Frank von Hippel reminds us that what’s really dangerous about nuclear power plants is a factor located hundreds if not thousands of miles from any reactor: regulatory capture.

Therefore, perhaps the most important thing to do in light of the Fukushima disaster is to change the industry-regulator relationship. It has become customary for administrations not to nominate, and the Senate not to confirm, commissioners whom the industry regards as “anti-nuclear” — which includes anyone who has expressed any criticism whatsoever of industry practices. The commission has an excellent staff; what it needs is more aggressive political leadership.

Fukushima also shows why we need to develop reactors that are more inherently safe. Almost all the world’s power reactors, including those at Fukushima, are descended from the much smaller reactors developed in the 1950s by the United States for submarines. As we saw in the Fukushima accident, they depend on pumps to keep them from catastrophic failure, a major weak point. New designs less dependent on pumps have been developed, but there has not yet been enough research to make certain that they would work effectively

We need a regulatory outlook that would prioritize research into those alterrnate designs!

What Juan Zarate, a Bush Administration official, now calls “a deal with the devil” has not worked out “the way anyone would have wanted it to work out.” The deal in question was the normalization of trade relations with Libya in 2004. Calling Muammar el-Qaddafi “the devil” is excessively complimentary. The dictator is merely a garden-variety kleptocrat with more brawn than brains.

Daniel E. Karson, executive managing partner at Kroll, a risk-consulting firm, recalled in an interview that an international communications company he represented tried to enter the Libyan cellular phone market in 2007. From the outset, Libyan officials made it clear that the foreign company’s local business partner would have to be Muhammad Qaddafi, the eldest son of the Libyan ruler.

“We advised them they would have to go through Muhammad Qaddafi,” said Mr. Karson, who declined to identify the client. “This was not going to be done on the basis of, as they say in retail, price, quality and delivery.” Fearful of going into business with the Qaddafis, he said, the company made no investments in Libya.

Coca-Cola got caught in the middle of a fierce dispute between Muhammad Qaddafi and his brother Mutassim over control of a bottling plant the soda maker had opened in 2005, forcing it to shut down the plant for months amid armed confrontations, a diplomatic cable noted.

What’s really startling is Qaddafi’s attempt to shake down foreign corporations to pay for the Lockerbie settlement.

“A chain of marital events” has come to an end: Elizabeth Taylor has died, aged 79. From the end of Mel Gussow’s long and cheerful obituary:

Ms. Taylor was often seen as a caricature of herself, “full of no-nonsense shamelessness,” as Margo Jefferson wrote in The Times in 1998, adding, “Whether it’s about how she ages or what she wears, she has, bless her heart, made the principles of good and bad taste equally meaningless.”

Increasingly, Ms. Taylor divided her time between her charitable works (including various Israeli causes) and commercial enterprises, like a line of perfumes marketed under her name. She helped raise more than $100 million to fight AIDS.

[ snip ]

Married or single, sick or healthy, on screen or off, Ms. Taylor never lost her appetite for experience. Late in life, when she had one of many offers to write her memoirs, she refused, saying with characteristic panache, “Hell no, I’m still living my memoirs.”

Census data indicate that the population of Detroit has fallen by 25% in the past decade, making it the first American city to cross and then retreat from the million mark. While the collapse of Detroit is certain to be regarded by some observers — economists, mostly, we expect — as a benign development, reflecting the free choice of thousands of former residents, we don’t see much that’s creative in the destruction of a major city’s hopes for the future.

The question now is the degree to which the most recent census figures will discourage those who have invested in Detroit and continue to try to make a go of it.

“Obviously it’s going to be a blow,” Mr. Metzger said. “All of us are kind of shocked, but it means we have to work that much harder.”

With more than 20 percent of the lots in the 139-square-mile city vacant, the mayor is in the midst of a program to demolish 10,000 empty residential buildings. But for many, the city already seems hollowed out.

“You can just see the emptiness driving in,” said Joel Dellario, a student at the College for Creative Studies. “I’ve been in and out of this city my whole life, and it’s just really apparent.”

We believe that a lot of things went wrong in Detroit, and that Americans need to know a lot more about what happened there. We pray that the city will find redemption in the hands of astute historians.

You might dismiss what Bryn Mawr undergraduate Jennifer Cook says about Shakespeare as callow, but to deny its pertinence would be foolish. The world is slowly tipping toward those for whom the Internet is more familiar than the contents of any book, and nothing less than a reorganization of knowledge is inevitable. Assistant professor Katherine Rowe’s remark about the rapidly-closing gap between the new fluency and the old is sparkling.

Many teachers and administrators are only beginning to figure out the contours of this emerging field of digital humanities, and how it should be taught. In the classroom, however, digitally savvy undergraduates are not just ready to adapt to the tools but also to explore how new media may alter the very process of reading, interpretation and analysis.

“There’s a very exciting generation gap in the classroom,” said Ms. Rowe, who developed the digital components of her Shakespeare course with a graduate student who now works at Google. “Students are fluent in new media, and the faculty bring sophisticated knowledge of a subject. It’s a gap that won’t last more than a decade. In 10 years these students will be my colleagues, but now it presents unusual learning opportunities.”

As Ms. Cook said, “The Internet is less foreign to me than a Shakespeare play written 500 years ago.”

John Tierney’s report, “Do You Have Free Will? Yes, It’s the Only Choice,” was much more interesting the first time. How can you talk about free will and its opposite number, determinism, without calling in James Gleick on chaos and randomness? Oh, well. We do agree that belief in free will is good for your health; plus, we’re apparently hard-wired for it. We also think that “free will” is a semantic dustball that science inherited from philosophy.

At an abstract level, people seem to be what philosophers call incompatibilists: those who believe free will is incompatible with determinism. If everything that happens is determined by what happened before, it can seem only logical to conclude you can’t be morally responsible for your next action.

But there is also a school of philosophers — in fact, perhaps the majority school — who consider free will compatible with their definition of determinism. These compatibilists believe that we do make choices, even though these choices are determined by previous events and influences. In the words of Arthur Schopenhauer, “Man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.”

Does that sound confusing — or ridiculously illogical? Compatibilism isn’t easy to explain. But it seems to jibe with our gut instinct that Bill is morally responsible even though he’s living in a deterministic universe. Dr. Nichols suggests that his experiment with Mark and Bill shows that in our abstract brains we’re incompatibilists, but in our hearts we’re compatibilists.

“This would help explain the persistence of the philosophical dispute over free will and moral responsibility,” Dr. Nichols writes in Science. “Part of the reason that the problem of free will is so resilient is that each philosophical position has a set of psychological mechanisms rooting for it.”

Some scientists like to dismiss the intuitive belief in free will as an exercise in self-delusion — a simple-minded bit of “confabulation,” as Crick put it. But these supposed experts are deluding themselves if they think the question has been resolved. Free will hasn’t been disproved scientifically or philosophically. The more that researchers investigate free will, the more good reasons there are to believe in it.

We never watched Big Love, and we were always mystified that anyone would want to watch a show about polygamy. Ew! But Ginia Bellafante’s recessional opened our eyes a bit.

Perhaps nothing is less sexy to the prototypical thinking woman who watches HBO than the sort of man he represented, someone blind to his own subversions and immune to ambivalence. During the course of the series many women told me that they had stopped watching “Big Love” after a few episodes because polygamy as a notion was just too distasteful. This might be translated to mean that Bill Henrickson didn’t seem to have the right to all of the sex he was getting — not the way Don Draper, by virtue of his emotional afflictions, has the right on “Mad Men.” Women forgive the demonstratively tortured but never the brutally dull “nice.”

“Big Love” arrived in 2006, the pre-Obama age, and the series was served up as a chewy slab of sirloin for the network’s liberal audience, offering in Henrickson a character bound to infuriate as he seemed to enjoy an Esalen-era sex life without having to concede to the philosophies and politics that might attend it. The series always made “the principle” — the ostensibly religious foundation for the Henricksons’ living arrangement — vague enough to feel entirely suspect if not absurd. Tony Soprano was an appealing avatar of Clintonian compartmentalization and appetite. Henrickson was a distinctly Bush-era counterpart, forever unquestioning and wed to his certainties. His righteousness, merely annoying at first, became increasingly repellant as the series progressed and his hypocrisies mounted.

That he was partially redeemed in the final hour, granting his first wife, Barb, the religious autonomy she craved, seems peripheral to the larger matter of his actual death. In the end the series chose to affirm the idea that families must exist, as much as they can, as democracies. In an epilogue depicting the Henricksons 11 months after Bill’s death, we see the women existing as a kind of contented, collectivist sorority, with the youngest wife, Margene, finally pursuing her dream of medical volunteer work abroad as she guiltlessly leaves her children behind with her sister wives.

Literally speaking, a disgruntled and out-of-work neighbor — a casualty of the recession and his own traditionalism — shot Bill Henrickson. A mainstream Mormon, he explicitly resented Bill’s heresy and implicitly couldn’t stomach his virility. This was a man who couldn’t care for his lawn or even a single wife as Bill simultaneously bed-skipped his way through three marriages. Figuratively, though, it was all of us who pulled the trigger, all of us who could never really give over our sympathies to a man who seemed to get way more than he deserved. The dictator had to go.

More than ten years on, great progress has been made at MIT, where two reports conducted in the late Nineties revealed a number of gender inequality issues among professors. The school has done just about everything that it can do to eliminate disparity. The stubborn remainders are more broadly “societal,” reflecting prejudices that persist even among the most talented Americans. Men are still prepared to make almost any sacrifice for their families other than actually caring for them.

Because it has now become all but the rule that every committee must include a woman, and there are still relatively few women on the faculty, female professors say they are losing up to half of their research time, as well as the outside consultancies that earn their male colleagues a lot of money.

While women on the tenure track 12 years ago feared that having a child would derail their careers, today’s generous policies have made families the norm: the university provides a yearlong pause in the tenure clock, and everyone gets a term-long leave after the arrival of a child. There is day care on campus and subsidies for child care while traveling on business.

Yet now women say they are uneasy with the frequent invitations to appear on campus panels to discuss their work-life balance. In interviews for the study, they expressed frustration that parenthood remained a women’s issue, rather than a family one.

As Professor Sive said, “Men are not expected to discuss how much sleep they get or what they give their kids for breakfast.”

Administrators say some men use family leave to do outside work, instead of to be their children’s primary care giver — creating more professional inequity.

General Motors has announced that it will be closing a light-truck manufacturing plant for want of Japanese parts that the recent catastrophe (time to name earthquakes, guys!) has made unavailable. In retrospect, it seems idiotic to depend exclusively for the supply of any single part on factories located in lively seismic zones.

An average vehicle has about 20,000 parts and depends on thousands of suppliers, and the sudden loss of any one could be enough to stop production, Mr. Hoffecker said.

“It’s a real scramble for everybody,” he said. “It could be a chemical plant that got hurt that supplies material to make plastic that goes into a door panel that goes to someone.”

For parts that are shipped by boat to North America, shortages could take about a month to materialize. But for lightweight, high-value parts like microchips that travel by plane, problems could crop up much faster.

G.M. declined to identify the parts in short supply at Shreveport or their manufacturer. A person with direct knowledge of the situation said just one part was involved and it was also used in other G.M. models built elsewhere in North America. G.M. is diverting parts that would have gone to Shreveport so it can continue building models that are more important or in shorter supply, said this person, who was not authorized to speak publicly about the matter and so spoke anonymously.

When will George Grayson be lead off in chains? Maybe he won’t be — maybe the president of the Thoroughbred Retirement Foundation hasn’t done anything wrong — but one thing’s for sure: there’s more to the story that Joe Drape reports in today’s Times (“Ex-Racehorses Starve as Charity Fails in Mission to Care for Them“). The foundation posted a $1.2 million deficit in 2009, and it has not been making payments to the stables that care for the horses, as a result of which many thoroughbreds are emaciated, and some have died.

“I was being emotionally blackmailed to lower my per diem, and was the subject of retribution because I questioned the care of the horses,” said Mrs. Hurst-Marsh, who is owed $10,000.

When Gayle England, whose farm in Stroud, Okla., is also highly regarded as a special-care facility, complained not only of the chronic slow pay but the general lack of regard for the farms and the horses, 26 T.R.F. horses were taken from her.

Last month, some of the horses in the worst shape were taken from other foundation farms and returned to the Hurst-Marsh farm and Ms. England. In fact, one of the 14 horses moved to England’s farm with the help and funding of the Mellon Estate had to be put down.

“They were making their administrative payroll this whole time, but the horses they were suffering,” Ms. England said. “They need to be held accountable.”

Mr. Terry, a Mellon estate trustee, said he still does not know what went wrong.

The sesquicentennial of Italian unification is coming up. What’s often overlooked is that unification was really more of an eviction: the Austrians were thrown out, and the Pope was put in his place. Italy remains a congeries of distinct regions, each one the center of the world — except for the ambitious ones who leave. Silvio Berlusconi is the perfect symbol of the meaninglessness of “Italy” as anything more than the name of a peninsula.     

In 1911, Italy celebrated the 50th anniversary of unification by inaugurating the hulking Victor Emmanuel Monument in central Rome. (It also invaded Libya, the start of 40 years of bloody colonial rule.) In 1961, for the 100th anniversary, Italy was riding high in an economic boom.

This time around, as the country gears up for fireworks, concerts and special exhibitions — and kicks off a four-day weekend, with public offices and schools closed starting Thursday — the mood is different. Italy is facing economic difficulties, political scandals, brain drain, and once again problems with Libya, its largest supplier of natural gas.

In a fictive letter to the editor in the Turin daily La Stampa on Sunday, the humorist Massimo Gramellini assumed the guise of Italy. “The person writing to you is an old and unpredictable lady who as her birthday approaches feels overcome by a melancholy anxiety,” he wrote.

How we wish the Tea Partiers would get on the bus, instead of trying to wreck it. There’s nothing that this country needs more than popular concern for effective regulation. But when you consider the regulatory baackground (or lack of it) behind last weekend’s casino bus disaster, it’s hard not to share the TP’s cynicism about government.

Federal guidelines limit passenger-bus drivers to 10 hours behind the wheel, within a 15-hour work day, and bus carriers face a fine if violations are discovered. But the hours, recorded in a handwritten logbook, are easily falsified, and even outstanding violations are often ignored: World Wide Travel, the operator whose bus crashed in the Bronx, had been cited several times by regulators for problems with its logs.

At Foxwoods on Monday, a driver for World Wide Travel was preparing for a nap in his bus’s front passenger row. The driver had arranged a blanket and several small pillows atop a knapsack; later, he opened an overhead compartment to reveal a stash of blankets. “You see my bed?” he said with a smile.

[snip]

Federal law is nearly silent on qualifications for the job: for the most part, anyone with a state-issued commercial driver’s license is eligible. Carriers are expected to obtain medical certificates from their drivers and occasionally test for drug and alcohol use; a spokesman for the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, the industry’s regulator, said that the responsibility for administering those tests fell to the business, not the state, and that violators could face fines.

Some skeptics wonder if discount bus companies, which are rarely unionized and have only a few employees, end up with castoffs from more reputable places.

Jeff Gordinier visits Alex Ott, a former bartender from Germany who has gone on to bigger and better-smelling things in the cool-hunting area.

For him, sorcery begins at home. Beneath a mounted surfboard in his apartment is the nook where Mr. Ott, who studied organic chemistry during his younger years at the Braunschweig University of Technology, likes to tinker.

It’s like a dorm-room version of a laboratory, complete with a microscope, a bouquet of pipettes and a spice rack crowded with essential oils “worth about $2 million,” he claimed. He even has a gas mask. “When you work with some oils, they’re very strong,” he said. “They’ll burn your nostrils.”

Mr. Ott’s curiosity about the mood-altering potential of various aromas and ingredients led to an immersion in “Meaningful Scents Around the World,” a dense 2006 book by Roman Kaiser that explores the chemical properties of unusual scents and flavors, from “watermelon snow” algae in the Swiss Alps to pine resin in Italy to Cordyceps sinensis, the prized “caterpillar fungus” of China. “I was hooked,” said Mr. Ott, who became so obsessed with bark extracts and botanicals that he now owns a signed copy of the tome. “It explained everything about volatile molecules, your brain, your olfactory bulb, memories. The juices and herbs and spices that I choose come from the studies that I’ve done.

“There are people who do research and read books, and then there are people who just do cosmopolitans and sling drinks, and they know nothing about these things. They’re more entertainers. Bartenders should never be people who come up with cocktails, because they have no education.”

How quaint, that somebody interesting doesn’t live in Brooklyn.

Jim Dwyer’s column about executive pay at regional hospitals underscores the need to take a fresh look at the idea of the “task force.” Tasked with recommending spending and service cuts throughout the hospital system, which is broadly supported by state and local taxes, a force composed of industry consultants made sure that the seven-figure salaries paid to top executives were kept off the negotiating table.

A proposal to allow public financing for only the first $1 million in wages for an executive died before it even reached the task force. “It was classic how it was killed,” said Judy Wessler, director of the Commission on the Public’s Health System, an advocacy group that had suggested the limits.

“We submitted the proposal in writing, met with the state staff members about it, then testified for our two minutes at a hearing,” Ms. Wessler said. “Then in the written summary of all the 4,000 proposals, they twisted the wording of ours so that it would be impossible to implement. Then they said it was not viable, so it wasn’t even put up for a vote.”

State officials acknowledged that the proposal had been drastically changed from its original meaning, but did not explain how that happened. In an e-mail exchange provided by Ms. Wessler, Jason A. Helgerson, the state’s Medicaid director, apologized “for not having had the time to do all we wish to do.” Mr. Helgerson was not available for an interview on Tuesday, a spokeswoman said.
The subject of executive wages would have been familiar to the task force, many of whose members came from the health care industry. One had worked as a consultant for Mount Sinai Medical Center, which received $250 million in Medicaid and paid its chief executive $2.7 million in 2008. A co-chairman of the task force, Michael Dowling, was paid $2.4 million in 2008 by North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which received about $220 million from Medicaid.

It’s nonsense like this that, sooner or later, brings on the likes of the Tea Party.

We’re having a day of doctoring today, so we can’t be at our desk. But we’d really like to know why the Op-Ed piece by Susan Engel isn’t a news story. It’s the most interesting thing that we’ve read about education in years — despite its unfortunate title, “Let Kids Rule the School.”

The results of their experiment have been transformative. An Independence Project student who had once considered dropping out of school found he couldn’t bear to stop focusing on his current history question but didn’t want to miss out on exploring a new one. When he asked the group if it would be O.K. to pursue both, another student answered, “Yeah, I think that’s what they call learning.”

One student who had failed all of his previous math courses spent three weeks teaching the others about probability. Another said: “I did well before. But I had forgotten what I actually like doing.” They have all returned to the conventional curriculum and are doing well. Two of the seniors are applying to highly selective liberal arts colleges.

The students in the Independent Project are remarkable but not because they are exceptionally motivated or unusually talented. They are remarkable because they demonstrate the kinds of learning and personal growth that are possible when teenagers feel ownership of their high school experience, when they learn things that matter to them and when they learn together. In such a setting, school capitalizes on rather than thwarts the intensity and engagement that teenagers usually reserve for sports, protest or friendship.

Peter Applebome’s column about the projected demolition of Lands End, the Long Island estate that inspired Scott Fitzgerald to dream of the unattainable Daisy Buchanan and her doomed admirer, is almost as poignant as The Great Gatsby itself.  

Perhaps 500 of the grandest mansions have already been knocked down, said Monica Randall, who has chronicled the era and its architectural heritage. So the demolition of Lands End is just one last domino falling from a long-gone era. And yet, the gravitational pull of Gatsby’s world endures, undimmed.

Dan McCall, a professor emeritus at Cornell University, taught the book for 40 years. He marvels at the hold Gatsby still has on students. On the one hand, he said, with its hypnotic prose, its layers of longing for money, status, reinvention and love, it’s still channeling the American experience. “It’s not an antique to them, it’s never gone out of style the way some books I teach.” On the other hand, he said, Gatsby’s evocation of the American dream has an innocence and passion that are impossibly distant, like astral material from a lost galaxy. “Gatsby’s dream, the way he’s so devoted to it, that’s not something you find much in this economy, at this time. I think it’s breathtaking for kids in college. It’s an America they haven’t heard about from their parents.”

Of course, Gatsby’s dream was built on deceit and illusion. The Roaring ‘20s ended in the Great Depression. Fitzgerald burned out and died at 44.

Japan’s quake-damaged nuclear power plants could be taken as warning against future nuclear projects, but we hope that they will instead provide a learning experience for engineers. The catastrophe at Fukushima does not in the slightest alter our available energy options.

Three of the world’s chief sources of large-scale energy production — coal, oil and nuclear power — have all experienced eye-popping accidents in just the past year. The Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion in West Virginia, the Deepwater Horizon blowout and oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico and the unfolding nuclear crisis in Japan have dramatized the dangers of conventional power generation at a time when the world has no workable alternatives able to operate at sufficient scale.

The policy implications for the United States are vexing. “It’s not possible to achieve a climate solution based on existing technology without a significant reliance on nuclear power,” said Jason Grumet, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center in Washington and an energy and climate change adviser to the 2008 Obama campaign. “It’s early to reach many conclusions about what happened in Japan and the relevance of what happened to the United States. But the safety of nuclear power will certainly be high on the list of questions for the next several months.”

“The world is fundamentally a set of relative risks,” Mr. Grumet added, noting the confluence of disasters in coal mining, oil drilling and nuclear plant operations. “The accident certainly has diminished what had been a growing impetus in the environmental community to support nuclear power as part of a broad bargain on energy and climate policy.”

Steven Erlanger outlines what the 17 members of the euro-zone spent the day haggling over. The price of Germany’s further cooperation in restoring financial health to the continent will entail chipping away at sovereign powers — as treaties routinely do, but rarely with such broad domestic impact.

The issue that has gotten the most attention is the German-French Pact for Competitiveness, a name chosen for German ears. The intention was to lay down specific commitments to coordinate euro-zone economies — a common basis for corporate taxes for instance, or a common age for retirement — intended to unify policies across the region while raising tax revenue and reducing spending. Wage indexation was to be banned and high deficits punished.

But when the pact was first broached at the European level last month, there was anger from other leaders, who had not been consulted. While the pact might help in the future, it would do nothing to solve the current problems of Greece, Ireland and Portugal. Nor, critics argue, does it deal with a looming problem for Germany and the euro zone — huge private debt and shaky banks, including some German state banks. Berlin has resisted serious stress tests of its banks.

Still, on Friday, euro-zone leaders are expected to approve a watered-down version of the pact, negotiated by the European Council president, Herman Van Rompuy, that eliminates fixed pension ages and wage indexation and gives states more latitude to reach objectives, with monitoring of compliance left unclear. The main fight is about whether to align corporate tax systems, and if so, how to do so.

What an awful surprise it was, this morning, to turn from the print edition of the Times to its Web site’s headlines. 

Television images showed waves of more than 12 feet roaring inland in Japan. The tsunami drew a line of white fury across the ocean, heading toward the shoreline. Cars and trucks were still moving on highways as the water rushed toward them.

The floodwaters, thick with floating debris shoved inland, pushed aside heavy trucks as if they were toys, in some places carrying blazing buildings toward factories, fields, highways, bridges and homes. The spectacle was all the more remarkable for being carried live on television, even as the waves engulfed flat farmland that offered no resistance.

The force of the waves washed away cars on coastal roads and crashed into buildings along the shore. Television footage showed a tsunami wave bearing down on the Japanese coastline near the community of Sendai.

NHK television transmitted aerial images of columns of flame rising from an oil refinery and flood waters engulfing Sendai airport, where survivors clustered on the roof of the airport building. The runway was partially submerged. The refinery fire sent a plume of thick black smoke from blazing spherical storage tanks. A television commentator called the blaze an “inferno.”

We are grieved.

In our view, it’s a problem of democracy that a man such as Chris Christie can win a powerful public office. What attracts voters to someone so grouchy, impatient and fearful? Does he mirror their own anxieties? If so, why is this an asset? In any case, we doubt that Richard Pérez-Peña’s commendable hounding is going to cramp his style or lower his ratings.

Misstatements have been central to Mr. Christie’s worst public stumbles — about how the state managed to miss out on a $400 million education grant last year, for example, and whether he was in touch enough while he was in Florida during the blizzard in December — and his rare admissions that he was wrong. But Peter J. Woolley, a politics professor and polling director at Fairleigh Dickinson University, said there had been no sign, so far, that these issues had much effect on the governor’s political standing.

“People prefer directness to detail,” Professor Woolley said. “People know it’s not unusual for politicians to take the shortcut in public debate, that they’re not academics who are going to qualify everything.”

Some overstatements have worked their way into the governor’s routine public comments, like a claim that he balanced the budget last year without raising taxes; in truth, he cut deeply into tax credits for the elderly and the poor. But inaccuracies also crop up when he is challenged, and his instinct seems to be to turn it into an attack on someone else instead of giving an answer.