Times Watch for 04/16/03

Three Jeers For Tax Cuts!

President Bushs announcement of a lower target ($550 billion) for his planned tax cuts was greeted with the sort of front-page enthusiasm the Times could never quite muster over, say, Iraqs liberation. The headline for Elisabeth Bumillers front-page story: In a Concession, Bush Lowers Goal of Tax Cut Plan. The sub-head: White House Talks Tough, but the Final Deal May Well Be Closer to $350 Billion. Its hard to shake the subtle feeling the Times considers this good news.

Times vs. Times on Manhattans Budget Crisis

Michael Coopers front-page story on the New York City budget, Bloomberg Offers Two Budgets, One Bleak and the Other Bleaker offers the typical budget-shutdown dystopia. It opens with a laundry list of services that would be shut down if mayor Mike Bloomberg doesnt get more state aid, and if his commuter tax on city workers who live elsewhere (a tax beloved by the Times) is not approved.

Cooper warns: That plan, known as the doomsday budget around City Hall, calls for 10,000 more layoffs. City streets would get dirtier, as many as 40 firehouses would close, after-school programs would be eliminated, all city pools would be padlocked, subway and bus discounts for the elderly would be eliminated, and the Police Department would shrink through attrition to its lowest level in years.

But a good counter-argument against this sort of budget-shutdown hysteria can be found, in, of all places, the Times, in Randal Archibolds Metro section story on the budget deal: It is normal for city workers facing thousands of pink slips to conjure nightmarish visions of the woe to befall the city.But most outside analysts studying Mr. Bloomberg's plan to trim some 4,500 workers from the city payroll as part of $600 million in savings needed to close a budget gap are not nearly so pessimistic.

Maureen Dowd Uncowed by Wars Success

It takes brass to ignore the good things happening in Iraq, but Times columnist Maureen Dowd is up to it. The Times reporting acknowledged, at least for one day, how ecstatic Iraqis were over Saddam Husseins defeat. But Dowd breezed by the jubilation in one snotty sentence: We were always going to win the war with Iraq, she wrote on April 9.

Now Dowd is back on the Iraq beat, just in time to criticize U.S. forces for not stopping the looting of Baghdads museums and libraries. She criticizes them for NOT acting more imperialistic: The government should have taken 20 seconds, when it was awarding the Halliburton contract, to protect the art, the books and the hospital supplies.Just because we don't want to be an empire doesn't mean we have to be utterly lacking in grandeur. Just because the leaders who prosecuted this war were oil men doesn't mean they have to prosecute the war like oil men. The situation in Iraq has changed 180 degrees for the better, but Dowd maintains her foolish consistency.

Augustas Last Stand?

Like the Southern bitter-enders still fighting the Civil War, the battle of Augusta National golf club isnt over at the Times. Though feminist Martha Burks protest was a crowd-of-40 flop she herself fled after a single hour, the Times most respected sports columnist sees victory in defeat, and comes close to making a civil rights martyr out of Martha.

In The Sporting World Could Certainly Use a Few More Martha Burks, sports columnist George Vecsey writes, Not to compare one musty old-boy network to the civil rights movement... and then does exactly that.

Vecsey continues: but back in the early 60's people proclaimed failure every time somebody got doused with ketchup and tossed into the street during a lunch-counter demonstration. What they overlooked was the process. Photographs of the civil rights demonstrations were distributed. The whole world was watching. Before long, Martin Luther King Jr. was preaching to millions at the mall in Washington.

He adds: Who knows? Maybe people will discuss Martha Burk's message at Passover seders this evening.

Then Vecsey does it again: Golf is hardly civil rights he writes, and then implies it is. It is a cerebral message, not nearly as graphic as watching some sheriff turn the fire hoses or the dogs on a bunch of freedom riders, but gradually it sinks in. Burk knew what she was doing in an obscure field out of sight of the lush lawns of Augusta.

As Conservative AsPat Buchanan?

Sheryl Gay Stolbergs profile of Rep. Duncan Hunter, House Armed Services Committee chairman, includes this eyebrow-raising bit: Mr. Hunter, who represents California's 52nd District, stretching south and east from the inland suburbs of San Diego, is among the most conservative members of Congress. Some compare his politics to those of Patrick J. Buchanan.

Hunter indeed has a populist streak on issues like trade and immigrationbut Pat Buchanan? The comparison may have been valid ten years ago, but Buchanans anti-war views have made him less appealing to mainstream conservatives. To make America safe from a terrorism provoked by our own mindless interventions, Buchanan wrote in November, we have decided to liberate Iraq, with Ariel Sharon as our role model. So the U.S. is responsible for 9-11? Thats a rather narrow sect of conservatism, to say the least?

CORRECTION: The April 15 Times Watch story Krugmans Non-Existent Cuts referred incorrectly to the author of a weblog. His name is Matthew Hoy.