The Tax Bill's Final Indignity The tax bill that President Bush triumphantly signed into law on Wednesday is not just unfair, dishonest and economically unsound. It is also cruel to low-income families. In a last-minute revision, Senate and House negotiators dropped a provision that would have extended child tax credits to millions of these families. The stated reason was that the total cost of the bill had to be kept to an agreed-upon limit of $350 billion. This excuse is typical of the shifty argumentation that has accompanied this legislation from the start. Under the new law, which raises the child tax credit to $1,000 from $600, most families with children will receive a $400-per-child check this summer. It was never intended that the wealthiest families � or the very poorest families, making less than the minimum wage � would get the credit. As it turns out, however, millions of families with incomes between $10,500 and $26,625 will not get it either. Blanche Lincoln, an Arkansas Democrat, had insisted that the Senate version of the bill extend the enlarged credit to this particular group of working families, who have nearly 12 million children. The provision would have cost $3.5 billion, or exactly 1 percent of the advertised price of the bill. But because it would have helped push the tab above $350 billion, out it went. Set aside for the moment the fact that the official $350 billion figure is a phony. The real cost of the bill over 10 years will more nearly approximate $800 billion if all the provisions that are scheduled to "sunset" in the next few years are eventually made a permanent part of the tax code, as they almost certainly will be. But even if the cost of the bill were actually $350 billion, there were fairer ways to reach that target than by depriving low-income families of the tiny crumbs the bill gives them.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/30/opinion/30FRI1.html

ABCNEWS.com : Justice Dept. Lifts FBI Database Limits The Justice Department lifted a requirement � that the FBI ensure the accuracy and timeliness of information about criminals and crime victims before adding it to the country's most comprehensive law enforcement database. The system, run by the FBI's National Crime Information Center, includes data about terrorists, fugitives, warrants, people missing, gang members and stolen vehicles, guns or boats. Records are queried increasingly by the nation's law enforcement agencies to help decide whether to monitor, detain or arrest someone. The records are inaccessible to the public, and police have been prosecuted in U.S. courts for misusing the system to find, for example, personal information about girlfriends or former spouses. Officials said the change, which immediately drew criticism from civil-liberties advocates, is necessary to ensure investigators have access to information that can't be confirmed but could take on new significance later, FBI spokesman Paul Bresson said. The change to the 1974 U.S. Privacy Act was disclosed with an announcement published in the Federal Register. The Privacy Act previously required the FBI to ensure information was "accurate, relevant, timely and complete" before it could be added to the system.� Critics urged Congress to review the change, arguing that information in the computer files was especially important because it can affect many aspects of a person's life. "This is information that has always been stigmatizing, the type of data that can prevent someone from getting a job," said Marc Rotenberg of the Washington-based Electronic Privacy Information Center. "When you remove the accuracy obligations, you open the door to the use of unreliable information." Critics have noted complaints for years about wrong information in the computer files that disrupted the lives of innocent citizens, and the FBI has acknowledged problems. In one case, a Phoenix resident was arrested for minor traffic violations that had been quashed weeks earlier; in another, a civilian was misidentified as a Navy deserter. The system "is replete with inaccurate, untimely information, but everybody does their best to keep it up to date," said Beryl Howell, former general counsel to the Senate Judiciary Committee. "That's a goal we shouldn't just throw out." In the change, the Justice Department said earlier restrictions on information "would limit the ability of trained investigators and intelligence analysts to exercise their judgment in reporting on investigations and impede the development of criminal intelligence necessary for effective law enforcement." http://abcnews.go.com/wire/Politics/ap20030324_2121.html

Counterpane: Crypto-Gram: April 15, 2003 National Crime Information Center (NCIC) Database Accuracy Last month the U.S. Justice Department administratively discharged the FBI of its statutory duty to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database. This database is enormous. It contains over 39 million criminal records. It contains information on wanted persons, missing persons, and gang members, as well as information about stolen cars, boats, and other information. Over 80,000 law enforcement agencies have access to this database. On average, there are 2.8 million transactions processed each day. The Privacy Act of 1974 requires the FBI to make reasonable efforts to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the records in this database. Last month, the Justice Department exempted the system from the law's accuracy requirements. This isn't just bad social practice, it's bad security. A database with more errors is much less useful than a database with fewer errors, and an error-filled security database is much more likely to target innocents than it is to let the guilty go free. To see this, let's walk through an example. Assume a simple database -- name and a single code indicating "innocent" or "guilty." When a policeman encounters someone, he looks that person up in the database, and then arrests him if the database says "guilty." Example 1: Assume the database is 100% accurate. If that is the case, there won't be any false arrests because of bad data. It works perfectly. Example 2: Assume a 0.0001% error rate: one error in a million. (An error is defined as a person having an "innocent" code when he is guilty, or a "guilty" code when he is innocent.) Furthermore, assume that one in 10,000 people are guilty. In this case, for every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies it will mistakenly identify one innocent person as guilty (because of an error). And the number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is tiny: one in a million. Example 3: Assume a 1% error rate -- one in a hundred -- and the same one in 10,000 ratio of guilty people. The results are very different. For every 100 guilty people the database correctly identifies, it will mistakenly identify 10,000 innocent people as guilty. The number of guilty people erroneously listed as innocent is larger, but still very small: one in 100. The differences between examples 2 and 3 are striking. In example 2, one person is erroneously arrested for every 100 people correctly arrested. In example 3, one person is correctly arrested for every 100 people erroneously arrested. The increase in error rate makes the database all but useless as a system for figuring out how to arrest. And this is despite the fact that, in both cases, almost no guilty people get away because of a database error. The reason for this phenomenon is that the number of guilty people is a very small percentage of the population. If one in ten people were guilty, then a 0.0001% error rate would mistakenly arrest one innocent for every 100,000 guilty, and a 1% error rate would arrest approximately one innocent for every guilty. And if the number of guilty people is even less than one in ten thousand, then the problem of arresting innocents magnifies even more as the database has more errors. Now this is a simple example, and the NCIC database has far more complex data and tries to make more complex correlations. And I am assuming that the error rate for false positives are the same as the error rate for false negatives, and there aren't any data dependencies that complicate the analysis. But even with these complications, the problems are still the same. Because there are so few terrorists (for example) amongst the general population, a error-filled database is far more likely to identify innocent people as terrorists than it is to catch actual terrorists. This kind of thing is already happening. There are 13 million people on the FBI's terrorist watch list. That's ridiculous, it's simply inconceivable that a number of people equal to 4.5% of the population of the United States are terrorists. There are far more innocents on that list than there are guilty people not on that list. And these innocents are regularly harassed by police trying to do their job. And in any case, any watch list with 13 million people is basically useless. How many resources can anyone afford to spend watching about one-twentieth of the population, anyway? That 13-million-person list feels a whole like CYA on the part of the FBI. Adding someone to the list probably has no cost and, in fact, may be one criterion for how your performance is evaluated at the FBI. Removing someone from the list probably takes considerable courage, since someone is going to have to take the fall when "the warnings were ignored" and "they failed to connect the dots." Best to leave that risky stuff to other people, and to keep innocent people on the list forever.� http://www.counterpane.com/crypto-gram-0304.html#7

Why the Mullahs Love a Revolution The Bush team's vision for a postwar Iraq was founded on the dreams of exiles and defectors, who promised that Iraqis would shower American troops with flowers. Now, with the crowds shouting, "No to America; no to Saddam," and most Iraqis already referring to the American "occupation," the Bush administration seems puzzled. The truth is that the exiles had been in the West so long that they knew little of the reality inside Iraq; the defectors, in search of a haven from the cruel regime, told the eager Americans anything they wanted to hear. Now that these illusions have been shattered, American policy makers might do better to consider the history of the region. In particular, the dogged nationalism of the Iraqis that forced imperial Britain's departure in 1932; and, more recently, the events in 1979 after the downfall of the secular regime of the shah of Iran. A big argument among American officials had been over the future of the secular Baath Party, with the pragmatists advocating a mere "head transplant" of the top leadership while keeping the body intact, and the ideologues proposing outright destruction. Events, however, ignored the debate in Washington, and the Baath disappeared altogether. So too have the military and most of the police. This vacuum is reminiscent of what happened in Iran in February 1979. The 440,000-strong military of the pro-American shah disintegrated quickly, as did the police force and the Savak, the notorious secret police. Into that vacuum stepped the Islamic Revolutionary Komitehs, run by Shiite clerics operating from the local mosques. The Komitehs took over not only law enforcement but also such essential chores as distributing heating oil to households in wintry Tehran. Many groups took part in toppling the shah; but it was the nationwide religious network and the unified actions of the mullahs that enabled them to to become his successor. A similar pattern has emerged in Iraq, particularly in the Shiite-majority south and the Shiite neighborhoods of Baghdad. Over the centuries, as members of a community that was discriminated against and repressed, the Shiites learned to find comfort in religion and piety to a much greater extent than the ruling Sunnis. In recent decades, Shiite clerics devised clandestine networks of communication that even Saddam Hussein's spies failed to infiltrate. Eschewing written messages or telephones, they used personal envoys who spoke in code. In the wake of Iraq's collapse, this messenger system has proved remarkably efficient. The Shiites, however, are not uniform in their outlook. Religious loyalties are divided between Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sestani, an Iranian-born cleric living in Najaf, and the Tehran-based Ayatollah Bakr al-Hakim, leader of Supreme Council for Islamic Revolution in Iraq. Yet they are united in their demand, endorsed by predominantly Shiite Iran, that the Americans leave soon. The supreme council has a 10,000-man army, armed by Iran, and controls many Iraqi towns near the Iranian border. By contrast, the Free Iraqi Forces loyal to Ahmad Chalabi, leader of the American-sponsored Iraqi National Congress, has only about 600 men at arms. The Pentagon made a show of airlifting Mr. Chalabi's men into the April 15 assembly of Iraqi politicians convened by the American pro-consul, retired Lt. Gen. Jay Garner. But the attendance of a mere 80 delegates (the supreme council, previously part of the American-sponsored official Iraqi opposition, boycotted), along with a noisy anti-American protest by 20,000 demonstrators, showed the weakness of Washington's hand.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/23/opinion/23HIRO.html

Roads Not Taken Richard Gephardt's new proposal � to scrap the 2001 tax cut and use the reclaimed revenue to provide health benefits to the uninsured � has been widely dismissed as unrealistic. And in political terms that's probably true. After all, these days it's considered "moderate" to support an irresponsible tax cut that is merely large, as opposed to gigantic. But today I'd like to take a holiday from political realism, and ask a na�ve question: Why shouldn't the American people favor a proposal like Mr. Gephardt's? Never mind the details; why shouldn't the typical citizen, faced with a choice between Bush-style tax cuts and a plan to provide health insurance to most of the uninsured, choose the latter? Of course, originally tax cuts weren't supposed to require sacrificing something else. In the 2000 campaign, and up through the passage of the 2001 tax cut, George Bush insisted that there was plenty of money for everything. But there wasn't � and now, having returned to an era of deficits, we are told that social programs must be shrunk even as taxes are cut further. Why not choose a different road? http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/opinion/25KRUG.html

I.R.S. to Ask Working Poor for Proof on Tax Credits The Internal Revenue Service is planning to ask more than four million of the working poor who now claim a special tax credit to provide the most exhaustive proof of eligibility ever demanded of any class of taxpayers. The I.R.S., trying to prevent errors and cheating, says it needs greater proof of eligibility months before people claim the credit on their tax returns because its efforts to find errors through audits after the fact have not worked. Treasury officials estimate that $6.5 billion to $10 billion is lost to improper payments each year. But some tax experts criticize the higher burden of proof as unfair and a wasteful allocation of scarce I.R.S. enforcement dollars. They say that corporations, business owners, investors and partnerships deprive the government of many times what the working poor ever could � through both illegal means and legal shelters � yet these taxpayers face no demands to prove the validity of their claims in advance with certified records and sworn affidavits. Others warn that the proposed I.R.S. rules will set a standard of proof so high that it will be difficult, and in some cases impossible, for honest taxpayers to meet it. As a result, some people entitled to the tax credit will no longer receive it. And those who do manage to file successful claims will almost certainly have to pay commercial tax preparers more for helping them with the extra paperwork. "There is this double standard," said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a research group in Washington financed mainly by large foundations. "The losses are larger in other areas of the tax code, but somehow a different standard gets applied to this." Instead of conventional welfare benefits, the earned-income tax credit provides an offset for the Social Security taxes low-income workers have already paid, along with a credit based on their earnings that is intended to give them an incentive to work. The credits vary according to income and family size, but no household with earned income above $34,692 is eligible. The average tax credit, paid by the government by check, was $1,976 for households with children in 2001. That is less than the average food stamp benefit for households with children that year, $2,904. But the I.R.S.'s proposed rules would make it much harder to qualify for the tax credit than for food stamps. Republicans and Democrats have both supported expanding the tax credit, but as the cost of the program has risen, many Republicans have been vehement in saying that the program is riddled with errors and fraud. President Bush has praised the tax credit. But his administration has also complained about fraud, and the president has asked Congress for $100 million and 650 new employees to identify potentially erroneous claims before any money is paid out. There is a similar effort with federally subsidized school lunches. Eric Bost, the under secretary of agriculture for food and nutrition, has increased efforts to weed out students who officials say are ineligible for free or subsidized school meals. A Treasury official who insisted on not being identified said it was unfair to judge the size of the overpayment problem on the basis of just one year's tax credit, because the overpayments can continue year after year until each minor child listed on a false claim turns 18. "It's a permanent thing," she said. "The I.R.S. tends to take things that are permanent very seriously, and put a lot of resources into them." She added that screening out false claimants in advance could be characterized as a benefit to the poor, because such taxpayers would no longer have to have their claims audited, or scrounge for a way to pay back the money with interest if their claims are denied. The new measures, which are expected to be published for public comment shortly, are scheduled to begin in July, when the first 45,000 taxpayers who fit into a "high-error category" will be asked to submit proof of their eligibility within six months. The program will accelerate to two million taxpayers in 2004. Eventually some four million "high error" claimants � a fifth of the 19 million who now claim the tax credit � will be required to submit advance proof of their eligibility. The high-error category encompasses all claimants except married taxpayers filing joint returns and single mothers; it includes fathers with sole custody of children, grandparents, aunts, uncles, foster parents and others. They will have to provide papers proving that the relationship with the children claimed is as claimed, and that the children lived with them for at least six months of the year. Only a few types of evidence will be acceptable to the I.R.S., and some are documents that will be difficult or impossible for people to get within the six-month deadline. To prove their relationships to children, for example, they are expected to produce marriage certificates, in some cases for other people's marriages; for marriages that took place abroad; and in a few cases for marriages of great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents. Even American weddings may be hard to document adequately in less than six months. The State of California, for example, warns on its Web site that it may take "up to two to three years" to issue copies of marriage certificates, "due to budgetary constraints." The State of Ohio does not even issue copies of marriage certificates, only "marriage abstracts," which are not certified documents and take six months to obtain in any case. New York State will not issue certificates to people who were married in New York City. New York City will not issue the certificates to anyone but the husband and wife, "or someone with written authorization from them." The I.R.S. plan does not offer any guidelines for the children of couples in common-law marriages. To prove where a child lived, the I.R.S. will require claimants to produce school records, medical records, leases or similar documents that show both the filer's and the child's names and address, and state specifically the range of dates when they lived there together. Filers who have no such documents will be allowed to produce instead a sworn affidavit from a school official, employer, member of the clergy or other person in a quasi-official capacity, specifically stating under penalty of perjury that he or she has "personal knowledge" that the taxpayer and child lived together during the dates cited. An affidavit from a landlord, who may live far away, would be accepted, but not one from a building superintendent who lives on the premises. An I.R.S. briefing paper on the new rules states that in 1999 the Treasury lost $8.5 billion to $9.9 billion by paying earned-income tax credits to filers who should not have received them. A separate analysis, by two Treasury Department specialists, says subsequent measures may have reduced these erroneous payments by $2 billion. By comparison, corporations managed to sidestep as much as $54 billion in 1998, by hiding about $155 billion in profits in tax shelters, according to a study by a Harvard economist, Mihir A. Desai. The I.R.S.'s most recent attempt to measure tax cheating � based on 1988 data and published in 1992 � showed that the biggest tax dodgers by far were people running their own businesses. They cost the Treasury about $38 billion in lost 1992 taxes by failing to report all their income. The same I.R.S. study found that people who wrongly took tax credits of all types � including earned-income tax credits � cost the Treasury less than $6 billion in 1992. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/25/business/25TAX.html?pagewanted=all&position=

A Flashback to the 60's for an Antiwar Protester At the time, Brett A. Bursey says, he seemed to be having a 60's flashback. There he was at the Columbia Metropolitan Airport with his antiwar sign. There were the thousands of Republicans gathering to welcome a president. There were the police officers arresting him for trespassing. The first time this happened was in May 1969, before a visit by Richard M. Nixon. The charges against Mr. Bursey were dropped after the South Carolina Supreme Court ruled that if protesters were on public property � as the antiwar demonstrators were � they could not be charged with trespassing. Last Oct. 24, 33 years later and about 100 yards away, the now graying Mr. Bursey was again arrested for trespassing, this time before a visit by President Bush. The charge was soon dropped. But last month, the local United States attorney, J. Strom Thurmond Jr., brought federal charges against Mr. Bursey under a seldom-used statute that allows the Secret Service to restrict access to areas the president is visiting. He faces six months in jail and a $5,000 fine. This being South Carolina, Mr. Bursey's story includes lots of colorful history, old grudges and improbable plot twists, not to mention the Confederate battle flag. But to some legal experts it is also part of a growing pattern of repression against protesters, demonstrators and dissenters. The American Civil Liberties Union says it has found many examples, like increased arrests and interrogations of protesters and the shunning of celebrities who have opposed the war in Iraq. "When you connect the dots, you see very clearly a climate of chilled dissent and debate," said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the civil liberties group. In particular, Mr. Romero said, there is a growing practice of corralling protesters in "free-speech zones," which are often so far from the object of the protest as to be invisible. "It's an effort to mitigate the effectiveness of free speech," he said. And he does not buy the argument that such zones are necessary to protect the president and other officials. "John Hinckley wasn't carrying an anti-Reagan sign when he shot him," Mr. Romero said. It was just such a "protest zone" that got Mr. Bursey in trouble last fall. A spokeswoman for the airport said officials there had established a protest area on the verge of a highway, a good half mile from the hangar where the president would be speaking. (Airport police are not sure if anyone actually protested at the official zone, she said.) Mr. Bursey hoped he and some friends could protest somewhere closer, maybe across the road from the hangar, he said. The police in Charleston and Greenville had been accommodating, he said, when he had asked to avoid the protest zones, which he described as being "out there behind the coliseum by the Dumpsters." It did not work this time. "We attempted to dialogue for a while, them telling me to go to the free-speech zone, me saying I was in it: the United States of America," Mr. Bursey said. Finally, he said, an airport policeman told him he had to put down his sign ("No War for Oil") or leave. " `You mean, it's the content of my sign?' I asked him," Mr. Bursey said. "He said, `Yes, sir, it's the content of your sign.' " Mr. Bursey kept the sign and was arrested; he said he watched Air Force One land from the back of a patrol wagon and spent the night in the county jail. A Secret Service agent was present at the arrest, Mr. Bursey said, but he added that no one could have seen him and his companions as a security threat. "There was no one under 50 in that crowd," said Mr. Bursey, who is 54. "In my mind, at that time, we didn't pose a security threat; we posed a political threat." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/international/worldspecial2/27PROT.html

Democrats Use Job Chart to Try to Skewer Bush The chart, based on standard government statistics, measures the number of jobs created under every president since Harry S. Truman and ranks President Bush as dead last by a wide margin. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/01/03/national/03MEMO.html

"The new cuts will force more physicians to turn away Medicare patients. That's the reality. Doctors will not have any incentive to accept new Medicare patients. While Medicare reimbursements are going down, our expenses are rising 5 percent to 10 percent a year."

Medicare to Cut Payments to Doctors 4.4% The Bush administration announced today that Medicare payments to doctors would be cut 4.4 percent next year, after a 5.4 percent cut this year. Federal officials predicted that doctors would, as a result, be less willing to accept new Medicare patients. If the cuts are not reversed, Congress and the administration will face the wrath of two politically potent constituencies, elderly voters and doctors who care for the elderly.� http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/21/health/21HEAL.html

In the Name of Security

IN the spring of 2001, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist sounded an alarm. "Technology now permits millions of important and confidential conversations to occur through a vast system of electronic networks," he wrote in a First Amendment case. "These advances, however, raise significant privacy concerns. We are placed in the uncomfortable position of not knowing who might have access to our personal and business e-mails, our medical and financial records, or our cordless and cellular telephone conversations." From the Vietnam and Watergate era until Sept. 11, 2001, legal protection of privacy rights was moving in only one direction, with judges and legislators across the ideological spectrum working hard to create what is in many ways a new legal right. "Before 9/11, the American concern with invasion of privacy was growing," said Rodney A. Smolla, a law professor at the University of Richmond. "The law of privacy was poised to absorb and reflect some of the public concern. It was about to become the new civil right." Sept. 11 changed everything, and last week those changes came into sharper focus, suggesting that any comprehensive rethinking of the right to privacy will have to wait. On Monday, two federal appeals courts endorsed vastly expanded government intrusions into the private affairs of Americans, finding privacy interests less compelling than those of rooting out terrorists and child pornographers. The Pentagon also attracted considerable attention this month for a proposed database of unprecedented scale to help in government antiterrorism efforts. It would collect every sort of information imaginable, including student grades, Internet activity and medical histories. The USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, also altered the balance between privacy and government power in countless ways. Public opposition to greater government surveillance has been muted, even as many people continue to voice concerns about the commercial use of data about themselves. That dichotomy is a little hard to explain, given that intrusion by the government can be life-altering while most businesses can do little more than annoy people with phone calls at dinner time. The answer, it appears, is that many people believe the government will invade only someone else's privacy. Privacy for me, they seem to be saying, but not for thee.� http://www.nytimes.com/2002/11/24/weekinreview/24LIPT.html?pagewanted=all&position=top

MotherJones.com | News

The world that produced George W. Bush did not collapse in 2002, but it trembled and revealed the flawed foundation beneath his -- it can't be called a philosophy, but it amounts to a set of unexamined assumptions about his world. And what is that world, what are those assumptions? Too much ridicule of a fake-populist strain is heaped on Bush's pedigree; being the scion of aristocrats would be the best thing about him if only that tradition hadn't decayed and lost its noblesse oblige. He's neither an individualist in the Hoover grain nor an enlightened patrician like Theodore Roosevelt. What made Bush is crony capitalism: business as an end in itself, not as a way of furthering any larger goals, and conducted on the basis of personal connections, so that what matters is trust between "good men," not good institutions (none of this is changed by the fact that as a businessman, Bush wasn't a very good one). Unlike Hoover, whose opposition to government intervention in the economy was so rigid it cost him his job and his reputation, Bush has nothing in principle against it. In fact, his career in both business and politics has been built on a willingness to blur the distinction between public and private spheres -- not to further public goals, but always for private interest.� http://motherjones.com/commentary/power_plays/2002/45/ma_155_01.html

The Writings of Greg Palast HOW GEORGE W. BUSH STOLE THE ELECTIONhttp://www.gregpalast.com/

The Difficult Balance Between Liberty and Security Even more than last year, the Supreme Court's new term begins in the shadow of Sept. 11, 2001. The terrorist attacks led Congress to pass laws that increase the ability of federal officials to investigate not just terrorists but all Americans. While the Supreme Court may begin to hear challenges to those laws later in its term, which begins tomorrow, it already has on its docket several cases that could reveal how it draws the line between liberty and security. In hearing these cases, the justices will inevitably face one of the most basic and profound questions for any system of justice: how to ensure that the most serious restrictions on liberty are reserved for those who pose the most serious threats to security. Few Americans would disagree with the principle that the punishment should fit the crime. But whether the Constitution requires some degree of proportionality is unclear. Unfortunately, based on the justices' past rulings, it may be a mistake to rely on the Supreme Court to restore some sense of balance. Of the cases the court has already agreed to hear, three involve laws passed after highly publicized crimes in the 1990's: the Oklahoma City bombing and the murders of Polly Klass and Megan Kanka. Like the Sept. 11 attacks, these crimes created widespread fear and unrealistic public demands for security at the expense of liberty. Although the justices have been eager to expand their own power in relation to that of Congress and the president, they have been reluctant to strike down or modify excessively broad laws adopted in haste after especially dramatic or horrific events. In Demore v. Kim, the issue is whether Congress, in responding to terrorism after the Oklahoma City bombing, acted unconstitutionally when it passed a law in 1996 requiring the attorney general to take into custody all noncitizens who commit certain crimes and hold them without bail before deporting them. The law is being challenged by a South Korean citizen who served three years in prison for petty theft and was seized by the Immigration and Naturalization Service the day after his release. In striking down the mandatory detention, a federal appeals court said the plaintiff's treatment was disproportionate to his crime. How the Supreme Court decides this case may give some indication of its view of the U.S.A. Patriot Act, which Congress passed a year ago and which gives the attorney general even broader powers to detain criminal aliens. Two years ago, the Supreme Court narrowly held that the indefinite detention of certain aliens might violate the Constitution, although it made an exception for cases involving terrorism (which it did not define). Yet the court has traditionally given Congress broad discretion over immigration and historically has not insisted upon proportionality between the length of the detention and the seriousness of the crime in cases involving noncitizens. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/06/opinion/06ROSE.html

Drug Makers Cutting Back on Discounts for the Elderly Bristol-Myers Squibb and GlaxoSmithKline said that they had raised the prices they offer in a widely promoted discount program out of concern that federal officials will demand similar deep discounts for the government Medicaid program, which provides health care for the poor. But federal officials expressed surprise at the moves and said that they had not taken any action against the discount plans. At issue is whether the discounts by the two companies � as well as those offered by five other drug companies, all under a program called Together Rx � are subject to a federal law requiring drug makers to offer the Medicaid program the lowest price available to any buyer. For some of the 300,000 low-income people participating in Together Rx, the higher prices will hurt. For example, Bristol-Myers said it had been offering a month's supply of the cholesterol-lowering drug Pravachol for $15 to elderly people with incomes of $18,000 or less. On Tuesday, the company raised the price to $59. Under GlaxoSmithKline's plan, patients will get roughly a 25 percent discount from retail drugstore prices, the company said, rather than 33 percent. For asthma patients, for example, an Advair Diskus will cost $118. Previously, patients paid $106 for that drug. Thomas A. Scully, administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said this week that he was perplexed by the moves to reduce the discounts. "We have had hours of meetings with them trying to make sure we did not impact their discount programs," he said. Mr. Scully said he believed that the two drug companies had decided to raise their prices for a reason unrelated to the government. "Unless I see some solid evidence, I don't believe it is related to Medicaid," he said. At the request of one drug company, Mr. Scully sent a letter to the industry's trade group in June explaining the circumstances in which a discount plan could prompt the government to demand comparable prices. The letter left GlaxoSmithKline executives concerned that their program could force the Medicaid pricing rule to go into effect, said Mary Anne Rhyne, a company spokeswoman. A meeting with federal officials late last month confirmed those concerns, she said, prompting the company to raise its prices to try to avoid enforcement of the law. Extending the discounts to the Medicaid program could cost the drug companies hundreds of millions of dollars. State and federal governments spent $20 billion on prescription drugs last year for the 42 million Medicaid beneficiaries, an increase of more than 12 percent over 2000. A year ago, GlaxoSmithKline became the first company to offer discounts to low-income elderly people who were not poor enough to be covered by the Medicaid program but did not have private insurance to cover their prescription medicines. Under heavy public criticism for high drug prices, other manufacturers followed suit. The seven companies participating in the Together Rx program say that qualifying elderly people receive discounts of 20 percent to 40 percent off the prices they would normally pay at pharmacies. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/05/business/05DRUG.html

Death Toll Rises but Money in Mine Fund Goes Unspent This spring, an 8-year-old boy in western Pennsylvania died when he tumbled down a 60-foot sheer rock embankment, a dangerous vestige of an abandoned coal mine. Dozens of people die at abandoned mines each year in accidents that are supposed to be prevented by a government program intended to clean up such dangerous sites, subsidized by a tax that coal companies have paid since 1977. These tax revenues have collected in a government trust fund that now holds $1.54 billion. But the federal government refuses to spend most of the money, holding it back to help offset the budget deficit, raising continuing complaints from state officials as more people die. The federal government has recorded 78 deaths in abandoned or inactive mines since January 2000, including 26 this year. The numbers are incomplete, and the actual death count is probably higher, the government concedes. "With all these deaths and injuries, I would think that is all the proof you would need to free up this money," said Mike Kastl, director of the abandoned mines program in Oklahoma, where 25 people � 14 children and 11 adults � have died in old mine accidents in recent times. The government taxes coal companies 10 cents to 35 cents a ton for the cleanup fund, and that money is added to the Abandoned Mine Lands Trust Fund, which holds enough money to clean up almost half of the most dangerous abandoned mines nationwide. But this year, like every year since the fund's inception in 1977, the money is caught up in the federal budget battle, though by law it cannot be spent on anything other than mine cleanup projects. "We'd like to use more of the money," said Danny M. Lytton, a senior official in the Interior Department's Office of Surface Mining, which administers the fund. "Most years we aren't able to spend even as much as we collect." This is a result of a peculiar federal budget idiosyncrasy. When the abandoned mine trust fund was authorized, it was designated "on budget," as are most government trust funds. That means the money is held in the government's general treasury pool, although it cannot be spent on anything else. When the Interior Department asks to spend part of the fund, the request must compete with those from every other program in the department. Any increase in spending must be offset by a decrease somewhere else. A result, federal officials acknowledge, is that that the money is held back to help lower the budget deficit. "The fund is being used as a budget balancing tool," complained Gary Conrad, director of the Interstate Mining Compact Commission, a multistate government agency. "As with any appropriation bill," said James H. Zoia, Democratic staff director for the House Natural Resources Committee, "if you doubled the abandoned mine lands budget, you'd have to cut that money from someplace else." The appropriation from the abandoned mine fund is routinely cut, "to try to balance things out," Mr. Zoia said. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/09/26/politics/26MINE.html

Justice Dept. Balks at Effort to Study Antiterror Powers The Justice Department has rebuffed House Judiciary Committee efforts to check up on its use of new antiterrorism powers in the latest confrontation between the Bush administration and Congress over information sought by the legislative branch. Instead of answering committee questions, the Justice Department said in a letter that it would send replies to the House Intelligence Committee, which has not sought the information and does not plan to oversee the workings of the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who is chairman of the panel, and Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, its ranking Democrat, sent Attorney General John Ashcroft a list of 50 questions about the use of the new powers in the act, which the committee worked on before Congress approved it in October. They asked about "roving" surveillance; lists of calls to and from telephone numbers; demands for bookstore, library and newspaper records; and subpoenas under the amended Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act served on Americans or permanent residents. Some simpler questions, about Immigration and Naturalization Service employees the Canadian border, were answered. Mr. Conyers complained that the letter was "yet another shot in this administration's ongoing war against open and accountable government." He said Mr. Ashcroft was telling Congress that "his activities are not to be oversighted." " `Congress, butt out,' " Mr. Conyers said. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/15/politics/15PATR.html

Florida Court Bars Use of Vouchers The judge, P. Kevin Davey of Leon County Circuit Court, struck down a 1999 Florida law that gives money to students from poorly performing public schools to pay tuition at private schools, including ones run by churches. In his decision, Judge Davey wrote that the Florida Constitution was "clear and unambiguous" in prohibiting public money from being used in any sectarian institution. "There is scant room for interpretation or parsing," he wrote. "While this court recognizes and empathizes with the salutary purpose of this legislation � to enhance the educational opportunity of children caught in the snare of substandard schools � such a purpose does not grant this court the authority to abandon the clear mandate of the people as enunciated in the Constitution." Teachers groups and civil rights organizations called the ruling a victory for public schools. "Vouchers violate the Florida Constitution by taking taxpayer dollars from our struggling public schools and diverts them to private and overwhelmingly religious schools," said a statement from Maureen Dinnen, president of the Florida Education Association, which was a plaintiff in the case. About 9,000 students in 10 Florida schools that had received poor performance ratings were eligible this year for the vouchers under the program that was overturned, the Opportunity Scholarship Program, according to the Florida Board of Education. Parents of 659 students had applied for the vouchers for the school year that begins next week. Gov. Jeb Bush, who instituted the program, said the state would appeal. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/06/national/06VOUC.html

Loophole Lets Lobbyists Hide Clients' Identity It is a fact of life on Capitol Hill that new lobbying coalitions sprout almost every day to try to influence everything from electricity policy to bankruptcy law to health care legislation. But the rising popularity of such coalitions goes beyond simply a desire to influence policy. Thanks to a loophole in the federal lobbying law, some companies and individuals � especially those pursuing controversial or potentially embarrassing causes � are using coalitions to conceal their identities. "You can have unpopular causes such as a tobacco interest or one of these corporations that have renounced its American citizenship hide their interests through this device," said Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas. "You can have foreign interests, if they combine with others, hide their involvement through this device." The Congressional Research Service, a part of the Library of Congress, recently examined lobbyist registration forms, Congressional testimony and media databases and found 135 lobbying coalitions for which it could find only limited information or none at all. One such group, the Section 877 Coalition, has been largely dedicated to keeping Congress from tightening the section of the tax law applying to the estates of wealthy individuals who gave up their American citizenship. The coalition paid more than $760,000 to two firms in 2000 and 2001 to press its case, disclosure forms filed with Congress by the coalition's lobbyists show. But the reports give no clue about precisely who wanted to protect expatriates, and some of the group's lobbyists have hardly been forthcoming. "It is our policy not to comment on client matters, except to note that with respect to the registration of these entities, we are in full compliance with the letter and the spirit of the law," said Steven Silber, a spokesman for PricewaterhouseCoopers, which had been one of the lobbying firms for the Section 877 Coalition. This year, the accounting firm sold its federal tax lobbying operation. Only in recent days, after repeated inquiries from a reporter and a request from a former lobbyist who now is an official at the Treasury Department, did lobbyists say that the coalition was made up of trusts for members of the Arison family. In the 1990's, Congressional Democrats used Ted Arison, the founder of Carnival Cruise lines who saved millions in taxes by renouncing his United States citizenship and returning to Israel, as a case study of why the tax law should be rewritten. Mr. Arison was one of the richest men in the world when he died in 1999. A spokesman for the Carnival Corporation, whose chairman is Micky Arison, a son of Ted Arison's, referred questions about why the Arison family trusts had operated through the Section 877 Coalition to one of the lobbying firms, Alcalde & Fay. At the firm, Hector Alcalde said he had listed the client as the Section 877 Coalition for "simplicity's sake," because PricewaterhouseCoopers had already done so. "There's no hidden agenda," Mr. Alcalde said http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/05/politics/05LOBB.html

In Capitol, Last Names Link Some Leaders and Lobbyists With a pierced tongue, a goatee and previous employment as the owner of a record store and label called Seven Dead Arson, the young man is not a typical buttoned-down Washington lobbyist. But Joshua Hastert, 27, does have something increasingly common in lobbying circles � family ties to a Congressional leader. Mr. Hastert is the eldest son of J. Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House. Chester T. Lott Jr., the son of the Senate Republican leader, Trent Lott, is a registered lobbyist. Linda Daschle, the wife of the Senate majority leader, Tom Daschle, is a senior public policy adviser at one of Washington's premier lobbying firms, serving aviation interests. Numerous relatives of Congressional and administration officials are employed in lobbying shops around Washington, as they have been for years. Some ethics watchdogs say such arrangements are potentially troublesome, and the fact that relatives of three of the four top members of Congress work as lobbyists illustrates how pervasive and accepted the practice has become. Others say the lobbyists have every right to pursue their line of work as long as they observe ethics rules and keep their professional distance from their powerful relatives. Mr. Hastert and Mrs. Daschle, 47, say that their well-known last names can hurt as well as help, and that they are entitled to pursue their chosen livelihood, especially in a city where so much employment is government-related. "Why should a spouse, just because she is married to a high-profile public official, have to walk away from a career?" asked Mrs. Daschle. No rules prohibit lobbying by relatives, and any effort to regulate it raises free speech concerns. But it has always made ethics groups a little uneasy. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/04/national/04LOBB.html

Again, Election Confusion for the Florida Secretary of State Here they go again. Florida elections officials and political candidates are confused about another election. And once again, the controversy involves Katherine Harris, who is leaving her post as Florida secretary of state to run for Congress. She did not follow state elections procedures regarding her candidacy and, after realizing the oversight, was forced today to do a bit of damage control. Florida's "resign to run" law requires that elected officials seeking another office submit a letter on the day of qualifying for the upcoming race stating when they intend to resign. If they do not, their resignation becomes effective immediately. Ms. Harris, whose office enforces state elections law, said she did not realize that the law applied to her because secretary of state becomes an appointed position next year.

For Homeland Security Bill, a Brakeman The government's summer urgency to fend off terrorists by reorganizing security agencies seemed to melt away today when Robert C. Byrd walked onto the Senate floor in his seersucker suit and let loose a thundering demand to slow things down. The stripes on his jacket appeared to be trembling as much from indignation as from the infirmities of his 84 years as the senator held out his palm, and the power of parliamentary rules, before the onrushing bulldozer of the proposed Homeland Security Department. "Have we all completely taken leave of our senses?" he said, his tremulous drawl mocking the high-speed world flying by outside his timeless chamber. "The president is shouting, `Pass the bill, pass the bill!' The administration's cabinet secretaries are urging the adoption of the president's proposal without any changes." But that is not the way of the Senate, he argued. "If ever there was a time for the Senate to throw a bucket of cold water on an overheated legislative process that is spinning out of control," he said, "it is now. Now!" It might have been just another of the eight-term West Virginia Democrat's legendary diatribes against executive excess, except for the Senate rules that give a single member enormous power for tossing water buckets. All but single-handedly, Mr. Byrd has slowed the Homeland Security juggernaut by implicitly threatening a filibuster, almost certainly forcing the Senate to postpone debate until after the August recess. Tom Daschle, the majority leader, predicted on Friday, when the House passed its version of the legislation, that given the time needed to cut off Senate debate, a vote would be pushed back to September. That would threaten Congress's self-imposed memorial deadline of Sept. 11 for creating the department, and it did not sit well today with Trent Lott, the minority leader, who said the delay was a "huge mistake" that could be dangerous to the country. "What if we leave town," Mr. Lott said in an interview, "and in August we have some terrorist attack, some disaster, that maybe could have been prevented if we had a way to move people and money and get a focus in an appropriate way? I just think that's unacceptable. This really to me is emergency legislation." Although Mr. Lott's accusation carried with it a potent political threat, Mr. Byrd's plea for deliberation seemed to win some adherents today, particularly because the delay now seems inevitable. Mr. Daschle, eager for his party not to be portrayed as obstructionist, said a little cogitation might not be a bad idea. "This is the single biggest reorganization of the federal government in my lifetime," he told reporters, "and for us to take it up and to pass it in a couple of days asks a lot of our judgment and of our ability to deliberate on something of this import. Senator Byrd and others are suggesting that they may support in the end the proposal, but they want more care, more attention, more careful consideration given to a proposal of this magnitude. And frankly, I don't think that's too much to ask." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/31/politics/31SECU.html

KFF State Health Facts Online Kaiser Family Foundation's State Health Facts Online. This new resource contains the latest state-level data on demographics, health, and health policy, including health coverage, access, financing, and state legislation. http://www.statehealthfacts.kff.org/cgi-bin/healthfacts.cgi?

Red Flags New Fears and Lingering Doubts. The public has faced more bad news about the economy in the past year than it has since the recession of the early 1990s, and public opinion on the economy has become more negative as a result. Only a third of the public says the economy is in good shape, and seven in 10 say they�re concerned about July�s dramatic drop in the stock market. Yet some level of public doubt and dissatisfaction with the economy is normal, even during prosperous times. In the late 1990s, when most Americans were optimistic about both their personal outlook and the overall economy, people still were critical in some specific areas. Many Americans admitted having trouble saving money and keeping up with the cost of living, while large majorities said the gap between rich and poor is widening. http://www.publicagenda.org/issues/red_flags.cfm?issue_type=economy

Clinton Says Republicans Blocked His Audit Reforms "Arthur Levitt, my Securities and Exchange commissioner, tried to stop the Enron accounting issues � using the same accounting company being consultant and accountant � and the Republicans stopped it." Later, Mr. Clinton added that Republicans had fought Mr. Levitt's effort, "and Harvey Pitt was the leader trying to stop us from ending those kind of abuses. That is a matter of record." Mr. Pitt, who was a securities lawyer before being appointed by President Bush to head the S.E.C., counted accounting firms, including Arthur Andersen, among his clients. When asked if he agreed with senators and representatives who have called for Mr. Pitt's resignation, Mr. Clinton demurred. "I don't have to make those decisions anymore," he said. Mr. Clinton also said he had been overridden by Republicans when he vetoed a securities-industry bill he said would have "basically cut off investors from being able to sue if they were getting the shaft." And he recalled that his Treasury secretary, Lawrence H. Summers, had tried to crack down on the use of offshore accounts to conceal corporate financial information, but that Senator Phil Gramm of Texas "and other Republicans stopped that." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/25/business/25CLIN.html

Revised View of 2nd Amendment Is Cited as Defense in Gun Cases �criminal defendants around the nation have asked federal courts to dismiss gun charges against them based on the Justice Department's recently revised position on the scope of the Second Amendment. The new position, that the Constitution broadly protects the rights of individuals to own guns, replaced the view, endorsed by the great majority of courts, that the amendment protects a collective right of the states to maintain militias. While the challenges have been rejected by trial court judges, based largely on appeals court precedent, supporters and opponents of broad antigun laws say the arguments have forced the Justice Department to take contradictory stances. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/23/national/23GUNS.html

Brookings Study Calls Homeland Security Plans Too Ambitious Adding to a growing list of Congressional concerns about domestic security, a study released today warns that the president's plan for a new Department of Homeland Security is too ambitious and could create more problems than it solves. The report by the Brookings Institution recommends a pared-down department concentrating on border and transportation security, intelligence and threat analysis, and protecting the country's infrastructure. In a letter to the White House, Representatives Henry A. Waxman of California and David R. Obey of Wisconsin, both Democrats, wrote this week that the president's new department would have far-flung responsibilities like administering the National Flood Insurance Program, cleaning up oil spills at sea and eradicating the boll weevil. That, the lawmakers said, could dilute the department's mission to fight terrorism and "risks bloating the size of the bureaucracy." For similar reasons, the eight Brookings scholars and former government officials argued in their study today that the Federal Emergency Management Agency should remain separate from the new department. "Fortunately, terrorist attacks are rare, but you can count on national disasters every year � right now there are floods in Texas, fires in Arizona � so why should the Department of Homeland Security be pulled away from its mission and worry constantly about those disasters?" asked James M. Lindsay, an author of the study, "Assessing the Department of Homeland Security." The study also recommended that Congress delay deciding whether to include scientific and technological research on chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear countermeasures against terrorist attacks. "The proposal put on the table is too big; it needs to focus on just those functions directly related to homeland security like the Coast Guard, customs, intelligence analysis and protecting public and private infrastructure that doesn't really exist today," said Ivo H. Daalder, another author of the study and a former member of the National Security Council. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/14/politics/14HOME.html

Congress Looks at How Justice Uses New Power After passing the antiterrorism bill in record time in the fall, the House and Senate Judiciary Committees are making an unusually prompt and thorough, if sometimes unsuccessful, effort to determine how the Justice Department is using its new powers. This week, the House panel agreed to let the department have a few more days to finish answering 50 questions, some with as many as seven parts, that it submitted on June 13. Representatives F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., the Wisconsin Republican who leads the panel, and John Conyers Jr. of Michigan, its senior Democrat, asked about the law section by section, questioning how new authority like sharing grand jury information, easier search warrants, greater ability to deny entry to the United States and other features had been used and to what effect. The Senate committee, which has shorter lists of questions that await replies, had planned to question Attorney General John Ashcroft on Thursday. But Mr. Ashcroft canceled his appearance, which would have been his first before the committee since Nov. 25. The cancellation prompted Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the chairman, to send what the senator's spokesman called a stern letter of complaint. Senator Charles E. Grassley, the Iowa Republican who is probably the Senate's most devoted advocate of vigorous oversight, complained that the department's answers were not very satisfying. He characterized the response as stonewalling and said that considering all the additional power voted, "there is less reason for us to tolerate this stonewalling." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/14/politics/14PATR.html

Suffer the Children Millions of American children are facing such serious issues as substandard housing and homelessness, inadequate and crumbling schools, and restricted access to health care, even as the money that might help alleviate some of these ills is being squandered on tax cuts that are scandalously huge � and growing! An analysis of the Bush tax cut released jointly by Citizens for Tax Justice and the Children's Defense Fund found that while the wealthiest Americans "have already received a hefty down payment on their Bush tax cuts � averaging just under $12,000 each this year � 80 percent of their windfall is scheduled to come from tax changes that won't take effect until after this year, mostly from items that phase in after 2005." For the vast majority of Americans, three-quarters of the Bush tax cuts � averaging about $350 this year � are already in place, the study said. From 2001 through 2010, "the richest Americans � the best-off 1 percent � are slated to receive tax cuts totaling almost half a trillion dollars. The $477 billion in tax breaks the Bush administration has targeted to this elite group will average $342,000 each over the decade." The clincher: "By 2010, when (and if) the Bush tax reductions are fully in place, an astonishing 52 percent of the total tax cuts will go to the richest 1 percent, whose average 2010 income will be $1.5 million." Kids don't stand a chance in that environment. Marion Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund, put the matter well: "The Bush administration's words say, `Leave no child behind.' The Bush administration's deeds say, `Leave no millionaire behind.' " http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/11/opinion/11HERB.html

When When Patriotism Wasn't Religious �"God" does not appear in the Constitution of the United States, a document that erects if not quite a wall, at least a fence between church and state. "In God We Trust" began to appear on American coins in the 19th century, but in the early 20th century President Theodore Roosevelt, having asked the sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to design new coinage, was relieved to find no statute mandating "In God We Trust" on coins. "As the custom, altho without legal warrant, had grown up," T. R. wrote to a clergyman distressed over the prospect of godless coins, "I might have felt at liberty to keep the inscription had I approved of its being on the coinage. But as I did not approve of it, I did not direct that it should again be put on." T. R. expressed his "very firm conviction that to put such a motto on coins . . . not only does no good but does positive harm." His objection to "In God We Trust" was not constitutional; it was aesthetic. He felt that the motto cheapened and trivialized the trust in God it was intended to promote. "In all my life I have never heard any human being speak reverently of this motto on the coins or show any sign of its having appealed to any high emotion in him," he wrote. Indeed, he added, "the existence of this motto on the coins was a constant source of jest and ridicule." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/opinion/07SCHL.html

Succeeding in Business �George W. Bush is scheduled to give a speech intended to put him in front of the growing national outrage over corporate malfeasance. He will sternly lecture Wall Street executives about ethics and will doubtless portray himself as a believer in old-fashioned business probity. Yet this pose is surreal, given the way top officials like Secretary of the Army Thomas White, Dick Cheney and Mr. Bush himself acquired their wealth. As Joshua Green says in The Washington Monthly, in a must-read article written just before the administration suddenly became such an exponent of corporate ethics: "The `new tone' that George W. Bush brought to Washington isn't one of integrity, but of permissiveness. . . . In this administration, enriching oneself while one's business goes bust isn't necessarily frowned upon." Unfortunately, the administration has so far gotten the press to focus on the least important question about Mr. Bush's business dealings: his failure to obey the law by promptly reporting his insider stock sales. It's true that Mr. Bush's story about that failure has suddenly changed, from "the dog ate my homework" to "my lawyer ate my homework � four times." But the administration hopes that a narrow focus on the reporting lapses will divert attention from the larger point: Mr. Bush profited personally from aggressive accounting identical to the recent scams that have shocked the nation. In 1986, one would have had to consider Mr. Bush a failed businessman. He had run through millions of dollars of other people's money, with nothing to show for it but a company losing money and heavily burdened with debt. But he was rescued from failure when Harken Energy bought his company at an astonishingly high price. There is no question that Harken was basically paying for Mr. Bush's connections. Despite these connections, Harken did badly. But for a time it concealed its failure � sustaining its stock price, as it turned out, just long enough for Mr. Bush to sell most of his stake at a large profit � with an accounting trick identical to one of the main ploys used by Enron a decade later. (Yes, Arthur Andersen was the accountant.) � http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/opinion/07KRUG.html

The Competing Visions of the Role of the Court For Justice Scalia, constitutional principles are fixed, not evolving � "The Constitution that I interpret and apply is not living, but dead," he declared at a conference earlier this year � and Congress needs to be held to the words it wrote, not to interpretations written by committee aides or judges. "Our first responsibility is to not to make sense of the law � our first responsibility is to follow the text of the law," he said from the bench. In his view, the Supreme Court's job is to give lower court judges not factors to weigh, but rules to apply. �Justice Breyer presented an integrated theory of the role he sees for the court in society and for himself as a justice. Delivering New York University Law School's James Madison Lecture last October, he said three principles should guide the court's decision-making. First was the purpose (as opposed to text) of the constitutional provision or law under review. Second was the likely consequence of a decision, which he contrasted to "a more `legalistic' approach that places too much weight upon language, history, tradition and precedent alone." Without mentioning Justice Scalia by name, he said the "literalist" approach leads to a result "no less subjective but which is far less transparent than a decision that directly addresses consequences in constitutional terms." Third, Justice Breyer said, the court should bear in mind the Constitution's overall objective, that of fostering "participatory democratic self-government." The court should be wary, he said, about preempting a "national conversation" in which new legal understanding "bubbles up from below." JUSTICE BREYER'S lecture did more than clarify his own approach. It meant that Justice Scalia was no longer the solitary voice framing the debate on the role of the court. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/07/weekinreview/07GREE.html

Study Faults U.S. Regulators in Aftermath of Power Crisis More than a year after California endured power shortages and soaring energy prices, the nation's energy regulators are still not up to the task of protecting consumers and ensuring that electricity is sold at reasonable rates, a Congressional study to be made public on Tuesday has concluded. The study by the General Accounting Office, an investigative arm of Congress, says the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission is hobbled by antiquated procedures, legislation and perhaps a mind-set more suited to the old days when energy producers were regulated monopolies. "FERC has not yet adequately revised its regulatory and oversight approach to respond to the transition to competitive energy markets," the report states. While the energy agency recognizes that it must "fundamentally change how it does business," it has been unable to transform itself, partly because of leadership changes and high staff turnover created by higher salaries in private business, the report said. Moreover, the study found, the agency "lacks adequate enforcement `bite' to deter anticompetitive behavior or other violations of market rules" because it is simply unable to impose meaningful civil penalties. Without stronger enforcement power, the report says, the agency will not be able to deter anticompetitive behavior or outright violations of market rules. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/business/18FERC.html

G.O.P. Is Moving to Slow Action on Tax Loophole Republican leaders in Congress are using procedural tactics like walking out of committee hearings to keep Congress from voting on measures to close the so-called Bermuda loophole in the federal tax code, measures that would almost certainly pass overwhelmingly if given the chance. The loophole allows big companies to pretend legally that they are based offshore (Bermuda has been the country of choice) and then filter profits through a third country (most often Barbados), avoiding American income taxes. The administration and the Republican leaders have said the loophole should be closed but have emphasized that flawed tax laws are forcing companies to make the Bermuda move. Representative Lloyd Doggett, Democrat of Texas, will try to change the law again today with a measure that would forbid companies to use the loophole unless their shares actually trade on an exchange in the tax haven country or most of their stock is owned by people living there. The proposal would close the loophole for companies like Tyco International, nominally a conglomerate based in Bermuda but which manages its operations from Exeter, N.H. There would be no effect on legitimate multinational corporations, like DaimlerChrysler, that have not used a haven to avoid American taxes. "It seems eminently fair to require that people in your own country be the ones to benefit from the tax treaty," Mr. Doggett said. "We did not negotiate these treaties so that American companies could stop paying taxes on profits earned in the United States, but to benefit commerce between our country and the tax treaty countries." "We cannot let these fair-weather friends choose when to wrap themselves in the flag and when, renouncing the flag, they will wrap themselves in a tax treaty," Mr. Doggett said. "Enjoying the rights means sharing the responsibility." The determination of Republicans to not allow a vote on closing the Bermuda loophole has been seen in both the Senate and House in recent weeks. Republicans left a Senate Finance Committee meeting last Thursday, ending the meeting for lack of a quorum, shortly before a vote on a bill by Max Baucus, Democrat of Montana, and Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the two senior members of the committee, to close the loophole for new companies. Aides to both senators said that they were confident that the bill would pass by a wide margin if brought up for a vote on the Senate floor. The committee is to take up the bill again tomorrow. Three weeks ago, Republican leaders in the House cut off a vote on making permanent partial relief from the so-called marriage penalty to avoid allowing Democrats to bring up an amendment closing the Bermuda deals. The marriage penalty occurs when a working married couple pays more in taxes than if they lived together without being married. The Bermuda deals, according to the Treasury, reveal deep flaws in the system for taxing multinational companies. The administration has warned that a quick remedy, like the moratoriums proposed in the House or the denial of tax benefits in the bill by Mr. Baucus and Mr. Grassley, might make American multinational corporations vulnerable to takeovers by foreign companies or could damage their global competitiveness. Still, were a bill creating a moratorium on the Bermuda deals to come up for a vote in the House while a study was under way, it would easily win 300 votes, far more than needed for passage, said Representatives Jim McCrery, a Republican from Louisiana, who is on the House Ways and Means Committee. Mr. McCrery said that he favored a comprehensive review of the tax regime for international companies. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/18/business/18TAX.html

White House Gets 24 Hours to Turn Over Enron Papers White House officials were given 24 more hours today to turn over information about their contacts with Enron, as the administration and Democrats on the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee debated how thousands of pages of documents covered by subpoenas would be handled by investigators on the panel. Even so, both Democratic and Republican staff members from the panel began reviewing the documents this afternoon in the Eisenhower executive office building. In another development today, Texas utility regulators recommended fining Enron $7.1 million because they say that the company manipulated the state's wholesale power market last August. The White House counsel, Alberto R. Gonzales, said officials had already gathered 1,745 pages of documents detailing the White House's Enron-related contacts that were subpoenaed two weeks ago by the governmental affairs panel, which is led by Senator Joseph I. Lieberman, Democrat of Connecticut. Other documents are still being gathered by the White House, Mr. Gonzales said. The White House, which faced a deadline of noon today to hand over the materials to the committee, received a one-day extension after the committee's ranking Republican, Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, asked Mr. Lieberman for the delay. But the White House agreed that committee staff members could begin reviewing the materials immediately. The committee voted along party lines on May 22 to issue two subpoenas to the White House, seeking all information about communications between Enron and the White House since 1992 that in any way dealt with eight federal agencies, including the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission and the Securities and Exchange Commission. In addition, the subpoenas seek information about contacts between White House officials and officials at the eight agencies regarding Enron. They also seek contacts between Enron and the White House over the formulation of the national energy policy. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/06/04/business/04ENRO.html

Halliburton and Inquiry by the S.E.C. Whether the S.E.C. inquiry will reach Mr. Cheney, who as chief executive had final responsibility for Halliburton's books, is unclear. In a memo in 2000 to his colleagues at Arthur Andersen, which was Halliburton's auditor, the partner who managed the Halliburton account boasted of his close relationship with Mr. Cheney. The partner, Terry Hatchett, said the relationship was so close that Mr. Hatchett had remained lead partner on the Halliburton account even after he moved from Dallas to Tokyo to oversee Andersen's Asian operations. In addition, while he was an executive at Halliburton, Mr. Cheney appeared in a marketing video extolling Andersen's services. Current and former executives at Halliburton have described Mr. Cheney as a hands-off executive who left daily management to David Lesar, a former Andersen partner who at the time was Mr. Cheney's second-in-command. Mr. Foshee said last week that he could not imagine that Mr. Cheney had specifically approved the 1998 change, though he said he was certain that it was approved by Mr. Lesar, who became chief executive in 2000. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/30/business/30HALL.html?todaysheadlines

The True Purpose of Welfare Reform How have Americans been doing under the 1996 law? Federal welfare money is given to states as a block grant, so each state is different. Nonetheless, the broad story of families who left welfare has two major variants. One story is of the women who found jobs � the great majority of welfare payments go to single mothers � and the other is about those who are worse off. The latter are a remarkably large group; on any given day, something like 40 percent of former welfare recipients, or well over a million women, have no job, an indication of the 1996 law's failure as policy. The women who found work are the basis for the claim that the 1996 law is a huge success, but even there, one has to ask whether their families have escaped from poverty and what will happen to them if the current recession lasts. The 1996 law got some women to look for work who might otherwise not have done so, and it got the numbers down by pushing people off the welfare rolls or not letting them on. But the big post-1996 fact was the increase in the number of jobs � many areas had unemployment rates below 3 percent. Employment of never-married mothers shot up, although that did not necessarily mean they escaped from poverty. (Today they make an average of just under $8 an hour working about 35 hours a week, which would add up to around $14,000 annually.) The earned-income tax credit helped a lot, adding about $4,000 to the income of a minimum-wage worker with two children. But averages are deceiving. If your job was, for example, a 20-hour position as a school crossing guard for $107 a week, or if you kept cycling in and out of jobs, you and your children were still threatened with homelessness and hunger. The main lesson of the 1996 law is that having a job and earning a livable income are two different things. The Bush administration and its Congressional allies chose to ignore this fact and instead are going the get-tough route. Perhaps hoping to create a wedge issue by making the Democrats appear soft on the work issue, they looked at the fewer than two million parents still on welfare (down from nearly five million in the early 90's) and said, in effect: "These loafers are still on the rolls. We have to get after them." They proposed even tougher work requirements that had nothing to do with actually helping people find a job. Sad to say, they were abetted by a few Senate Democrats, led by Senators Evan Bayh and Thomas Carper, who have made a similar proposal the centerpiece of their own bill. Who are the two million adults still on the rolls? Many are there temporarily while they look for work and need no push to do anything. The remainder are the hard cases � the ones who have less education, less work experience and more personal problems. Rigid requirements are the exact opposite of the individualized approach they need. The House bill would effectively require states to spend large amounts of precious welfare funds on make-work jobs programs. (Such programs were not adopted by a single state on a statewide basis, as was possible under the 1996 law � probably because workfare is expensive and does not prepare people to find real jobs.) The pittance added for child care by the House is laughable � $2 billion over five years. If the Bush work proposals become law, states will be able to comply only by dismantling child care and other supports now in place. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/29/opinion/29EDEL.html?todaysheadlines

Florida Counties Seek to Avoid Suit Over Election But the Florida action has Democrats and civil rights groups accusing the Bush administration of dodging the most egregious charges of discrimination in the 2000 presidential race. Those critics also say that Duval County is conspicuously absent. Duval County, in and around Jacksonville, had among the highest numbers of complaints after the election, including charges county elections officials purged voters wrongly accused of being felons. Civil rights groups are also asking why the Justice Department did not address politically charged complaints from predominantly black districts in Florida, like those from thousands of voters that they were unjustly turned away from their precincts for not having multiple forms of identification. Several groups also denounced the Justice Department's failure to file suits against Florida state agencies. The department's actions do not address, for example, charges that the office of the secretary of state, Katherine Harris, wrongfully purged thousands of blacks from voter rolls. Figures from a report by the United States Commission on Civil Rights, examining possible improprieties in the election, estimated that at least 8,000 voters were incorrectly cited as having criminal records, resulting in their being barred from voting. The purging, civil rights advocates claimed, disproportionately affected black voters. Critics said they agreed with the Justice Department that language assistance to voters who have difficulties speaking English is a high priority in election reform. A lawsuit by a coalition of liberal civil rights groups, including the People for the American Way Foundation, the N.A.A.C.P. and the American Civil Liberties Union, also accused multiple counties in Florida of failing to provide bilingual voter information and translation services at the polls. But these critics said that the language issue is the easiest for the Bush administration to use to make political gains among immigrants. "They are actively courting Hispanics, and they are also trying to make inroads in the Haitian community," said Bob Poe, chairman of the Florida Democratic Party. "But the failure to address the disenfranchisement of African-Americans makes their whole case a sham." The Justice Department refused to comment, either on its cases or the charges from its critics, saying it would be "inappropriate to discuss matters further while the department is in presuit negotiations." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/25/politics/25CIVI.html?todaysheadlines

Rights Panel Plans Fight The United States Commission on Civil Rights announced today that it planned to ask the Supreme Court to overturn a court decision seating a Bush administration appointee on the panel. In a letter to the Justice Department, the commission's chairwoman, Mary Frances Berry, said that the commission would not try to block seating the appointee, Peter N. Kirsanow, while its application to the Supreme Court was pending and that Mr. Kirsanow would be recognized as a commissioner at the meeting scheduled for Friday. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/14/politics/14RIGH.html?todaysheadlines

Many on Medicaid Lack Drugs, Study Says The study was based on a survey of 39,000 adults, including nearly 1,800 on Medicaid. By most measures, it said, Medicaid recipients and people with private insurance have similar access to medical care. But, it said, prescription drugs appear to be an exception; some Medicaid recipients have almost as much difficulty as the uninsured in obtaining medications. Twenty-six percent of Medicaid beneficiaries ages 18 to 64 reported that they could not afford to get all their prescriptions filled in the last year, the report said. That was just slightly less than the 29 percent of uninsured people who reported similar difficulty. By contrast, 8 percent of people with employer-sponsored health coverage and 8 percent of elderly people with Medicare said costs prevented them from obtaining medicines. (Medicare generally does not cover prescription drugs outside the hospital, but about two-thirds of Medicare beneficiaries have drug coverage from other sources.) Len M. Nichols, vice president of the Center for Studying Health System Change, said, "The findings are surprising because Medicaid is expected to ensure access to affordable care for the poorest and sickest Americans." http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/health/09DRUG.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Many on Medicaid Lack Drugs, Study Says States have become so aggressive in trying to control Medicaid spending on prescription drugs that many Medicaid recipients do not get all the drugs prescribed for them, researchers said today. Although Medicaid covers prescription medicines in every state, one-fourth of patients enrolled in the program reported that they could not afford to fill some of their prescriptions in the last year, the researchers said. In an environment of rapidly rising drug prices, they said, states' cost-control efforts were the leading factor. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/09/health/09DRUG.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Affluent Avoid Scrutiny on Taxes Even as I.R.S. Warns of Cheating The government looks for tax cheating by wage earners far more carefully than it looks for cheating by people whose money comes from their own businesses, investments, partnerships and trusts. This is true despite many warnings by federal tax officials that cheating is becoming far more common among affluent Americans. Even as Congress finances a crackdown on tax cheating by the working poor, it is appropriating little money to detect abuses by people, usually among the wealthiest Americans, who do not rely entirely on wages for their income. Executives at the Internal Revenue Service have mentioned this discrepancy in several reports to Congress. They have not focused attention on how little they can do about it. But an examination by The New York Times of I.R.S. statistics including audit rates and staff deployment figures, as well as interviews with current and former I.R.S. officials, shows that the agency can identify at best only a tiny percentage of the cheats and pursue even fewer of them. That the I.R.S. audits the working poor more frequently than wealthy people is well known. What has not been discussed is that the agency does not track nonwage income as closely as wage income � and in some cases does not verify it at all, even as the I.R.S. says that cheating on nonwage income is rising. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/04/07/business/07TAX.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Energy Industry's Recommendations to Bush Became National Policy In one example cited by the natural resources council, the American Petroleum Institute, a trade group that represents the country's largest oil companies, submitted a proposed draft executive order on energy policy to the Energy Department on March 20, 2001. Two months later, Mr. Bush signed an executive order that the council's lawyers said was nearly identical in structure and language to the trade group's proposal. The executive order concerned government regulations that affect energy supply and distribution. "Big energy companies all but held the pencil for the White House task force as government officials wrote a plan calling for billions of dollars in corporate subsidies, and the wholesale elimination of key health and environmental safeguards," John H. Adams, the president of the council, said at a news conference today. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/28/politics/28ENER.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Lockbox or Not, Social Security's Ills Grow Democrats are casting this year's budget fight in Congress as a test of which party can do more to wean the government off of using excess Social Security revenue to pay for general programs. As one way of making their point, Democrats are preparing to assail the administration for having to request an increase in the legal limit on the national debt, a step they say proves that the tax cut last year was fiscally irresponsible. In the wake of the Enron (news/quote) collapse � and looking for an issue to carry into the Congressional elections this fall � Democrats are trying to focus attention again on the push by Mr. Bush and many conservatives to let workers invest a portion of their Social Security taxes in the stock market. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/24/business/yourmoney/24VIEW.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Doctors Shunning Patients With Medicare Medicare cut payments to doctors by 5.4 percent this year. The government estimates that under current law, the fees paid for each medical service will be reduced in each of the next three years, for a total decrease of 17 percent from 2002 to 2005. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/17/health/policy/17HEAL.html

Oil Industry Hesitates Over Moving Into Arctic Refuge Publicly, the biggest multinational petroleum companies, like Exxon Mobil (news/quote), Royal Dutch/Shell, BP and ChevronTexaco, back the Bush administration's assertion that developing the oil in the Arctic refuge is critical to the American economy. But privately, many large companies say the prospect, solely on business terms, is not terribly attractive. "Big oil companies go where there are substantial fields and where they can produce oil economically," said Ronald W. Chappell, a spokesman for BP Alaska, which officially supports opening the area to drilling. Using the acronym for the refuge, he continued, "Does ANWR have that? Who knows?" http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/10/business/10ALAS.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Top G.O.P. Donors in Energy Industry Met Cheney Panel Critics of the Bush administration's energy policy have long suspected that many of the corporations that were invited to advise the White House were large energy concerns that had contributed heavily to President Bush's campaign and the Republican Party in 2000. The White House has refused to release the names of the companies and individuals consulted during the formulation of the administration's energy policy last spring. It has been sued for the information. But interviews and task force correspondence demonstrate an apparent correlation between large campaign contributions and access to Mr. Cheney's task force. Of the top 25 energy industry donors to the Republican Party before the November 2000 election, 18 corporations sent executives or representatives to meet with Mr. Cheney, the task force chairman, or members of the task force and its staff. The companies include the Enron Corporation (news/quote), the Southern Company, the Exelon Corporation (news/quote), BP, the TXU Corporation (news/quote), FirstEnergy (news/quote) and Anadarko Petroleum (news/quote). http://www.nytimes.com/2002/03/01/business/01ENER.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

Stuffing the Pillowcase With Soft Money With companies like AT&T, SBC Communications and Philip Morris leading the way, corporations provided the bulk of the $11,450,673 raised by 24 soft-money political committees run by Congressional leaders, including Speaker J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois and Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the majority leader, in the 12 months that ended June 30, according to Public Citizen, a group founded by Ralph Nader. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/26/politics/26DONA.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow Fuzzy math Alert reader John Hart sends this link. Apparently the Pentagon--that model of fiscal responsibility which has, of late, taken to tossing hundred dollar bills out of planes over the skies of southern Afghanistan, and to whom taxpayers will be giving an additional $48 billion this year--has misplaced 2.3 trillion dollars, which amounts to $8,000 for every man, woman and child in this country. Twenty years ago, Department of Defense Analyst Franklin C. Spinney made headlines exposing what he calls the "accounting games." He's still there, and although he does not speak for the Pentagon, he believes the problem has gotten worse. http://thismodernworld.com/

Web Site Helped Change Farm Policy It is www.ewg.org, operated by the Environmental Working Group, a small nonprofit organization with the simple idea that the taxpayers who underwrite $20 billion a year in farm subsidies have the right to know who gets the money. Conceived by Ken Cook, 50, director of the group, the Web site has become unusual in the crowded world of special-interest politics, where it is hard to get noticed in Washington, much less heard. It not only caught the attention of lawmakers, it also helped transform the farm bill into a question about equity and whether the country's wealthiest farmers should be paid to grow commodity crops while many smaller family farms receive nothing and are going out of business. In farm circles, where neighbors now know who is receiving the biggest checks from the government, the Web site has name recognition roughly equal to that of Heinz ketchup. Web Site Helped Change Farm Policy