Paul Krugman in the Times nails it.

Sometimes it seems that the only way to make sense of the Bush administration is to imagine that it’s a vast experiment concocted by mad political scientists who want to see what happens if a nation systematically ignores everything we’ve learned over the past few centuries about how to make a modern government work.

Now that Times Select has gone away, everyone can read his Times columns. While I don’t miss Times Select…I had paid the $50.00/year, I’m sure that now we’ll pay for web access to Times columnists by more intrusive animated pop-up ads. This will escalate to the point that the web-based Times will become unreadable in a few months, like so many other news and financial sites.

Another event of interest is the looming presidential veto of the expansion of a health insurance for uninsured U.S. children. Even David Brooks, the Times’ chief apologist for the Republicans, thinks its a good program. So, why, when there are currently three relatively effective US government health plans; Medicare, Medicaid and S-CHIP, are we resisting doing what almost all other western democracies provide as a benefit of citizenship?