Some good news: key Republican Senators are defying President Bush on SCHIP. From CQ (sorry, subscription only): The chief Republican architects of a deal to expand a children's health insurance program are defending the proposal against criticism by President Bush, who has threatened to "resist" it. This week, members of the Senate Finance Committee tentatively agreed on a renewal and expansion of the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP), which covers about 6 million children from families that are low-income but not poor enough to qualify for Medicaid.

When Hall-of-Famer Mickey Mantle clouted the ball out of the park, the home run was called a "tape-measure shot." But no one ever actually took out a tape measure to quantify Mantle's clout. This appropriations season -- for the first time ever, thanks to earmarks disclosure -- the clout of members of Congress can be measured in dollars, down to the nearest million or so. Let's have a look at the Commerce-Justice-Science (C-J-S) bill, approved by the Senate Appropriations Committee on June 28 by a 28-1 vote, and see how the home run derby contestants measure up.

The evidence keeps piling up that the budget deficits aren't increasing interest rates and aren't harming the economy. But deficits aren't just an economic problem- they're a moral problem, says economist Andrew Samwick: Suppose for the sake of argument that deficits don't put much upward pressure on interest rates. Even in that case, they still have to be financed at the existing interest rate, and the burden of financing them has to be borne by someone in the future. Taxing someone in 2020 to pay for our spending binge in 2003 violates my notions of fairness, and that is a substantially more salient issue here than any additional concerns about efficiency. Hold on there- that's a bit too simple.

Kravis Argues Against Interest ... Carried Interest The lead business article in today's New York Times, Henry R. Kravis, the billionaire founder of the corporate buyout movement, put the lie to Wall Street's claims that taxing fund managers' fee income as ordinary income will shrink returns for America's pensioners. Rep. Sander Levin (D-MI) -- author of a bill to end the so-called "carried interest" tax loophole -- and his staff met in late June. The Times reports that at the meeting, a Levin aide