President Bush insisted that we could afford both
a tax cut and the shoring up of Social Security. He was dead wrong. So the
Democrats could hardly pick a better set of galvanizing issues. But as Robert
Borosage points out in "The Austerity Trap" (see page 13), many Democrats are
taking surplus-worship to such an extreme that they are in danger of losing their
raison d'être as a party.

The biggest menace to the personal security of Americans may not be terrorism but
government's response to it.

The administration has already rammed through an antiterrorism bill that allows normal due process and
privacy protections to be waived if a prosecutor thinks some potential suspect has some remote
connection to terrorism. Now the president has decided that terrorism suspects can be tried before
special military tribunals, which do away with the inconvenience of constitutional niceties.