apartment. The table beside her bed is covered with medicine vials.

"I lost my prescription drug coverage," she said, "so I have to pay out of pocket for my 11-odd medications, plus two insulins. I can't afford it. The total bill is $912 per month and my income is $728. Right now I'm surviving off samples my doctor can give me."

Oregon is one of many states caught in a fiscal quagmire. There are many reasons for the budgetary distress, which has spread from coast to coast. They include a lousy national economy, a widespread unwillingness locally and nationally to levy the taxes necessary to support government services, and the refusal of the Bush administration to help state and local governments that are experiencing their worst budget shortfalls since World War II.

In Oregon the situation is getting worse, not better. School financing has been cut so drastically that some districts have had to curtail the school year. And health care cuts that have already hurt thousands of poor and working-poor residents are expected to go much deeper, beginning July 1.

Not too long ago the Oregon health care system was a model that was admired and studied by professionals around the country. Now, because of a lack of funds, it is falling apart.

"It's horrible to see what's happening with some of the very successful things that we did," said Jean Thorne, the state's director of human services.

The drastic cuts in governmental services that are being made in Oregon and other states are eroding the nation's basic defenses against ignorance, disease and destitution.

Both Rose Spears and Cheryl Asbell are petrified that at some point they won't be able to get doctors' samples and their medication will be cut off entirely.

"I haven't had my blood sugar below 250 since the beginning of the year," said Ms. Spears. "It's the stress. I have to take my medication if I want to stick around. But what if I can't get it? I pray constantly."

"I've lost 45 pounds since my coverage was cut," said Ms. Asbell. "I don't sleep at all, I'm so worried."

She said she is convinced that without her medication she will sink ever more deeply into a depression from which she will not emerge.

From the NY Times:
Teaching Kids a Lesson
By BOB HERBERT

HILLSBORO, Ore.
It's still chilly in northwestern Oregon, and there's a real bite to the wind in the evenings. But for the 19,000 students in the sprawling Hillsboro public school district, summer vacation is coming real soon.

Starved for money, Hillsboro lopped 17 days off the school year. It is not alone. Throughout this budget-stricken state, school districts are dismantling programs, firing employees and tearing pages off the school calendar.

There's a twist on an old adage at work here — if it ain't broke, break it. The Oregon public school system was terrific, one of the best in the nation. Now, suddenly, it's speeding along the road to ruin, the victim of a bad economy and, more than anything else, the radical antitax fever that has gripped so many Americans.

The idea that American kids in 2003 — first and second graders, juniors and seniors in high school — could be forced out of their classrooms because the public will not come up with the money to pay for them is astonishing.

"During the Great Depression we didn't close schools," said Dr. Walter Hellman, a physics teacher at Hillsboro High School. "We didn't close schools during World War II. Are we the most civically irresponsible generation in Oregon in 100 years? That's a problem."

Oregon is experiencing a budget meltdown. Home to Intel and other high-tech highfliers, it suffered disproportionately from the bursting of the technology bubble. Its jobless rate is the highest in the U.S. And it is being squeezed, like many other states, by a dismal national economy.

The result has been a hemorrhaging of state revenues so severe that such fundamental services as schools, basic health care and law enforcement have been undermined. A ballot proposal to raise the state income tax temporarily and thus ward off at least some of the cuts to schools and to services desperately needed by the sick and the disabled was rejected by voters in January.

Something ugly is happening in Oregon, and it is not unrelated to the sense of economic insecurity and the erosion of support for traditional public services that have spread across the U.S. There is a faint but unmistakable whiff of the Depression in the air. The states, collectively, are mired in their worst budget situation in half a century. Long-term unemployment across the country is way up. The lines at food banks are lengthening. And hard-core child poverty, only recently on the run, is threatening a comeback.

For years the residents of Hillsboro, a scenic suburb of Portland, felt insulated from such problems. More than 80 percent of the parents send their children to the public schools, which by all accounts have been thriving. But school funding in Oregon is a state responsibility, and neither the Legislature nor the voters have been willing to raise the additional money needed to keep the system going.

Now, in Hillsboro and other districts, there's not even enough money to keep the schools open a full year.

"The kids are being told their schools are not important and we can close them, and that's how you balance the state budget," said Ike Maness, president of the Hillsboro Education Association. "People are starting to refer to Oregon as the Mississippi of the West."

One of the more mature approaches to the crisis is coming from Ian Atkins, an 18-year-old senior at Glencoe High School who could fit the stereotype of the all-American kid. He played football and baseball, ran track and participated in poetry jams. A music program in elementary school enabled him to go on to the Portland Symphonic Boy Choir. In September he will begin classes at the University of Oregon.

Mr. Atkins is dismayed by the trashing of a school system that treated him so well. He noted that even deeper cuts are planned for next year.

"I've had so many opportunities, including sports and all the electives," he said. "It's not fair that the same classes and the same opportunities won't be around for the kids who are coming up through the schools now."

He and another student have organized a campaign to save the system. They are not casting blame, and they don't want to hear excuses. They are simply demanding that state legislators and other responsible officials find a solution — and soon — to a problem that is as absurd as it is destructive.