Op-Ed Columnist: The Politics of Self-Pity: "Republicans relished their philosophy of personal responsibility last week with John Belushi's famous mantra: Cheeseburgercheeseburgercheeseburger. When the House passed the 'cheeseburger bill' to bar people from suing fast food joints for making them obese, Republican backers of the legislation scolded Americans, saying the fault lies not in their fries, but in themselves. 'Look in the mirror, because you're the one to blame,' said F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, home of brats and beer bellies." So it comes as something of a disappointment that the leader of the Republican Party, the man who epitomizes the conservative ideal, is playing the victim. President Bush has made the theme of his re-election campaign a whiny "not my fault." His ads, pilloried for the crass use of the images of a flag-draped body carried from ground zero and an Arab-looking everyman with the message, "We can fight against terrorists," actually have a more fundamental problem. They try to push off blame for anything that's gone wrong during Mr. Bush's tenure on bigger forces, supposedly beyond his control. One ad cites "an economy in recession. A stock market in decline. A dot-com boom gone bust. Then a day of tragedy. A test for all Americans." Mr. Bush's subtext is clear: If it weren't for all these awful things that happened, most of them hangovers from the Clinton era, I definitely could have fulfilled all my promises. I'm still great, but none of my programs worked because, well, stuff happens." It's as if his inner fat boy is complaining that a classic triple cheeseburger from Wendy's (940 calories and 56 grams of fat, 25 of them saturated, and 2,140 milligrams of sodium) jumped out of its wrapper and forced its way down his unwilling throat, topped off by a pushy Frosty (540 calories and 13 grams of fat, 8 of them saturated).… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/opinion/14DOWD.html

Democrats Demand Inquiry Into Charge by Medicare Officer: "Democrats called Saturday for an investigation of charges that the Bush administration threatened to fire a top Medicare official if he gave data to Congress showing the high costs of hotly contested Medicare legislation. The official, Richard S. Foster, chief actuary of the Medicare program, said he had been formally told not to provide the information to Congress. Moreover, he said, he was told that 'the consequences of insubordination would be very severe.'" Senior officials at the Medicare agency made it clear that "they would try and fire me" for responding directly to inquiries from Congress, Mr. Foster said in an interview on Saturday. Mr. Foster said he had received that message from Thomas A. Scully, who was then administrator of the Medicare program. Mr. Scully denies threatening Mr. Foster but confirms having told him to withhold certain information from Congress.… The Senate and the House approved different Medicare bills on June 27, after being assured that the cost would not exceed $400 billion over 10 years, the amount proposed by President Bush. Just two weeks earlier, Mr. Foster estimated that the drug benefits in a bill very similar to the Senate measure would cost $551.5 billion. Mr. Foster said he prepared "dozens and dozens of analyses and estimates" of the cost of the legislation last year. "All our estimates showed that the cost of the drug benefit, through 2013, would be in the range of $500 billion to $600 billion," he said. The cost estimates were all provided to Mr. Scully, and some were also sent to the White House, the Office of Management and Budget and top officials at the Department of Health and Human Services, Mr. Foster said. For example, he said, "some cost estimates were sent directly to Doug Badger," the White House official who coordinates health policy for the administration. Mr. Duffy confirmed that the White House had received the actuary's cost estimates for parts of the bill. But he said the administration had relied on the Congressional Budget Office as "the primary authority" on the overall cost. "For many years," Mr. Foster said, "my office has provided technical assistance to the administration and Congress on a nonpartisan basis. "But in June 2003, the Medicare administrator, Tom Scully, decided to restrict the practice of our responding directly to Congressional requests and ordered us to provide responses to him so he could decide what to do with them. There was a pattern of withholding information for what I perceived to be political purposes, which I thought was inappropriate." Mr. Foster, 55, was an actuary at the Social Security Administration from 1973 to 1995, when he became chief Medicare actuary.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/politics/14MEDI.html?pagewanted=all&position=

U.S. Set to Ease Some Provisions of School Law: "Education Secretary Rod Paige says the Bush administration is working to soften the impact of important provisions of its centerpiece school improvement law that local educators and state lawmakers have attacked as arbitrary and unfair. Tomorrow, the Education Department will announce policies relaxing a requirement that says teachers must have a degree or otherwise certify themselves in every subject they teach, Dr. Paige said in an interview on Friday. Officials are also preparing to offer new flexibility on regulations governing required participation rates on standardized tests, he said." Those changes would follow the recent relaxation of regulations governing the testing of special education students and those who speak limited English. They appear devised to defuse an outcry against the law, known as No Child Left Behind, in thousands of local districts, especially in Western states where powerful Republican lawmakers have called the law unworkable for tiny rural schools. Legislatures in Utah, Virginia and a dozen other states, many controlled by Republicans, are up in arms about what they see as the law's intrusion on states' rights. They have approved resolutions in recent weeks protesting or challenging the law.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/14/education/14CHIL.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-Ed Columnist: No More Excuses on Jobs: "It's true that there are two employment surveys, which have been diverging lately. The establishment survey, which asks businesses how many workers they employ, says that 2.4 million jobs have vanished in the last three years. The household survey, which asks individuals whether they have jobs, says that employment has actually risen by 450,000. The administration's supporters, understandably, prefer the second number." But the experts disagree. According to Alan Greenspan: "I wish I could say the household survey were the more accurate. Everything we've looked at suggests that it's the payroll data which are the series which you have to follow." You may have heard that the establishment survey doesn't count jobs created by new businesses; not so. The bureau knows what it's doing — conservative commentators are raising objections only because they don't like the facts. And even the less reliable household survey paints a bleak picture of an economy in which jobs have lagged far behind population growth. The fraction of adults who say they are employed fell steeply between early 2001 and the summer of 2003, and has stagnated since then. But wait — hasn't the unemployment rate fallen since last summer? Yes, but that's entirely the result of people dropping out of the labor force. Even if you're out of work, you're not counted as unemployed unless you're actively looking for a job. We don't know why so many people have stopped looking for jobs, but it probably has something to do with the fact that jobs are so hard to find: 40 percent of the unemployed have been out of work more than 15 weeks, a 20-year record. In any case, the administration should feel grateful that so many people have dropped out. As the Economic Policy Institute points out, if they hadn't dropped out, the official unemployment rate would be an eye-popping 7.4 percent, not a politically spinnable 5.6 percent. In short, things aren't as bad as they seem; they're worse. But should we blame the Bush administration? Yes — because it refuses to learn from experience.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/12/opinion/12KRUG.html

C.I.A. Chief Says He's Corrected Cheney Privately: "George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told a Senate committee on Tuesday that he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Vice President Dick Cheney and others, and that he would do so again.…" Mr. Tenet identified three instances in which he had already corrected public statements by President Bush or Mr. Cheney or would do so, but he left the impression that there had been more. His comments, in testimony before the Armed Services Committee, came under sharp questioning from some Democrats on the panel, who have criticized him and the White House over prewar intelligence on Iraq. He insisted that he had honored his obligation to play a neutral role as the top intelligence adviser. In response to a question, he said he did not think the administration had misrepresented facts to justify going to war. Mr. Tenet said he planned to call Mr. Cheney's attention to a recent misstatement, in a Jan. 9 interview, when the vice president recommended as "your best source of information" on links between Iraq and Al Qaeda the contents of a disputed memorandum by a senior Pentagon official, Douglas J. Feith. That memorandum, sent last October to the Senate Intelligence Committee, portrayed what was presented as conclusive evidence of collaboration between Saddam Hussein's government and Al Qaeda, but it was never endorsed by intelligence agencies, who objected to Mr. Feith's findings. Mr. Tenet said he was not aware of Mr. Cheney's comments in that interview, published in The Rocky Mountain News, until Monday night.… According to government officials who have seen copies of the briefing documents, the information was presented to Stephen Hadley, the deputy national security adviser, and I. Lewis Libby, Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, and included slides that were strongly disparaging of C.I.A. analyses. The other two instances in which Mr. Tenet said he had acted to correct administration statements involved the State of the Union address in January 2002, when he objected after the fact to Mr. Bush's inclusion of disputed intelligence about Iraq's seeking to obtain uranium from Africa, and a Jan. 22 radio interview in which Mr. Cheney portrayed trailers found in Iraq as being for biological weapons, and thus "conclusive evidence" that Iraq "did in fact have programs for weapons of mass destruction." That was the conclusion initially reached by American intelligence agencies last spring, and it is still on the C.I.A.'s Web site. But it has been disputed since last summer within intelligence agencies, and Mr. Tenet said he had told Mr. Cheney there was "no consensus" among American analysts, with those at the Defense Intelligence Agency in particular arguing that the trailers were for producing hydrogen.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/10/politics/10INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Kerry Condemns Bush for Failing to Back Aristide: "'I would have been prepared to send troops immediately, period,' Mr. Kerry said on Friday, expressing astonishment that President Bush, who talks of supporting democratically elected leaders, withheld any aid and then helped spirit Mr. Aristide into exile after saying the United States could not protect him. 'Look, Aristide was no picnic, and did a lot of things wrong,' Mr. Kerry said. But Washington 'had understandings in the region about the right of a democratic regime to ask for help. And we contravened all of that. I think it's a terrible message to the region, democracies, and it's shortsighted.'…" In his first in-depth interview on foreign affairs since effectively winning the Democratic nomination, Mr. Kerry hop-scotched around the world in the course of an hour. He took issue with Mr. Bush's judgment beyond their well-aired differences on Iraq, questioning his handling of North Korea, the Mideast peace process and the spread of nuclear weapons and arguing that he would rewrite the Bush strategy that makes pre-emption a declared, central tenet of American policy.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/03/07/politics/campaign/07KERR.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Public Agenda: First Choice 2004: "First Choice 2004 Know What You Want Before You Choose Who You Want" Most voters' guides compare the candidates. That's useful, but how can you decide who you want in office until you're sure about what you want that politician to do? And these days that's harder to figure out than it should be, particularly for young or first-time voters. When politicians present their plans, they naturally play up the quick, easy, cheap part of their program and downplay the messy, expensive, risky parts. In reality, however, many problems don't get solved without facing harsh choices; the government can't avoid pleasing some people and offending others. First Choice 2004 is designed to help you make the most of your vote by having strong, informed opinions about what those choices might be. With these guides, you can find out more about the problems facing the nation and be better armed when considering the plans politicians put forward.… http://www.publicagenda.org/firstchoice2004/index.cfm

Treasury Department Is Warning Publishers of the Perils of Criminal Editing of the Enemy: "Writers often grumble about the criminal things editors do to their prose. The federal government has recently weighed in on the same issue — literally. It has warned publishers they may face grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations, on the ground that such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy. Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace "inappropriate words," according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months. Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of "camera-ready copies of manuscripts" is allowed. The Treasury letters concerned Iran. But the logic, experts said, would seem to extend to Cuba, Libya, North Korea and other nations with which most trade is banned without a government license. Laws and regulations prohibiting trade with various nations have been enforced for decades, generally applied to items like oil, wheat, nuclear reactors and, sometimes, tourism. Applying them to grammar, spelling and punctuation is an infuriating interpretation, several people in the publishing industry said. "It is against the principles of scholarship and freedom of expression, as well as the interests of science, to require publishers to get U.S. government permission to publish the works of scholars and researchers who happen to live in countries with oppressive regimes," said Eric A. Swanson, a senior vice president at John Wiley & Sons, which publishes scientific, technical and medical books and journals.…" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/national/28PUBL.html

Intelligence: Senator Rebuts Times Article on Panel Vote Over Subpoenas The Republican chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Friday that the panel had not reached agreement on any specific plan to compel the release of documents from any source as part of its inquiry into prewar intelligence on Iraq. The chairman, Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, disputed as inaccurate a report in The New York Times that the panel voted Thursday in closed session to move toward a possible subpoena unless the Bush administration produced certain documents within three weeks. Mr. Roberts and Democratic Congressional officials said Friday that there had been no vote on the issue and no agreement to any specific timetable during Thursday's meeting.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/28/politics/28INTE.html

Senate Panel Presses Bush on War's Plan: "Faced with a refusal by the Bush administration to provide certain documents related to prewar intelligence on Iraq, the Senate intelligence committee voted in a closed session on Thursday to move toward a possible subpoena, according to senior Congressional officials. The bipartisan vote on the Republican-led panel sets a three-week deadline for a voluntary handover by the administration, after which the committee would employ unspecified 'further action,' which could only mean a subpoena, the officials said.…" The panel requested the information as part of its inquiry into the administration's prewar intelligence about Iraq, including the disputed intelligence about Iraq's illicit weapons and ties to terrorism, the officials said. The White House has said publicly that it is complying with the panel's requests. But Congressional officials say the administration is continuing to withhold important information, including copies of the president's detailed daily written intelligence digest. After the independent commission looking into the Sept. 11 attacks issued its own subpoena threat, the White House and the commission agreed earlier this year on a plan that is to allow representatives of that panel to review some copies of the presidential briefings, which are highly classified. But in discussions with the Senate committee, the White House has so far insisted that the documents be kept away from Congress, on the ground that they are covered by executive privilege.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/27/politics/27INTE.html

C.I.A. Admits It Didn't Give Weapon Data to the U.N.a>: "The Central Intelligence Agency has acknowledged that it did not provide the United Nations with information about 21 of the 105 sites in Iraq singled out by American intelligence before the war as the most highly suspected of housing illicit weapons. The acknowledgment, in a Jan. 20 letter to Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan, contradicts public statements before the war by top Bush administration officials. " Both George J. Tenet, the director of central intelligence, and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, said the United States had briefed United Nations inspectors on all of the sites identified as "high value and moderate value" in the weapons hunt. The contradiction is significant because Congressional opponents of the war were arguing a year ago that the United Nations inspectors should be given more time to complete their search before the United States and its allies began the invasion. The White House, bolstered by Mr. Tenet, insisted that it was fully cooperating with the inspectors, and at daily briefings the White House issued assurances that the administration was providing the inspectors with the best information possible. In a telephone interview on Friday, Senator Levin said he now believed that Mr. Tenet had misled Congress, which he described as "totally unacceptable." Senior administration officials said Friday night that Ms. Rice had relied on information provided by intelligence agencies when she assured Senator Levin, in a letter on March 6, 2003, that "United Nations inspectors have been briefed on every high or medium priority weapons of mass destruction, missile and U.A.V.-related site the U.S. intelligence community has identified." Mr. Tenet said much the same thing in testimony on Feb. 12, 2003. U.A.V.'s are unmanned aerial vehicles, commonly called drones. Asked about the contradiction between the C.I.A.'s current account and Ms. Rice's letter, the spokesman for the national security council, Sean McCormack, said, "Dr. Rice provided a good-faith answer to Senator Levin based on the best information that was made available to her." This is not the first time the White House and the C.I.A. have engaged in finger-pointing about the quality of the intelligence that formed the basis of administration statements. Last summer, Dr. Rice noted that Mr. Tenet had not read over the State of the Union address in which Mr. Bush said Saddam Hussein had attempted to buy uranium from Africa, a statement the White House later acknowledged was based on faulty intelligence. That began a prolonged period of tension between the agency and the White House that has never fully abated, and may be inflamed by the C.I.A.'s acknowledgment to Senator Levin. The letter to Senator Levin, from Stanley M. Moskowitz, the agency's director of Congressional affairs, disclosed that the agency had shared information on only 84 of the 105 suspected priority weapons sites.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/21/politics/21WEAP.html

Schneier.com: Crypto-Gram: February 15, 2004: "The Politicization of Security Since 9/11, security has become an important political issue. The Bush administration has seized on terrorism as a means to justify its policies. Bush is running for re-election on a 'strong on security' platform. The Democrats are attacking the administration's record on security. Congress has voted on, and will continue to vote on, security countermeasures. And the FBI and the Justice Department are implementing others, even without Congressional approval. " …the Bush administration is using the fear of terrorism as a political tool. That being said, I'm not sure a Democrat would do anything different in Bush's place. Fear is a powerful motivator, and it takes strong ethics to resist the temptation to abuse it. I believe the real problem with America's national security policy is that the police are in charge; that's far more important than which party is in office. Some of the Democratic presidential candidates for president have been more rational about security, but none have discussed security in terms of trade-offs. On the Republican side, I've read some criticisms of Bush's heavy-handed security policies. Certainly the traditional Republican ideals of personal liberty and less government intervention are in line with smart security. And have the people who accuse me of hating Republicans forgotten that the Clipper Chip initiative was spearheaded by the Clinton administration? The Republicans don't have a monopoly on reducing civil liberties in the United States. Rational security is not the sole purview of any political party. Fighting stupid security does not have to be partisan. Bush's White House has done more to damage American national security than they have done to improve it. That's not an indictment of the entire Republican party; it's a statement about the current President, his Attorney General, and the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security. It's a statement about the current political climate, where the police -- and I use this term to encompass the FBI, the Justice Department, the military, and everyone else involved in enforcing order -- and their interests are put ahead of the interests of the people.… http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-0402.html#2

In Haze of Guard Records, a Bit of Clarity: "Until this month, the Republican defense of Mr. Bush's military record, sticking to the bare essentials, had successfully neutralized a succession of newspaper articles that raised questions about Mr. Bush's service. But now, with Iraq casualties mounting, with angry Democrats coalescing behind a decorated Vietnam veteran and with credibility questions dogging Mr. Bush, the broad-brush defense has been abandoned. Still, even through the fog of political combat it is possible from an examination of Mr. Bush's military records to get a firm fix on several important points along the path of his National Guard service. It is also possible to identify the areas that remain in dispute and the questions that have yet to be fully answered.… " http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/politics/campaign/15GUAR.html?pagewanted=all&position=

How America Doesn't Vote: "One outcome of this year's presidential election is already certain: people will show up to vote and find they have been wrongly taken off the rolls. The lists of eligible voters kept by localities around the country are the gateway to democracy, and they are also a national scandal. In 2000, the American public saw, in Katherine Harris's massive purge of eligible voters in Florida, how easy it is for registered voters to lose their rights by bureaucratic fiat. Missouri's voting-list problems received far less attention, but may have disenfranchised more eligible voters." It's hard to judge where voting lists are being mishandled, since the procedures by which they are kept and corrected are shrouded in secrecy. That's the beginning of the problem. The public has a right to know that the rolls are being properly maintained — and to know it before the election. As became clear in 2000, after the fact is too late. Federal law provides some general guidelines about keeping voting rolls, but the basic decisions about who is eligible to vote are largely left to local officials. City and county election offices are responsible for adding new registrants to the voting rolls, and purging voters who die, move away or are convicted of felonies. If election offices had adequate resources and precise rules, voting lists might accurately reflect who is entitled to vote. But the reality is far more chaotic, and errors abound. Ms. Harris's 2000 purge in Florida is a classic case. Before it began, Ms. Harris cast a cloud of suspicion over the process by signing on as co-chairwoman of the Florida Bush campaign while she also served as the state's top election official. The purge itself required sensitive judgment calls, notably when to regard a name on a list of convicted felons as a valid match with a name on the voting rolls. According to post-election testimony before the United States Commission on Civil Rights, Ms. Harris's office overruled the advice of the private firm that compiled the felon list and called for removing not just names that were an exact match, but ones that were highly inexact. Thousands of Florida voters ended up being wrongly purged. After a federal lawsuit that followed the infamous 2000 election, Florida restored some voters to the rolls, and agreed to start using more precise identification methods. But there is still no reliable system, and Florida voting rights advocates are bracing for a rerun of the mistakes of 2000.… The sad state of voting rolls may be due to underfunding and mismanagement, but it can create an appearance of ulterior motives. The voters wrongly removed by Ms. Harris's purge were disproportionately black — African-Americans make up one of the strongest Democratic voting groups in the state — as were the voters on the St. Louis inactive voters list. For years, partisan "ballot security" programs in the South singled out tens of thousands of black voters for removal from the voting rolls. Just this month, civil rights groups sued a Texas district attorney who threatened, in violation of the law, to prosecute students at Prairie View A&M University, a predominantly black school, if they register using their school addresses. Election officials have a duty to remove voters from the rolls when they have become ineligible, and to guard against voter fraud. But it must be done in a manner that takes great care to avoid preventing eligible voters from casting a ballot. Officials cannot allow vague rumors or reckless allegations about voter fraud to stampede them into overkill. In Missouri, elected officials have charged for years that large numbers of St. Louis residents were casting votes from vacant lots. A study conducted by The Post-Dispatch in 2001 found that in the vast majority of cases, the voters lived in homes that had been wrongly classified by the city. The Help America Vote Act, passed after the 2000 election, will eventually computerize voting rolls at the state level. Most of the decisions about who is eligible to vote, however, will still be made by the officials who are making them now. The new law also requires that when there is a dispute about whether someone is eligible to vote, he or she must be given a "provisional" ballot, whose status will be determined later. But the ultimate decision about whether to count the ballot will remain with local election officials.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/15/opinion/15SUN1.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Stung by Exiles' Role, C.I.A. Orders a Shift in Procedures: "American intelligence officials who before the war were sifting through claims that Iraq had illicit weapons were generally not told that much of the information came from defectors linked to exile organizations that were promoting an American invasion, according to senior United States intelligence officials. The claims, which have largely proved to be unsubstantiated, included those from a defector who was identified as early as May 2002 as a fabricator by the Defense Intelligence Agency. Nevertheless, reports based on his debriefings arranged by the Iraqi National Congress found their way into documents and speeches used by the Bush administration to justify the war. The nondisclosure of the source's connection to an exile organization was 'standard practice' under the procedures in place at the time, intelligence officials said on Thursday. But that episode and others have prompted the Central Intelligence Agency to order a major change in its procedures. Operations officers will now be required to tell analysts more about sources' identities and possible motivations.…" So deeply held was the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons — within the intelligence community and beyond — that it took American interrogators several months to concede that Iraqi prisoners who repeatedly said Iraq did not have such arsenals might be telling the truth, current and former intelligence officials said in recent interviews. "They denied that there were weapons, and so we polygraphed them," a senior intelligence official said. "And even when they passed, our first response was to say, wow, they really are good at deception." As early as May of last year, the month that major combat operations ceased, senior Iraqi officials and scientists in American custody were uniformly denying knowledge of any chemical or biological weapons production or reconstituted nuclear program, senior intelligence officials said. But the administration gave its first public hint that the suspected weapons stockpiles might not exist only in October, in an interim report by David A. Kay.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/politics/13INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Bush's Duty, and Privilege: "Mr. Bush has been nothing if not consistent. He has always been about the privileged few. And that's an attitude that flies in the face of the basic precepts of an egalitarian society. It's an attitude that fosters, that celebrates, unfairness and injustice. More than 58,000 Americans died in Vietnam, another war of choice that was marketed deceitfully to the American people. Mr. Bush's experience in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam years is especially relevant today because it throws a brighter spotlight on who he really is. He has walked a charmed road, with others paying the price of his journey, every step of the way." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13HERB.html

Op-Ed Columnist: The Real Man: "To understand why questions about George Bush's time in the National Guard are legitimate, all you have to do is look at the federal budget published last week. No, not the lies, damned lies and statistics — the pictures. By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq. Somehow the art director neglected to include a photo of the president swimming across the Yangtze River." It was not ever thus. Bill Clinton's budgets were illustrated with tables and charts, not with worshipful photos of the president being presidential. The issue here goes beyond using the Government Printing Office to publish campaign brochures. In this budget, as in almost everything it does, the Bush administration tries to blur the line between reverence for the office of president and reverence for the person who currently holds that office. Operation Flight Suit was only slightly more over the top than other Bush photo-ops, like the carefully staged picture that placed Mr. Bush's head in line with the stone faces on Mount Rushmore. The goal is to suggest that it's unpatriotic to criticize the president, and to use his heroic image to block any substantive discussion of his policies. In fact, those 27 photos grace one of the four most dishonest budgets in the nation's history — the other three are the budgets released in 2001, 2002 and 2003. Just to give you a taste: remember how last year's budget contained no money for postwar Iraq — and how administration officials waited until after the tax cut had been passed to mention the small matter of $87 billion in extra costs? Well, they've done it again: earlier this week the Army's chief of staff testified that the Iraq funds in the budget would cover expenses only through September. But when administration officials are challenged about the blatant deceptions in their budgets — or, for that matter, about the use of prewar intelligence — their response, almost always, is to fall back on the president's character. How dare you question Mr. Bush's honesty, they ask, when he is a man of such unimpeachable integrity? And that leaves critics with no choice: they must point out that the man inside the flight suit bears little resemblance to the official image.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/13/opinion/13KRUG.html

Trippi's Two Americas: "In this political season, technology keeps cutting both ways. Productivity is up, keeping the market moving forward, corporate profits up and interest rates down. But that same efficiency also maintains the jobless recovery. So too does broadband, virtualization and outsourcing. Where Edwards' Two Americas are classic Democratic haves and have-nots, Trippi's are The Onlines and The Offlines. And the same dynamics that brought Dean to prominence also served to accelerate his decline. The transparency of the network that allowed rapid fundraising and bubble-up communications within the campaign also allowed Kerry, Edwards and Clark to cherry-pick voter lists and redirect them to their own volunteer corps of handwritten letter authors.… " Trippi didn't have the luxury of waiting out the down cycle. The Dean campaign was primed to counter the front-loaded primary schedule designed by DNC chairman Terry McAuliffe to wrap up the nomination by early spring. If anything, Trippi was too successful, peaking too soon. Though an experienced operative, he violated the fundamental rule of salesmanship: Once you've closed the sale, shut up. We all know how quickly things fell apart once the campaign went off the rails. But Trippi made it clear he understood from the beginning the fundamental disconnect between the Internet and political crowds. "The Internet community doesn't understand the hard realities of American politics," he said, and the political press doesn't get the Internet. Of course, Trippi then tarred the mainstream media with the "broadcast-politics" brush, charging the networks with purveying entertainment, not information, with 933 replays of Dean's infamous scream speech. To Trippi, what the media did in taking the speech out of context was damaging—"not what the Governor did.…" http://www.eweek.com/print_article/0,3048,a=118842,00.asp

The President's Guard Service: "The payroll records released yesterday document that he performed no guard duties at all for more than half a year in 1972 and raise questions about how he could be credited with at least 14 days of duty during subsequent periods when his superior officers in two units said they had not seen him. Investigative reporting by The Boston Globe, our sibling newspaper, revealed in 2000 that Mr. Bush had reported for duty and flown regularly in his first four Texas Guard years but dropped off the Guard's radar screen when he went to Alabama to work on a senatorial campaign. The payroll records show that he was paid for many days of duty in the first four months of 1972, when he was in Texas, but then went more than six months without being paid, virtually the entire time he was working on the Senate campaign in Alabama. That presumably means he never reported for duty during that period" Mr. Bush was credited with 14 days of service at unspecified locations between Oct. 28, 1972, and the end of April 1973. The commanding officer of the Alabama unit to which Mr. Bush was supposed to report long ago said that he had never seen him appear for duty, and Mr. Bush's superiors at the Texas unit to which he returned wrote in May 1973 that they could not write an annual evaluation of him because he had not been seen there during that year. Those statements are so jarringly at odds with the payroll data that they demand further elaboration..… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/11/opinion/11WED1.html

Chicago Tribune | Bush releases military records: "But the documents also show gaps of weeks and months in Bush's service record that the White House could not explain, making it unlikely that these records will resolve a heated election-year debate over whether Bush fulfilled his commitment to the Guard or received special treatment from military officials.…" No records prove Bush showed up for duty in Alabama, and the commanding officer of that unit, retired Gen. William Turnipseed, maintains that he never saw Bush. The documents released Tuesday included pay records that spelled out which days Bush reported for duty in 1972 and 1973. But they do not indicate where Bush worked on those days. The White House said it has not been able to find anyone who served with Bush who could verify that he worked at the Alabama unit.… http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/chi-0402110328feb11,1,3170943.story?coll=chi-newsnationworld-hed

An Antiwar Forum in Iowa Brings Federal Subpoenas: "To hear the antiwar protesters describe it, their forum at a local university last fall was like so many others they had held over the years. They talked about the nonviolent philosophies of Mahatma Gandhi and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., they said, and how best to convey their feelings about Iraq into acts of civil disobedience." But last week, subpoenas began arriving seeking details about the forum's sponsor — its leadership list, its annual reports, its office location — and the event itself. On Monday, lawyers for the sponsor, the Drake University chapter of the National Lawyers Guild, went to court in an effort to block the federal prosecutors' demands. Those who attended the forum, at least four of whom said they had received subpoenas to appear before a federal grand jury on Tuesday, said that they did not know what to make of the inquiry and that they feared it was intended to quash protest. Late on Monday, prosecutors in the United States attorney's office for the southern district of Iowa took the unusual step of issuing a confirmation of the investigation, stressing that its scope was limited to learning more about one person who had tried to scale a security fence at an Iowa National Guard base in a protest a day after the forum. "The United States attorney's office does not prosecute persons peacefully and lawfully engaged in rallies which are conducted under the protection of the First Amendment to the Constitution of the United States," a written statement issued by the prosecutor here, Stephen Patrick O'Meara, said. Prosecutors also delayed the grand jury appearances by a month, a move local civil liberties officials interpreted as a sign that the government might be backing away from the investigation. "I'd say the prosecutors are recognizing the groundswell of reaction that has happened in the face of this extraordinary thing they've done," said R. Ben Stone, executive director of the Iowa Civil Liberties Union. Still, the protesters, their lawyers and some national civil liberties advocates described the investigation into the attendance rolls and leadership lists of the lawyers' group as highly unusual in recent years. Some said it could send a chilling message far beyond Iowa, leaving those who consider voicing disapproval of the administration's policy in Iraq, or anywhere else, wondering whether they too might receive added scrutiny.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/10/national/10PROT.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-Ed Columnist: Lost in Credibility Gulch: "Samuel Butler said, 'I care about truth not for truth's sake but for my own.' Mr. Bush presented himself in 2000 as an honest, straight-shooting Texan, an aw-shucks kind of guy whose word, unlike that of the sitting president ('I did not have sexual relations . . .'), could always be trusted." The credibility that he enjoyed during that campaign, and which reached a peak in the immediate aftermath of Sept. 11, has steadily eroded since then. He said he was a compassionate conservative, but he has hammered programs designed to assist the poorest and most vulnerable among us. His administration has taken a blowtorch to the environment. And his fiscal policies are so outlandish that liberals, moderates and conservatives are asking if he's taken leave of his senses. During the run-up to war, the public heard ominous references to mushroom clouds and was encouraged to believe there was a link between Saddam Hussein and Sept. 11. It's time to put an end to the fantasies and the deceit, which have landed us in a quagmire overseas and the equivalent of fiscal quicksand at home. It's not too much to ask that the president of the United States speak the clear truth about his policies and their implications.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/09/opinion/09HERB.html

Chicago Tribune | AP: Kerry Pocketed Speaking Fees: "Back when federal lawmakers legally could be paid for speaking to outside groups, John Kerry collected more than $120,000 in fees from interests as diverse as big oil, tobacco, the liquor lobby and unions, records show. Between 1985 and 1990, Kerry's first five years in the Senate from Massachusetts, he pocketed annual amounts slightly under the limits for speaking fees set by Congress. Unlike many colleagues, he donated a speaking fee to charity only once, according to annual financial disclosure reports reviewed by The Associated Press. " One of the companies to pay Kerry $1,000 for a speech in 1987, Miami-based Metalbanc, was later indicted, along with two executives, on charges it helped the Cali drug cartel in Colombia launder money in the United States. The charges eventually were dropped because the firm was defunct. At the time of the 1987 speech to Metalbanc, Kerry was chairman of the Senate subcommittee that investigated drug trafficking and money laundering. Kerry, now the front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, said he didn't learn about the drug connection to the company or its executives, who also gave him political donations, until The Boston Globe informed him of it in 1996. He donated several thousand dollars to charities to make amends. Kerry's ethics reports show he made more than 90 paid speeches between 1985, when he first took office, and 1990, when Congress began the move to end honoraria. The senator's campaign acknowledged Sunday that he accepted the speaking fees, but said he also gave several speeches a year for free. "He gave these speeches to address what he saw as the important issues at the time such as the growing national deficit," spokeswoman Stephanie Cutter said. "In compliance with the law, he accepted small speaking fees from some of the groups he spoke to, and, in at least one case, donated that money to charity." At the time Kerry could accept speaking fees, senators were forced to abide by annual limits, which ranged from $26,568 to $35,800. A number of veteran lawmakers often collected more than $100,000 in a single year but had to give everything over the limit to charity. For instance, former House Ways and Means committee chairman Dan Rostenskowski once donated $155,000 of his speaking fees in one year to charity.… A longtime federal election regulator said Kerry's extensive speaking efforts after he arrived in Washington followed a path taken by many new lawmakers who were not wealthy. With congressional salaries half what they are today, many lawmakers pressed to find outside income from special interests. "Members were often pulled almost like a magnet into a circle of lobbyists who were very willing to pay large honoraria for them to give a brief speech or a talk to their organization or group," said Kent Cooper, former public disclosure chief for the Federal Election Commission who now runs a Web site that studies political donations and lobbying. "This provided instant cash to a member and at the same time built a relationship with that lobbyist or organization," Cooper said.… http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/specials/elections/sns-ap-kerry-speaking-fees.story

Making the Facts Fit the Case for War: "In 1846 President James Polk announced that Mexican troops had fired on American soldiers on American soil, and he took the country to a war that eventually gained it California, New Mexico and Arizona. Was the disputed soil ours? Probably not. Did Polk distort the information he had? Almost certainly. He wanted the territory, and he needed a war to get it. A first-term representative warned that if you 'allow the president to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion . . . you allow him to make war at pleasure.' For these words, Abraham Lincoln received the usual reward of political courage: he forfeited any chance of a return to Congress and was retired to private life for more than a decade. (Although he would do quite well after that.) Our current dispute over the intelligence that led to the invasion of Iraq seems to be yet another illustration of this eternal principle: presidents and other decision makers usually get the intelligence they want. This doesn't mean that intelligence reports should be ignored, but that they must be viewed with skepticism.…" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/08/opinion/08GOOD.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Op-ed Columnist: Budgets of Mass Destruction: "It should be clear to all by now that what we have in the Bush team is a faith-based administration. It launched a faith-based war in Iraq, on the basis of faith-based intelligence, with a faith-based plan for Iraqi reconstruction, supported by faith-based tax cuts to generate faith-based revenues. This group believes that what matters in politics and economics are conviction and will — not facts, social science or history.…" … Too many Americans, including me, believe in their guts that removing Saddam was the right thing to do, even if the W.M.D. intel was wrong. The Bush team's real vulnerability is its B.M.D. — Budgets of Mass Destruction, which have recklessly imperiled the nation's future, with crazy tax-cutting and out-of-control spending. The latest report from the Congressional Budget Office says the deficit is expected to total some $2.4 trillion over the next decade — almost $1 trillion more than the prediction of just five months ago. That is a failure of intelligence and common sense that threatens to make us all insecure — and people also feel that in their guts.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/opinion/01FRIE.html

Dispatches: Looking for Intel on the Intel: "Since the fall of Saddam Hussein, a burning question here is how the C.I.A. could have gotten the intelligence about Iraq so wrong. While American inspectors have yet to wrap up their work in Iraq, there is already an enormous gap between the alarming intelligence assessments prepared before the war and the more modest weapons programs the inspectors have actually uncovered so far." This is not a dispute among specialists but an issue that raises fundamental questions about the quality of American intelligence and its role in shaping foreign policy. A nation that has embarked on a policy of military pre-emption to neutralize new dangers requires the most reliable and accurate intelligence. It can literally be a matter of war and peace. Regardless of when the Bush administration made up its mind that Saddam Hussein had to go, it was able to bring the country and Congress along because of intelligence assessments indicating that Iraq was making chemical and biological weapons and actively pursuing nuclear arms. Despite the secrecy that cloaks American intelligence, much of the material that is needed to evaluate the Central Intelligence Agency's performance is readily available on the Web. Start with the unclassified version of the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, which circulated within the administration and was made available to lawmakers before the war. It can be found on the Web site of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which has done a stellar job of compiling government reports and expert assessments on the subject. The report is posted at ceip.org. The estimate not only asserts that Iraq had programs to develop weapons of mass destruction — or, as President Bush put it in this year's State of the Union address, "weapons of mass destruction-related program activities" — it also says that Iraq actually possessed stockpiles of chemical and germ weapons and was manufacturing more. "We assess that Baghdad has begun renewed production of mustard, sarin, cyclosarin and VX," said the estimate, which asserted that Iraq had stockpiled at least 100 tons of chemical agents, and as much as 500 tons, adding much of it over the previous year. The estimate noted that there were important differences within the intelligence community over Iraq's nuclear efforts: the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research was so dubious about the nuclear claims, including the assertion that aluminum tubes sought by Iraq were for a nuclear program, that it stated a vigorous dissent. While that view was included in the National Intelligence Estimate, the document also noted that most American intelligence organizations believed that there was compelling evidence that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear program. The estimate stated that it had "high confidence" that "Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to U.N. resolutions." The estimate also offered this ominous warning: "We judge that we are seeing only a portion of Iraq's W.M.D. efforts, owing to Baghdad's vigorous denial and deception efforts." In other words, it is probably worse than we think. The agency says that it is now reviewing this prewar intelligence, but so far it has provided little indication that it understands where it went wrong. Its analysts still insist that their method was solid, even though it appears to have yielded some seriously wrong answers.&helliip; http://www.ceip.org/files/projects/npp/pdf/Iraq/declassifiedintellreport.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/29/international/middleeast/29CND-GORD.html?pagewanted=all&position=

ABC12.com: The Dean Scream: The version of reality that we didn't see on TV: "It was the scream Howard Dean says became famous after the media played it nearly 700 times in a few days. Not only that, his camp adds, what we heard on the air was not a reflection of the way it sounded in the room. " After my interview with Dean and his wife in which I played the tape again -- in fact played it to them -- I noticed that on that tape he's holding a hand-held microphone. One designed to filter out the background noise. It isolates your voice, just like it does to Charlie Gibson and me when we have big crowds in the morning. The crowds are deafening to us standing there But the viewer at home hears only our voice. So, we collected some other tapes from Dean's speech including one from a documentary filmmaker, tapes that do carry the sound of the crowd, not just the microphone he held on stage. We also asked the reporters who were there to help us replicate what they experienced in the room. Reena Singh, ABC News Dean campaign reporter: "What the cameras didn't capture was the crowd." Garance Franke-Ruta, Senior Editor, American Prospect: "As he spoke, the audience got louder and louder and I found it somewhat difficult to hear him." Dean's boisterous countdown of the upcoming primaries as we all heard it on TV was isolated, when in fact he was shouting over the roaring crowd. And what about the scream as we all heard it? In the room, the so-called scream couldn't really be heard at all. Again, he was yelling along with the crowd. Neal Gabler, Senior Fellow, Lear Center USA: "When you're talking about visuals, context is everything. So, you've got a situation in which you have what I'd call the televised version of reality, which is not the same as the actual reality in room. You know in a situation like this, no one takes responsibility." How do the networks see it? Here are comments from network executives to ABC News: CBS News: "Individually we may feel okay about our network, but the cumulative effect for viewers with 24-hour cable coverage is -- it may have been overplayed and, in fact, a disservice to Dean and the viewers." -- Andrew Heyward, President - CBS News ABC News: "It's always a danger that we'll use good video too much." -- David Westin, President - ABC News … http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/news/012904_NW_r2_group_deanscream.html

Missteps Pulled a Surging Dean Back to Earth: "… just as Dr. Dean headed onstage, his campaign manager, Joe Trippi, offered a snippet of rocker philosophy: 'Freedom's just another for word for nothing left to lose.' Actually, Dr. Dean still had plenty to lose that night, when his speech turned his highflying candidacy into late-night joke fodder. " Above is what passes for objective analysis, and until recently I'd have bought into it too. Then I saw a four minute story on ABC where they played a recording of the "I have a scream speech" made by people who were actually in the room. You couldn't even hear Dean, above the cheers of the crowd. He was yelling trying to be heard and failing miserably. Unfortunately, someone, gave him a noise cancelling microphone. Unfortunately it wasn't hokked up to the PA system so his crowd could hear him. Unfortunately, it was connected to the media, who, being there, had to know that the people in the room never heard a scream, but reported it as if they had. At the time of ABC's "correction" the phony (manipulated) scream had been aired well over 800 times. If you missed the truth on ABC, well, you missed it. The Dean Scream: The version of reality that we didn't see on TV http://abclocal.go.com/wjrt/news/012904_NW_r2_group_deanscream.html The scream that may not have been http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/01/politics/campaign/01DEAN.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Today's Editorials: How to Hack an Election: "When the State of Maryland hired a computer security firm to test its new machines, these paid hackers had little trouble casting multiple votes and taking over the machines' vote-recording mechanisms. The Maryland study shows convincingly that more security is needed for electronic voting, starting with voter-verified paper trails." When Maryland decided to buy 16,000 AccuVote-TS voting machines, there was considerable opposition. Critics charged that the new touch-screen machines, which do not create a paper record of votes cast, were vulnerable to vote theft. The state commissioned a staged attack on the machines, in which computer-security experts would try to foil the safeguards and interfere with an election. They were disturbingly successful. It was an "easy matter," they reported, to reprogram the access cards used by voters and vote multiple times. They were able to attach a keyboard to a voting terminal and change its vote count. And by exploiting a software flaw and using a modem, they were able to change votes from a remote location. Critics of new voting technology are often accused of being alarmist, but this state-sponsored study contains vulnerabilities that seem almost too bad to be true. Maryland's 16,000 machines all have identical locks on two sensitive mechanisms, which can be opened by any one of 32,000 keys. The security team had no trouble making duplicates of the keys at local hardware stores, although that proved unnecessary since one team member picked the lock in "approximately 10 seconds."… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/31/opinion/31SAT1.html

We Are the Majority | Bernie Sanders | February 2004 Issue: "So how do the rightwingers get elected if they have nothing to say about the most important issues facing the American people? That is the central question of modern American politics. And the answer is that they work day and night to divide the American people against each other so that they end up voting against their own best interests. That is what the Republican Party is all about. They tell white workers their jobs are being lost not because corporate America is downsizing and moving to China, but because black workers are taking their jobs--because of affirmative action. White against black." If you turn on talk radio, what you will hear, in an almost compulsive way, is a hatred of women. And they're telling working class guys, you used to have some power. You used to be the breadwinner. But now there are women running companies, women in politics, women making more money than you. Men against women. And they're turning straight people against gay people. The homosexuals are taking over the schools! Gay marriage is destroying the country! Straights against gays. And if you're not for a war in Iraq waged on the dubious and illegal doctrine of "preemptive war," you're somehow unpatriotic. And those of us who were born in America are supposed to hate immigrants. And those of us who practice religion in one way, or believe in the separation of church and state, are supposed to be anti-religious, and trying to destroy Christianity in America--and we get divided up on that. And on and on it goes. The Republican leadership does all of this in an incredibly cynical, poll-driven way, because they know when you lay out their program about the most important economic issues facing America, it ends up that they are representing the interests of 2 percent of the population. You can't win an election with the support of 2 percent. So they divide us, and the result is that tens of millions of working people vote against their own interests. We know, that come election time, they will have huge sums of money that we will never come near to having. But we also know something else: that we are the vast majority of the people. We are the middle class and working families, and there are a hell of a lot more of us than there are of them.… http://www.progressive.org/feb04/sand0204.html

Protester=Criminal? | Matthew Rothschild | February 2004 Issue: "In many places across George Bush's America, you may be losing your ability to exercise your lawful First Amendment rights of speech and assembly. Increasingly, some police departments, the FBI, and the Secret Service are engaging in the criminalization--or, at the very least, the marginalization--of dissent.…" This crackdown took a violent turn in late November at the Miami protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas and at an anti-war protest at the Port of Oakland last April. In both cases, the police used astonishing force to break up protests. But even when the police do not engage in violence, they sometimes blatantly interfere with the right to dissent by preemptively arresting people on specious grounds.… It's not every day that a sitting judge will allege he saw the police commit felonies. But that's what Judge Richard Margolius said on December 11 in regard to police misconduct in Miami during the protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) in late November. Judge Margolius was presiding over a case that the protesters brought against the city. In court, he said he saw the police commit at least twenty felonies, Amy Driscoll of the Miami Herald reported. "Pretty disgraceful what I saw with my own eyes," he said, according to the paper. "This was a real eye-opener. A disgrace for the community." Police used tasers, shock batons, rubber bullets, beanbags filled with chemicals, large sticks, and concussion grenades against lawful protesters. (Just prior to the FTAA protests, the city of Miami passed an ordinance requiring a permit for any gathering of more than six people for longer than twenty-nine minutes.) They took the offensive, wading into crowds and driving after the demonstrators. Police arrested more than 250 protesters. Almost all of them were simply exercising their First Amendment rights. Police also seized protest material and destroyed it, and they confiscated personal property, demonstrators say. "How many police officers have been charged by the state attorney so far for what happened out there during the FTAA?" the judge asked in court, according to the Herald. The prosecutor said none. "Pretty sad commentary, at least from what I saw," the judge retorted. Even for veterans of protests, the police actions in Miami were unlike any they had encountered before. "I've been to a number of the anti-globalization protests--Seattle, Cancún, D.C.--and this was different," says Norm Stockwell, operations coordinator for WORT, the community radio station in Madison, Wisconsin. "At previous events, the police force was defensive, with heavy armor hoping to hold back protests. In Miami, police were in light armor and were poised to go after the protesters, and that's what they did. They actually went into the crowds to divide the protesters, then chased them into different neighborhoods." Stockwell says some reporters were mistreated, especially if they were not "embedded" with the Miami police. "I got shot twice [with rubber projectiles], once in the back, another time in the leg," reported Jeremy Scahill of Democracy Now! "John Hamilton from the Workers Independent News Service was shot in the neck by a pepper-spray pellet." Ana Nogueira, Scahill's colleague from Democracy Now!, was videotaping some of the police mayhem when she was arrested, Scahill said. "In police custody, the authorities made Ana remove her clothes because they were pepper sprayed. The police forced her to strip naked in front of male officers." John Heckenlively, former head of the Racine County Democratic Party in Wisconsin, says he was cornered by the police late in the afternoon of November 20. Heckenlively and a few companions were trying to move away from the protest area when "a large cordon of police, filling the entire block edge to edge, was moving up the street," he says. "As they approached, an officer told us that we should leave the area. We informed him that was precisely what we were attempting to do, and seconds later, he placed us under arrest." Police kept Heckenlively in tight handcuffs behind his back for more than six hours, he says, adding that he was held for a total of sixty hours. Trade unionists were particularly outraged at the treatment they received in Miami. John Sweeney, head of the AFL-CIO, wrote Attorney General John Ashcroft on December 3 to urge the Justice Department to investigate "the massive and unwarranted repression of constitutional rights and civil liberties that took place in Miami." Sweeney wrote that on November 20, police interfered with the federation's demonstration "by denying access to buses, blocking access to the amphitheater where the rally was occurring, and deploying armored personnel carriers, water cannons, and scores of police in riot gear with clubs in front of the amphitheater entrance. Some union retirees had their buses turned away from Miami altogether by the police, and were sent back home." Blocking access to the rally was the least of it. After the march, "police advanced on groups of peaceful protesters without provocation," Sweeney wrote. "The police failed to provide those in the crowd with a safe route to disperse, and then deployed pepper spray and rubber bullets against protesters as they tried to leave the scene. Along with the other peaceful protesters, AFL-CIO staff, union peacekeepers, and retirees were trapped in the police advance. One retiree sitting on a chair was sprayed directly in the face with pepper spray. An AFL-CIO staff member was hit by a rubber bullet while trying to leave the scene. When the wife of a retired Steelworker verbally protested police tactics, she was thrown to the ground on her face and a gun was pointed to her head."… http://www.progressive.org/feb04/roths0204.html

Op-Chart: The Medicare Index: "Last month, President Bush signed into law Republican-sponsored legislation that adds a prescription drug benefit to Medicare and invests billions of dollars in an effort to lure the elderly away from the government program and into private health insurance plans. Last week, in his State of the Union address, President Bush said the new measure 'kept a basic commitment to our seniors.' By approving the legislation, the president may have fulfilled a commitment or two, but not to the nation's elderly. Here are some key details omitted from President Bush's speech …" http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/28/opinion/28BROW.html

Citing Free Speech, Judge Voids Part of Antiterror Act: "For the first time, a federal judge has struck down part of the sweeping antiterrorism law known as the USA Patriot Act, joining other courts that have challenged integral parts of the Bush administration's campaign against terrorism. In Los Angeles, the judge, Audrey B. Collins of Federal District Court, said in a decision made public on Monday that a provision in the law banning certain types of support for terrorist groups was so vague that it risked running afoul of the First Amendment.…" At issue was a provision in the act, passed by Congress after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, that expanded previous antiterrorism law to prohibit anyone from providing "expert advice or assistance" to known terrorist groups. The measure was part of a broader set of prohibitions that the administration has relied heavily on in prosecuting people in Lackawanna, N.Y., Portland, Ore., Detroit and elsewhere accused of providing money, training, Internet services and other "material support" to terrorist groups.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/27/politics/27PATR.html

ZDNet AnchorDesk: Security breach on Capitol Hill: It's criminal: "Let's say you happen to gain access to confidential information, either on a Web site or another individual's system. Do you report it? Do you read the confidential information yet not act on any of it? Or do you read the information and immediately use it to your own personal advantage? It's question of ethics, really, one that speaks to the integrity of the individual involved and the security policy in place in a given environment. IF YOU ARE a certain Republican staff member for the politically divisive U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee, apparently you choose that last option. According to the Boston Globe and other news sources, GOP committee members gained access to computers used by their Democratic colleagues and, from the spring of 2002 well into 2003, both monitored communications and leaked info to the press. The material obtained through this breach has already been used by columnists and talk show hosts, who offered their audiences unprecedented insight into the inner workings of the Democratic party. " This is as wrong as a criminal hacker breaking into a corporation's Web site. If these allegations hold up under investigation, those responsible should be punished just as a criminal would. It could happen in the private sector as easily as in the public. Many corporate employees work on shared networks and systems that contain plenty of confidential materials, everything from corporate strategy to trade secrets. Can you imagine the financial losses and legal repercussions had this same thing happened between competing businesses?… http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/AnchorDesk/4520-7297_16-5118530.html?tag=ns

Boston.com / News / Nation / Infiltration of files seen as extensive: "From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.…" http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2004/01/22/infiltration_of_files_seen_as_extensive/#

Easing of Internet Regulations Challenges Surveillance Efforts: "In a series of unpublicized meetings and heated correspondence in recent weeks, officials from the Justice Department, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Drug Enforcement Administration have repeatedly complained about the commission's decision in 2002 to classify high-speed Internet cable services under a looser regulatory regime than the phone system. The Justice Department recently tried to block the commission from appealing a decision by a federal appeals court two months ago that struck down major parts of its 2002 deregulatory order. Justice Department officials fear that the deregulatory order impedes its ability to enforce wiretapping orders. " The department ultimately decided to permit the F.C.C. to appeal, but took the highly unusual step of withdrawing from the lawsuit, officials involved in the case said. As a result of the commission's actions, said John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general who has played a lead role for the Justice Department, some telecommunications carriers have taken the position in court proceedings that they do not need to make their networks available to federal agents for court-approved wiretapping. "I am aware of instances in which law enforcement authorities have not been able to execute intercept orders because of this uncertainty," Mr. Malcolm said in an interview last Friday. He declined to provide further details. The clash between the commission and officials from the Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies pits two cherished policies of the Bush administration against each other. On one side stand those who support deregulation of major industries and the nurturing of emerging technologies; on the other are those who favor more aggressive law enforcement after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The outcome of the debate has far- reaching consequences.… David Fiske, the commission's chief spokesman, said that he could not respond to Mr. Malcolm's statement that the F.C.C.'s interpretation of the rules was making it more difficult to execute surveillance orders. A senior official at the F.C.C. said the commission was not unsympathetic to the concerns of the law enforcement agencies. "We're an economic regulatory agency as well as a law enforcement agency and we have to look at the interests of everyone," the official said. Some industry experts say that their biggest worry is that law enforcement demands may reshape the technical specifications of the new Internet voice services, an accusation that officials at the Justice Department and the F.B.I. deny. "What's most scary for industry and perhaps some people at the F.C.C. is the notion that the architecture of the Internet will depend on the permission of the F.B.I.," said Stewart A. Baker, a former general counsel of the National Security Agency, which monitors foreign communications. Mr. Baker now represents a number of telecommunications companies as a partner at the law firm of Steptoe & Johnson. But law enforcement officials say they are not seeking uniform technical standards but requirements that the new companies offering so-called "voice over Internet" services build into their systems easy ways for agents to tap into conversations between suspects. In a strange-bedfellows twist, officials from the F.B.I. and other agencies have found themselves the unlikely allies of groups like the American Civil Liberties Union, which have also argued that the new Internet services offered by cable companies should be under a regulatory regime like the phone system — but for different reasons. The A.C.L.U. prefers that approach because it would prohibit cable companies from discriminating against Internet service providers, and as such would assure a greater diversity of voices.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/technology/22VOIC.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Ex-C.I.A. Aides Ask for Leak Inquiry by Congress: "It is unusual for former intelligence officers to petition Congress on a matter like this. The unmasking of Ms. Plame is viewed within spy circles as an unforgivable breach of secrecy that must be exhaustively investigated and prosecuted, current and former intelligence officials say. Anger over the matter is especially acute because of the suspicion, under investigation by the Justice Department, that the disclosure may have been made by someone in the White House to punish Ms. Plames's husband, former Ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, for opposing administration policy on Iraq. Attorney General John Ashcroft disqualified himself last month from any involvement in the inquiry, and Justice Department officials have named Patrick J. Fitzgerald, the United States attorney in Chicago, as a special prosecutor in the case. Mr. Ashcroft's decision to step aside came after months of criticism from Democrats in the Senate who complained that the attorney general could not impartially lead an investigation that focused in part on his political patrons and friends at the White House. Justice Department officials have said almost nothing in public about the status of the investigation. But they have said they are focusing on conversations between White House officials and reporters that both sides might try to cast as private.…" The 10 former intelligence officers who signed the letter include respected intelligence analysts and retired case officers, including at least two, John McCavitt and William Wagner, who were C.I.A. station chiefs overseas. The former analysts include Larry C. Johnson, a former analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department's intelligence branch, and Ray Close and Ray McGovern, former C.I.A. analysts in the agency's Near East division. "The disclosure of Ms. Plame's name was an unprecedented and shameful event in American history and, in our professional judgment, has damaged U.S. national security, specifically the effectiveness of U.S. intelligence-gathering using human sources," the group wrote in the two-page letter.… "For this administration to run on a security platform and allow people in the administration to compromise the security of intelligence assets, I think is unconscionable," Mr. Johnson said. In addition to Mr. Hastert, the letter was sent to Representatives Tom DeLay, the House Republican leader; Nancy Pelosi, the House Democratic leader; Porter J. Goss, a Republican and chairman of the House Intelligence Committee; and Jane Harman, the top Democrat on the panel. A copy was made available to The New York Times by a Congressional official who received one. Current and former intelligence officials have felt particularly bruised in recent months as the C.I.A. and other agencies have come under criticism from some in Congress and the public as having underestimated the danger of attacks on the United States like those on Sept. 11, 2001, and having overestimated the dangers posed by Iraq's alleged stockpiles of illicit weapons. In the letter, the former officers called on Congress to act "for the good of the country" and said it was time to "send an unambiguous message that the intelligence officers tasked with collecting or analyzing intelligence must never be turned into political punching bags." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/22/politics/22INTE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Chicago Tribune | Democratic response to Bush's speech: "Democrats have an unwavering commitment to ensure that America's armed forces remain the best trained, best led, best equipped force for peace the world has ever known. Never before have we been more powerful militarily. But even the most powerful nation in history must bring other nations to our side to meet common dangers. The president's policies do not reflect that. He has pursued a go-it-alone foreign policy that leaves us isolated abroad and that steals the resources we need for education and health care here at home." The president led us into the Iraq war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition. Therefore, American taxpayers are bearing almost all the cost, a colossal $120 billion and rising. More importantly, American troops are enduring almost all the casualties -- tragically, 500 killed and thousands more wounded.…Instead of alienating our allies, let us work with them and international institutions so that together we can prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction and keep them out of the hands of terrorists. Instead of billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for politically connected firms such as Halliburton, and an insistence on American dominance in Iraq, let us share the burden and responsibility with others, so that together we can end the sense of American occupation and bring our troops home safely when their mission is completed. Instead of the diplomatic disengagement that almost destroyed the Middle East peace process and aggravated the danger posed by North Korea, let us seek to forge agreements and coalitions so that, together with others, we can address challenges before they threaten the security of the world. We must remain focused on the greatest threat to the security of the United States, the clear and present danger of terrorism. We know what we must do to protect America, but this Administration is failing to meet the challenge. Democrats have a better way to ensure our homeland security. One-hundred percent of containers coming into our ports or airports must be inspected. Today, only 3 percent are inspected. One-hundred percent of chemical and nuclear plants in the United States must have high levels of security. Today, the Bush administration has tolerated a much lower standard. One-hundred percent communication in real time is needed for our police officers, firefighters and all our first responders to prevent or respond to a terrorist attack. Today, the technology is there, but the resources are not. One-hundred percent of the enriched uranium and other material for weapons of mass destruction must be secured. Today, the Administration has refused to commit the resources necessary to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists. America will be far safer if we reduce the chances of a terrorist attack in one of our cities than if we diminish the civil liberties of our own people.… http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-bush-democrats-text,1,5098513.story?coll=chi-news-hed

If a hero like Max Cleland, can be made to appear unpatriotic, what will Bush do to an actual war criminal?

The Iowa Surprise:

Neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Edwards has yet gone through the kind of withering scrutiny that Dr. Dean endured in Iowa.

"John Kerry, who came in first last night, and John Edwards, who scored a surprising second, appeared to be the men voters thought looked most electable. That throws cold water, at least temporarily, on the long-held theory that primary voters favor candidates who are too far to the left or right to win in the fall. In this era of attack-dog politics, it's nice to have a moment of pragmatism. The fact that the two senators did so well in Iowa is, however, no proof that either would be the best Democratic nominee. Neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Edwards has yet gone through the kind of withering scrutiny that Dr. Dean endured in Iowa. Senator Kerry has at least demonstrated that he knows how to take some knocks and stage a comeback. The early months of his candidacy were a disaster of disorganization and a message void. But he regrouped and convinced Iowa voters that he had the military record and foreign affairs background necessary to take on President Bush. Senator Edwards, who once seemed doomed to spend the entire election season smiling sunnily and being ignored, is now going to find himself near the front of the pack, a place that Dr. Dean and Representative Gephardt found extremely uncomfortable." http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/20/opinion/20TUE2.html

The Iowa Surprise: "John Kerry, who came in first last night, and John Edwards, who scored a surprising second, appeared to be the men voters thought looked most electable. That throws cold water, at least temporarily, on the long-held theory that primary voters favor candidates who are too far to the left or right to win in the fall. In this era of attack-dog politics, it's nice to have a moment of pragmatism. The fact that the two senators did so well in Iowa is, however, no proof that either would be the best Democratic nominee. Neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Edwards has yet gone through the kind of withering scrutiny that Dr. Dean endured in Iowa. Senator Kerry has at least demonstrated that he knows how to take some knocks and stage a comeback. The early months of his candidacy were a disaster of disorganization and a message void. But he regrouped and convinced Iowa voters that he had the military record and foreign affairs background necessary to take on President Bush. Senator Edwards, who once seemed doomed to spend the entire election season smiling sunnily and being ignored, is now going to find himself near the front of the pack, a place that Dr. Dean and Representative Gephardt found extremely uncomfortable."

O'Neill Says Bush Was Set on Cutting Taxes, Too: "Mr. O'Neill has provoked a political firestorm with his contention that President Bush tilted toward war with Iraq almost as soon as he took office; the administration has vigorously denied that. But the former Treasury secretary described a similar pattern in Mr. Bush's push to cut taxes by at least $1.7 trillion over 10 years. Mr. O'Neill was openly skeptical about the need for big tax cuts and expressed concern about frittering away what were then huge budget surpluses. In hindsight, he may have been too sanguine about the economy's prospects in early 2001 and too dismissive of the value in cutting taxes as a way to soften the downturn. But Mr. O'Neill may also prove to have been prescient about other issues that are likely to have long-lasting significance. One was the idea of building 'triggers'' into Mr. Bush's tax cuts, provisions that would prevent some of the cuts from becoming effective if budget surpluses evaporated." Behind the scenes, Mr. O'Neill described how he quietly collaborated with Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, to press for such triggers. As recounted by Mr. O'Neill, the president and his top advisers wanted no part in such precautions. Though the Treasury secretary had one-on-one meetings with Mr. Bush almost once a week, Mr. O'Neill said the president listened to him in stony silence. And when Mr. Greenspan testified in favor of making future tax cuts conditional on the government's fiscal health, the White House balked. There were questions about whether the triggers would have done any good. Congress, in theory, operated under "pay-as-you-go'' rules in the last years of the Clinton administration, under which any spending growth above the rate of inflation was supposed to be offset by budget cuts or tax increases. But tax revenue soared so quickly as a result of the stock market bubble and the booming economy that spending increased much faster than inflation. Tax-cut advocates like R. Glenn Hubbard, then chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, argued that the tax cuts had to be predictable and permanent to achieve their intended impact. If people thought the cuts would expire, he and others argued, they would have less confidence about spending their extra cash. Shortly after the tax cuts, the government's seemingly inexhaustible surpluses evaporated. Revenues plunged as the economy slid into a recession and the stock market endured a three-year plunge that wiped out investment profits. Then came the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, followed by huge increases in spending on domestic security and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Projections by Congress and the Bush administration of surpluses of $5.6 trillion over 10 years, the outlook in 2001, have turned into estimated deficits of at least $1.4 trillion and possibly as much as $5 trillion. Mr. O'Neill strongly suggests that Mr. Bush worried little about budget deficits and did not want advice about them.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/business/yourmoney/18view.html?pagewanted=print&position=

Fixing Democracy: "The morning after the 2000 election, Americans woke up to a disturbing realization: our electoral system was too flawed to say with certainty who had won. Three years later, things may actually be worse. If this year's presidential election is at all close, there is every reason to believe that there will be another national trauma over who the rightful winner is, this time compounded by troubling new questions about the reliability of electronic voting machines. This is no way to run a democracy." Americans are rightly proud of their system of government, and eager to share it with the rest of the world. But the key principle behind it, that our leaders govern with the consent of the governed, requires a process that accurately translates the people's votes into political power. Too often, the system falls short. Throughout this presidential election year, we will be taking a close look at the mechanics of our democracy and highlighting aspects that cry out for reform. Among the key issues: Voting Technology An accurate count of the votes cast is the sine qua non of a democracy, but one that continues to elude us. As now-discredited punch-card machines are being abandoned, there has been a shift to electronic voting machines with serious reliability problems of their own. Many critics, including computer scientists, have been sounding the alarm: through the efforts of a hacker on the outside or a malicious programmer on the inside, or through purely technical errors, these machines could misreport the votes cast.… …There is a fast-growing list of elections in which electronic machines have demonstrably failed, or produced dubious but uncheckable results. One of the most recent occurred, fittingly enough, in Palm Beach and Broward Counties in Florida just this month. Touch-screen machines reported 137 blank ballots in a special election for a state House seat where the margin of victory was 12 votes. The second-place finisher charged that faulty machines might have cost him the election. "People do not go to the polls in a one-issue election and not vote," he said. But since the machines produce no paper record, there was no way to check.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/18/opinion/18SUN1.html?pagewanted=all&position=