Old Fashioned Patriot

"When you have seen a system that has gone from a few hundred thousand cases to 1.5 million last year — most of that increase during the fat years of the Clinton administration — you must conclude something is not right," said Edith H. Jones, a federal appellate court judge in Houston who served on a blue-ribbon panel to review bankruptcy law in the 1990s and is widely believed to be seen as on President Bush's short list for a position on the Supreme Court.

While Democrats may argue over whether U.S. troops should stay in Iraq or come home now, there should be little dispute that the American people are owed the truth about the history of U.S. relations with both Iraq and Iran.

-- (1) The official counterproposal should be not to raise taxes, but to cancel the proposed extension of the 2001 tax cuts (an issue that has already divided Republicans in Congress). At every opportunity, Democrats should portray these as new tax cuts, pushing Dubya's language about the urgency of fixing Social Security back in his face and insisting that we can't worsen this crisis by cutting taxes again.

-- (2) When the Bushites complain that these aren't really new tax cuts, but the same ones from four years ago, feed them Dubya's words from 2001 about how the cuts wouldn't endanger the budget surplus or Social Security. Now that we know those promises have been broken, we can't allow ourselves make the problem worse by passing new tax cuts to replace the expiring ones.

Mr. Greenspan acknowledged that he had wanted to reduce the budget surplus, but said he also proposed "trigger" mechanisms for Congress to re-evaluate the tax cuts if the budget forecasts proved wrong.

Bush's first legislative victory of his second term ... Among Washington state's delegation, Democrats Brian Baird, Rick Larsen and Adam Smith joined two Republicans in voting for the measure.