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Paul Krugman (The New York Times, 7/30/07) explained why President Bush says he will veto a popular bi-partisan bill that would provide health insurance to nine million children, who otherwise would have not have coverage.

• “It’s not because [President Bush] thinks the plans wouldn’t work. It’s because he’s afraid that they would. That is, he fears that voters, having seen how the government can help children, would ask why it can’t do the same for adults.

[Mr. Bush] wants the public to believe that government is always the problem, never the solution. But it’s hard to convince people that government is always bad when they see it doing good things. So his philosophy says that the government must be prevented from solving problems, even if it can. In fact, the more good a proposed government program would do, the more fiercely it must be opposed.”

A recent Georgetown University poll found that 9 out of 10 Americans, including 83 percent of Republicans, support an expansion of the government’s health insurance program for children.

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Whenever problems start piling up on the Bush Administration, as they have lately, you can always count on some kind of terrorist-related scare to take your mind off their troubles. This time, CNN (The Most Trusted Name in News, 7/25/07) came through with an ominous report on a number of terrorist “dry runs” designed to test airport security.

In one case, Transportation Security Administration personnel in San Diego reported finding luggage containing plastic ice-packs “configured to mimic bomb components” by being filled with clay and wrapped in duct tape. Pretty scary, huh?

The only problem with the CNN report is that The San Diego Union-Tribune quickly learned that the ice-packs contained the regular blue gel--not clay, and they were not wrapped with duct tape. Other than being wrong on all the facts, the CNN report served its purpose to make us all remember that we are never really safe and only the Bush Administration can keep us that way.

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