I've been away on a biz trip but have a couple of posts in the hopper I wanted to get out there.   In this case, 2 interesting reactions from MSM to Bush plans.  The NYT reports on the budget proposal to make deep cuts into Farm Subsidies -

WASHINGTON, Feb. 5 - President Bush will seek deep cuts in farm and commodity programs in his new budget and in a major policy shift will propose overall limits on subsidy payments to farmers, administration officials said Saturday.

Such limits would help reduce the federal budget deficit and would inject market forces into the farm economy, the officials said.

The proposal puts Mr. Bush at odds with some of his most ardent supporters in the rural South, including cotton and rice growers in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Louisiana and Mississippi.

I'm personally impressed that this is on the agenda (although still skeptical it will be carried out).   Nevertheless, my prediction that Bush would ignore this lightning rod has been proven false.

Second, Michael Kinsley reacting to Bush's connection between Tyranny & Terror -

THE STRANGEST aspect of President Bush's new war on tyranny is the connection he draws between tyranny and terrorism. It's not the connection you would suspect, or the one Mr. Bush was making during his first term. When Saddam Hussein was still in charge of Iraq, it was enough to say that bad guys are bad guys. A sadistic dictator is just the type of person who would also harbor terrorists and stockpile weapons of mass destruction.

But now Mr. Bush says that terrorists are actually the victims of tyranny. In his inaugural address, this seemed like a bit of transitory, use-once-and-discard hifalutinism. But Mr. Bush returned to the theme in his State of the Union address Wednesday. "In the long term," he said, "the peace we seek will only be achieved by eliminating the conditions that feed radicalism and ideologies of murder. If whole regions of the world remain in despair and grow in hatred, they will be the recruiting grounds for terror, and that terror will stalk America."

The legendary anarchist writer Emma Goldman said much the same thing in a 1917 essay, "The Psychology of Political Violence." It is "the despair millions of people are daily made to endure" that drives some of them to acts of terror. She quotes a pamphlet from British-ruled India: "Terrorism ... is inevitable as long as ... tyranny continues, for it is not the terrorists that are to be blamed, but the tyrants who are responsible for it."

Mr. Bush does not say that tyranny excuses terrorism. But he does say that tyranny explains terrorism. This is new. One of Mr. Bush's big themes after 9/11 was that terrorism is "evil," pure and simple.

Conservative thought has long rated the notion of "root causes" - explaining antisocial behavior as a consequence of social conditions - as a major heresy. Neoconservatives have especially enjoyed burning witches over this doctrinal deviation. This makes it especially remarkable that a president thought to be in the thrall of neocons should sink so eloquently into deep doctrinal error. Not only does he blame terrorism on social conditions, he says point-blank that "only ... by eliminating [these] conditions" can the terrorist threat be eliminated.

Our president appears to be on some kind of intellectual journey. The idea of an evolution in George W. Bush's thinking is about as hard to accept for Mr. Bush's opponents as evolution itself is for some of his supporters. Nevertheless, there is evidence. I thought I had our president pegged as a man who made the great leap of faith at age 40 and has used that as his intellectual model ever since. Decide what you want to believe, believe it and cross it off your to-do list. But this assessment may have been an injustice.

Seems like Kinsley can't believe that Swamp Draining was the real goal from the outset.  It's OK Michael, we'll speak more slowly next time.