Tenet: Iraq Not 'Wrong' -- Just 'Looking Bad'

Just call the cops.

Is It Official? Budget Panel Slams Kerry

Some good-government types are looking askance at a Senate Budget Committee report that skewers Democratic candidate John F. Kerry's policy proposals. That report, prepared by no fewer than 17 Republican staffers at the request of retiring Sen. Don Nickles (R-Okla.), came out the day after the Senate left town.

This naturally aroused speculation as to what legislative purpose the report served. The ethics rules say "Senate employees are [paid] for regular performance of official duties. They are not paid to do campaign work."

Ah, but the 13-page report says clearly "For Internal Senate Use Only," so it's obviously not a campaign-related document. We particularly liked the report's "key finding" that "Sen. Kerry has a dismal voting record on enforcing existing budget rules."

Of course, even on the odd chance that the senator from Massachusetts were to win, Nickles won't be in the next Congress to consider any policy proposals.

Unfazed by the First Phase

No matter what, the key to most everything is to be confident. For example, voters in Santa Cruz, Calif., are to decide next Tuesday on a 30-year, half-cent sales tax to pay for widening a bottlenecked section of Highway 1 -- not the scenic portion. The road improvement project has been bitterly contested for years, with enviros blocking the proposal, saying it would just lead to more sprawl.

But the highway proposal is now before the voters, along with the sales-tax increase to fund it. One question, of course, is whether that tax would be adequate.

"We're confident that [the sales tax] would fulfill the first phase [of the widening project], though we're not sure what the first phase entails," Karena Pushnik, a regional transportation planner, told the San Francisco Chronicle last week.

That's confidence.

Getting New Terms

Keeping up with well-known area folks getting recent appointments . . . President Bush over the summer named Madeleine C. Will, former assistant secretary of education for special education and rehabilitative services and former spouse of columnist George Will, to another term as chairman of the President's Committee for People with Intellectual Disabilities. Bush reappointed to that committee the Rev. Lon N. Solomon, senior pastor of the McLean Bible Church, which has planned an $18.5 million center for disabled children. Solomon also serves as chairman of the board of the executive committee of Jews for Jesus.