Dean Raises $14 Million and Sets Record, Aides Say: "Howard Dean has raised at least $14.1 million in the fourth quarter, bringing his annual total to almost $40 million and setting what aides say is a one-year record for Democratic fund-raising in a presidential race. At the same time, aides to Gen. Wesley K. Clark's campaign said he had raised at least $10 million this quarter, putting him in a financial position to challenge Dr. Dean should he do well in next year's early primaries." When the books close Wednesday, the year-end deadline for reporting fund-raising, Dr. Dean and General Clark are expected to lead the quarterly list of nine Democratic candidates, all of whom have spent much of December scrambling to raise money before the start of primary voting next month. Though President Bush is expected to eclipse all the Democratic candidates, having raised at least $111 million so far this year, candidates are still making last-minute appeals to donors this week. Even Dr. Dean, with his strong final quarter, will be working until the last minute to increase his numbers. The campaign is sponsoring a nationwide conference call on Tuesday to more than 1,370 fund-raising house parties nationwide. The campaign's goal is to match its $14.8 million performance last quarter. Dr. Dean's campaign manager, Joe Trippi, said the additional money was needed because rivals were running one- and two-state strategies that allowed them to focus their resources, while Dr. Dean was running nationwide. "Everyone is against us," Mr. Trippi said. "They are all running against us in states we'd like to win." Dr. Dean is also taking advantage of an endorsement by former Vice President Al Gore, who will join him on the conference call and who sent an e-mail letter in Dr. Dean's behalf. "Think of the sonic boom that we can create in this race if every person who supports this campaign makes a contribution," Mr. Gore wrote.… http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/30/politics/campaigns/30DONA.html

American Politics: A New Movement Logs on to the Democratic Party and May Reshape It: "Even if Howard Dean's own electoral ambitions are not realized, he may take credit for ushering in an era of movement politics that could have implications for the Democrats, and Republicans, for years to come. More than any Democratic politician in years, Dr. Dean, the former governor of Vermont, has tapped into an intensifying bitterness among his party faithful toward the administration in power, and, through the Internet, has drawn a corps of citizens who had not paid heed to electoral politics. For Democrats, the payoff is that many of these new faces have views that fit the left wing of politics, the party's old-time base." At the core of the movement is an inchoate anger stirred by the war in Iraq and, more broadly, by the rightward tilt of many policies in the Bush administration. President Bush has become the personification of much of this anger, but the Dean movement also seems to be reviving some long-held Democratic Party sentiments about the role of government in the life of the nation. Through his assertive approach, or his clever tapping into the Internet, Dr. Dean has somehow put himself at the head of this parade. Democratic activists are now turning to him to answer - and remedy - all their concerns about the environment, social programs and the economy. But the more Dr. Dean is viewed as the mouthpiece for the left, the more perilous his quest could be. The party's pragmatists are fearful. The danger, they say, is that Dr. Dean's success means that the Democrats could abandon the delicate machinations of Bill Clinton that pushed the party to the middle - and helped them take the White House. It was the first time a Democrat had won two terms since Roosevelt.… Recognizing the Dean campaign's success, Republicans are already trying to compete by beefing up their own grass-roots operations and use of the Internet. But at least some of Dr. Dean's success is because he presents himself as the candidate who best embodies the "anti-Bush.'' By seizing on his opposition to the war, Dr. Dean is essentially repudiating Mr. Bush. Yet Dr. Dean is different from movement politicians of the past like Barry M. Goldwater and Ronald Reagan because they were far more ideological - and promoted an array of values and positions. By contrast, Dr. Dean resembles George McGovern and Eugene McCarthy, Democrats whose appeal was founded in their antiwar positions but could not sustain their support because they had little to say when the war ended. Dr. Dean's ideological underpinnings are less evident: many Democrats say he is the liberal in the field (the White House is certainly trying to) but politicians in Vermont say his record was middle of the road. If he does not win the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency, Dr. Dean could suffer the fate of Mr. McGovern and Mr. McCarthy because his appeal is so steeped in the issue of the war. On the other hand, Dr. Dean has the potential to lead an enduring movement because he is less of an establishment figure than those two former senators. There is also a practical advantage that past movement leaders did not have: the Internet could continue to be a backbone of his appeal. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/28/weekinreview/28dems.html

When Workers Die: U.S. Rarely Seeks Charges for Deaths in Workplace: "very one of their deaths was a potential crime. Workers decapitated on assembly lines, shredded in machinery, burned beyond recognition, electrocuted, buried alive — all of them killed, investigators concluded, because their employers willfully violated workplace safety laws. These deaths represent the very worst in the American workplace, acts of intentional wrongdoing or plain indifference that kill about 100 workers each year. They were not accidents. They happened because a boss removed a safety device to speed up production, or because a company ignored explicit safety warnings, or because a worker was denied proper protective gear. And for years, in news releases and Congressional testimony, senior officials at the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration have described these cases as intolerable outrages, "horror stories" that demanded the agency's strongest response. They have repeatedly pledged to press wherever possible for criminal charges against those responsible. These promises have not been kept. " Over a span of two decades, from 1982 to 2002, OSHA investigated 1,242 of these horror stories mdash; instances in which the agency itself concluded that workers had died because of their employer's "willful" safety violations. Yet in 93 percent of those cases, OSHA declined to seek prosecution, an eight-month examination of workplace deaths by The New York Times has found. What is more, having avoided prosecution once, at least 70 employers willfully violated safety laws again, resulting in scores of additional deaths. Even these repeat violators were rarely prosecuted. OSHA's reluctance to seek prosecution, The Times found, persisted even when employers had been cited before for the very same safety violation. It persisted even when the violations caused multiple deaths, or when the victims were teenagers. And it persisted even where reviews by administrative judges found abundant proof of willful wrongdoing. Behind that reluctance, current and former OSHA officials say, is a bureaucracy that works at every level to thwart criminal referrals. They described a bureaucracy that fails to reward, and sometimes penalizes, those who push too hard for prosecution, where aggressive enforcement is suffocated by endless layers of review, where victims' families are frozen out but companies adeptly work the rules in their favor. "A simple lack of guts and political will," said John T. Phillips, a former regional OSHA administrator in Kansas City and Boston. "You try to reason why something is criminal, and it never flies." In fact, OSHA has increasingly helped employers, particularly large corporations, avoid the threat of prosecution altogether. Since 1990, the agency has quietly downgraded 202 fatality cases from "willful" to "unclassified," a vague term favored by defense lawyers in part because it virtually forecloses the possibility of prosecution.… http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/22/national/22OSHA.html?pagewanted=all&position=

On the Web, an Amateur Audience Creates Anti-Bush Ads: "When the Web-based political group MoveOn.org announced a contest in October for homemade commercials challenging the Bush administration (the winner to be shown on television during the week of the State of the Union address) grass-roots America proved a willing and eager advertising agency." Thirty-second spots poured in by the hundreds in e-mail attachments to MoveOn.org, which has already shown that the Internet can be a battering ram for political activism by organizing protests against the invasion of Iraq. Last week, the group posted 1,017 of the amateur commercials on a Web site (www.bushin30seconds.org), asking viewers to pick their favorites. In the first hour of polling on Wednesday, more than 5,700 votes were logged. So many people visited the site that MoveOn, experiencing bandwidth problems, limited the curious to 20 ads a day. Next month the top vote-getters will be shown to a panel of left-leaning celebrity judges including Moby, Michael Moore, Janeane Garofalo, Margaret Cho and Gus Van Sant, with one or more winning entries to be broadcast as paid advertisements in Washington, D.C., in potential swing states or perhaps nationally. What the cascade of entries demonstrates is that the home-movie revolution made possible by inexpensive digital camcorders and off-the-shelf software has elevated the United States from merely being a nation of wedding videographers.… www.bushin30seconds.org http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/21/fashion/21MOVE.html?pagewanted=all&position=

It's Pork on the Hill: "Like most other members of Congress, Representative Jim Gibbons, Republican of Nevada, tries to do what he can for the folks back home. So when the House passed a catchall spending bill this month, Mr. Gibbons wasted no time in announcing that he had secured millions of dollars for Nevada, including $6 million for a bus terminal, $2 million for a truck climbing lane and $1.6 million for drinking water improvements." But it was a lesser appropriation — $225,000 to repair a swimming pool in Sparks, Nev., his hometown — that got Mr. Gibbons in hot water. The 59-year-old congressman confessed that he sought the money because he had always felt guilty about clogging the pool's drain with tadpoles when he was 10 years old. "Congressman Gibbons is using taxpayer dollars to repay his debt to society," Brian M. Reidl, a federal budget analyst at the Heritage Foundation, a research organization, said in describing the pool money as his "favorite pork story." Mr. Gibbons, who defends the project as "very meritorious," is far from the only lawmaker riding the pork gravy train this year. The spending bill, called an omnibus, is stuffed with an estimated 7,000 special interest provisions, from $50 million for an indoor rain forest in Iowa to $150,000 for a stop light and traffic improvements in Briarcliff Manor, N.Y. If the Senate approves it, total spending on pet projects — which has more than doubled in the last five years — will reach roughly $23 billion this year, the most ever, according to watchdog groups that track federal spending. Pork barrel projects are a time-honored tradition in Washington. But observers of the Congressional efforts are surprised, and in some cases dismayed, by the size of the special-interest projects this year, at a time when the federal deficit is rising and Republicans, who fashion themselves as fiscally conservative, run both houses of Congress. The spending bill, which the Senate will take up in January, treats the home states of powerful appropriators especially well. Alaska, home to Senator Ted Stevens, the Republican chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, would reap millions under the measure, including $1 million for the Anchorage Museum and $1 million for the Tongass Coast Aquarium. Florida, the home state of Representative C. W. Bill Young, a Republican who is Mr. Stevens's counterpart in the House, also stands to gain millions. Every state — indeed nearly every Congressional district, no matter Democratic or Republican — is the recipient of one pork project or another. The measure includes $200,000 for the University of Hawaii to produce a documentary on the Kalahari Bushmen, $220,000 to renovate a blueberry research center at the University of Maine and, in a provision Senator Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader, called "most ironic," $500,000 for the "Exercise in Hard Choices" program at the University of Akron, which examines how Congress makes budget decisions.… http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/20/politics/20PORK.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Electronic Voting: "Electronic voting has garnered significant attention in recent months. Controversy abounds over whether e-voting machines are secure and reliable, while strong movements toward expanding their use have arisen. India, for instance, announced in July 2003 that it would use exclusively electronic polls in its future elections. This trend and its associated security risks are examined in this Topic in Depth." The NSDL Scout Report for Mathematics Engineering and Technology-- Volume 2, Number 25 Topic in Depth 1. The Free E-Democracy Project
http://www.free-project.org/learn/
2. Caltech-MIT/Voting Technology Project [pdf, RealOne Player]
http://web.mit.edu/voting/
3. Electronic Voting and Counting [pdf]
http://www.elections.act.gov.au/Elecvote.html
4. The Open Voting Consortium
http://www.openvotingconsortium.org/
5. Election Reform and Electronic Voting Systems (DREs): Analysis of Security Issues [pdf]
http://www.epic.org/privacy/voting/crsreport.pdf
6. Electronic Voting: What You Need to Know
http://www.truthout.org/docs_03/102003A.shtml
7. Can Voting Machines Be Trusted?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2003/11/11/politics/main583042.shtml From The NSDL Scout Report for Math, Engineering, & Technology, Copyright Internet Scout Project 1994-2003. http://www.scout.wisc.edu/ http://scout.wisc.edu/Reports/NSDL/MET/2003/met-031219-topicindepth.php#1

Remember 'Weapons of Mass Destruction'? For Bush, They Are a Nonissue:

"This was a pre-emptive war, and the rationale was that there was an imminent threat," said Senator Bob Graham of Florida, a Democrat who has said that by elevating Iraq to the most dangerous menace facing the United States, the administration unwisely diverted resources from fighting Al Qaeda and other terrorists.

"On Tuesday, with Mr. Hussein in American custody and polls showing support for the White House's Iraq policy rebounding, Mr. Bush suggested that he no longer saw much distinction between the possibilities. 'So what's the difference?' he responded at one point as he was pressed on the topic during an interview by Diane Sawyer of ABC News. To critics of the war, there is a big difference. They say that the administration's statements that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons that it could use on the battlefield or turn over to terrorists added an urgency to the case for immediate military action that would have been lacking if Mr. Hussein were portrayed as just developing the banned weapons." The overwhelming vote in Congress last year to authorize the use of force against Iraq would have been closer "but for the fact that the president had so explicitly said that there were weapons of mass destruction that posed an imminent threat to citizens of the United States," Mr. Graham said in an interview on Wednesday. As early as last spring, Mr. Bush suggested that the Iraqis might have dispersed their biological and chemical weapons so widely that they would be extremely difficult to find. And some weapons experts have suggested that Mr. Hussein may have destroyed banned weapons that he had in the early 1990's but left in place the capacity to produce more. This week, at a news conference on Monday and in the ABC interview on Tuesday, Mr. Bush's answers to questions on the subject continued a gradual shift in the way he has addressed the topic, from the immediacy of the threat to an assertion that no matter what, the world is better off without Mr. Hussein in power. Where once Mr. Bush and his top officials asserted unambiguously that Mr. Hussein had the weapons at the ready, their statements now are often far more couched, reflecting the fact that no weapons have been found — "yet," as Mr. Bush was quick to interject during the interview. In trying to build public and international support for toppling Mr. Hussein, the administration cited, with different emphasis at different times, the banned weapons, links between the Iraqi leader and terrorist organizations, a desire to liberate the Iraqi people and a policy of bringing democracy to the Middle East. When it came to describing the weapons program, Mr. Bush never hedged before the war. "If we know Saddam Hussein has dangerous weapons today — and we do — does it make any sense for the world to wait to confront him as he grows even stronger and develops even more dangerous weapons?" Mr. Bush asked during a speech in Cincinnati in October 2002. In the weeks after the fall of Baghdad in April, the White House was equally explicit. "One of the reasons we went to war was because of their possession of weapons of mass destruction," Ari Fleischer, then the White House spokesman, told reporters on May 7. "And nothing has changed on that front at all." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/18/politics/18PREX.html

Advertising: Two Unions Criticize Ads for Attacks Against Dean: "Two labor unions that provided financing for a shadowy Democratic political group running tough commercials against former Gov. Howard Dean of Vermont criticized the advertising campaign yesterday, and one said it might ask for its money back. Both unions, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers and the Laborers' International Union of North America, have endorsed Representative Richard A. Gephardt, who said yesterday that he knew nothing about the group running the commercials." Rick Sloan, a spokesman for the machinists, said the union donated $50,000 to the group, Americans for Jobs, Health Care and Progressive Values. Mr. Sloan said the group's treasurer, David Jones, solicited the money by saying it would pay for "issues ads." The union, Mr. Sloan said, believed the group's commercials would focus on economic and health care policies. But in the end, he said, the advertisements were not what the union had bargained for, especially the latest one, in which an announcer questions Dr. Dean's national security qualifications as a camera zooms in on a magazine cover showing Osama bin Laden's face. "Osama bin Laden has nothing at all to do with this campaign; it's a travesty," Mr. Sloan said. "We think the ads are despicable and if it was up to me, we'd ask for a refund." He said the union's leadership had not yet had a chance to meet and discuss requesting its money back. Noting Mr. Gephardt's slippage in some polls since the group began running advertisements against Dr. Dean two weeks ago, Mr. Sloan said, "They are doing more damage to Dick Gephardt than any of his opponents could have hoped to have done or dreamed of doing." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/17/politics/campaigns/17ATTA.html

ZDNet AnchorDesk: How to stop spam? Don't look to legislation: "After months of debate, Congress has approved an antispam bill, known as the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act, or the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. President Bush has indicated he will sign it before the end of the year. That sounds like good news for anyone who uses e-mail. But once you look beyond the spin, you'll find there's much less here than meets the eye. " IN A NUTSHELL, CAN-SPAM prohibits the use of fraudulent e-mail headers, the use of robotic means to collect e-mail addresses from Web sites, and the sending of unsolicited adult advertising. It requires e-mail marketers to provide a working URL in messages so recipients can remove themselves from any future mailings. Down the road, the law also calls for the creation of a federal Do Not Spam list, much like the FTC's Do Not Call list, which gives you the ability to remove your phone number from telemarketers' databases. The law also prohibits unwanted commercial messages via mobile services on mobile phones and PDAs.� SO WHY DID the attorneys general from California, Kansas, Maryland, Nevada, Texas, Vermont, and Washington urge the House of Representatives to vote against the act? Because CAN-SPAM ignores and supercedes any existing or pending junk e-mail laws in 30 states--including the toughest, California's--with a decidedly weaker federal law. The state laws, which are now obsolete, were more stringent than the federal one in several ways. For example, the laws in Utah and California would allow recipients to sue spammers who use false e-mail headers. One provision of a California law would even use the penalties claimed from such cases to help fund the state's high-tech crime task forces. However, under CAN-SPAM, while recipients can still sue spammers, the burden of proof has been extended beyond showing that the e-mail header was false and now requires that plaintiffs show the sender also knew it was false. It's the opinion of several state attorneys general that this is a much higher standard of proof than other consumer protection laws, and that spam recipients will now tie up the legal system with new cases without being able to stop unsolicited e-mails in the meantime. That is what the direct-marketing associations wanted: judicial gridlock. ANOTHER SHORTCOMING of the law: According to Spamhaus.org, an antispam clearinghouse, CAN-SPAM allows 23 million U.S. businesses to spam U.S. e-mail addresses legally as long as they also provide a means for users to opt-out of future mailings. It turns out the direct marketers got their way this time around. With telemarketing restricted by the Do Not Call list, direct-marketing associations now see e-mail advertising as their last and best option, since automatically sending hundreds of thousands of e-mails is much cheaper than maintaining call centers. These groups made the rounds in Washington D.C. and managed to get this muted federal antispam bill passed quickly. For the legislators in Congress, CAN-SPAM allows them to say, "Look, we did something about spam," when, in reality, the act does little to actually solve the problem.� http://reviews-zdnet.com.com/AnchorDesk/4520-7297_16-5113118.html?tag=ns

New Economy: Considering Computer Voting: "HIGH-TECH voting is getting a low-tech backstop: paper. Most new voting machines are basically computers with touch screens instead of keyboards. Their makers promise that the new machines will simplify voting and forever end the prospect of pregnant and hanging chads. But as the market for computerized voting equipment has intensified, a band of critics has emerged, ranging from the analytical to the apoplectic." The opponents of the current machines, along with the people who make them and election officials who buy them, gathered to spar in Gaithersburg, a Washington suburb, last Wednesday and Thursday, at a symposium optimistically titled, "Building Trust and Confidence in Voting Systems." The critics complained that the companies were putting democracy into a mystery box, and that the computer code for the systems was not written to standards that ensure security. Critics are uneasy about the major vendors' political ties, and they worry about what a malevolent insider or a hacker could do to an election. But above all, they complain that few of the new machines allow voters to verify their votes, whether with a paper receipt or another method, an idea favored by computer scientists including David L. Dill of Stanford University. The companies generally respond that the lever-style, mechanical voting machines offer no such backup, either. The critics counter that the computerized systems are the first to need voter verification methods. Now a growing number of election officials and politicians seem to be agreeing with the skeptics. Last week, Nevada said it was buying voting machines for the entire state, and it demanded paper receipts for all voters. Nevada Secretary of State Dean Heller said he received an overwhelming message from voters that they did not trust electronic voting. "Frankly, they think the process is working against them, rather than working for them," Mr. Heller, a Republican, said. Last month, the California secretary of state, Kevin Shelley said that his state would require all touch-screen voting machines to provide a "voter-verified paper audit trail." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/15/technology/15neco.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Divided Court Says Government Can Ban 'Soft Money': "A 5-to-4 majority upheld most provisions of the McCain-Feingold Law, finding that the law's ban on soft-money donations was not an unconstitutional curb on free speech, as its opponents have argued, but rather a legitimate response to perceptions that big money has stained the political system. The court also upheld two other pillars of the law: a ban on the solicitation of soft money by federal candidates, and a prohibition against political advertisements by special interest groups in the weeks just before an election. 'The idea that large contributions to a national party can corrupt or create the appearance of corruption of federal candidates and officeholders is neither novel nor implausible,' the court said in a summary of its 298-page decision as it alluded to debates about the potent mix of money and politics over the years." Today's decision means that the candidates for president, the House and Senate can run their campaigns under the fund-raising rules laid down in 2002, when Congress passed the McCain-Feingold Law after years of bitter argument over how political contributions should be regulated. (The law, formally the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002, is usually known by its chief Senate sponsors, John McCain, Republican of Arizona, and Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin.) "We are under no illusion," Justices John Paul Stevens and Sandra Day O'Connor wrote for the majority. "Money, like water, will always find an outlet. What problems will arise, and how Congress will respond, are concerns for another day." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/10/national/10CND-SCOT.html?hp=&pagewanted=all&position=

Chicago Tribune | Gore Endorses Dean for Party Nomination: "Gore said Dean 'really is the only candidate who has been able to inspire at the grass-roots level all over the country.' He said the former Vermont governor also was the only Democratic candidate who made the correct judgment about the Iraq war. 'I realized it's only one of the issues, but my friends, this nation has never in our two centuries and more made a worse foreign policy mistake,' Gore told the Iowa crowd. " http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/sns-ap-gore-dean,1,6428598.story

Pentagon and Bogus News: All Is Denied: "Early last year Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld disbanded the Pentagon's Office of Strategic Influence after it became known that the office was considering plans to provide false news items to unwitting foreign journalists to influence policymakers and public sentiment abroad. But a couple of months ago, the Pentagon quietly awarded a $300,000 contract to SAIC, a major defense consultant, to study how the Defense Department could design an 'effective strategic influence' campaign to combat global terror, according to an internal Pentagon document. " Sound familiar? Senior Pentagon officials said Thursday that they were caught unawares by the contract and insisted its language was a "poor choice of words" by a low-level staffer. They said the work did not reflect any backdoor effort to resurrect the discredited office and was merely a study to understand Al Qaeda better and find ways to combat it. "We are not recreating that office," said Thomas O'Connell, the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict, the policy arm of the Pentagon that deals with the military's most secretive operators and whose staff wrote the document. But some critics of the former office voiced skepticism, saying that the contract amounted to a veiled attempt to create a low-budget copy of its ill-fated predecessor. A spokesman for SAIC referred all questions to the Pentagon.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/05/politics/05STRA.html

Op-Ed Columnist: Hack the Vote: "You don't have to believe in conspiracy to worry that partisans will take advantage of an insecure, unverifiable voting system. Inviting Bush supporters to a fund-raiser, the host wrote, "I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president next year." No surprise there. But Walden O'Dell � who says that he wasn't talking about his business operations � happens to be the chief executive of Diebold Inc., whose touch-screen voting machines are in increasingly widespread use across the United States. For example, Georgia � where Republicans scored spectacular upset victories in the 2002 midterm elections � relies exclusively on Diebold machines. To be clear, though there were many anomalies in that 2002 vote, there is no evidence that the machines miscounted. But there is also no evidence that the machines counted correctly. You see, Diebold machines leave no paper trail. Representative Rush Holt of New Jersey, who has introduced a bill requiring that digital voting machines leave a paper trail and that their software be available for public inspection, is occasionally told that systems lacking these safeguards haven't caused problems. 'How do you know?' he asks. What we do know about Diebold does not inspire confidence. The details are technical, but they add up to a picture of a company that was, at the very least, extremely sloppy about security, and may have been trying to cover up product defects." Early this year Bev Harris, who is writing a book on voting machines, found Diebold software � which the company refuses to make available for public inspection, on the grounds that it's proprietary � on an unprotected server, where anyone could download it. (The software was in a folder titled "rob-Georgia.zip.") The server was used by employees of Diebold Election Systems to update software on its machines. This in itself was an incredible breach of security, offering someone who wanted to hack into the machines both the information and the opportunity to do so. An analysis of Diebold software by researchers at Johns Hopkins and Rice Universities found it both unreliable and subject to abuse. A later report commissioned by the state of Maryland apparently reached similar conclusions. (It's hard to be sure because the state released only a heavily redacted version.) Meanwhile, leaked internal Diebold e-mail suggests that corporate officials knew their system was flawed, and circumvented tests that would have revealed these problems. The company hasn't contested the authenticity of these documents; instead, it has engaged in legal actions to prevent their dissemination.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/opinion/02KRUG.html

Bush Aides Say Attacks Won't Scare Allies Into Leaving Iraq:

Meanwhile, a toy gun can shut down congress. A radar glitch, the White House

"But all was not smooth on Monday after the latest attacks, and officials said the United States was not especially pleased with the latest move by the United Nations secretary general, Kofi Annan, in setting up a meeting in New York on Iraq with Security Council and Arab diplomats." Secretary Powell has been stepping up the pressure on Mr. Annan to appoint a special personal representative in Iraq to replace Sergio Vieira de Mello, who was killed last summer. But United Nations diplomats say they doubt that Mr. Annan will move quickly, in part because of anxiety in the United Nations ranks. The fear at the United Nations, said one diplomat there, is that the attacks against the latest targets � coming on top of earlier attacks against Jordanian, Italian and United Nations offices � appeared well organized, as if they were an extension of the defense of Iraq by Saddam Hussein. "You may have toppled the statue, but you didn't take out the wiring that he set up to organize these attacks," said one diplomat, referring to Mr. Hussein. Some diplomats cautioned that although leaders of the nations fighting with the United States in Iraq were standing firm, the same could not be guaranteed of the people in their countries, where the attacks have had a huge and devastating psychological impact. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/politics/02DIPL.html

Self-Appointed Israeli and Palestinian Negotiators Offer a Plan for Middle East Peace: "'Our critics say that officials should make such agreements, not representatives of civil society,' Mr. Rabbo said. 'We could not agree more. But what can we do if officials do not meet, if governments do not negotiate? We can't wait and watch as the future of our two nations slides deeper into catastrophe.' [The full text of the Geneva Accord is available at www.nad-plo.org/cigeneva.php or www.heskem.org.il/Heskem_en.asp] " http://www.nytimes.com/2003/12/02/international/europe/02PEAC.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Broad Bills Stuffed With Lawmakers' Pet Items: "In public, members of Congress have spent hundreds of hours debating the future of Medicare and the need for a national energy policy. Behind the scenes, they have spent even more time working on little-known provisions of the legislation that would benefit specific health care providers and energy companies." Tucked inside the Medicare bill is an assortment of provisions that have nothing to do with providing prescription drug benefits to the elderly. The energy bill and the annual spending bills for federal agencies are also stuffed with pet projects, intended to win votes for the legislation. Congress gave final approval to the Medicare bill on Tuesday, but is still wrestling with the energy measure. The two bills � top priorities for President Bush and the Republican leaders of Congress � provided convenient vehicles for spending narrowly focused on special interests. Hundreds of health care providers and colleges now receive such largess, and the numbers have soared in recent years.� A provision benefiting a specific hospital in Tennessee was added to the Medicare bill at the last minute in an effort to get the vote of Representative Harold E. Ford Jr., Democrat of Tennessee.� The Medicare bill also increases payments for doctors in Alaska for a cancer treatment known as brachytherapy and for health maintenance organizations that have been dropping out of the Medicare market. The energy bill includes $1 billion for a new nuclear reactor in Idaho, $800 million in federal loan guarantees for a coal gasification plant in Minnesota and tens of millions of dollars in subsidies for timber companies to log national forests for energy production. Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said "parochial projects" were siphoning money away from higher priorities at many agencies. Timothy M. Westmoreland, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center, said: "Big bills become larded with whatever bait it takes to get a majority vote. A lot of money in the Medicare bill is spent on things that have nothing to do with a prescription drug benefit." For decades, it has been common practice for lawmakers to designate money for specific military bases, post offices and waterways. In recent years, they have funneled increasing amounts to specific hospitals, medical schools and health care projects. Data collected by The Chronicle of Higher Education shows that spending on pork barrel projects at colleges and universities topped $2 billion this year for the first time. In a recent report, the Democratic staff of the House Appropriations Committee said the number of projects designated for assistance under the health and education spending bill nearly quadrupled, to 1,850, in the last three years.� Just before the Senate gave final approval to the Medicare bill on Tuesday, Dr. Frist displayed a chart listing 358 organizations that supported it. Members of many of those groups stand to benefit from the bill and participated in a lobbying campaign coordinated by Susan B. Hirschmann, a former chief of staff to Tom DeLay of Texas, now the House Republican leader. The push for special interest provisions to ensure passage of the Medicare and energy bills led, in some cases, to new variations on the traditional relationships between lobbyists and lawmakers. Lobbyists have long tried to influence members of Congress. But increasingly members of Congress have put pressure on lobbyists to support their legislative priorities. E-mail messages obtained from recipients provide details of such reverse lobbying. On Sept. 12, Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa, the chairman of the Finance Committee, sent a "wake-up call" to hospital executives around the country, asking for their help in fighting cuts proposed by the House. "I met with Washington representatives from the American Hospital Association, the Federation of American Hospitals, the Catholic Health Association, the Association of American Medical Colleges and the National Association of Public Hospitals," Mr. Grassley wrote. "I asked them to stand with me in opposing these cuts." Senator Grassley was successful. Hospitals were spared, and rural hospitals received substantial increases in payments.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/27/politics/27LOBB.html?pagewanted=all&position=

Chicago Tribune | Governor to punish big drug companies: "With Congress moving to undermine his push to buy prescription drugs from Canada, Gov. Rod Blagojevich on Tuesday said he would seek to punish big drug companies that fought his initiative by making it more difficult or expensive for state workers to buy their drugs if safe alternatives are available."

Firms' medicines to be off state list

The five pharmaceutical firms impacted by the decision, which have been limiting supplies of their pills to Canada, criticized Blagojevich and said the governor was playing politics with an issue that affects public safety. The pharmaceutical industry's trade association also suggested the governor's insistence on punishing the companies could hamper another effort he is pushing to make prescription drugs more affordable--a consumer-discount club aimed at bringing lower-priced drugs to seniors. The club, which is set to begin operations Jan. 1, is designed to allow senior citizens to join forces with state agencies that now buy $1.8 billion in medicines, creating an entity with massive buying power that could have the clout to command price breaks. The state still must negotiate those savings with drug companies, and critics have questioned whether that effort could be impeded by Blagojevich's Canadian drug purchase campaign, which has antagonized the pharmaceutical industry. "He should give the buying club a chance to work, and it hasn't even been implemented yet," said Jeff Trewhitt, spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, a drug-industry lobby. Blagojevich said he doubted drug companies would retaliate. "They're not going to cut their nose to spite their face when they run the risk of losing even more business in Illinois," Blagojevich said. Though the drug buying club could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of seniors, Blagojevich's initiative unveiled Tuesday deals only with drugs for state employees and retirees, inmates in state prisons and patients at state mental facilities. Still, it is the Democratic governor's latest effort in a battle to seize the initiative on a controversial issue with compelling appeal to voters. Because Canada has price controls on medicine, Blagojevich has said the state could save $91 million if the U.S. Food and Drug Administration allowed Illinois to buy prescriptions north of the border. The FDA, however, has said the governor's savings claims are exaggerated and that the agency cannot certify the safety of medication coming from Canada, which is often ordered over the Internet. Medicare reform legislation passed by Congress Tuesday did not include a provision sought by many Democrats and fought by big drug companies that would have allowed states and cities to import cheap Canadian drugs. "It should have been in the bill," Blagojevich argued. "It's a missed opportunity." As the debate has raged in recent months, the five companies Blagojevich has targeted chose to begin limiting drug supplies to Canada, saying it was done to prevent Canada from becoming a middleman supplying drugs to the U.S. while endangering the drug supply for Canadians. According to Blagojevich's new plan, the state will remove from its preferred drugs list name-brand pharmaceuticals made by the firms when safe equivalents are available. The five companies--AstraZeneca, Eli Lilly, GlaxoSmithKline, Pfizer and Wyeth--currently make up between 20 and 25 percent of the market share in Illinois.� http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/chi-0311260109nov26,1,4720596.story

Op-Ed Columnist: The Uncivil War: "One of the problems with media coverage of this administration,' wrote Eric Alterman in The Nation, 'is that it requires bad manners.' He's right. There's no nice way to explain how the administration uses cooked numbers to sell its tax cuts, or how its arrogance and gullibility led to the current mess in Iraq." So it was predictable that the administration and its allies, no longer very successful at claiming that questioning the president is unpatriotic, would use appeals to good manners as a way to silence critics. Not, mind you, that Emily Post has taken over the Republican Party: the same people who denounce liberal incivility continue to impugn the motives of their opponents. Smart conservatives admit that their own side was a bit rude during the Clinton years. But now, they say, they've learned better, and it's those angry liberals who have a problem. The reality, however, is that they can only convince themselves that liberals have an anger problem by applying a double standard. When Ann Coulter expresses regret that Timothy McVeigh didn't blow up The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal laughs it off as "tongue-in-cheek agitprop." But when Al Franken writes about lies and lying liars in a funny, but carefully researched book, he's degrading the discourse. More important, the Bush administration � which likes to portray itself as the inheritor of Reagan-like optimism � actually has a Nixonian habit of demonizing its opponents.� http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/25/opinion/25KRUG.html

Medicare Debate Turns to Pricing of Drug Benefits: "With Congress poised for final action on a major Medicare bill this week, some of the fiercest debate is focused on a section of the bill that prohibits the government from negotiating lower drug prices for the 40 million people on Medicare. That provision epitomizes much of the bill, which relies on insurance companies and private health plans to manage the new drug benefit. They could negotiate with drug companies, but the government, with much greater purchasing power, would be forbidden to do so." Supporters of the provision say it is necessary to prevent the government from imposing price controls that could stifle innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. Critics say the restriction would force the government and Medicare beneficiaries to spend much more for drugs than they should. The House passed the Medicare bill on Saturday by a vote of 220 to 215, after an all-night session and an extraordinary three-hour roll call. President Bush and House Republican leaders persuaded a few wayward conservatives to vote for the bill, which calls for the biggest expansion of Medicare since its creation in 1965. In the Senate, debate continued on Sunday, with Democrats asserting that the bill would severely undermine the traditional Medicare program. Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, said he would lead a filibuster against the measure. Democrats acknowledged they did not have the votes to sustain a filibuster. But they said they would use points of order to slow the legislation, whose passage is a priority for President Bush.� No provision has been mentioned more often in Congressional debate than the section that prohibits the government from interfering in negotiations with drug companies. Democrats have repeatedly asserted that Medicare could provide more generous drug benefits if, like other big buyers, it took advantage of its market power to secure large discounts. But many Republicans have expressed alarm at the possibility that federal officials might negotiate drug prices. The Medicare program, they say, dwarfs other purchasers, and the government is unlike other customers because it could give itself the power to set prices by statute or regulation, just as it sets the rates paid to doctors and hospitals for treating Medicare patients. Under the bill, the government would subsidize a new type of insurance policy known as a prescription drug plan. "In order to promote competition," the bill says, the secretary of health and human services "may not interfere with the negotiations between drug manufacturers and pharmacies and prescription drug plan sponsors, and may not require a particular formulary or institute a price structure for the reimbursement" of drugs.� Representative Tom Allen, Democrat of Maine, said it struck him as absurd that "the government will not be able to negotiate lower prices" for the drugs on which it plans to spend $400 billion in the next decade. "The bill will allow the pharmaceutical industry to continue charging America's seniors the highest prices in the world," Mr. Allen said. Representative Peter A. DeFazio, Democrat of Oregon, said, "We could provide a much more meaningful benefit if we negotiated lower prices as other nations have done." Representative Rahm Emanuel, Democrat of Illinois, said: "We could bring down drug prices if we allowed the secretary of health and human services to negotiate on behalf of 40 million seniors. That is what Sam's Club does." http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/24/politics/24MEDI.html?pagewanted=all&position=