After reading this article in the WP on the steroidal growth of the budget deficit, I was about to write a tough post on budget director Mitch Daniels. Then I remembered I'd already taken care of that.

Just as Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld have come to represent the best aspects of the Bush presidency to date, budget director Mitch Daniels is the perfect exemplar of all that's worst -- the arrogance, the smug self-satisfaction, and (in the domestic policy arena) the breath-taking intellectual dishonesty.
The O'Toole File -- Dec. 31, 2002

Welcome Back: Virginia Postrel gets back to blogging today with several new posts, including this one on North Korea:

Here's my crazy idea: North Korea has 8,000 spent nuclear fuel rods that could be converted to plutonium for weapons. Let's save the North Koreans the trouble and buy the fuel rods and the plant that reprocesses them. (To seal the deal, maybe we could get some Hollywood types to entertain Kim's thoughts on cinema for an evening or two.) Yes, buying the spent fuel rods would be giving into nuclear blackmail. But that's probably going to happen anyway�nuclear blackmail is tough stuff ...

Read the rest here.
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