News Analysis: Bush Seeks Ways to Create Jobs, and Fast: "With a phalanx of women entrepreneurs at his side and a billboard covered with the word 'Jobs!' behind him, President Bush proclaimed his confidence about the economy here on Friday. But he made only passing reference to the latest news about employment. The reason was clear: Friday's report on unemployment in December was much weaker than either the administration or most independent economists had predicted. Job creation was virtually nil, and the unemployment rate declined only because the labor force shrank by 309,000 workers. Many of those were people who had simply become too discouraged to keep looking for work." The problem confronting Mr. Bush is that there is little he can do between now and the elections except wait and hope that the employment picture improves. And the administration is not likely to get much more help from the Federal Reserve, which has already reduced short-term interest rates to just 1 percent. "In terms of big levers to pull, they don't have anything," said Pierre Ellis, a senior economist at Decision Economics, a forecasting company.… Both the White House and the Fed are confronted by a recovery unlike any other in modern history. Economic growth has been soaring for months, corporate profits have shot up and the stock market has regained much of its old ebullience. Yet job creation has been slower than in almost any previous recovery, and wage growth has slowed to a crawl. That appears to reflect another big new element that lies entirely outside the president's control: the enormous increases in productivity, which have made it possible for companies to squeeze more output from each worker. "The evidence is powerful that we can have 4 or 5 percent growth without hiring much," said John Makin, a senior economist at the American Enterprise Institute. Mr. Makin has long been among the more pessimistic economic forecasters, but the employment and wage data on Friday came in far worse than even he had expected. "I was stunned, quite frankly," he said.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/10/business/10jobs.html

U.S. Reasserts Right to Declare Citizens to Be Enemy Combatants: "The Bush administration on Wednesday reasserted its broad authority to declare American citizens to be enemy combatants, and it suggested that the Supreme Court consider two prominent cases at the same time. The Justice Department, in a brief filed with the court, said it would seek an expedited appeal of a federal appeals court decision last month in the case of Jose Padilla, jailed as an enemy combatant in 2002.… " The divided Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York, ruled on Dec. 18 that President Bush lacked the authority to indefinitely detain an American citizen like Mr. Padilla who was arrested on American soil simply by declaring him an enemy combatant. Mr. Padilla has been held incommunicado at a military brig in South Carolina. American authorities say he plotted with operatives of Al Qaeda overseas to detonate a "dirty" radiological bomb in the United States. But the Justice Department said in its brief that the ruling was "fundamentally at odds" with court precedent on presidential powers. The decision "undermines the president's constitutional authority to protect the nation," Solicitor General Theodore B. Olson wrote. The Justice Department said it hoped the Supreme Court would consider an appeal in April.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/08/politics/08COMB.html

News: FBI investigates hack at e-voting software company: "Local and federal authorities including the FBI are investigating an intrusion into a computer network at an e-vote software company, which suspects the hack was politically motivated. VoteHere, a 7-year-old company in Bellevue, Wash., on Tuesday confirmed reports that its network had been breached in October. The company identified a suspect and said it turned the case over to the FBI, the Secret Service and the U.S. Attorney's office for an investigation that is ongoing." "This is a crime," said VoteHere Chief Executive Jim Adler. "This is about breaking and entering and stealing." It's also, e-voting critics would say, about security. The story of VoteHere's network breach, reported Monday by MSNBC and the Associated Press, is likely to play into a lively debate over the security and reliability of electronic voting systems. That debate has risen in pitch as federal deadlines loom for states to upgrade their voting systems, and e-voting systems provider Diebold has become a lightning rod for criticism for its own series of woes relating to security, partisan comments by its CEO and other issues.… VoteHere has tentatively linked the suspect to a number of advocacy groups critical of electronic voting systems. The company declined to identify the suspect or the groups, again citing the investigation. The FBI said the case was being handled by a federal and local multi-agency group called the Northwest Cybercrime Task Force. No suspects have been charged yet in the case. VoteHere, which has posted some of its technical documents to the Web at VerifiedVoting.org, and has pledged to reveal the source code to its software when it completes an internal review within months, said no elections were compromised in the intrusion.… http://zdnet.com.com/2100-1105_2-5134106.html

Keeping the Faith: In Government We Trust (as Far as We Can Throw It): "TO listen to pollsters, politicians and pundits, you might think 'the public trust' in government has been urgently threatened at every juncture since the Enron scandal broke in 2001 - or, in the view of the Democratic presidential candidates, since the inauguration of George W. Bush. The year just ended provided its own fodder for distrust. If the herbal supplement ephedra is so bad for you, why wasn't it banned years ago rather than just last week? What about mad cow disease? They said it couldn't happen here. Remember the budget surplus? Where did it go? Don't forget those weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. ('Nothing could be a more serious violation of public trust than to consciously make a case for war based on false claims,' Gen. Wesley K. Clark said last fall.) " In the fall it was revealed that some mutual fund hotshots, apparently immune to regulation, were favoring fat cats and not ordinary investors. And yes, Parmalat is a foreign company, but its name is on American milk cartons. Nobody knew that a $5 billion - $5 billion - account was just a figment of the company's imagination? Finally, wasn't the nation just put on Orange Alert? Tell that to the pilot of a private plane who went joy riding around the Statue of Liberty last week, or to the guy who managed to hijack a bus from the Port Authority terminal in Manhattan and drive it to Kennedy Airport. No alarm was raised for seven hours that the bus was even missing. For all of this, it might not be surprising that public faith in government, in big business and in institutions in general appears to be dwindling.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/weekinreview/04robe.html?pagewanted=all&position=

The Things They Carry: "In October, the Center for American Progress, a new liberal policy institute, held a two-day conference in Washington designed to lay out the foundations of an alternative, and politically viable, national security policy. The panels at the symposium (which was also sponsored by the Century Foundation and The American Prospect magazine) featured, in the main, nonideological figures offering sober and pragmatic counsel: reserve the right to act pre-emptively but don't make a doctrine of it; do peacekeeping right; focus on ''failed'' states like Afghanistan and Sudan; devise carrots as well as sticks to deal with state sponsors of terrorism; forge a global strategy to deal with the proliferation of nuclear weapons. " For the keynote speaker, the sponsors invited not a conventional liberal but Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's hawkish national security adviser, a fervently anti-Soviet Polish emigre reviled during the cold war by the Democratic Party's left wing. I expected Brzezinski to be at least mildly sympathetic to the Bush administration. I was wrong. ''American power worldwide is at its historic zenith,'' he told his audience, which consisted largely of technocrats and midlevel Clinton administration officials. And yet, he noted: ''American global political standing is at its nadir. Why?'' First, Brzezinski said, because of the ''paranoiac view of the world'' summed up in the expression -- a paraphrase of President Bush -- ''He who is not with us is against us.'' Second, because of ''a fear'' -- of terrorism -- ''that periodically verges on panic'' and is stoked by ''extremist demagogy.'' To Brzezinski, the Bush administration's unilateralism, and its militarism, constituted a radical break with a consensus that stretched across several generations and presumably included not only cold warriors like himself but also the liberals he once opposed, like Cyrus Vance, Carter's secretary of state.… Brzezinski's question -- Why is so much of the world against us? -- is, in fact, the starting point for the Democratic critique of the Bush administration. The sheer velocity of the change from worldwide sympathy to worldwide antipathy is almost incredible, and while much of the new anger comes from the very nature of our superpower status, the conduct of the Bush administration has plainly had a lot to do with it as well. In an article in Newsweek on the eve of the war in Iraq, Fareed Zakaria, that magazine's foreign-policy analyst, pointed out that some nations offered America only quiet support on Iraq ''not because they fear Saddam Hussein but because they fear their own people.'' The Bush administration had asked a very great deal and offered less than nothing. Zakaria noted that ''with the exception of Britain and Israel, every country the administration has dealt with feels humiliated by it.'' And of course the United States is now paying a price for that in Iraq, where it cannot find either enough foreign troops or funds to supplement its own. Conservatives have a longstanding answer to the argument for multilateralism. As Condoleezza Rice, now Bush's national security adviser, wrote in a much discussed essay in Foreign Affairs during the 2000 campaign, ''The belief that the support of many states -- or even better, of institutions like the United Nations -- is essential to the legitimate exercise of power'' proceeds from a deep discomfort with the fact of America's power. This discomfort is, in turn, the residuum of Vietnam. There's some truth to that claim. One Democratic policy figure I spoke to said, ''If you listen to the Democrats in Iowa, you sometimes get the impression that the U.N. is going to save us from the situation.'' And yet, at least when they're not preaching to the Iowan choir, Democrats generally use hardheaded, looking-out-for-No.-1 language that Rice herself would have trouble taking exception to. They forswear ''mushy multilateralism,'' in John Kerry's phrase, for what Senator Joe Lieberman calls ''muscular multilateralism'' -- multilateralism not as a source of legitimacy but as an instrument to advance our own interests. The consequences of unilateralism in Iraq dominate the debate. Yet if you talk to Democratic policy experts, Iraq rarely appears as the country's top national security priority. In ''An American Security Policy,'' a study ordered by Tom Daschle, the Senate minority leader, and written by a group that included top former Clinton aides like William Perry, the former defense secretary; Madeleine Albright, the former secretary of state; and Sandy Berger, the former national security adviser, Iraq appears as only the fourth of six major areas of concern. The first is ''The Loose Nukes Crisis in North Korea,'' and the second is the overall problem of weapons of mass destruction in Russia, Pakistan, Iran and elsewhere.… http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/04/magazine/04DEMOCRATS.html?pagewanted=all&position=

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