Advanced meat recovery. Yumm.

Apparently the Bush administration has grown so arrogant that they no longer feel they need to lie about everything they do.

"Facing a record budget deficit, Bush administration officials say they have drafted an election-year budget that will rein in the growth of domestic spending without alienating politically influential constituencies."

That means, accoring to the Times story, reining in anything that aids the poor, veterans, and the unemployed.

"They said the president's proposed budget for the 2005 fiscal year, which begins Oct. 1, would control the rising cost of housing vouchers for the poor, require some veterans to pay more for health care, slow the growth in spending on biomedical research and merge or eliminate some job training and employment programs. The moves are intended to trim the programs without damaging any essential services, the administration said."

And still the deficit grows, which the Bush budget director says will reach beyond $450 billion.

The inanity of the administration's domestic "policies" are summed up in the story's last graf:

"The budget also seeks money to train more nurses, to encourage sexual abstinence among teenagers and to recruit 'volunteers in homeland security,' who can respond to emergencies, including terrorist attacks."

One place where the Bush administration is not increasing spending -- in fact, tried to zero the program out until a bipartisan outcry forced them to reluctantly maintain a starved budget for it -- is the Nunn-Lugar Cooperative Threat Reduction Program, which provides money to help the Russians keep their thousands of nuclear weapons secure. A small nuclear device, or a dirty bomb, set off in Times Square is our most imminent security threat, but the Bush administration is spending only $451 million, or "one-tenth the annual cost of the national missile-defense program."

The issue is raised in James Traub's cover story for the Times Magazine, "Can Any Democrat Win on National Security?"

The article is important as it lays out ways in which Democrats can turn national security to their advantage by following in the tradition of Kennedy and go after Bush's right flank on the issue. "Liberal nationalism" they're calling it, using multinational institutions in our best interest on issues such as the international criminal court and fighting terrorism and its funding. It defines the positions of virtually all of the candidates, with the exception of Dennis the Menace. Even Dean. American power can be excersized in a manner that pays attention to the means, not just the ends, and in a fashion that recognizes our allies' interests while not sacrificing our own. Madeleine Albright's "The indispensible nation."

"The underlying critique offered by Democratic policy experts is that the Bush administration, for all its bluster about how 9/11 'changed everything,' has in fact not adapted to the transformed world into which it has been catapulted and is still chasing after the bad guys of an earlier era. The administration understands war, but not the new kind of multifaceted, globalized war that must be fought against a stateless entity. As Ashton B. Carter, a Defense Department official in the Clinton administration, puts it, 'We've done one thing in one place' -- or two, counting Afghanistan. What about the other things in the other places? What about diplomacy, for example? Do we have some means beyond threats of military action to induce Iran and Syria to stop sponsoring terrorists? Do we have some means of persuading the European allies to toughen judicial processes so that terrorism suspects can't walk away -- a United Nations treaty, for example?"

Unfortunately, Traub notes, the party activists, particularly in Iowa, are driving the party leftward, in the tradition of George McGovern.

"Dean may well be a nationalist liberal, but his audience members -- the activists, the students -- often are not; he is exploiting that deep discomfort with the exercise of power, the skepticism about American legitimacy that Condoleezza Rice was writing about. (A candidate who says, as Dean does, 'We're all just cogs in a big machine someplace,' is not catering to the middle.) This is the cliff that Democratic thinkers fear the party is heading over. As one Senate aide tells me, 'I don't see how a Democrat who is easy to stereotype as soft, even if it's unfair, is going to win.'"

That's why so many of us are grasping at Wesley Clark so feverishly. While I don't think his medals and Vietnam experience gives him immunity from the Rove attack machine (just ask Max Cleland what Team Rove is capable of), he does have the bona fides, unlike the former governor of Vermont.

"Michael O'Hanlon, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, has a nightmare in which Dean wins the nomination, conditions in Iraq improve modestly and in the course of a debate, President Bush says: 'Go to Iraq and see the mass graves. Have you been, Governor Dean?' In this nightmare, Bush has been, and Dean hasn't. 'Saddam killed 300,000 people. He gassed many of these people. You mean I should have thought there were no chemical weapons in the hands of a guy who impeded our inspectors for 12 years and gassed his own people and the Iranians?' O'Hanlon glumly says that he has resigned himself to the thought that 'the Democratic base is probably going to lose the Democrats the election in 2004.'

"Strong and wrong beats weak and right -- that's the bugbear the Democrats have to contend with. George McGovern may have had it right in 1972, but he won Massachusetts, and Richard Nixon won the other 49 states. McGovern recently said that he is a big fan of Howard Dean, whose campaign reminds him very much of his own. Dean may want to ask him to hold off on the endorsement"

*****

Packers take the lead with 2 minutes to go.