Bush Rolls Back Clinton's Medicaid Rules Representative Henry A. Waxman, Democrat of California, said, "The Bush administration has taken every opportunity to side with the H.M.O. industry and against Medicaid patients in these regulations." A Medicaid patient who needs a life-saving treatment on Friday might have to wait until the next Wednesday because the "emergency protections don't apply over the weekend," Mr. Waxman said. About half of the 40 million Medicaid recipients are in managed care. Many are heavy users of medical care. They generally do not have the money to go outside the network of doctors and hospitals selected by their health plans. William A. Pierce, a spokesman for the Department of Health and Human Services, said he was unaware of specific differences between the Clinton and Bush rules. But Congressional aides expressed concern about several differences when they met today with federal Medicaid officials. Under the Clinton rules, H.M.O.'s had to do a comprehensive assessment of Medicaid patients with "special health care needs," including pregnant women, foster children and people over 65. Most of those requirements have been dropped. The Bush rules would allow patients to appeal an overt reduction, suspension, termination or denial of services. The new rules drop a provision that would, in addition, have allowed appeals if an H.M.O. simply "delayed access to services to the point where there is a substantial risk" of harm to the patients' health. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/17/politics/17MEDI.html

Social Security Budget Revised Social Security Budget Revised The Bush administration says a change in budget accounting methods will make $4.3 billion in Social Security funds available for general spending or tax cuts. The change, which involves the manner in which payroll-tax revenues are calculated, would technically allow the White House and Congress to spend the money while maintaining their commitment to only use Social Security surplus funds to pay retirees and reduce the national debt. The accounting change comes at a time when officials in Washington are predicting the surplus for the entire federal budget will be much lower than expected because of the slowing economy. http://www.publicagenda.org/headlines/headline.htm

Pentagon Harbors Antimissile Skepticism The head of the Pentagon's missile defense programs said today that he was not fully confident in the "basic functionality" of the antimissile system that successfully intercepted a mock warhead in space last month. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/national/16MISS.html

Administration Reconfigures the Budget Pie The Bush administration is making an accounting change involving Social Security that will free $4.3 billion for Congress to use, officials said today. The increase could be important as the White House and its Republican allies in Congress try to fend off Democratic assertions that President Bush's tax cuts have drained too much of the surplus to meet government spending priorities. Even with the change, the revised surplus projections for the fiscal year ending Sept. 30 will be much lower than the administration and Congressional Budget Office projected earlier this year. The $275 billion surplus, including Social Security, that was forecast by the budget office in May could fall to roughly $160 billion because of the tax cut and slowing economy. Administration officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the accounting change more correctly describes revenue from payroll taxes, those dedicated to Social Security and Medicare. "There's a general consensus that the Social Security surplus should be used for debt reduction," one official said. Democrats described the change as an unprecedented accounting gimmick intended to mask the impact of Mr. Bush's 10-year, $1.35 trillion tax cut on the budget. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/16/national/16BUDG.html

States Dismayed by Federal Bills on Patient Rights "The House bill appears to pre- empt all state internal and external review laws," Mr. Fitzgerald said. "If that becomes law, I would have real concern about the ability of people to get an appropriate and adequate review of adverse decisions by H.M.O.'s. In regulating insurance and health care, it's critical to strike an appropriate balance between the rights of states and the role of the federal government." Democrats agree. In an interview, Gov. Gray Davis of California said: "The federal government is diminishing the health care rights of Californians. Congress should adopt minimum standards and allow states to exceed them. But instead, it's rolling back rights that we accorded to patients in a package of 20 separate bills that I signed in 1999." Under a federal bill passed by the Senate on June 29 and the companion bill passed by the House on Aug. 2, insurance companies could charge a filing fee of $25 for the external review of a health plan's decision. "Those fees are really a patients' rights tax, which I find wholly unacceptable," Mr. Davis said. California allows patients to sue health plans for any harm caused by the insurer's negligence, but the state does not limit the amount of damages. By contrast, the bill passed by the United States House of Representatives would set limits in state and federal court: $1.5 million for pain and suffering, plus $1.5 million in punitive damages. President Bush and many Republicans in Congress said the limits were needed to discourage the filing of frivolous lawsuits and to hold down insurance costs. Mr. Bush has said he will sign the version that passed the House, but not the one the Senate passed. Daniel Zingale, the director of the California Department of Managed Health Care, said the potentially unlimited liability of health plans in California had been "an incentive for good corporate behavior" by H.M.O.'s. "We have not had a single lawsuit under the 1999 law," Mr. Zingale said. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/13/politics/13PATI.html

A New Threat to the President's Agenda: The Tax Cut Democrats are indeed gasping. They are already warning that Congress will face painful tradeoffs when it returns from its summer recess next month and begins wrangling in earnest with Mr. Bush over next year's spending bills and the array of policy choices within them. But Mr. Bush cannot breathe freely, either. Just two months after he signed it into law, the tax cut that once seemed an unalloyed triumph now threatens to complicate the rest of his agenda and expose him to political peril. From his plans for modernizing the military and developing a national missile defense to his aspirations of becoming the education president and tackling long-term issues like Social Security, Mr. Bush might have trouble paying the tab. At the same time, he has left himself open to accusations from Democrats that the tax cut will plunge the government back into budget deficits of a sort. The buffer left in the surplus following his tax cut appears to be eroding rapidly because of the flagging economy. Both Congress and the White House will update their surplus projections by the end of the month. It is possible the new figures will show the budget in the current fiscal year dipping into money that Democrats and most Republicans had considered off limits � the excess revenues being generated by Medicare. Raiding Medicare, as the Democrats put it, would be a tricky enough charge for the White House to deal with. But it could get worse. Within a year or two, the government may again start spending the Social Security surplus, breaching a bulwark against fiscal irresponsibility agreed to by both parties and the administration. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/12/weekinreview/12STEV.html

Data Permanently Erased From Florida Computers The examination, paid for by a group of news organizations including The New York Times, also found that some information had probably been permanently erased earlier this year after new operating systems were installed on three of the four computers, experts from Ontrack Data International Inc., a firm based in Minneapolis, said yesterday. While finding "bits and pieces" of hundreds of partly deleted files, they said there was no way to know the full extent of the destruction. But they also said they had found no evidence that records had been systematically purged as part of an intentional effort to destroy election documents. "If somebody did that, then it was a pretty poor attempt to cover their tracks," said Mike Rands, manager of operations for DataTrail, a division of Ontrack Data that specializes in data recovery and forensic computer examinations. Indeed, the company's examination unearthed dozens of election- related documents that had never been released by Ms. Harris's office. Among other things, the examination showed that Ms. Harris's lawyers and aides used the machines to send and retrieve e-mail messages, conduct legal research via the Internet, prepare Ms. Harris for potential questions from reporters and even to hunt for snappy quotations for her speeches. For months, Ms. Harris's lawyers have insisted that the computers had been used solely to write news releases. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/08/politics/08FLOR.htm

Reform and an Evolving Electorate Although we don't like to acknowledge it, there have always been strong antidemocratic forces in the United States. Large numbers of Americans, throughout our history, have not believed in universal suffrage and have acted accordingly. Their presence delayed the achievement of a fully enfranchised population until roughly 1970 and produced many episodes in which the right to vote contracted. The most extreme and well-known examples involve African-Americans in the South who were deprived of their constitutionally protected right to vote for more than 70 years. But antidemocratic Southerners have had plenty of company, and not just in the early days of the republic when voting was limited to men of property. National women's suffrage was not finally adopted until 1920. Rhode Island imposed a property qualification on all foreign-born citizens for much of the 19th century; California went to great lengths to prevent Asians from voting; New York adopted an English language literacy test in 1921 that was still disfranchising hundreds of thousands of people in the 1960's. In the 1930's, an organization headed by George Wickersham, a former United States attorney general, actively sought to disfranchise unemployed workers who were receiving federal relief. The resistance to democracy affected voting procedures as well as the right to vote itself; indeed, the erection of procedural obstacles to voting was often a strategic response to the formal enfranchisement of people considered undesirable. The registration systems that emerged in the late 19th century, for example, were not simply good government reforms designed to eliminate corruption (which is how the Carter-Ford commission describes them); they were also efforts to keep immigrants and the poor from voting by interposing layers of paperwork and deadlines between potential voters and the ballot box. The decline in turnout in American elections, which began at the end of the 19th century, was not an accident or the symptom of a mysterious malady. Both in the North and in the South, turnout was reduced, in good part, by laws designed to keep citizens from the polls and to prevent popular dissident parties from effectively contesting elections. Alabama's disfranchisement of men convicted of crimes like vagrancy and adultery � even after time had been served � was expressly crafted at the turn of the century to limit black participation in politics. (Similar laws limit black Alabaman voting today. Such permanent disfranchisement would be eliminated by the Carter-Ford recommendations.) In 1907, Pittsburgh's newly created voter registration board crowed about the "good results obtained" under a recently passed Pennsylvania registration law: in two years, the number of registrants was nearly halved. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/05/opinion/05KEYS.html

Is There No Choice? But the Israeli government view ignores facts that loom large among Palestinians. Israel has repeatedly failed to carry out promises and negotiated agreements � to make further redeployments from occupied territory, for example. Israel has made a two-state solution to the conflict less and less attractive by continuously building and enlarging settlements on land that would be part of the Palestinian state. The Palestinian view at the time of the Camp David conference last year was well described in The New York Review of Books by Robert Malley, a special assistant to President Clinton who was at Camp David, and Hussein Agha. "Seen from Gaza and the West Bank," they wrote, "Oslo's legacy read like a litany of promises deferred or unfulfilled. Six years after the agreement, there were more Israeli settlements, less freedom of movement and worse economic conditions. Powerful Palestinian constituencies � the intellectuals, security establishment, media, business community . . . � whose support was vital for any peace effort were disillusioned . . ., doubtful of Israel's willingness to implement signed agreements." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/04/opinion/04LEWI.html?todaysheadlines

Senate Republicans Boycott Vote on Election Reform "The message is unfortunate. This ought not be a partisan issue. There ought to be discussions on both sides.'' McConnell is angry that Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., who chairs the committee, is pushing through his own election overhaul bill. McConnell wanted the committee also to consider a bill he and several other senators prepared. Dodd's bill would provide $3.5 billion to help states adopt uniform standards for voting machines by 2004. It would also take steps to improve voter education and ensure that people who are properly registered aren't deprived of the right to vote. Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., has prepared a House version. Thursday's session "mocks the bipartisan promise of election reform,'' McConnell said in a letter to Dodd. Dodd said he was saddened by McConnell's comments. He said he asked McConnell in November, when Republicans still controlled the Senate, to work with him on an election reform bill. ``I never did receive a reply,'' Dodd said in a letter to McConnell Wednesday. Thursday, Dodd said Republicans could have come to the hearing and tried to offer amendments. "The idea that you do not show up to a vote is not exactly what I call a good civics lesson,'' Dodd said. Congress is considering election improvements to avoid problems such as those that plagued last fall's presidential elections. President Bush was declared the winner over Al Gore 36 days after the voting, enabled by a 5-4 Supreme Court decision that effectively halted a partial recount in Florida. "You get the impression they (Democrats) sort of want to stick their thumb in President Bush's eye,'' McConnell said Wednesday. Just Tuesday, a commission chaired by former Presidents Ford and Carter offered a number of broad changes to improve the nation's voting system. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/politics/AP-Electoral-Changes.htm

Oregon Democrats Seek to Oust Justices The Oregon Democratic Party endorsed a drive today to impeach five United States Supreme Court justices for the decision that effectively gave George W. Bush the presidency last year. The party's central committee voted overwhelmingly to begin a campaign it hoped would take the issue to the House of Representatives, which has the authority to impeach justices. The resolution passed today by Oregon party leaders called for the "immediate investigation of the behavior" of the five justices who voted to stop hand recounts of Florida ballots. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/23/politics/23OREG.html

Figures About Recent Global Summits Facts, figures about recent global summits: Genoa, Italy: Summit of wealthy industrial nations, July 2001 --One protester killed. --About 500 people injured. --Nearly 180 arrested. --About 20,000 police officers, paramilitary police and soldiers deployed. --Cost: about $145 million, including $25 million for security and $120 million for refurbishing the city. http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/international/AP-Summits-Numbers-Box.html

Hamas Threatens Suicide Bombers After Child's Death The militant Islamic group Hamas threatened to unleash 10 suicide bombers against Israel in revenge for the killing of an 11-year-old Palestinian boy who was buried in the Gaza Strip on Sunday. ``There are 10 martyrs waiting inside Israel. They are ready at any moment to get revenge on the Israeli killers,'' shouted members of Hamas's military wing during Khalil Mughrabi's funeral. He was killed by Israeli troops on Saturday. ``If the Israelis have big bombs, we have human bombs,'' they chanted through loudspeakers during the funeral at Rafah, along Gaza's border with Egypt, near where the child was shot dead. Mughrabi became the 17th Palestinian killed since a cease-fire drawn up by U.S. CIA Director George Tenet was supposed to have taken effect on June 13. Nine Israelis have also been killed since the truce was brokered. http://www.nytimes.com/reuters/world/international-mideast.html

Arafat Criticizes U.S., Saying It Should Do More As evidence of what he contends is his "100 percent effort" to clamp down on terrorism, Mr. Arafat pulled from his jacket pocket, which seemed to contain a wealth of documents, a typed report in Arabic from the Palestinian intelligence service. The report, he said, held detailed information that was provided to the Israelis a day after the June 1 suicide bombing outside a Tel Aviv discoth�que that killed 21 young people. It said the Palestinians had learned that the man who drove the suicide bomber to the beachside disco was a longtime informant for Israeli intelligence, Mr. Arafat said, a Palestinian who had been granted Israeli citizenship and resettled in Israel like many "collaborators." The bomber himself was a Palestinian with a Jordanian passport. Mr. Arafat appeared to be trying to make the point that the Tel Aviv bomber and his driver had no connection to the Palestinian Authority while they had at least indirect links with Israel. He also made reference to another deadly terrorist attack, years ago, in which he said Palestinian collaborators also played a key role. Asked to spell out what he was suggesting, he said, "I'm giving you facts and leaving it for everyone to arrive to realities." Nabil Shaath, a senior minister who has objected repeatedly to Israeli demands for a Palestinian roundup of Islamist militants, added, "At the very least, this means that looking for the usual suspects will not work in these cases." Ahttp://www.nytimes.com/2001/07/08/world/08ARAF.html?pagewanted=all

The E.E.O.C. Is Short of Will and Cash Throughout corporate America, complaints of discrimination and harassment remain stubbornly high, despite the decade-long economic boom that forced many employers to scramble for workers. Some 80,000 individual complaints are made annually to the commission, a number that has held steady in recent years. A growing proportion are accusations of harassment of women and minorities: factory floors where some men feel free to expose themselves and work places where supervisors don Ku Klux Klan hoods or fellow employees hang nooses. Claims of retaliation by employers against workers who have complained of discrimination have nearly tripled in the last decade, to about 22,000 a year. "There are thousands of establishments that appear to be discriminating," said Alfred W. Blumrosen, a professor at the Rutgers School of Law in Newark, who was an official at the agency in its early years and has maintained ties there. With a Ford Foundation grant, Mr. Blumrosen is analyzing the agency's own data, without identifying specific companies, to determine the breadth of discrimination in the United States. He plans to release his results this fall. Through much of its history, the E.E.O.C. has been plagued by a lack of resources and a combination of internal politics and inefficiencies that have prevented it from accomplishing much more than isolated victories. While it has recently taken stands on some controversial issues � it has sought to prohibit employers from using genetic testing on employees and to force companies to cover the cost of prescription contraceptives � its critics say it is too cognizant of how the political winds are blowing to pursue its mission aggressively. "There is not a huge national will to have the agency be more effective," said John Rowe, a district office director in Chicago who has worked for the E.E.O.C. for nearly 30 years. "It shows itself not only in the want of resources and want of political appetite for radical change but also down in the trenches. It's unwise to upset anybody too much." http://partners.nytimes.com/2001/07/01/business/01EEOC.html?pagewanted=all

U.S. Report Finds Flaws in Study of California Power Companies An investigative arm of Congress faulted federal regulators today for claiming that there was no evidence to support accusations that power companies manipulated California's electricity market. The General Accounting Office reviewed a study by the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission issued in February. The energy agency found no evidence that companies withheld power to drive up prices. Politicians in California and some economists have been asserting for months that power companies withheld available electrical generating capacity to create or worsen shortages. Generating companies had cited the energy agency's report to rebut those accusations. The accounting office said the agency's work looked only at physical reasons for outages and did not explore the possibility that generating companies used bidding strategies to withhold supplies. Moreover, the office found that the study did not prove that cutoffs had occurred for unavoidable physical reasons. "FERC's study was not thorough enough to support its overall conclusion that audited companies were not physically withholding electricity supply to influence prices," the accounting office said. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/30/national/30POWE.html?pagewanted=all

Senators Hear Bitter Words on Florida Vote One of the dissenting members, Abigail Thernstrom, presented her rebuttal to the report today. Relying on a statistical analysis by John Lott, an economist at Yale Law School, Ms. Thernstrom said that "voter error was the central problem in Florida, not disenfranchisement" and that the committee report was flawed and prejudicial. "One of the dissenting members, Abigail Thernstrom, presented her rebuttal to the report today. Relying on a statistical analysis by John Lott, an economist at Yale Law School, Ms. Thernstrom said that "voter error was the central problem in Florida, not disenfranchisement" and that the committee report was flawed and prejudicial. In another tense exchange, Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, took on the credibility of Mr. Lott, Ms. Thernstrom's statistician. Mr. Schumer, a proponent of gun control, first belittled Mr. Lott in passing as the person who had found, in Mr. Schumer's words, "The more guns, the less violence." In prosecutorial tones, Mr. Schumer then wrung out of Mr. Lott a defeated "yeah" to the question of whether "a greater percentage of black and Hispanic people are turned away than, or don't get to vote, than white people?" The packed hearing room broke into applause at Mr. Lott's concession, prompting Senator Christopher J. Dodd, Democrat of Connecticut, to gavel the room to order, saying, "It's not a rally; it's a hearing." http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/28/politics/28VOTE.html

Senators Hear Bitter Words on Florida Vote Ms. Berry affirmed the findings of the report and said she was "surprised that people are so exercised" about it. She said it was clear that black voters had higher rates of problems than others, regardless of whether they were intentional. "If I ran over you at 90 miles an hour and killed you, it doesn't matter whether I intended to or not, I still killed you," Ms. Berry said. http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html?todaysheadline

2 Judges Do Battle in an Immigration Case �something extraordinary has happened in the case of a 46-year-old man from Trinidad, detained since last summer in a county jail here, whose wife seeks such a visa for him. First an immigration judge here, William Van Wyke, suspended an effort by the Immigration and Naturalization Service to deport the man, and pressured officials to act quickly on the visa application. Then, in an even more unusual twist, Judge Van Wyke's decision was overruled by the nation's chief immigration judge, Michael J. Creppy, after what Judge Van Wyke and his supporters call a series of improper contacts between I.N.S. lawyers and Judge Creppy's office. The reversal, and Judge Van Wyke's denunciation of his boss, are the talk of the immigration circuit, whose union of administrative judges has filed a formal protest against Judge Creppy and a top aide, accusing them of unethical behavior. "The actions of the office of the chief immigration judge raise profoundly troubling questions about the integrity of the deportation process and the independence of the chief immigration judge from the I.N.S.," said Lucas Guttentag, director of the American Civil Liberties Union's immigrants' rights project. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/21/national/21JUDG.html?todaysheadlines&pagewanted=all

How Do You Consider Someone Spending Decades In Prison, Sentenced to Death, Then Released Minus Years of His Life Proof That the System Is Working?

Death Penalty Falls From Favor as Some Lose Confidence in Its Fairness Some said that what persuaded them was the news that 13 prisoners on death row in Illinois were discovered to be innocent � a revelation that led Gov. George Ryan, a Republican, to declare a statewide moratorium on the death penalty last year. Others said they were troubled by reports that the death penalty may be disproportionately imposed on blacks and Hispanics. "I've slowly been changing my mind about the death penalty," said Fredrica Hicks, a mother of three who works in a Social Security office in Chicago, where the exonerations of prisoners in her state gave her pause. "What would happen if something went wrong and someone accused me of something and there was no way for me to prove my innocence, or evidence was lost and I was sitting on death row? If it has happened to someone else, it could happen to anyone. It could be me." But Charlotte Stout, a retired nurse in Greenfield, Tenn., rebutted that, saying: "To me, that is the system working. If it hadn't been working, the innocent people wouldn't have been released." "Today to be raising questions about capital punishment is to be in the company of the pope, Governor Ryan, the Legislatures of Nebraska and New Hampshire, the columnist George Will, Pat Robertson and William Sessions, the former director of the F.B.I., all of whom have come out in favor of a moratorium, said Mr. Sarat, the author of "When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition" (Princeton University Press, 2001). "Go down to the police department and look at the police blotter and you'll be convinced it's not deterring anything," said Jerry Jones, an election worker in Chicago. http://www.nytimes.com/2001/06/17/national/17VOIC.html?pagewanted=all