They say that you catch more flies with honey than with threatening rhetoric. Both Iran and South Korea, two of the three “axis of evil” countries Bush named in his 2002 State of the Union address, have expressed unwillingness to talk with Washington because of its hostile policy and confrontational attitude.

After weeks of the Bush administration and its neoconservative cronies hinting at strikes on Iran, an Iranian cabinet secretary has fired back, “We have said that if anyone wants to talk to us in a threatening language, we will adopt the same tone.” Abdollah Ramazanzadeh, who also acts as an Iranian government spokesman, has stated his government’s unwillingness to negotiate with the Americans is in large part due to the continual threats and demeaning manner in which the Bush administration has treated Iran. (Meanwhile, the European Union, which has been actually using the diplomatic approach, is making significant headway with Iran.)

Last year, North Korea put a grinding halt to the seemingly productive six-party talks, citing the United States’ “hostile policy” as the reason, and claiming that the success of the talks will depend on Bush’s foreign policy. Already seven months into a standstill, some diplomats are worried that the deadlock will lead to the failure of the negotiations. And though Bush points to nuclear proliferation as the single most serious threat to national security, the White House has set no deadline for resuming the talks.

This is not a call for coddling dangerous leaders, but there needs to be recognition that “Do it or else” cannot continue to be implemented as a one-size-fits-all policy.

The Congressional Budget Office just released its latest projections on the federal budget. Things aren’t looking good. The CBO projects the federal government will rack up “$855 billion in debt between 2006 and 2015,” and $365 billion this year alone. But that doesn’t even begin to describe the scope of our budget problem. Through a combination of Bush administration trickery and legal technicalities, the CBO numbers don’t include:

1. The $80 billion Bush just requested for Iraq and Afghanistan (including, as Atrios notes, an astounding $1.5 billion for a U.S. embassy in Iraq).

2. Assumes no spending on Iraq or Afghanistan over the next 10 years. This omission reduces the deficit by as much as $1.4 trillion.

3. Bush’s $2 trillion Social Security privatization scheme.

4. $2.5 trillion over ten years to make Bush’s 2001 and 2003 tax cuts permanent, a stated priority.

Here is the really scary part: even with all this chicanery, Bush still doesn’t meet his promise of cutting the actual deficit in half by 2009.

As the finagling over Social Security privatization lingo continues, it would be worthwhile to ask President Bush why he himself has changed his song.

As Dan Froomkin recently pointed out:

“The past several weeks, Bush has been calling Social Security at various times a crisis (see my Jan. 10 column) or a problem (see my Dec. 10 column). And he’s been getting a lot of heat for calling it a crisis.

“Yesterday, I’m guessing everyone got together and agreed: No more crisis! Say problem instead! In his talk, Bush only used the word crisis once, when mocking his critics. Problem, he used 29 times.”

This from a president who last year claimed, “If I tried to fine-tune my messages based upon polls, I think I’d be pretty ineffective. I know I would be disappointed in myself. … And as to whether or not I make decisions based upon polls, I don’t. I just don’t make decisions that way.”

Someone might ask President Bush: Do you no longer believe that Social Security faces a funding crisis? And if not, why have you stopped using the word?

On 9/16/02, White House economic advisor Lawrence Lindsay estimated the Iraq war would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion.

White House Budget Director Mitch Daniels responded quickly, assuring reporters the war would cost between “$50 billion to $60 billion” and that Lindsay’s projection was “very, very high.”

After that, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld relied on Daniels’s estimate.

Yesterday, the Bush administration announced it would ask Congress to approve about $80 billion in extra defense spending this year, most of it for operations in Iraq. That will bump the overall cost of the war above $180 billion.

So, Lindsay was right and Daniels was wrong. Where are they now?

Daniels is the governor of Indiana, thanks in part to President Bush’s energetic campaigning for “my man Mitch.”

Lindsay? He was fired a long time ago.

Many scientists believe stem-cell research could one day be used to treat spinal injuries as well as Alzheimer’s, strokes, brain injuries, Parkinson’s, diabetes and heart defects. They also recently the discovery that the cells “also produce druglike compounds that can help ailing organs repair themselves.” Other advances show the versatile cells can be used as “biological pacemakers” and in fighting blindness. Unfortunately, scientific advances have been stymied by the White House ban on federal funds for the development of new stem-cell lines for new research. Check out the timeline:

August 8, 2001: President Bush, bowing to pressure from the right-wing, announces no federal money will be allowed for the development of new stem cell lines. He promises, however, that “more than 60 genetically diverse stem cell lines already exist…Leading scientists tell me research on these 60 lines has great promise that could lead to breakthrough therapies and cures.”

May 9. 2003: National Institutes of Health Director Elias Zerhouni reports the president was too optimistic and, in fact, only 11 of the cell lines created by August 2001 are available for research.

November 11, 2003: A medical ethics panel formed by Johns Hopkins University finds “treating patients with the embryonic stem cells approved by President Bush for federally funded research would be unethical and risky” because the approved cell lines, “were initially grown on mouse cells. That could expose humans to an animal virus their immune systems couldn’t fight.”

September 20, 2004: President Bush fudges the numbers and ignores recent scientific findings, claiming: “I agreed to allow federal funding to go forward on existing stem cell lines … Out of those 70 lines, some 22 are functional now. And out of that 22 lines, there’s over 300 different projects that are going forward.”

January 24, 2005: A new scientific study finds the existing stem cell lines should be destroyed. “All human embryonic stem cell lines approved for use in federally funded research are contaminated with a foreign molecule from mice that may make them risky for use in medical therapies, according to a study released Sunday.”