It looks optimistic mainly because people think of zero as the threshold. In fact, job creation must keep up with population growth in order to prevent the labor market from deteriorating.

Job Creation Math: The Three-Card Monte of Economics: "What does an increase in jobs really mean? John W. Snow, the Treasury secretary, raised the issue last week by saying that he expected the economy to add 200,000 jobs a month for the next year. With almost three million jobs having been lost since early 2001, the comment had an air of bold optimism to it and caused a bit of a stir on Wall Street." We are surprised," a senior economist at Goldman Sachs wrote to clients, "that Snow would choose to hand the Democratic presidential candidates this optimistic prediction." But it looks optimistic mainly because people think of zero as the threshold. In fact, job creation must keep up with population growth in order to prevent the labor market from deteriorating. These days, the economy must add from 150,000 to 200,000 jobs every month to keep the unemployment rate from rising, economists say. In 1997, the economy added 250,000 jobs a month, and the unemployment rate fell substantially. But in 1995, 180,000 new jobs were created each month, and the jobless rate ticked up slightly. Shortly after a downturn ends, people who had dropped out of the labor force during the slump � no longer working or looking for work � begin their job search again. This swells the ranks of the officially unemployed and makes a monthly gain of 200,000 look even smaller. "It's entirely possible that you'll see an uptick in the unemployment rate even with" a monthly increase of more than 150,000, said Richard Berner, the chief United States economist at Morgan Stanley. So without changing his meaning, Mr. Snow instead could have said, "We're not going to have enough job growth over the next year to bring down the jobless rate very much, if at all." Given that the Bush administration last year predicted a monthly job gain of about 300,000 for 2004, Mr. Snow could even have added, truthfully, "This estimate of job growth is about 50 percent lower than the last one the administration made." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/26/weekinreview/26LEON.html

Reconstruction: Bush Got $500,000 From Companies That Got Contracts, Study Finds: "The overwhelming majority of government contracts for billions of dollars of reconstruction work in Iraq and Afghanistan went to companies run by executives who were heavy political contributors to both political parties. Though the employees contributed to both parties, their giving favored Republicans by a two-to-one margin. And they gave more money to Mr. Bush than any other politician in the last 12 years." Among the biggest contributions to Mr. Bush's election and re-election efforts were those from executives and employees of Dell Computer at $113,000; of Bearing Point, a business consulting firm, at $119,000; of General Electric at $72,000 and of Halliburton Inc. at $28,000, according to the report. Nine of the 10 biggest contractors � the biggest of which were Bechtel Corporation and Halliburton, either employed former senior government officials or had close ties to government agencies and to Congress. Prepared by the Center for Public Integrity, a nonprofit research group, the report said the contractors' executives and employees had contributed $49 million to political candidates and parties since 1990. The new report is the first comprehensive independent study of companies involved in Iraqi reconstruction, and it provides evidence that the process for handing out big contracts has often been secretive, chaotic and favorable to companies with good political contacts. The report is the result of a six-month investigation, which included obtaining information on 70 contracts through the Freedom of Information Act.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/politics/31CONT.html

Critical Study Minus Criticism of Justice Dept.: "An internal report that harshly criticized the Justice Department's diversity efforts was edited so heavily when it was posted on the department's Web site two weeks ago that half of its 186 pages, including the summary, were blacked out. The deleted passages, electronically recovered by a self-described 'information archaeologist' in Tucson, portrayed the department's record on diversity as seriously flawed, specifically in the hiring, promotion and retention of minority lawyers." The unedited report, completed in June 2002 by the consulting firm KPMG, found that minority employees at the department, which is responsible for enforcing the country's civil rights laws, perceive their own workplace as biased and unfair. "The department does face significant diversity issues," the report said. "Whites and minorities as well as men and women perceive differences in many aspects of the work climate. For example, minorities are significantly more likely than whites to cite stereotyping, harassment and racial tension as characteristics of the work climate. Many of these differences are also present between men and women, although to a lesser extent." Another deleted part said efforts to promote diversity "will take extraordinarily strong leadership" from the attorney general's office and other Justice Department offices. Even complimentary conclusions were deleted, like one that said "attorneys across demographic groups believe that the Department is a good place to work" and another that said "private industry cites DOJ as a trend-setter for diversity." Beyond that, a recommendation that the department should "increase public visibility of diversity issues," was kept out of the public report. The edited version gave a much narrower view of the department's diversity problems.� "The Justice Department has sought to hide from the public statistically significant findings of discrimination against minorities within its ranks," said David J. Shaffer, a lawyer who has represented agents from federal agencies in class-action discrimination lawsuits. "These cases challenge the same type of discriminatory practices found to exist at the Justice Department." After the unedited document began circulating in computer circles, and articles began appearing earlier this month in publications like Computer World and newspapers like Newsday, the Justice Department pulled the edited report from its Web site, later posting a different version thought to be more resistant to electronic manipulation. The complaints about the Justice Department come as it has shifted many resources to fighting terrorism and critics have said it has allowed the enforcement of civil rights to languish and failed to aggressively pursue some accusations of discrimination in housing, the workplace and other critical areas. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said the department's handling of the report called into question its commitment to diversity in its own workplace. At a Senate hearing this week, Mr. Kennedy told James B. Comey, nominated by President Bush to succeed Larry Thompson as deputy attorney general, that the episode "gives the distinct impression that the department commissioned the report, then left it on the shelf, ignoring the recommendations." By the time the department posted the theoretically more secure version of the report on its Web site, it was too late. Russ Kick, a writer and editor in Tucson, who operates a Web site, thememoryhole.org, had had already electronically stripped the edited version of the black lines that hid the full text. Mr. Kick then posted the unedited version of the report on his Web site, where it has been copied more than 32,000 times, a near record for the site. Justice Department officials said it was unlikely that any action would be taken against Mr. Kick.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/national/31JUST.html

Intelligence: Senate Panel Sends New Letter to Rice Demanding Papers on Iraq Arms Friday: "The Senate Intelligence Committee, in a letter to Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, demanded Thursday that the White House 'must lift' its objections and hand over to the panel documents related to intelligence about Iraq and its illicit weapons before the war. The panel set a deadline of noon Friday for compliance by the White House, the same as it has set for the Central Intelligence Agency, the State Department and the Pentagon to provide documents and schedule interviews that the committee has been seeking for months." The committee � headed by Senators Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas, and Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia � is trying to determine how the Bush administration reached its conclusions about Iraq's suspected stocks of chemical and biological weapons and its nuclear program. Among the documents sought by the committee, Congressional officials said, are copies of President Bush's Daily Brief, a document prepared by the C.I.A. that the White House has until now maintained was off limits to Congress because of executive privilege. The Congressional officials said the documents also included memorandums between the C.I.A. and the White House discussing disputed claims that Iraq was seeking to obtain enriched uranium from Niger for its nuclear weapons program.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/31/politics/31PANE.html

Report Links Iraq Deals to Bush Donations: "Companies awarded $8 billion in contracts to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan have been major campaign donors to President Bush, and their executives have had important political and military connections, according to a study released Thursday." The study of more than 70 U.S. companies and individual contractors turned up more than $500,000 in donations to the president's 2000 campaign, more than they gave collectively to any other politician over the past dozen years. The report was released by the Center for Public Integrity, a Washington-based research organization that produces investigative articles on special interests and ethics in government. Its staff includes journalists and researchers. The Center concluded that most of the 10 largest contracts went to companies that employed former high-ranking government officials, or executives with close ties to members of Congress and even the agencies awarding their contracts. Major contracts for Iraq and Afghanistan were awarded by the Bush administration without competitive bids, because agencies said competition would have taken too much time to meet urgent needs in both countries. ``No single agency supervised the contracting process for the government,'' Center executive director Charles Lewis said. ``This situation alone shows how susceptible the contracting system is to waste, fraud and cronyism.'' J. Edward Fox, an assistant administrator at the U.S. Agency for International Development, took issue with Lewis' statement and aspects of the report. ``It would ... be incorrect to suggest that there is no overall oversight of this process,'' he wrote the Center. ``The USAID inspector general's review of all Iraq contracts which was requested by USAID Administrator Andrew S. Natsios on April 14th has shown that all Iraq contracts to date have been done in compliance'' with federal regulations. The top contract recipient was the Halliburton subsidiary KBR, with more than $2.3 billion awarded to support the U.S. military and restore Iraq's oil industry. Halliburton was headed by Vice President Dick Cheney before he resigned to run with Bush in 2000.� http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Iraq-Contracts.html

In a blistering review of President Bush's national security policy, Gen. Wesley K. Clark said on Tuesday that the administration could not "walk away from its responsibilities for 9/11." "You can't blame something like this on lower-level intelligence officers, however badly they communicated in memos with each other," said the retired general, the latest entrant in the Democratic presidential field. "It goes back to what our great president Harry Truman said with the sign on his desk: `The buck stops here.' And it sure is clear to me that when it comes to our nation's national security, the buck rests with the commander in chief, right on George W. Bush's desk." "And," he added, "we've got to say again and again and again, until the American people understand: strong rhetoric in the aftermath is no substitute for wise leadership." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/10/29/politics/campaigns/29CLAR.html

In his now legendary interview last month with Brit Hume of Fox News, George W. Bush explained that he doesn't get his news from the news media � not even Fox. "The best way to get the news is from objective sources," the president said, laying down his utopian curriculum for Journalism 101. "And the most objective sources I have are people on my staff who tell me what's happening in the world." Those sources? Condoleezza Rice and Andrew Card. Mr. Hume, helpfully dispensing with the "We Report" half of his network's slogan, did not ask the obvious follow-up question: What about us poor benighted souls who don't have these crack newscasters at our beck and call? But the answer came soon enough anyway. The White House made Condoleezza Rice's Newshour available to all Americans by dispatching her to Oprah. "No camera crews have ever been granted this much access to this national security adviser," Oprah told her audience as she greeted her guest. A major scoop was not far behind. Is there anything you can tell us about the president that would surprise us? Oprah asked. Yes, Ms. Rice said, Mr. Bush is a very fast eater. "If you're not careful," she continued, "he'll be on dessert and you're still eating the salad." And that's the way it was, Oct. 17, 2003. This is objective journalism as this administration likes it, all right � news you can't use.�