Paul Krugman

The Bush administration has misled the public on many issues, from the budget outlook to the Iraqi threat.

We still don't know what started the chain reaction on Thursday. Whatever the initial cause, however, the current guess is that a local event turned into an epic blackout because the transmission network has been neglected.

For about 20 months the U.S. economy has been operating in a twilight zone: growing too fast to meet the classic definition of a recession, but too slowly to meet the usual criteria for economic recovery.

The U.S. military has always had superb logistics. What happened? The answer is a mix of penny-pinching and privatization — which makes our soldiers' discomfort a symptom of something more general.

Since we're stuck in Iraq indefinitely, we may as well try to learn something. But I suspect that our current leaders won't be receptive to the most important lesson of the land where cities and writing were invented: that manmade environmental damage can destroy a civilization.

Treasury has an elaborate computer model designed to evaluate who benefits and who loses from any proposed change in tax laws.

Bay Bush'un bütçe açığını çözmeye niyeti olduğuna dair hiçbir işaret yok. Tam tersine, hükümet daha çok vergi indirimi sağlamak için verilerle oynamaya devam ediyor. Eninde sonunda piyasalar durumu farkedecektir.

Bush, anket oranları her ne kadar savaş öncesi düzeylere düşmüş olsa da, Blair gibi bir çöküşten mustarip değil. Niye? Cevaplardan biri kuşkusuz, 11 Eylül sonrasında soytarıca bir yaltaklanmayı âdet edinen medyanın, Bush'a 'fasulyeden' eleştiriler yöneltmesi.

The Brookings Institution military analyst Michael O'Hanlon, who describes our volunteer military as "one of the best military institutions in human history," warns that "the Bush administration will risk destroying that accomplishment if they keep on the current path."

Here's another sentence in George Bush's State of the Union address that wasn't true: "We will not deny, we will not ignore, we will not pass along our problems to other Congresses, to other presidents and other generations."

More than half of the U.S. Army's combat strength is now bogged down in Iraq, which didn't have significant weapons of mass destruction and wasn't supporting Al Qaeda.

Furthermore, even on the military front the administration has been weirdly reluctant to come to grips with terrorism.

Some crazy guy? Public images are funny things. Newt Gingrich became a famous symbol of Republican radicalism.

The Bush and Blair administrations are trying to silence critics — many of them current or former intelligence analysts — who say that they exaggerated the threat from Iraq.

The mystery of Iraq's missing weapons of mass destruction has become a lot less mysterious.

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.

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.

I've always assumed that at some point the American people would realize what was happening and demand an end to the process. Now, though, I'm not so sure, and that wartime vote illustrates why.

Anyway, what defines patriotism? Talk is cheap; so is putting a flag in your lapel. Citizens prove their patriotism when they make sacrifices for the sake of their country. Mr. Kerry, a decorated veteran, has met that test. Most of his critics haven't.

Over the last two weeks, nobody has been paying much attention to economic news; even the ups and downs of the Dow have reflected reports from the battlefield, not the boardroom.

Where has been much speculation why Europe and the U.S. are suddenly at such odds. Is it about culture? About history?

The mood among business lobbyists, according to a jubilant official at the Heritage Foundation, is one of "optimism, bordering on giddiness."

Today, George Bush is scheduled to give a speech intended to put him in front of the growing national outrage over corporate malfeasance. He will sternly lecture Wall Street executives about ethics and will doubtless portray himself as a believer in old-fashioned business probity.

Last week the Web site SatireWire.com ran a mock news story: "Enron Admits It's Really Argentina." It was pretty funny, though quite unfair — unfair, that is, to Argentina. And yet the satire was more on point than its authors realized.