Debt and Kryptonite

When the only way to go is up, it’s easy to make things look rosier than they are. But two things about pink: It’s still a derivative of red, whether we’re talking blood or red ink. On Tuesday, and in a ceremony fit for the USS Abraham Lincoln, President Bush declared victory against the deficit. My Tuesday column shows why that "victory" has so much in common with Bush's rolling "victory" in Iraq: Bush's Deficit Fog in full...

Frequent CN contributor and pop culture columnist Rick de Yampert takes on Superman's erectile shyness in Krypton and Nothingness...

And in other reads, Candide Recommends:

• The Wall Street Journal's Peter Waldman reports on the FBI's favored tactic of corralling Muslim informants: use their Green Card to blackmail them and threaten deportation if they don't join up. As one FBI agent told Yassine Ouassif, the Moroccan subject of the story, "America is just like a bus, and you have a choice to make: Either you board the bus, or you leave." Emma Lazarus, R.I.P. The whole story here…
• Zidane's self-implosion is still the story of the planet, the circling hurricane that won't abate. Leave it to Bernard-Henri Lévy, also in today's Journal, to tell us what led this man, "a man more admired than the Pope, the Dalai Lama and Nelson Mandela put together," to implode: It isn't the insults. "No. The truth is that it is perhaps not so easy to stay in the skin of an icon, demigod, hero, legend." The essay here...