Now that the headline-grabbing primary season is now essentially complete, we can get back to the future of the Bush Years - of course, I or II is still the question.
A DEAL'S UNDOING STIRS DEFICIT FEARS;
BUSH'S BUDGET PACT RETREAT DISMAYS ECONOMISTS, AND SOME ADVISERS
Steven Mufson, Washington Post
March 6, 1992
Today, with another election at hand, Bush seems willing to borrow a little more from young people's futures to protect his own. This week he gave three interviews in which he called that once "essential" budget compromise with Congress a "mistake." Smarting from rival Republican Pat Buchanan's attacks on the modest tax increases in the 1990 budget deal, Bush told a columnist from the Atlanta ...
DETOURING THE RECOVERY
Boston Globe Editorial
Published on March 5, 1992It would be unfortunate if the mildly optimistic appraisal of the economy presented by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan worked as a drag on the recovery rather than as a form of encouragement. Congress and the Bush administration are in a position to avoid that hazard. Greenspan's hopefulness on two major issues lies at the heart of the problem. His statement that inflation will not be a problem for the time being was particularly impressive, coming from someone whose public career...
2 ECONOMIC INDICATORS SHOW SIGNS OF RECOVERY
Martin Crutsinger, Associated Press
March 3, 1992
WASHINGTON -- Two hard-hit sectors of the economy got good news yesterday. A key manufacturing barometer climbed out of recession territory in February and the construction industry enjoyed its best showing since last spring. The Commerce Department, however, reported that consumers increased their spending a lackluster 0.2 percent in January while their incomes actually fell by 0.1 percent.Private economists said the mixed reports were typical of an economy at a turning point with some...
GOP MOVE PUTS SENATE IN MIDDLE OF CRIME WAR
Helen Dewar and Kenneth J. Cooper, Washington Post
March 4, 1992It excluded a waiting period for handgun purchases, approved by both chambers and included in the House-Senate compromise. [Bush] had agreed to support the waiting period as part of a comprehensive bill but criticized the compromise as insufficiently tough on criminals.
"I'm tickled to death to jump right in in a good old election year," said Minority Whip Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), characterizing the compromise ...
HEAD START'S LEAN-TIMES BACKLOG MIDDLE-CLASS NOSES PRESSED TO WINDOW OF PROGRAM FOR POOR
Aaron Zitner, Boston Globe
March 5, 1992At the Head Start office run by Ann Linehan, a sad letter arrived last month on behalf of a Newton man facing bankruptcy. ''He remains financially insolvent, and most likely all assets will be liquidated,'' wrote the man's lawyer, who then asked: Could his client's two young children get into Head Start? The request was a striking sign of the times. These days, people who once had well-paying jobs and children in private day care are seeking help from a program...
BANKRUPTCIES SET RECORD; NEW ENGLAND HARDEST HIT
Dave Skidmore, Associated Press
March 3, 1992WASHINGTON -- A record 944,000 American individuals and businesses filed for bankruptcy in 1991 -- a 21 percent increase from the year before -- as the economy struggled to emerge from recession, a nonprofit group said yesterday. Many of the biggest increases came in economically shellshocked New England. Filings rose 51 percent in New Hampshire, 47 percent in Rhode Island, 45 percent in New Jersey, 43 percent in Massachusetts, 43 percent in Maryland, 41 percent in Connecticut, 37 percent in...
ERNST & YOUNG ORDERED TO TURN OVER DOCUMENTS
Boston Globe
March 4, 1992A DISTRICT COURT judge yesterday ordered Ernst & Young to turn over what could total 1 million documents to federal regulators probing the accounting firm's work for 23 troubled savings and loan institutions. ''Accounting firms may have been responsible for many of the abuses which have led to this country's savings and loan crisis,'' Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote in the decision compelling the firm to comply with the Office of Thrift Supervision's...
FLIP, FLOP. . . FLIP?
The Washington Post Editorial
March 5, 1992. pg. a.20
Mr. Bush doesn't quite say of the broken promise that the devil made him do it. He says Congress did. "But, yes, I, you see, I'm very disappointed with Congress," he explained in one of several recantations this week. "I thought this one compromise, and it was a compromise, would result in no more tax increases. I thought it would result in total control of ...
PENDULUM SWINGS TOWARD STOCKS -- AGAIN
Thomas Watterson, Boston Globe
March 5, 1992At least once a week, it seems, the stock market sets a record. This week is no exception. Investors have been buying in reaction to positive economic news on production, consumer spending and construction. But with records in the Dow Jones industrial average coming so often that they aren't even reported as records any more, ordinary folks may wonder if it's too late for them, if stocks will start to fall as soon as they buy in.
Not according to a number of investment...
THE GULF GLOW FADES
Mark Shields, Washington Post
March 6, 1992
President Bush's reelection strategy of focusing on his victory in the Persian Gulf War has at least one major problem: The Persian Gulf War does not loom quite so historic in Americans' minds when the battle now is here at home, and the stakes are nothing less than our children's future.
BIPARTISAN SENATE PANEL ASSAILS BUSH'S HEALTH CARE PLAN
Elizabeth Neuffer, Bsoton Globe
March 5, 1992WASHINGTON -- Senate Republicans and Democrats yesterday sharply criticized President Bush's proposed health care reforms for failing to provide coverage for all Americans and to contain surging health care costs.
But Health and Human Services Secretary Louis Sullivan defended the plan before the Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee as ''built on choice, not central control.''
"The president's plan addresses the health care worries expressed...
TARGETING PBS CONSERVATIVES REVIVE LIBERAL BIAS CHARGE
Patti Hartigan, Boston Globe
March 4, 1992Conservatives who have been challenging the National Endowment for the Arts for issuing controversial grants to artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe are now holding public broadcasting stations to the same watchdog scrutiny. In a debate likened to ''an attempt to hold 'Sesame Street' hostage,'' the Senate yesterday began a preliminary discussion of a bill to authorize $1.1 billion in federal money for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which channels money...
COLLEGES ASSAIL BID TO REVISE AID RULES BUSH'S PLAN WOULD BAN RACE-BASED SCHOLARSHIPS
Tamara Henry, Associated Press
March 5, 1992WASHINGTON -- Groups representing virtually every college and university in the United States issued a denunciation yesterday of a Bush administration proposal to ban race-specific scholarships. ''The proposed policy is based on faulty legal reasoning . . . and . . . has the potential of doing significant harm'' to recruitment and fund- raising, said Robert Atwell, president of the American Council on Education.
"We are urging the department to withdraw its...
VOTERS' ANGER MAY TAKE ITS TOLL ON CAPITOL HILL:
MARYLAND UPSET SEEN AS A HARBINGER
John W. Mashek, Globe Staff
March 5, 1992
WASHINGTON -- The anti-incumbent sentiment that defeated a veteran Democrat in Maryland's primary on Tuesday, combined with retirements and redistricting, is likely to bring about 100 new members to Congress this fall. That would be the biggest turnover since the post-Watergate election of 1974. Rep. Beverly Byron, a seven-term incumbent, lost by 12 percentage points to Tom Hattery, a 38-year-old farmer who spoke of ''business as usual in Washington.''...SHIPMENTS TO PAKISTAN QUESTIONED: COMMERICAL SALES OF WAR MATERIEL MAY BREAK U.S. LAW
Steve Coll and David Hoffman, Washington Post
March 7, 1992
A senior Bush administration official said today that the United States issued licenses for more than $100 million in commercial sales of military equipment to Pakistan in 1990 and 1991, actions that some in Congress charge may violate a law blocking aid to Pakistan as long as that country continues its nuclear weapons program.
WHY VIETNAM WON'T GO AWAY
H.D.S. Greenway, Boston Globe
March 5, 1992When Desert Storm was over, President Bush said that, at last, the Vietnam syndrome had been put behind us. How wrong he was.
It seems astonishing to think that a war that the United States pulled out of in 1973 should still remain a factor in an election 19 years later. What the candidates did or did not do in World War II was no longer discussed in the presidential elections of 1964. Korea was, to my knowledge, never even mentioned in the campaigns of 1972.
Yet Vietnam rolls on...
FROM FUMES TO WATER, BUSH IS FLEXING REGULATORY RULES
Michael Weisskopf and Thomas W. Lippman, Washington Post
March 7, 1992Now a presidential primary in Michigan on March 17 has created the art of the possible. In a few days, President [Bush]'s EPA is expected to free the Detroit-based auto industry from the need to install small canisters in cars to capture the fumes. The responsibility for pollution controls would shift to gas stations.
In the decision on gasoline vapors, the White House was also ...
EDGING TOWARD THE ENERGY FUTURE
Boston Globe Editorial
Published on March 6, 1992The energy bill passed recently by the Senate represents a step forward, but only a modest one. As Sen. James Jeffords of Vermont said: ''The bill falls short because we still will become increasingly dependent on oil from the Middle East. We still don't have a national energy strategy.'' The United States depends on foreign oil for 45 percent of its petroleum needs. If present trends continue, that dependency will climb to 80 percent by 2010. Domestic oil production...
GOP MOVE PUTS SENATE IN MIDDLE OF CRIME WAR
Helen Dewar and Kenneth J. Cooper, Washington Post
March 4, 1992It excluded a waiting period for handgun purchases, approved by both chambers and included in the House-Senate compromise. [Bush] had agreed to support the waiting period as part of a comprehensive bill but criticized the compromise as insufficiently tough on criminals.
"I'm tickled to death to jump right in in a good old election year," said Minority Whip Alan K. Simpson (R-Wyo.), characterizing the compromise ...
HEART OF GOP DARKNESS
Richard Cohen, Washington Post
March 3, 1992
President Bush, paddling up the GOP's fetid river of either passive or active racism, has finally met his Kurtz: "The horror, the horror." Those famous lines spoken by Joseph Conrad's equally famous character turn out to describe Patrick J. Buchanan and what he represents. Racism is the GOP's "Heart of Darkness."The tragedy of George Bush, besides a wasted presidency, is that on a given ...