Bush supporters' aftermath thread

In the meantime, 500 layoffs with more to come - good news indeed.

But as said, another continent ...

Newspaper circulation is in decline.

The root problems go back to the late 1940s, when the percentage of Americans reading newspapers began to drop. But for years the U.S. population was growing so much that circulation kept rising and then, after 1970, remained stable.

That changed in 1990 when circulation began to decline in absolute numbers.

And the problem now appears to be more than fewer people developing the newspaper habit. People who used to read every day now read less often. Some people who used to read a newspaper have stopped altogether.




Today, just more than half of Americans (54 percent) read a newspaper during the week, somewhat more (62 percent) on Sundays, and the number is continuing to drop.1

Overall, some 55 million newspapers are sold each day, 59 million on Sunday.

At the same time, the number of newspapers in the country has been on a steady decline for even longer, dropping nearly 1 percent a year for now two decades to 1,457 in 2002.2

Where are readers going? It is impossible to say fully. Some people may be getting news online, some perhaps from cable television. Some may be opting out of traditional news sources. Others may be sharing copies of a paper among multiple readers. Many people now read newspapers only occasionally, a couple days a week, but no longer everyday. Much of the loss came from people no longer reading afternoon papers. Whatever it is, these people are not paying everyday for the journalism produced by newspapers, even if they are reading it in other outlets such as online.

Some newspaper companies are now de-emphasizing paid circulation and pushing total readership as more meaningful. Readership helps capture multiple readers in a single household or people reading a copy in public settings like a coffee shop or waiting room. And readership studies can provide advertisers with more detailed information about who reads, what they read and how much time they spend with a newspaper. But the emphasis on readership is also a sign that the circulation story is not a good one.

No kidding. Albuquerque has two daily papers - The Tribune and The Journal. Some years ago, the Journal was pretty leftwing oriented and the Trib was the more balanced of the two. Little by little, the Trib gained more and more readership and got bigger--the Journal lost market share and got smaller.

DAVID BROOKS: Yes, he [Bush] is in deep trial. The National Review Magazine on the right said President Bush has never been in so much trouble with the conservatives in the history of his life. So yes. Let alone with the rest of the country. The exhaustion, the disillusionment, the worry about the cost, it's just still building.

JIM LEHRER: Let's talk about the cost. You say the conservatives are upset. How upset are they and what are they going to do about it?

DAVID BROOKS: They are upset for a lot of reasons. Some of it is Katrina - anger just with reaction. A lot of it is that. Again Katrina is always the end of a long accumulation of events and for conservatives on spending, you have got a highway bill which was ridiculous, a travesty of pork barrel spending; you had an Ag bill; you had really five years in which George Bush has spent money at a faster clip than Lyndon Johnson.

JIM LEHRER: Say that again.

DAVID BROOKS: Domestic discretionary spending - non-defense spending - non-homeland security spending -- has increased.

JIM LEHRER: Non-Social Security, none all of those things -

DAVID BROOKS: -- has increased under George W. Bush twice as fast as under Bill Clinton, and faster than under Lyndon Baines Johnson. Conservatives didn't expect that in 2000. I guarantee you that. A lot of it is, frankly, the Republican Congress's fault. If you look back - when we look back on this period, we are going to look at a Congress that came preaching limited government but just has gone hog-wild in spending, and a president who never disciplined members of his own party to restrain themselves.

So there's just a lot of built-up anger and symbolically I think for a lot of conservatives there has to be what they call offsets, which are budget cuts to compensate for the cost -

JIM LEHRER: Of Katrina, of Rita --

DAVID BROOKS: And what we were about to say.

JIM LEHRER: Or Iraq or whatever.

DAVID BROOKS: Right.

JIM LEHRER: What's your view of this, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I have seen this movie before, Jim. The first 200 years of the United States, seven wars, Louisiana Purchase, expansion of the continent, the Great Depression; we ran up a total indebtedness of 1 trillion dollars.

In 12 years from 1980 to 1992, under Republican presidents promising to eliminate waste, fraud and abuse, which is the term I heard again this week, we saw that national debt quadruple. It became an issue in the '92 campaign on balanced budgets raised by Ross Perot and the consequence was that Bill Clinton, Democratic president, working with the Republican Congress left George Bush with a budget surplus.

JIM LEHRER: This George Bush.

MARK SHIELDS: This George Bush. In the four and a half years he's been there, the national debt has gone from $5.7 trillion to $7.9 trillion. That has to be paid off.

The question is: What are we going to do about Katrina? We are going to do exactly what we have done all the way through. We are going to say tax cuts are the holy grail of Republicans. We can never tamper with those because my goodness gracious that's what we are all about as a party.

And the Democrats will say that's what you ought to do. Tax cuts this year alone -- George Bush's tax cuts -- $225 billion. That's what they total. Okay.

For the next five years it's going to average $255 billion. This just isn't coming in. But it is being spent, being spent in Iraq, being spent in Katrina. And I just think if you look at it in anyway realistically, they are going to borrow it and they're going to pass it on to our grandchildren.

Right now 46 percent of the national debt is owed. It is owed and held by China and other foreign interests.

I don't think such is very astonishing: both are owned by the very same owner, namely The E.W. Scripps Company.

# of anti-war demonstrators in DC.... 100,000

# of pro-war demonstrators next day.... 400




http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/national/AP-War-Rally.html