AUSTIN, Texas -- The evidence just keeps stacking up that this administration intends to turn the entire country into a giant Texas. The hallmarks of Bush's governorship are everywhere, being reenacted on a grander scale in Washington, D.C. The favors and services for big corporations, ludicrously obvious pro-polluter policies advertised as something else, the occasional bone thrown to the right-wing and, above all, tax cuts that leave the government unable to carry out even its most basic obligations. Foreign policy is the only new element in the mix.

-- Bush offers something called the Clear Skies Initiative, arguing it would reduce pollution "better and faster" than the Clean Air Act now in effect. But the Energy Department already did a study in 2000 analyzing various enforcement strategies and concluded the approach wouldn't even work as well as what we already have, a law that the administration is very busily NOT enforcing.

-- Energy Secretary Spencer Abraham, who helped write Bush's energy policy, met with 36 representatives of industry, almost all of them

The Committee to Protect Journalists released a bleak report the other day. "Attacks on the Press in 2001" is a thick document with details about media suppression in much of the world. While American readers may feel very fortunate, they have no good reason to be smug.

Last year, the report says, 37 journalists were killed because of their work. Many more were jailed or physically attacked. In some countries the jeopardy is primarily legal; elsewhere the main dangers are assault and murder. But -- one way or another -- journalistic pursuit of truth can bring grim consequences.

Worldwide, the picture is largely dismal. But also inspiring. Despite serious and ever-present hazards in numerous countries, a lot of journalists keep setting aside fear to do their jobs with integrity.

Meanwhile, anyone who assumes that the USA is setting a great example should reconsider. The Committee to Protect Journalists points out that some ominous steps began as last autumn got underway. "The U.S. State Department contacted the Voice of America, a broadcast organization funded by the federal government, and expressed concern

Call it the year of the yellow notepad. Doris Kearns Goodwin, ejected from Parnassus, from Pulitzer jury service and kindred honorable obligations, sinks under charges of plagiarism consequent, she claims, upon sloppy note-taking on her trusty yellow legal pads.

Michael Bellesiles, taking heavy artillery fire for knavish scholarship in his book "Arming America," says that his notations from probate records central to his assertions about gun ownership in eighteenth-century America were on legal yellow pads that were irreparably damaged when his office at Emory sustained an inundation in 2000, the year his book was published. Connoisseurs of such sports of nature or of plumbing may note that, unusually, this particular flood came in May rather than mid-April, when people have completed their tax returns and are trying to clean out the Augean stables of their accounting.

Stephen Ambrose, overtaken by charges of plagiarism, did not have recourse to the yellow-notepad defense, presumably because he had become rich enough not only to discard them in favor of teams of

You've probably heard a lot of spooky tales about "the liberal media."

Ever since Vice President Spiro Agnew denounced news outlets that were offending the Nixon administration in the autumn of 1969, the specter has been much more often cited than sighted. "The liberal media" is largely an apparition -- but the epithet serves as an effective weapon, brandished against journalists who might confront social inequities and imbalances of power.

During the last few months, former CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg's new book "Bias" has stoked the "liberal media" canard. His anecdote-filled book continues to benefit from enormous media exposure.

In interviews on major networks, Goldberg has emphasized his book's charge that American media outlets are typically in step with the biased practices he noticed at CBS News -- where "we pointedly identified conservatives as conservatives, for example, but for some crazy reason didn't bother to identify liberals as liberals."

But do facts support Goldberg's undocumented generalization? To find out, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg searched a database of 30 large

Saddam Hussein's regime is ordering thousands of small generators, which tells us that, for one, Saddam Hussein reckons that a U.S. attack may indeed be in the offing. When the bombing starts and the central generating stations get blown up all over again, there'll at least be some micro-generating capacity to keep a few lights on.

But just what is the likelihood of Bush cashing out his bluster about the Axis of Evil with an effort to finish off Saddam?

Start with the diplomatic chessboard. Bush I put together a formidable coalition in 1990 after Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. There's scant chance of Bush II matching that achievement. Among the European allies, only the U.K. has signified support, and it will be harder to enlist France, let alone Germany. In 1990, Arab nations mustered to the coalition, led by Saudi Arabia, which trembled at the prospect that after Kuwait, it might be next. The likelihood that Saudi Arabia or any other Arab territory would endorse an attack today, let alone allow its territory to be the springboard for a ground assault on Iraq is remote, as the visit of Vice President Richard