Something not hockey related for a change

From today's Washington Post

( Officials Argue for Fast U.S. Exit From Iraq )

In short, it's beginning to look as if the US regime isn't even going to continue the maskirovka it used as a rationale for the war. Seems a committment on that scale is just too much with which to be bothered. Unfortunately, it's unlikely the government's attention will be turned on the domestic front, but, hey, the US economy is still stronger than those of Afghanistan and Iraq combined.

The message the US invasion of Iraq sends the rest of the world

Just in case there was any doubt. This from the English service of Russia's ITAR-TASS news agency.

Iraq war urges Russia to change its Military Doctrine
21.04.2003

By Anatoly Yurkin

MOSCOW, April 21 (Itar-Tass) -- The developments in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as the NATO combat operations in the Balkan Peninsula, show the need for amending the Russian Military Doctrine, General Makhmut Gareyev, President of the Academy of Military Sciences, said in an exclusive interview with Itar-Tass on Monday. "At present we are working on a new version of the Conceptual Framework of National Security and of the Military Doctrine," he said.
According to General Gareyev, "a doctrine is not a document that should never be changed. It should be updated and brought into line with the current world situation." In his opinion, the existing Military Doctrine is at variance with some other basic documents. It deals only with military security, but "Russia should ensure its security not only by military means. Economic, information, psychological, political and diplomatic means should also be used for that purpose." "The war in Iraq showed that all those means are really necessary. Life itself is suggesting amendments to us," Gareyev believes.

And one more...

This from the homefront, columnist Neal Peirce, in today's Seattle Times

States, cities imperiled by federal fiscal follies
Full story: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/opinion/134679442_peirce21.html
 
 
 
 
WASHINGTON — The fiscal prognosis for America's states and cities flipped last week. It went from the unmitigated disaster likely to flow from the $726 billion tax-cut package President Bush has been demanding to a more moderate disaster: $350 billion in revenue losses.
 
Maybe it's no accident that the two Republican senators who withstood heavy White House pressure and forced the lower figure know lots about the pressures that state and local governments must labor under. Maine's Olympia Snowe served years in the Maine House and Senate. George Voinovich was both mayor of Cleveland and governor of Ohio.
 
The federal and state-local tax systems are theoretically separate. But they're bound together by thousands of threads, from federal road and rail subsidies to joint ventures such as Medicaid to state income taxes tied directly to the federal schedule.
 
So a fiscally sick Uncle Sam dooms states and localities to hard times. Already the states, denied the luxury of deficit spending, face grave fiscal crises. They've cut tens of billions from their budgets for the year starting July 1, and still have $25 billion in cuts to go. For next year, their prospective shortfall is $85 billion to $90 billion — nearly 10 percent of their total operating budget figures.
 
In the face of that extreme, the federal government ought to be helping out with emergency aid. Is it? No. Instead, it wants to dump, counting the earlier Bush tax cuts, $1 trillion-plus in tax benefits into the laps of wealthy individuals whom it claims will use the cash to invest and stimulate the economy.
 
Can such a formula work? Not if you ask a group of such authorities as former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, former Treasury Secretaries Peter Peterson and Robert Rubin, former Sens. Bob Kerrey, Sam Nunn and Warren Rudman. In a joint New York Times op-ed article last week, they warned the Bush tax cuts would lead to cumulative 10-year deficits ranging from $4.2 trillion to $6.7 trillion, eventually slowing the economy, raising interest rates to pay off national debt, lowering the national savings that can be devoted to productive investments.
 
The long-term result, clearly, may be a fiscally paralyzed national government, unable to rise to unforeseen challenges.
 
And this wild throw of the fiscal dice is being made less than a decade before a tsunami of baby boomers starts to retire (from 2011 on), presenting gargantuan demands for increased Social Security and Medicare outlays.
 
On the one hand, Bush and Co. moved us into the Iraq war, at a total cost sure to exceed (maybe double) the $75-billion-plus just asked for and appropriated. On the other hand, the administration and its congressional allies continue to press for all manner of immediate domestic aid cuts, ranging from Medicaid to low-income housing, vocational education to after-school programs.
 
The Bush camp's fiscal leadership on the homeland-security costs that the states and cities are shouldering has been extraordinarily weak. And now, if the president has his way and gets stock dividends exempted from income taxes, the federal government will virtually erase the incentive for wealthy individuals to invest in low-income housing tax credits — today, the nation's largest source of low-income housing construction and rehabilitation.
 
Another serious warning: Up to now, the country's real-estate boom hasn't seriously deflated. But some reports indicate softening has already begun.
 
That could bring serious consequences. In a very real way, cities were protected from recession by sustained real-estate prices that translated into a continued strong flow of returns from their big source of revenue — property taxes. But now, cities face twin perils: First, a bursting of the real-estate bubble; and second, governors and legislatures, more and more desperate as they try to balance budgets, deciding to cut heavily into assistance for localities.
 
However one reads these economic tea leaves, the bottom line is clear: Real danger is building for the state and local governments that account for a lot of our common welfare, from public safety to education to the environment to basic infrastructure. After all, states and cities are where we all actually live.
 
Yet, we have a national administration that seems bent on an ideologically driven course of reckless fiscal policy.
 
The risks are enormous. Soon, the hurt and peril will spread from the disadvantaged to everyone who relies on any public service — all of us, in short.
 
Must we wait until then before we cry halt?
 

(no subject)

Bah! Ever have one of those days when you should have just stayed in bed?

Today's one of them.

As soon as i get the panic attack under control, i think i'm going to crawl back into bed, pull the covers over my head, and hide until tomorrow. I don't lose my calm particularly often, but when i do, i do it in spades.

Now if i can just get my hands to stop shaking. And the pulse in my eyelid to go away.