washingtonpost.com - nation, world, technology and Washington area news and headlines: "Deadline Set for Leak Papers
White House workers told to turn in all relevant documents in by Tuesday."

Read that sentence, from the front page of washingtonpost.com closely. This is a very commonly read newspaper. Do they not have anyone that knows how to check grammar?

WSJ.com - The Rich Recession: "It is this progressivity that makes the federal government so hugely dependent on top earners for revenue. In the period 1997-to-2000, the last years of the Clinton bubble, adjusted gross income for the top 1% went up every year and so did its share of all income taxes paid. When times are really good, in other words, tax revenue from the rich tends to increase faster than the economy. When times are bad, however, federal revenue falls faster than overall growth does. This helps to explain the wide budget swings in the past decade from deficit to surplus and back to deficit."

An interesting explanation that I'd never considered before. It helps the liberal rhetoric to say that Bush drove us from surplus to defecit, and it's always surprised me that that would be possible. This seems to explain some of that broad swing.

WSJ.com - Who's Vulnerable? (sorry, subscribers only)

Barnes lays out a good case for why Bush isn't nearly as vulnerable as the press seems to think. The key here is to recognize that it's easy to get excited into thinking that, since the Democrats have been campaigning now for almost 6 months, they're beating him. But the election itself is 13 months away, and he has not yet begun to respond to the Dems' criticisms of him. As the situation in Iraq continues to improve, as the economy continues to show signs of recovery and jobs begin increasing again, his approval will go back up. As Barnes says, "President Bush has until mid-2004 for the public to sense the improved trajectory of the economy. That's plenty of time." Everyone is overly excited, and Bush has more than enough time to earn reelection.