The Backslap Backlash The political incompetence that led to Mr. Jeffords's defection hardly squares with the prevailing Beltway view of the Bush White House during its first 100 days. That view, as usual, is best articulated by Washington's Dean, the pundit David Broder, who in February gave the new administration high grades for having "a cabinet of C.E.O.'s, made up mainly of men and women who have run large enterprises." But of course it's exactly the C.E.O.-itis exemplified by Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul O'Neill that led the administration to be blindsided, taking the Jeffords rebellion seriously only days after it had been reported by such obscure news outlets as CNN. As one veteran of past administrations and the corporate world puts it: "C.E.O.'s are used to flying their own planes, seeing only their own subordinates and being accountable to no one. They are profoundly certain of their own value system. They have contempt for the public and the press. They have none of the accountability required of a president of the United States." Such arrogance is the real story of this White House thus far. The administration proceeds on the belief that no one would possibly question its wisdom and that anything can be sold with the proper marketing strategy and enough repetition of an unvarying script. If the president is known for "reaching out" and "building bridges," as we're constantly told, it must be so, even if the Jeffords fiasco proves it wildly false. If he says it's possible to have a huge tax cut while building a missile shield and without dipping into the Social Security and Medicare piggy banks, it must be so, even if the numbers don't remotely add up. So goes this cognitive-dissonance presidency. Perhaps it's the ease with which the White House walked over the Democrats on the way to the tax cut that has accelerated this brand of subterfuge. These days, with impressive brazenness, almost every Bush photo op belies what his administration is actually up to. � In a five-day period the president appeared at two national parks, Sequoia and the Everglades, dressed in more earth tones than Al Gore at his most craven. The message, of course, is that Mr. Bush likes hugging trees almost as much as he does African-American schoolchildren. But in fact his environmental record remains unchanged. He shows no signs of opposing drilling off Florida's Gulf Coast (though even his brother is against it) or of opposing the development of a commercial airport not far from the Everglades' border. The National Parks Conservation Association gives his record a D thus far, noting that his modest increase in the parks budget is more for buildings and roads than for preserving nature. � In his commencement address at Notre Dame, among other religious venues, Mr. Bush has repeatedly praised the power of faith-based charities. But according to The Washington Post, the administration very quietly stopped pushing its promised boon to charities in the tax bill: a deduction for charitable contributions for those taxpayers who don't itemize on their returns. Not only did the White House let that provision die to preserve its main goal, a top-heavy reduction of tax rates, but in fighting for an end to the estate tax it has also eliminated an added incentive for the wealthy to donate to charity. � In Philadelphia in mid-May, Mr. Bush posed in front of a sea of police officers to push a plan to hire more prosecutors to enforce existing gun laws. But three days later Attorney General John Ashcroft wrote a letter to the National Rifle Association endorsing an interpretation of the Second Amendment that could in fact gut existing gun laws. Some of those cops standing behind the president may also be gutted, for in its budget the administration has asked for a 17 percent decrease in COPS, the federal program that provides money for police salaries. � Mr. Bush has repeatedly visited various Boys and Girls Clubs, touting them as an example of how the government can "facilitate programs" for kids and promote "the universal concept of loving a neighbor." In his budget, federal money for Boys and Girls Clubs is eliminated entirely. Even the first lady has been enlisted in these bait-and-switch shenanigans. Laura Bush appeared at a Washington public library in April to kick off "the Campaign for America's Libraries" � just one week before her husband's budget cut the federal outlay for libraries by $39 million. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/09/opinion/09RICH.html?pagewanted=all

Floyd Norris: Bush's Tax Shuffle The alternative tax is supposed to hit the rich. It forces taxpayers with substantial deductions to compute their tax bill twice. First they do it the regular way, and then they calculate it again, and apply a lower tax rate, without being able to take advantage of a substantial number of exemptions. Then, they pay whichever tax is higher. The new tax law promises higher deductions late in this decade. Married couples will get a bigger deduction, and higher-income taxpayers will get a larger standard deduction. But those deductions don't count for the alternative tax. Tens of millions of taxpayers will see their savings largely vanish after the alternative tax kicks in. The tax-bill writers understood this, and even threw in a provision to reduce the impact � up until the next presidential election. As a result, the official estimate is that the number of taxpayers paying the alternative minimum tax in 2004 will be 5.3 million, up from 1.4 million this year but fewer than the 5.6 million who would have paid it under the old law. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/01/business/01NORR.html?pagewanted=all

Jeffords Defects, Forcing Shift in Agenda Later in an interview he said the critical issue that led to his defection was education, specifically the decision by Senate leaders and the White House to drop $300 billion in school spending from the final budget resolution. "When they took that all out," he said, "that was it." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/25/politics/25CHAN.html?pagewanted=all

While a Restless Senator Stirred, the Bush Team May Have Slept The strategist said that when Mr. Jeffords refused to give White House officials unconditional love, they responded in a fashion that left him feeling "constantly dissed, ignored, embarrassed, not treated with the kind of respect you would accord a senator, let alone a Republican." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/24/politics/24BUSH.html?pagewanted=all

Nuclear Power Gains in Status After Lobbying In mid-March, a cadre of seven nuclear power executives sought and won an hourlong meeting in the White House with Karl Rove, Mr. Bush's top political adviser. Also attending were Lawrence B. Lindsey, the president's top economic adviser, Andrew Lundquist, the executive director of Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force, and others involved in devising the energy plan. "We said, Look, we are an important player on this energy team and here are our vital statistics, and we think that you should start talking about nuclear when you talk about increasing the nation's supply," Christian H. Poindexter, chairman of the Constellation Energy Group, recalled today. And then a surprising thing happened. "It was shortly after that, as a matter of fact I think the next night, when the vice president was being interviewed on television, he began to talk about nuclear power for the first time," Mr. Poindexter said. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/23/politics/23NUKE.html?pagewanted=all

Con�cept The Standard: Don't Know Much About a Science Book

Con�cept When a Test Fails the Schools, Careers and Reputations Suffer

Right Answer, Wrong Score: Test Flaws Take Toll One day last May, a few weeks before commencement, Jake Plumley was pulled out of the classroom at Harding High School in St. Paul and told to report to his guidance counselor. The counselor closed the door and asked him to sit down. The news was grim. Jake, a senior, had failed a standardized test required for graduation. To try to salvage his diploma, he had to give up a promising job and go to summer school. "It changed my whole life, that test," Jake recalled. In fact, Jake should have been elated. He actually had passed the test. But the company that scored it had made an error, giving Jake and 47,000 other Minnesota students lower scores than they deserved. But it was not an isolated incident. The testing industry is coming off its three most problem-plagued years. Its missteps have affected millions of students who took standardized proficiency tests in at least 20 states. An examination of recent mistakes and interviews with more than 120 people involved in the testing process suggest that the industry cannot guarantee the kind of error-free, high-speed testing that parents, educators and politicians seem to take for granted. In recent years, the four testing companies that dominate the market have experienced serious breakdowns in quality control. Problems at NCS, for example, extend beyond Minnesota. In the last three years, the company produced a flawed answer key that incorrectly lowered multiple-choice scores for 12,000 Arizona students, erred in adding up scores of essay tests for students in Michigan and was forced with another company to rescore 204,000 essay tests in Washington because the state found the scores too generous. NCS also missed important deadlines for delivering test results in Florida and California. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/20/business/20EXAM.html?pagewanted=all

25 Years Later, Rumsfeld's Dream Is Alive Again In his first three months on the job, American warplanes bombed Iraq, a Navy submarine sank a Japanese fishing boat, killing nine people aboard, and 24 Americans were detained in China after their Navy spy plane collided with a Chinese fighter jet. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/18/world/18MILI.html?pagewanted=all

The Details: Excessive Regulation Is Blamed for Energy Woes The 170-page policy paper devotes the bulk of its text, which reads in parts like a nonpolitical academic study, to examining how to reduce energy demand and cultivate clean sources of energy like wind and biomass, as agricultural, human and animal waste are known. The administration has emphasized that of its 105 specific recommendations, highlighted throughout the text with blue stars, 42 deal with conservation, efficiency and renewable energy sources, while only 35 address supplies of traditional energy sources. But the report's priorities are evident from the start. The first chart in the report, which illustrates how energy consumption is outpacing production, uses a mix of government statistics to make the future shortfall in production seem more acute than it might turn out to be. Among the many regulations it has vowed to review, streamline, expedite or eliminate are land-use restrictions in the Rocky Mountains, lease stipulations for off-shore and coastal zones where oil and gas are plentiful and environmental reviews required when utilities want to retool power plants or oil companies want to expand refineries. Thttp://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/18/politics/18ENER.html?pagewanted=all

News Analysis: A New Focus on Supply Under federal law, anyone wanting to drill oil wells, lay pipelines or build power plants has for decades been required to prepare an environmental impact statement clearing the project on environmental grounds. Now, as a central part of his new energy plan, President Bush is calling for attention to the flip side of that approach. Under an executive order that Mr. Bush is to issue on Friday, any federal agency considering steps that might adversely affect the nation's energy health would have to issue a new kind of impact statement, this one on energy grounds. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/18/politics/18ENVI.html?pagewanted=all

Education: Government Internet Subsidy Stretched to Its Limits "The point of the program is to make things more affordable," Hershman said. "There's been more demand than they thought there would be. There are still very poor schools that haven't been able to make the cut off." With help from e-rate discounts, 98 percent of U.S. public schools now have Internet connections, according to new statistics issued this month by the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics. But only 77 percent of instructional classrooms have Internet connections, and the number drops to 60 percent for schools with the highest concentrations of poverty. Despite continued demand for education technology funding, lawmakers and advocates for the e-rate are not clamoring for more money, nor are the telephone companies that have been contributing to the fund offering to ante up more. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/15/technology/16EDUCATION.html?pagewanted=all

Lott Rebuked for Delaying Campaign Finance Bill Senator John McCain pushed through the Senate a rebuke of the Republican leader today for acting to "thwart the will of the majority" by failing to send to the House the overhaul of the campaign finance law that was handily approved by the Senate last month. The resolution, which was attached as an amendment to education legislation, did not mention Senator Trent Lott, the majority leader from Mississippi. Because the education bill is still being debated, the resolution has no immediate effect. But Mr. McCain made quite clear in debate that it was directed straight at Mr. Lott and was a repudiation of his quiet delay of campaign finance legislation. "What we are seeing here is a minority of one stopping the will of this body," Mr. McCain said. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/16/politics/16DONA.html?pagewanted=all

Bush Task Force on Energy Worked in Mysterious Ways

"It's an incredible insult to the consumers of this country that, to the best of my knowledge, none of the consumer organizations were invited to the meetings or otherwise participated."

Among those who said they felt shut out was the Consumer Federation of America, the nation's largest consumer-advocacy group. Howard Metzenbaum, a Democrat and former senator from Ohio who is now chairman of the group, said, "The energy crisis is first and foremost a price crisis affecting consumers." Juleanna Glover Weiss, Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, said no invitations were issued and groups had to request meetings. "We didn't invite anybody to meet with us," she said. The leaders of about two dozen environmental groups had asked to see Mr. Cheney, whose office turned down their requests. Instead, midlevel staff members from the groups met with Mr. Lundquist and Ms. Knutson. Alys Campaigne, legislative director of the National Resources Defense Council, said that that meeting lasted about 40 minutes but that the size of the group inhibited substantive policy discussion. "We asked who the deputies were on different issues so we could have more in-depth conversations, and they wouldn't tell us," she said. "They said, `Just send us paper, we'll take a look at it.' The meeting felt like window dressing for us, but they got to check off the box that they consulted with stake-holders." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/16/politics/16LOBB.html?pagewanted=all

The Fine Print: Senate Tax Bill Isn't All That It Seems Under the tax bill the Senate Finance Committee will take up on Tuesday, the federal estate tax would be repealed in 2011. Yet most people with estates large enough to owe taxes before the repeal date would owe more in taxes after the repeal. That is one of several anomalies in a bill that was jury-rigged to include all the different tax cuts President Bush campaigned for, more tax relief for low- and moderate-income taxpayers than the president proposed and a total cost of no more than the $1.35 trillion over 11 years that Congress allotted in the budget plan adopted last week. Another oddity relates to how the bill would increase the amount of income exempt from the alternative minimum tax. The purpose is to make sure that millions more people do not have to pay this alternative tax and thus be worse off than they would have been without the bill's cut in income-tax rates. But the increased exemption would only be in effect from 2002 through 2006. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/15/politics/15TAX.html?pagewanted=all

Far From Dead, Subsidies Fuel Big Farms Surveying the farm that he carved out in the Panhandle landscape of dry mesquite and sagebrush, Mr. Bezner says the key to his family's prosperity is federal farm subsidies. "We're successful primarily because of government help," said Mr. Bezner, 59, an entomologist who grew up on a farm outside Amarillo. Although Mr. Bezner hesitated to discuss the size of those subsidies (and refused to divulge how much he makes without federal help, or what his expenses are), government documents show that in the last four years of the 1990's, he received $1.38 million in direct federal payments. Most remarkably, Mr. Bezner and the other big farmers here in Hartley County and across the country received those record-breaking payments in an era when farm subsidies were slated for extinction. Far From Dead, Subsidies Fuel Big Farms

White House Is Denying Pulling In Welcome Mat "Up until this administration, we normally got 8 to 10 busloads of tourists into the White House four, five times a week," Mr. Patterson said. "Now we're lucky if we get one in once a week. Today we needed 80 tickets; we got 10. I got drivers who have been here 30, 35 years and all they talk about is how the White House is letting fewer people in. It's just not right; we are the people and that is our house." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/13/politics/13TOUR.html?pagewanted=all

Blacks and Hispanics in House Balk on Campaign Finance Bill Many blacks in Florida complained that they were prevented from voting because their names had been removed or omitted from voter rolls and that poll workers and election officials were ill-prepared to help them. "Florida made all of us aware of what goes on at the street level, the need for voter registration for example," said Representative Albert R. Wynn, a Maryland Democrat who is heading a committee created by the Congressional Black Caucus to study the issue. Soft money was often used by the parties for get-out-the vote efforts, Mr. Wynn said, adding, "I'm concerned about the adverse effects on voter registration, voter mobilization." After the study group met tonight, he said it had not come to a decision and wanted to "look at some options." The Senate version of campaign finance legislation would not only ban soft money, but also raise the limits on regulated donations given by individuals to federal candidates to $2,000 per election from $1,000. Some black lawmakers say they will go along with that increase only if political action committees are allowed to give more money to candidates. Historically, minority candidates have a more difficult time competing for individual contributions, while they have drawn support from political action committees connected to labor unions, minority political organizations and liberal ideological groups. Some black and Hispanic lawmakers say they are deeply disturbed that changes in the campaign finance law are being taken up in Congress while legislation to overhaul the electoral system, like making investments in new voting machines, has languished. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/09/politics/09DONA.html?pagewanted=all

Gains Found for the Poor in Rigorous Preschool But the study also sounds an early warning about the Bush plan. The Chicago preschool program, which is operated by the public school system in 23 centers across the city, requires parents to participate in their children's homework assignments and also helps families arrange medical care and social services. In setting priorities for Head Start, the Bush administration has thus far ranked those aspects of the program � traditionally its cornerstones � below reading, much to the concern of Head Start advocates. "It's more than just providing basic literacy skills," said Arthur J. Reynolds, a professor of social work at Wisconsin, who was the lead author of the study. "You've got to put parents in classrooms, as well as kids." The study being released today tracked 989 children, all born in 1980, who enrolled in the Chicago Child Parent Center Program no later than age 4, and were taught an average of 2.5 hours a day for 18 months. Nearly all children were living at or below the poverty level, and many of the children and the parents had to be recruited and cajoled to attend by the centers' staff, who canvassed for students door to door. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/05/09/national/09SCHO.html?pagewanted=all

InternetNews - Web Developer News -- OASIS Begins Work on Election Markup Language If this works out, open-source fans would have a worthy achievement to cheer after the 2000 election recount debacle in Florida. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS), a non-profit XML interoperability consortium, this week put the finishing touches on a technical committee to standardize the exchange of election and voter services information using XML. Succinctly titled Election Markup Language, the standard, when hashed out by the new OASIS Election and Voter Services Technical Committee, would guide such data as voter registration and ballots safely among hardware, software and vendors. http://www.internetnews.com/wd-news/article/0,,10_759241,00.html