Interest Groups Are Gearing Up for High-Stakes Tax Cut Fight The organizing goes far beyond the old-fashioned "Gucci Gulch" lobbying for particular corporate tax breaks, and is drawing groups as far- flung as the Food Marketing Institute and the N.A.A.C.P. into the tax cut debate. The Congressional struggle could well turn into the kind of epic fight for public opinion that took place over President Bill Clinton's proposal for national health insurance. "This is the first test," said Grover Norquist, the head of Americans for Tax Reform, one of the conservative groups joining the fray. "If Bush gets his $1.6 trillion, two things happen � his stature and power in town is greatly enhanced and it makes the rest of his agenda more likely to pass." Promising field operations against the tax cut all across the country, Ralph G. Neas, of the liberal People for the American Way, said that in swaying Congress, "the most important thing is having the voters outside of Washington � the people who vote � register the opposition to the tax cut." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/24/politics/24LOBB.html?pagewanted=all

Federal Panel Warns Bush of Social Security Problems Beneficiaries must wait two to four hours for assistance at many field offices and often cannot obtain accurate information by telephone, the panel said. Social Security's disability programs, which provide assistance to 10 million people at a cost of $90 billion a year, are in chaos, swamped with a backlog of claims and litigation, the panel said. Eligibility decisions are not made in a uniform or consistent manner, the panel said, and two-thirds of the people who challenge the denial of disability benefits prevail on appeal, overturning the initial decisions of the Social Security Administration. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/19/politics/19BENE.html?pagewanted=all

Malcolm X Conference Audio proceedings of the conference Malcolm X: Radical Tradition and Legacy of Struggle May 1990, Borough of Manhattan Community College, New York City http://www.murchisoncenter.org/malcolm/

Under orders from Congress, the I.R.S. is giving particular attention to returns filed by the working poor�

Rate of All I.R.S. Audits Falls; Poor Face Intense Scrutiny The chance of an individual tax return's being audited last year was less than one in 200, down from one in 112 in 1999 and one in 60 in 1996, new data and revised figures for last year show. Even those figures significantly overstate the risk of an audit for most taxpayers. That is because, under orders from Congress, the I.R.S. is giving particular attention to returns filed by the working poor who apply for a special tax credit. Such returns accounted for 44 percent of all audits. Among taxpayers who did not apply for that credit, the audit rate last year was just one in 370. For taxpayers who make more than $100,000, and who pay 62 percent of all individual income taxes, the audit rate last year was slightly less than one in 100, down from one in 50 in 1998 and down from one in 9 in 1988. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/16/business/16AUDI.html?pagewanted=ally

Dozens of Rich Americans Join in Fight to Retain the Estate Tax Some 120 wealthy Americans, including Warren E. Buffett, George Soros and the father of William H. Gates, are urging Congress not to repeal taxes on estates and gifts. President Bush has proposed phasing out those taxes by 2009. But a petition drive being organized here by Mr. Gates's father, William H. Gates Sr., argues that "repealing the estate tax would enrich the heirs of America's millionaires and billionaires while hurting families who struggle to make ends meet." The billions of dollars in government revenue lost "will inevitably be made up either by increasing taxes on those less able to pay or by cutting Social Security, Medicare, environmental protection and many other government programs so important to our nation's continued well-being," the petition says. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/14/politics/14ESTA.html?pagewanted=all

Medical Industry Lobbies to Rein In New Patients Privacy Rules Just weeks before far-reaching new rules to protect the privacy of people's medical records go into force, the health care industry is lobbying the Bush administration to delay, change or kill the regulations. Hospitals, insurance companies, health maintenance organizations and medical researchers said the rules, issued in the final weeks of the Clinton administration, would impose costly burdens. But members of Congress said the privacy protections, while they went further than many lawmakers expected when Congress asked to have them written, were immensely popular with consumers and would be hard to reverse at this point. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/politics/12PRIV.html?pagewanted=all

Some Fault Bush Tax Cuts for Lean Days in Texas While President Bush is lobbying Congress to pass his $1.6 trillion tax cut proposal in Washington, lawmakers in his home state are struggling with budget problems that some critics are tracing to tax cuts Mr. Bush passed here as governor. For the last week, state legislators have grown increasingly testy about budget projections showing that the state will have little, if any, money to spare. Lawmakers in both parties are talking of possible cutbacks after the projections showed that the state's once-healthy surplus might be nearly erased by budget overruns, particularly from health care costs like Medicaid. "There's no doubt in my mind that George W. Bush's tax cuts have put us in the situation we're in right now," said State Senator Mario Gallegos, a Houston Democrat who regularly criticized Mr. Bush in the presidential campaign. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/politics/12TEXA.html?pagewanted=all

Census Officials Ponder Adjustments Crucial to Redistricting Census officials have been tight- lipped about what the panel will recommend, though some experts have said they expect it to find that the net undercount in 2000 will be smaller than in 1990, when it was put at about 1.6 percent of the population. The experts suggested that fewer members of minorities, especially Hispanics and to a lesser extent blacks, were missed in 2000 than in 1990. But both of these trends may be overshadowed by a larger than expected number of people � mainly whites � who were counted twice. Census officials have been concerned for some time that last year's census may include a large overcount, perhaps even bigger than the more than four million people who were counted twice in 1990. Those who are counted twice tend to be children of divorced parents, college students living away from home whose parents list them on census forms and who also fill out census questionnaires on campus, and people with two homes who have received census forms in the mail at both of their dwellings. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/12/politics/12CENS.html?pagewanted=all

I'm Not Making This Up � Really!

Bush's Dubious Victory At Google It turns out that for the past three months, if you did a search on Google for a particularly insulting phrase -- think "dumb Oedipus" -- the top result was to the official George W. Bush campaign store. How on earth did this happen? http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/01/02-bush.html

Emotions Soar at Vigil on 2nd Anniversary of Diallo Killing This time the crowds did not swell as they did in 1999 in the months after Mr. Diallo, an unarmed West African immigrant on his way home from work, was gunned down. Nor did the event have the elevated drama of the first anniversary, last Feb. 4, when Mr. Diallo's parents traveled from Albany during the criminal trial of the four officers. But a two-hour vigil yesterday did not pass without raw emotion and some contentious moments, including remarks by the city's comptroller, Alan G. Hevesi, being drowned out by boos. "My life has not been the same," Amadou Diallo's father, Saikou Diallo, told the more than 400 people who congregated outside his son's building, at 1157 Wheeler Avenue in Soundview. Since Amadou's death, he continued, he has "spent every minute of my life searching for justice." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/05/nyregion/05DIAL.html?pagewanted=all

White fortresses in cyberspace. The face of racism changes on the Internet as preppy professionals join the ranks of the �classic� tattooed skinheads. Will they prove even more dangerous? http://www.unesco.org/courier/2001_01/uk/medias.htm

Bush and AIDS George W. Bush, in his first major decision as president, took an action that will increase the spread of AIDS. That was his decision to deny U.S. aid to family-planning organizations abroad that inform women about medical options including abortion. Mr. Bush's press secretary, Ari Fleischer, explaining the decision, said, "The president does not support using taxpayer funds to provide abortions." But that was a non sequitur. Government funding of abortions abroad has been prohibited by law since 1973. The Bush rule says that clinics in developing countries will lose U.S. funds if they even discuss abortion with their patients. What it means on the ground is this: A woman who has AIDS comes to a clinic somewhere in Africa or Asia. Drugs to prevent transmission of the disease to newborn infants are not available there. She desperately wants to avoid bearing the child. But the doctor or nurse cannot advise her on a safe, legal abortion if the clinic wants to keep its American funds. Many family planning groups, knowing that women will not understand a refusal to discuss abortion, will decide to give up U.S. support. That will have drastic consequences, because U.S. dollars may provide most of the contraceptives. The result? Families will not get contraceptives. Without them, more people will be infected with H.I.V. � and in due course develop AIDS.http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/03/technology/03MSN.html

ZDNet: Story: Hey, Dubya! Mr. President. Did you hear the one about...? Have you noticed that we can't seem to elect a president who doesn't seem like a parody of himself? From President "Don't-Confuse-Me-With-The-Facts" Reagan to President "Truth-Is-A-Slippery-Slope" Clinton to President "How-Did-I-Get-Here-And-Now-What-Do-I-Do-Daddy?" Bush, each one is more outrageous than the next. Ask President Bush is a free, Magic-Eightball-like Palm program that takes some of our tongue-tied president's more bizarre statements and issues them as answers to your life questions. (Shareware/Palm) Click for more. http://www.zdnet.com/anchordesk/stories/story/0,10738,2679882,00.html

Who Is a Seminole, and Who Gets to Decide? Polly Gentry's skin is black. But she says she is an Indian. A black Indian. For generations, a little-known chapter of America's racial history shows, she and other descendants of escaped slaves have been members of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma. Even on the tribal council, descendants of slaves have sat alongside descendants of native people. Until last summer. Then, in the middle of a bitter legal battle over $56 million in federal funds, Seminoles with native blood voted to strip the people who call themselves black Seminoles of tribal membership. Suddenly, Ms. Gentry said, "My skin makes a difference." The battle over the place of the black Seminoles is now at the center of two federal lawsuits that challenge basic notions about race in America. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/29/national/29SEMI.html?pagewanted=all

In Policy Change, Greenspan Backs a Broad Tax Cut But Mr. Greenspan passed up an opportunity to endorse Mr. Bush's proposal specifically. And while he did not say how big a tax reduction would be appropriate, he suggested that he was sympathetic to the concern expressed by many Democrats that a stampede to cut taxes could come back to haunt the nation if the surplus falls short of expectations. Surplus projections are little more than educated guesswork, he said, and Congress should view them with some skepticism, at least until economists have a better understanding of why the economy has been generating far more tax revenue than expected in recent years. Analysts have been grappling in particular with how much of the surge in tax revenue came from the run-up in stock prices in the late 1990's and what would happen if the market remained flat or fell in coming years. "With today's euphoria surrounding the surpluses, it is not difficult to imagine the hard-earned fiscal restraint developed in recent years rapidly dissipating," Mr. Greenspan said. "We need to resist those policies that could readily resurrect the deficits of the past and the fiscal imbalances that followed in their wake." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/26/business/26TAX.html?pagewanted=all

This is Leadership?

Democratic Leader Assures Bush on Ashcroft Nomination Tom Daschle, the Democratic leader in the Senate, told President Bush today that he need not worry about getting confirmation for his cabinet choices, including John Ashcroft, the embattled nominee for attorney general, Mr. Bush's spokesman told reporters. "You will not be denied your choice on nominees," Ari Fleischer quoted Mr. Daschle as telling the president in a White House meeting, an account that Mr. Daschle's office did not dispute. Few people, Democrat or Republican, would quarrel seriously with that assessment of how the Ashcroft nomination will end, probably in little more than a week. But the fight over whether to confirm Mr. Ashcroft has taken on a different political contour in recent days. The discussions are now less over whether he will be confirmed than over such questions as how much of a unified front the Democrats can present in opposition and what that will bode for the level of partisan confrontation in the early months of the Bush administration. href="http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/politics/25ASHC.html?pagewanted=all">http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/25/politics/25ASHC.html?pagewanted=al

A Time of Upheaval and Dramatic Events

The Year of the Snake

News Analysis: Tradition and Legitimacy Unlike most of his precursors � but like John Quincy Adams, Benjamin Harrison and a handful of other presidents past � Mr. Bush entered the White House without an unchallenged, universally accepted title to office. A half-million more Americans voted for Al Gore than for Mr. Bush, which counted for nothing in the legal sense but for something, at least, in the political sense. Mr. Bush became the first president since Harrison in 1888 to lose the popular vote but win in the Electoral College. Only the intervention of the United States Supreme Court, itself as deeply divided as possible, 5 votes to 4, tipped the Electoral College vote in Mr. Bush's favor. Arguments about the legitimacy of the Texas governor's victory have persisted even as the country accepted the fact that he had won. Thousands of the doubtful and disenchanted took to the streets of Washington today in angry protest. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/21/politics/21ASSE.html?pagewanted=all

This is, after all, the Year of the Snake

After the Ball Is Over George W. Bush seems like an earnest man. When he says he has come to Washington to "change the tone" and "unite, not divide," I don't doubt his sincerity. But so far his actions are those of another entitled boomer who is utterly blind to his own faults. He narcissistically believes things to be so (and his intentions pure) because he says they are. Change the tone? Hard as it is to imagine that anyone could choose an attorney general as polarizing as the last, Mr. Bush has outdone himself. With a single cabinet pick he has reproduced the rancor that attended the full Clinton legal troika of Reno, Hubbell & Foster. There's been much debate about whether John Ashcroft is a racist � a hard case to make against a man whose history of playing the race card to pander to voters is balanced by his record of black judicial appointments. But there has not been nearly enough debate about whether our incipient chief legal officer has lied under oath to the Senate. Perhaps his seeming fudging and reversals of his previous stands on Roe v. Wade and gun control can be rationalized as clever lawyerese. Perhaps some of his evasions can be dismissed as a politician's typical little white lies � and I do mean white � such as when he denies he knew that a magazine he favored with an interview, Southern Partisan, espoused the slaveholding views of Southern partisans. But it took a bolder kind of dissembling to contradict his own paper trail in public office. After he swore that the state of Missouri "had been found guilty of no wrong" in a landmark St. Louis desegregation case and that "both as attorney general and as governor" of the state he had followed "all" court orders in the matter, The Washington Post needed only a day to report the truth: A federal district judge in fact ruled that the state was a "primary constitutional wrongdoer" in the matter and threatened to hold Mr. Ashcroft in contempt for his "continual delay and failure to comply" with court orders. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/20/opinion/20RICH.html?pagewanted=allr

It's a D@#! Shame

A Nation's Voices: Concern and Solace, Resentment and Redemption CHICAGO, Jan. 19 � Clearly the Blind Faith Cafe was not named with today's political climate in mind. On the eve of the inauguration of a president who won office after one of the most contentious and divisive elections in memory, a more apt name for a vegetarian restaurant in the Democratic-majority suburban town of Evanston, Ill., might be the Who-Do-You-Think-You're-Kidding Cafe. "We'll have an inauguration that a lot of people are not excited about, and it's just like it's a cartoon," said Joanna Baker, a 39-year-old executive search consultant and yoga enthusiast, who was eating a barbecued seitan salad and worrying what a Bush presidency would mean for abortion rights and other issues she cares about. "It's like it's not really real." At the next table, another Democrat, Dr. Ken Moses, a 58-year-old psychologist, gave a wry grin while describing how he was adjusting to the White House transition. "I happen to be a therapist that deals with nothing but profound losses," Dr. Moses said. "The issue of disappointment and how to deal with it is my trade." Here in the Chicago area, and across the country in Miami, Denver and Boston, there is a sense that the nation has been through an extraordinary upheaval, and many people have been left a little stunned. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/20/politics/20VOIC.html?pagewanted=all

Black America Isn't Buying

News Analysis: Selling Point Is a Sore One On Saturday, African-Americans will be prominent among those protesting at Mr. Bush's inauguration, even though he has chosen for his cabinet the first black secretary of state and a widely respected black educator. Ask black politicians about the appointments, and they quickly change the subject to Florida, where, they assert, antiquated voting equipment and unfriendly electoral officials in minority precincts illegitimately tipped the outcome to Mr. Bush. "A majority of African-Americans think that the election was stolen," said David Bositis, an analyst of minority voting at the Joint Center for Economic Studies, a think tank here. The bitterness that many black voters and their white allies feel toward the president-elect was on vivid display as the Senate Judiciary Committee pressed Mr. Bush's choice of former Senator John Ashcroft as attorney general. With attention centered on Judge Ronnie L. White of the Missouri Supreme Court, an African-American, and Mr. Ashcroft's success in blocking his nomination as a federal judge, the session was supercharged with racial tension. Studies by the Joint Center found that Mr. Bush's favorable rating among black voters dropped from 43 percent in May 1999, when he was pondering a run for president, to 29 percent at the end of September 2000, when the campaign was nearing a climax. The more African-Americans saw of Mr. Bush, said Mr. Bositis, who designed the polls, "the less they liked him." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/19/politics/19ASSE.html?pagewanted=all