RISING TO 'THE LEVEL OF THEIR INCOMPETENCE'

Remember David Walker? In his position as the GAO's Comptroller General, which is charged with insuring financial transparency, he requested information on Vice-President Dick Cheney's energy task force (only to be turned away). Then, as our country’s chief accountant, he became a tenacious financial watchdog, warning we are ignoring threats to our nation’s long-term fiscal security with continued record budget deficits. Well, he's finally given up and quit.

In other good news that augers well for transparency and fiscal responsibility, effective March 1 the Bush administration’s Department of Commerce starts playing more fiscal games and will shut down its extremely useful and popular economic indicators site because of “budgetary constraints.”

Imagine that ... We have a recession ramping up. We get more record budget deficits. Consumer confidence is down. And Team Bush decides we don’t need easy access to the data that allow us to better understand our financial state of affairs. The investor site Angora Financial says it best:

Funny how that works, eh? Bush proposes the first-ever $3 trillion budget this year, but there’s not enough porked in to keep a stats Web site running.

Forcing good people out ... and we can't even keep a good web site running. This explains why even Conservatives are starting to acknowledge that the only people now surrounding President Bush are those who have the unique ability to "rise to the level of their incompetence."

Is this any way to run a country?

- Mark