Bon Mots

The Washington Post's Style Invitational once again asked readers to take any word from the dictionary, alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing one letter, and supply a new definition. Here are some of the 2003 winners:

1. Intaxication: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.
3. Bozone (n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating.
13. Glibido: All talk and no action.
14. Dopeler effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.
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The Deal: Dr. Rice's Testimony, Executive Priviledge, and the 9/11 Commission

Of Privilege and Politics
NY Times Editorial
Published: March 31, 2004

President Bush finally agreed yesterday to allow his national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice, to testify publicly and under oath to the panel investigating the 9/11 attacks. But Mr. Bush did the right thing only under intense political pressure and after he had already undermined the principles he claimed to be upholding. His reversal came with disturbing conditions attached, wrapped up in a volley of spin. All in all, it leaves the impression of a White House less interested in helping the 9/11 panel perform its vital task than in protecting the president's political flanks.

There is merit to the argument that Mr. Bush's nearest adviser on war, terrorism and other such momentous issues is entitled to some confidentiality. But if upholding that principle was the administration's concern, Ms. Rice was obliged in return to show public discretion. Instead, she became part of the president's re-election machine.

The regularity with which Ms. Rice has popped up on television talk shows has become a running joke. It's hard to claim the need to protect your privacy when you're spending as much time doing television interviews as Ms. Rice has recently. She has been leading the administration's attack on Richard Clarke, the former presidential adviser who has criticized Mr. Bush's record on terrorism.

While Bush administration officials have accused Mr. Clarke of lying to promote a book, the White House has worked to unseal Congressional testimony by Mr. Clarke that had been delivered with the same understanding of confidentiality that Ms. Rice claimed. And when the 9/11 commissioners attempted to fulfill their mandate from Congress by trying to resolve the differences between Ms. Rice's version of reality and Mr. Clarke's, the president balked at allowing her to testify as Mr. Clarke did, under oath.

Yesterday, Mr. Bush's lawyer told the commission that Ms. Rice would testify. And after months of unacceptable delay, the lawyer said Mr. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney would also talk to the entire commission in private, not under oath. But the panel had to pay a price: it agreed, at the administration's insistence, that after Ms. Rice testifies, it will not call her back or ask any other White House official to testify in public.

The White House's initial refusal to allow Ms. Rice to testify and its cynical use of a confidential adviser as a public accuser would have been bad enough. But they fit an unpleasant pattern. This president has repeatedly abused his executive privilege while seeking to hide behind it, starting when Mr. Cheney invoked that privilege to gather business executives in secret to draft the administration's energy policy.

President Bush may be right in holding that this battle has harmed his important, but limited, right to executive privilege. If so, the wounds were self-inflicted.

Internet Hoaxes, Chain Letters, et al

Note: Over the past few years we have all received numerous emails which consisted of some hoax, whether it was the "Nigerian Oil", "Madlyn Murray O'hair vs FCC", "Poor Girl Cancer Victim" or other warning or appeal that the sender forwarded to our email box, many times with the name or email address of a friend attached.

For a fuller introduction to the range of these emails, we have the CAIC webpage that speaks to the matter in plain language.

However, my take on this has more to do with several factors only marginally addressed in that article, which I refer to as the "Hook, Line, and Sinker" email messaging system. First, is the "hook" where the email author makes a statement that the reader responds to; usually about the primacy of Christian based activities such as prayer in the school, religious programming, or indecency on the airwaves. Lately we have seen this include an opposition to "partial birth abortions", "gay marriage", and other controversial social issues.

The "line" attempts to suggest a fault with current activities, address a perceived need, cast blame on some entity, or in some other manner substantiate the thesis of the "hook".

The "sinker" is the appeal, where the chain letter or hoax email recipient is encouraged to add their name to a list to be forwarded to someone, who it is suggested, can provide a solution, or to forward the original message to their email buddies for their edification and combined action.

It seems these emails depend on two related phenomenon: a) the veracity of the "hook" requires a Judeo-Christian religious bias, and b) the recipient is expected to acknowledge a responsibility to address this matter in an evangelical manner. Whereas the "line" almost always includes an appeal to authority, narrowly selected.

But what is most striking is the "sinker" component. It is almost impossible to believe that anyone in a position of power would grant favored status to an email with 10,000 signatures attached over one with 10 signatures. A legally valid petition requires a confirmable signature which is not provided by affixing one's name to an email list of names. Any moderately skilled spammer can spit out a list of a million names with mostly matching email addresses in short order. Any auditor attempting to verify signatures on an email chain letter would throw in the towel long before getting to Signature # 100.

On the other hand, when ten thousand people send a personal letter or non-templated email to a legislator the import will be several orders of magnitude greater than an email containing ten thousand signatures. That should be obvious; but perhaps something else explains the "pile-on" chain letter phenomenon. Two likely explanations might very simply be standard features of group dynamics, such as: affixing a signature indicates an acceptance of the "hook, line, and sinker", or an acknowledgement that their individual voice carries little weight unless used in combination with other voices, or is an attempt to indicate support in the least threatening manner possible.

The Website: chainletters.net, lists 1,148 chain letters in current circulation. By topic they include: 141 dealing with money, 111 dealing with sex, 84 dealing with church or prayer, 15 dealing with President Bush, and 2 dealing with tolerance. Not exactly the distribution one would expect, or perhaps it is exactly what one would expect.

Mao's "Three Rules and the Eight Remarks"

The Complete Treatise on Guerilla Warfare by Chairman Mao"

Rules:
All actions are subject to command.
Do not steal from the people.
Be neither selfish nor unjust.

Remarks:
Replace the door when you leave the house.
Roll up the bedding on which you have slept.
Be courteous.
Be honest in your transactions.
Return what you borrow.
Replace what you break.
Do not bathe in the presence of women.
Do not without authority search those you arrest.

"Many people think it impossible for guerrillas to exist for long in the enemy's rear. Such a belief reveals lack of comprehension of the relationship that should exist between the people and the troops. The former may be likened to water the latter to the fish who inhabit it. How may it be said that these two cannot exist together? It is only undisciplined troops who make the people their enemies and who, like the fish out of its native element cannot live. "

Note: This is the biggest difference between guerilla fighters of the past and the newer crop of Islamic fundamentalist fighters: the former considered non-combattants as one of the main sources of their power, and worked to ingratiate themselves into the fabric of the common man's daily lives. Al Quieda operatives consider all who are not "pure, or like us" as legimate targets. They routinely execute captives who have surrendered. Their stated goals are not compatible with international codes of human rights, but rather depend on ancient religious laws and practices that relegate vast segments of society to inferior social standing, while granting their followers favors and virtues completely at odds with socialist or democratic principles.

How Europeans See the USA

What Do Europeans Like and Dislike about the United States?

New five-country survey of Western European adults shows few dislike Americans or the United States but most dislike President Bush and his foreign policies.

ROCHESTER, N.Y. and LONDON, March 24 /PRNewswire/ --

When people think about foreign countries their views are generally not all positive or all negative. They usually see both good things, which they like, and others, which they dislike. This is certainly true of European attitudes to the United States today.

When people in the five largest European countries think of the United States, they tend, on balance, to feel positively about the American people, American films and television programs, the quality of life in America, and how Americans do business. On the other hand, large majorities of Europeans have negative opinions of President Bush, U.S. policies in Iraq and Afghanistan and of recent American foreign policy. So the phrase "anti-American" is capable of many meanings and is potentially misleading.

This ability to differentiate is particularly strong when Europeans consider the people, as compared to leaders and government policies of the United States.

-- Only 13% of these Europeans, on average, have negative opinions of the American people, and only 33% have negative opinions of the United States.

-- Fully 70% have negative opinions of President Bush; 69% have negative opinions of U.S. policies in Iraq, and 62% have negative opinions of American foreign policy since 2000, when President Bush came to power.

Other aspects of the United States which are viewed positively, on average, by pluralities in the five countries are:
-- American films and television (48% positive, 22% negative);
-- The quality of life in America (45% positive, 21% negative); and
-- "How Americans do business" (37% positive, 24% negative).

On the other hand, majorities of Europeans in the five countries have negative opinions not only of U.S. foreign policy and President Bush but also of American food (56% negative, 17% positive). We suspect that this is strongly influenced by perceptions of American fast food chains that are, of course, pervasive across Europe.

These are some of the results of a poll conducted online by Harris Interactive and its European subsidiary HI Europe between February 27 and March 4, 2004 among 2,637 adults in Great Britain; 2,547 in France; 1,273 in Germany; 2,407 in Spain; and 1,301 in Italy. It should be noted that the survey was completed just before the bombing in Madrid that killed more than 200 people.

Most Americans are proud of traditional American values, American justice and the U.S. Constitution. Furthermore many Americans believe that other people share these favorable opinions and look up to the United States, its
freedoms and its system of government as a "shining city on a hill."

The reality is rather different in the five European countries surveyed. Only a quarter of these Europeans hold favorable views of American justice and governmental systems. Using the averages across the five countries,
pluralities hold negative views of American courts and systems of justice (by 41% to 26%) and of the American system of government (by 40% to 26%). Attitudes to American values are less negative but not strongly positive.
A modest 34% to 30% plurality rates American values positively. Here, as in other questions, there are big differences among opinions in the five countries. In general, the Italians have the most positive views of the American system of government (50% positive, 20% negative), of American values (44% positive, 23% negative), and American justice (44% positive, 23% negative). The Germans and French are the most negative on these two criteria.

The average results for the five countries are based on very different responses in each country. In general, the Italians and, to a somewhat lesser extent the British, have the most positive attitudes to the United States, while the French and the Germans are the most negative. Spanish attitudes toward the United States (as measured just before the recent Madrid bombings) mostly fall somewhere in the middle, closer to the five-country averages. Some exceptions to this pattern are that the Spanish people feel as positively as the British and Italians toward the American people, American multinational companies and American movies and television.

911 days between WTC and Madrid Attacks
Al-Jazeera - 3/17/2004 5:09:00 PM GMT

Coincidence? There was exactly 911 days between the World Trade Centre attacks on 9/11 and the recent bombings in Madrid that left hundreds dead. What do you think, is this a coincidence or is someone trying to tell us something.
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Spanish police probing the deadly Madrid train bombings found the fingerprints on Saturday of two leading suspects.

Police also recovered detonators and traces of dynamite inside the house near Morata de Tajuna, 20 miles southeast of Madrid, Spanish media reported. The fingerprints found in the house were from Jamal Zougam and Abderrahim Zbakh, two Moroccans considered prime suspects in the bombings, which killed 190 people and wounded more than 1,800, radio station Onda Cero and Spanish national television reported.

Zougam and Zbakh, who were arrested in the first week after Spain's worst terror attack, are being held on charges of mass murder. Spanish court documents have linked Zougam to members of an al-Qaida cell in Spain. A French private investigator told The Associated Press that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, a Jordanian linked to al-Qaida and suspected of heading a terrorist network in Iraq, is now believed to have been the brains behind the Madrid railway attacks.

Jean-Charles Brisard said Spanish officials told him some suspects held in the March 11 attacks were in contact with al-Zarqawi as recently as a month or two before the bombings. Brisard is a recognized expert on Islamic terrorism. He has testified before the U.S. Congress on the issue and has strong connections with police investigators on both sides of the Atlantic.

Spanish investigators believe six or seven of the 18 people now in custody in Spain helped plan the Madrid attacks and that al-Zarqawi was behind the plot, Brisard said. Authorities have analyzed a videotape found in Madrid in which a man claiming to speak on behalf of al-Qaida said the group carried out the Madrid attacks in reprisal for Spain's backing of the U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Police believe the attackers used the Spanish house, discovered a week ago, to prepare the explosives and stuff them into knapsacks, media reports said. The Interior Ministry did not answer calls seeking confirmation Saturday.

Police have arrested 21 people since the bombs ripped through four commuter trains during morning rush-hour. Twelve of the 21 suspects have been charged with mass murder or belonging to or collaborating with a terrorist group. Three former suspects have been released and another six suspects will go before a judge at the National Court next week.

Also Saturday, Judge Del Olmo lifted the solitary confinement order he imposed on nine of the 12 suspects charged, Onda Cero said. Three detainees, including Zougam, have not had access to lawyers or family since being arrested March 13, two days after the bombings. No official at the jail or Interior Ministry could be contacted to confirm the report. No explanation was given for the lifting of the confinement order.

The national news agency Efe said Del Olmo visited the jail Friday with some witnesses of the bombings for a recognition lineup of the detainees. There were no details on the result of the lineup. The probe has spread to Germany, which, along with Spain, is believed to have been a key staging ground for the Sept. 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

In Germany, police raided an apartment Thursday in Darmstadt where a Moroccan suspect arrested this week in Madrid stayed briefly last year. The 28-year-old man, who was not identified, is suspected of membership in a foreign terrorist organization, a prosecutor said. But German officials said they had no evidence the Madrid attacks were planned or prepared in Germany.

Morocco, the native country of at least nine of the suspects, reported its first arrests in the case, although a senior official said they had not yielded significant information.

The Richard Clark Affair

Dick Clarke Is Telling the Truth
Why he's right about Bush's negligence on terrorism.
By Fred Kaplan
Posted Tuesday, March 23, 2004, at 3:22 PM PT

Clarke: a credible critic

I have no doubt that Richard Clarke, the former National Security Council official who has launched a broadside against President Bush's counterterrorism policies, is telling the truth about every single charge. There are three reasons for this confidence.

First, his basic accusations are consistent with tales told by other officials, including some who had no significant dealings with Clarke.

Second, the White House's attempts at rebuttal have been extremely weak and contradictory. If Clarke were wrong, one would expect the comebacks—especially from Bush's aides, who excel at the counterstrike—to be stronger and more substantive.

Third, I went to graduate school with Clarke in the late 1970s, at MIT's political science department, and called him as an occasional source in the mid-'80s when he was in the State Department and I was a newspaper reporter. There were good things and dubious things about Clarke, traits that inspired both admiration and leeriness. The former: He was very smart, a highly skilled (and utterly nonpartisan) analyst, and he knew how to get things done in a calcified bureaucracy. The latter: He was arrogant, made no effort to disguise his contempt for those who disagreed with him, and blatantly maneuvered around all obstacles to make sure his views got through.

The key thing, though, is this: Both sets of traits tell me he's too shrewd to write or say anything in public that might be decisively refuted. As Daniel Benjamin, another terrorism specialist who worked alongside Clarke in the Clinton White House, put it in a phone conversation today, "Dick did not survive and flourish in the bureaucracy all those years by leaving himself open to attack."

Clarke did suffer one setback in his 30-year career in high office, though he doesn't mention it in his book. James Baker, the first President Bush's secretary of state, fired Clarke from his position as director of the department's politico-military bureau. (Bush's NSC director, Brent Scowcroft, hired him almost instantly.) I doubt we'll be hearing from Baker on this episode: He fired Clarke for being too close to Israel—not a point the Bush family's political savior is likely to make in an election season. (For details on this unwritten chapter and on why Clarke hasn't talked to me for over 15 years, click here.)

But on to the substance. Clarke's main argument—made in his new book, Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror, in lengthy interviews on CBS's 60 Minutes and PBS's Charlie Rose Show, and presumably in his testimony scheduled for tomorrow before the 9/11 Commission—is that Bush has done (as Clarke put it on CBS) "a terrible job" at fighting terrorism. Specifically: In the summer of 2001, Bush did almost nothing to deal with mounting evidence of an impending al-Qaida attack. Then, after 9/11, his main response was to attack Iraq, which had nothing to do with 9/11. This move not only distracted us from the real war on terrorism, it fed into Osama Bin Laden's propaganda—that the United States would invade and occupy an oil-rich Arab country—and thus served as the rallying cry for new terrorist recruits.

Clarke's charges have raised a furor because of who he is. In every administration starting with Ronald Reagan's, Clarke was a high-ranking official in the State Department or the NSC, dealing mainly with countering weapons of mass destruction and terrorism. Under Clinton and the first year of George W. Bush, he worked in the White House as the national coordinator for terrorism, a Cabinet-level post created specifically for his talents. When the terrorists struck on Sept. 11, Condi Rice, Bush's national security adviser, designated Clarke as the "crisis manager;" he ran the interagency meetings from the Situation Room, coordinating—in some cases, directing—the response.

Clarke backs up his chronicle with meticulous detail, but the basic charges themselves should not be so controversial; certainly, they're nothing new. According to former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill's account in Ron Suskind's* The Price of Loyalty, Bush's top officials talked about invading Iraq from the very start of the administration. Jim Mann's new book about Bush's war Cabinet, Rise of the Vulcans, reveals the historic depths of this obsession.

Most pertinent, Rand Beers, the official who succeeded Clarke after he left the White House in February 2003, resigned in protest just one month later—five days before the Iraqi war started—for precisely the same reason that Clarke quit. In June, he told the Washington Post, "The administration wasn't matching its deeds to its words in the war on terror. They're making us less secure, not more." And: "The difficult, long-term issues both at home and abroad have been avoided, neglected or shortchanged, and generally underfunded." (For more about Beers, including his association with Clarke and whether there's anything pertinent about his current position as a volunteer national security adviser to John Kerry's presidential campaign, click here.)

Clarke's distinction, of course, is that he was the ultimate insider—as highly and deeply inside, on this issue, as anyone could imagine. And so his charges are more credible, potent, and dangerous. So, how has Team Bush gone after Clarke? Badly.

To an unusual degree, the Bush people can't get their story straight. On the one hand, Condi Rice has said that Bush did almost everything that Clarke recommended he do. On the other hand, Vice President Dick Cheney, appearing on Rush Limbaugh's show, acted as if Clarke were a lowly, eccentric clerk: "He wasn't in the loop, frankly, on a lot of this stuff." This is laughably absurd. Clarke wasn't just in the loop, he was the loop.

Cheney's elaboration of his dismissal is blatantly misleading. "He was moved out of the counterterrorism business over to the cybersecurity side of things ... attacks on computer systems and, you know, sophisticated information technology," Cheney scoffed. Limbaugh replied, "Well, now, that explains a lot, that answer right there."

It explains nothing. First, he wasn't "moved out"; he transferred, at his own request, out of frustration with being cut out of the action on broad terrorism policy, to a new NSC office dealing with cyberterrorism. Second, he did so after 9/11. (He left government altogether in February 2003.)

In a further effort to minimize Clarke's importance, a talking-points paper put out by the White House press office states that, contrary to his claims, "Dick Clarke never had Cabinet rank." At the same time, the paper denies—again, contrary to the book—that he was demoted: He "continued to be the National Coordinator on Counter-terrorism."

Both arguments are deceptive. Clarke wasn't a Cabinet secretary, but as Clinton's NCC, he ran the "Principals Committee" meetings on counterterrorism, which were attended by Cabinet secretaries. Two NSC senior directors reported to Clarke directly, and he had reviewing power over relevant sections of the federal budget.

Clarke writes (and nobody has disputed) that when Condi Rice took over the NSC, she kept him onboard and preserved his title but demoted the position. He would no longer participate in, much less run, Principals' meetings. He would report to deputy secretaries. He would have no staff and would attend no more meetings with budget officials.

Clarke probably resented the slight, took it personally. But he also saw it as a downgrading of the issue, a sign that al-Qaida was no longer taken as the urgent threat that the Clinton White House had come to interpret it. (One less-noted aspect of Clarke's book is its detailed description of the major steps that Clinton took to combat terrorism.)

The White House talking-points paper is filled with these sorts of distortions. For instance, it notes that Bush didn't need to meet with Clarke because, unlike Clinton, he met every day with CIA Director George Tenet, who talked frequently about al-Qaida.

But here's how Clarke describes those meetings:

[Tenet] and I regularly commiserated that al Qaeda was not being addressed more seriously by the new administration. ... We agreed that Tenet would ensure that the president's daily briefings would continue to be replete with threat information on al Qaeda.

The problem is: Nothing happened. (It is significant, by the way, that Tenet has not been recruited—not successfully, anyway—to rebut Clarke's charges. Clarke told Charlie Rose that he was "very close" to Tenet. The two come off as frustrated allies in Clarke's book.)

The White House document insists Bush did take the threat seriously, telling Rice at one point "that he was 'tired of swatting flies' and wanted to go on the offense against al-Qaeda."

Here's how Clarke describes that exchange:

President Bush, reading the intelligence every day and noticing that there was a lot about al Qaeda, asked Condi Rice why it was that we couldn't stop "swatting flies" and eliminate al Qaeda. Rice told me about the conversation and asked how the plan to get al Qaeda was coming in the Deputies' Committee. "It can be presented to the Principals in two days, whenever we can get a meeting," I pressed. Rice promised to get to it soon. Time passed.

The Principals meeting, which Clarke urgently requested during Bush's first week in office, did not take place until one week before 9/11. In his 60 Minutes interview, Clarke spelled out the significance of this delay. He contrasted July 2001 with December 1999, when the Clinton White House got word of an impending al-Qaida attack on Los Angeles International Airport and Principals meetings were called instantly and repeatedly:

In December '99, every day or every other day, the head of the FBI, the head of the CIA, the Attorney General had to go to the White House and sit in a meeting and report on all the things that they personally had done to stop the al Qaeda attack, so they were going back every night to their departments and shaking the trees personally and finding out all the information. If that had happened in July of 2001, we might have found out in the White House, the Attorney General might have found out that there were al Qaeda operatives in the United States. FBI, at lower levels, knew [but] never told me, never told the highest levels in the FBI. ... We could have caught those guys and then we might have been able to pull that thread and get more of the conspiracy. I'm not saying we could have stopped 9/11, but we could have at least had a chance.

That's what Clarke says is the tragedy of Bush's inaction, and nobody in the White House has dealt with the charge at all.

Call to Indict Sharon Ignites Political Storm
By JAMES BENNET
NY Times International
Published: March 29, 2004

JERUSALEM, March 28 — Israel's state prosecutor cast a shadow over Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on Sunday when, the Israeli news media reported, she recommended that the attorney general indict him on charges of taking bribes from a developer.

A Workhorse SUV - not a Show-Horse for the Ladies

Cheap, Ugly and Tough. Meet the Pinzgauer.
By PHIL PATTON
Published: March 26, 2004

To capture the material he needs for his work, Warren Cross, a sound designer, ranges far and wide, recording everything from storms and waterfalls to police sirens to be used on stage or in films. A few years ago, he discovered what he considers the perfect vehicle for his work: a 1974 Pinzgauer 710K. The Pinzgauer is a boxy, canvas-topped military vehicle built in Austria, and Mr. Cross and other Pinz owners insist that it is the toughest off-roader in the world. "It'll go over anything, especially ditches," Mr. Cross said. "It doesn't matter how you attack them, it's not going to get stuck."

Theo Hanson, a vice president of SoCal Pinzgauers, an importer, said, "It's a ruffian vehicle, the unique beast of the world." SoCal, which has offices in San Diego and Hemet, Calif., is one of a handful of companies that sell the few hundred used Pinzgauers brought to the United States each year, including Southwest Unimog and Pinzgauer in Prescott, Ariz., Cold War Remarketing in Littleton, Colo., and Northeast Off-Road in Keene, N.H.

Would-be buyers at Northeast Off-Road are taken up a 70-degree slope, a demonstration the company says is especially persuasive. "Please wait until the vehicle comes to a complete stop before writing your check," its Web site requests. Unlike the latest generation of beauty S.U.V.'s, with their gleaming finishes and leather seats, the Pinzgauer is clearly a workhorse, resembling nothing so much as a small utility building that has sprouted wheels and begun to drive off. (It is, in fact, named after a famously sturdy Austrian breed of draft horses.)

Introduced by the Austrian manufacturer Steyr-Daimler-Puch in 1971, the Pinzgauer in its 4-wheel and 6-wheel versions is used by about 30 armies around the world. The 4x4 version, the 710, weighs 4,300 pounds and can carry 2,200 pounds. It enjoys ground clearance of about a foot. A used 710 sells for as little as $10,000 in a bare-bones version; the six-wheel 712 goes for about $16,000.

But they do not necessarily stay that cheap. Many owners heavily customize their vehicles, adding creature comforts like sound insulation, tops and air-conditioning. It is not uncommon for customers of SoCal or Cold War Remarketing to put $100,000 into their $10,000 Pinzes.

Mr. Cross's model was originally a radio command car for the Swiss military. And while he is enthusiastic about where it has been able to take him to record sounds, including "a heron rookery at two in the morning in a state park that was not supposed to be open," he did not truly appreciate the vehicle's toughness until he started building a house in upstate New York a couple of years ago. Once a truck delivering lumber got stuck trying to get up his dirt driveway. So Mr. Cross attached a chain to the truck and used his Pinzgauer to tow it up the drive. "It's truly unstoppable," he said.

Indeed, Robert Lutz, the General Motors vice chairman who owns a Czech-made jet plane and a garage full of sports cars, has called his Pinz "the most competent off-road vehicle in the world." And while the Pinz does not yet have the Hollywood cachet of a gleaming Mercedes G-Class, it does have its celebrity fans. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, the great Hummer fan, also has two Pinzgauers, which were customized for use in the film "Terminator 3" with larger engines and gearing. "They're in a warehouse now that Arnold is chauffeured in a state car," Mr. Hanson said.

But Pinz owners — even famous ones — tend to be quiet about their cars. "The Pinz is less about standing out than belonging — and being in the know," Mr. Hanson said. When Pinz owners do get together, it is usually for regional "treffens" (German for "meet") — weekend mini-treks on famed roads like the Rubicon Trail in California or in areas like the Big Scrub, in Florida.

The gatherings tend to be small. Dealers estimate that there are only about 1,800 Pinzes in the United States. The current supply goes back to a decision made in Austria in 1988 when Steyr-Daimler-Puch replaced the vehicle's gas engine with a diesel one. As it buys the new models, the Swiss military has been selling off its older, gasoline Pinzes, many to customers in the United States. Those vehicles fall under federal regulations that exempt models at least 25 years old from Environmental Protection Agency emissions rules.

Not long after he bought his Pinz, Mr. Cross became the resident sound designer at Cornell University's Department of Theater, Film and Dance, and it became his commuter car. (He now drives a smaller, more fuel-efficient Steyr-Daimler-Puch vehicle called a Haflinger.) It was noisy and chilly, he said, but the biggest drawback was being stopped and queried by curious observers.

Mr. Sweeney knows exactly what he means. "It does stand out," he said. "I guarantee you a Pinzgauer will get twice as many people looking as a Ferrari."

Note: If you are having trouble thinking of a Pinz in your driveway, perhaps you need to consider the Ultimate SUV, which you can see here.

Or maybe you're more in tune with Euro-customized Rice Rockets. Well there's info for you here on that too.

Pakistani troops found 'executed'
Aljazeera
Saturday 27 March 2004, 15:32 Makka Time, 12:32 GMT

Eight Pakistani soldiers have been found executed a few days after being taken hostage during fighting with alleged al-Qaida fighters and their tribal allies near the border with Afghanistan. The soldiers, their hands tied behind their backs and apparently shot at close range, were found on Friday near Wana, the capital of the South Waziristan area in Pakistan's semi-autonomous tribal territories.

They were likely killed shortly after their convoy was ambushed on Monday, a Pakistan army official said. Scores of people have been killed since last week when paramilitary forces hunting fighters allegedly linked to Usama bin Ladin ran into a hail of bullets as they approached a suspect's house in the rugged South Waziristan region.

The battle, involving 5000 troops, is Pakistan's biggest ever in the region. The executed troops are separate to a group of 14 soldiers and officials thought to have been kidnapped at the start of the clashes. Tribal elders had been trying for days to persuade the fighters to release the men and surrender.

President Pervez Musharraf's government announced on Thursday more troops would be sent to the tribal territories bordering Afghanistan to reinforce a campaign to root out al-Qaida fighters and their Pakistani tribal allies.

Some reports put the number of Pakistani troop deaths in the operation at over 100 and observers have called it a disaster for Musharraf who came to power in a military coup in 1999.

What is Art Good For ?

Bridges, Translations and Change: The Arts as Infrastructure in 21st Century America
By William Cleveland
Part 2: SIX ARGUMENTS IN SUPPORT OF THE ARTS IN AMERICA

1. The Arts Are an Essential Resource for Community Development
"Without creative personalities able to think and judge independently, the upward development of society is unthinkable..."
-Albert Einstein

ECONOMIC IMPACT: Numerous studies show the consistent and dramatic positive economic impact the arts have had on communities large and small. Recent research shows that each dollar spent on the arts generates three to four dollars in non-arts expenditures. Other research has further demonstrated that the arts are a magnet for large corporations and an effective and economical catalyst for the revitalization of urban centers. Rural arts providers, as well, make the case for the arts as particularly useful tool for both economic and social development, particularly in depressed areas.

The selling of cultural destinations, urban and rural, has become a core marketing strategy in the tourism industry. Beyond tourism and community renewal, the arts are big business. In California, the state with the largest economy, the arts and entertainment industry is the third ranked economic segment, generating $3.5 billion in wages subject to taxation.

FUTURE LEADERSHIP: In recent years, the top executives of America's leading companies have complained about the lack of creativity and problem-solving abilities exhibited by entry level workers, managers, engineers and scientists. Similar sentiments are also being voiced in the public sector, where one often hears talk of a leadership deficit. Government and business leaders alike have invested millions of dollars in training programs designed to increase the creativity and teamwork of the American work force.

Education in the arts, for young and old alike offers access to the kinds of skills our next generation of workers and leaders will need. These skills include: harnessing and synthesizing the qualities of logic, organization, flexibility and insight; creative teamwork; learning that problems are opportunities not obstacles; learning to discipline the imagination to solve difficult problems; and learning that "failure" is a functional aspect of discovery.

2. The Arts Are a Basic Educational Reform
Since the publication of A Nation At Risk: The Imperative for Education Reform, educators, parents, and civic leaders have sought reforms in education. In response, school systems nationwide have placed a greater emphasis on the generally accepted "building blocks" of basic education: math, science and the language arts.

A 1989 Assembly Office of Research report, Arts Education In California: Thriving or Surviving?, cites evidence that "a more balanced approach" emphasizing "the arts as well as basic skills" would be more "advantageous." The report also cites "evidence that suggests that in schools where students perform above average academically, they also receive a richer dose of visual and performing arts courses."

Other studies suggest that the arts offer an alternative for success and respectability for students who struggle academically, particularly learning disabled and ESL students. Indications are that the discipline and self-esteem these students acquire often carries over to their study of other academic subjects and provides motivation to stay in school.

The fact of the matter is that education in the arts is a curricular necessity. The creative process is the means we employ to put our basic skills to use. The problem solvers of the future-the explorers, scientists, engineers who will confront tomorrow's challenges- require more than the basics of math, science and language. They need hands-on experience, manipulating the tools of change-taking chances, challenging convention, taking on the impossible.

Educators are only just beginning to acknowledge the complex mix of human intelligences and learning styles. In this context, arts education is educational reform. The pedagogy of the future should not be just arts inclusive, it should be arts-based. Teachers should know and employ the creative process in everything they do. Arts-based education is the laboratory for harnessing the power of the intellect through the discipline and vision of the creative process. Arts-based education will support the growth of the imagination and creativity as tools students must employ to succeed in a complex society.

3. The Arts Provide a Common Language in a Complex Global Culture
"...the ichnography of the Great Goddess arose in reflection and veneration of the laws of nature.... The message here is of an age of harmony and peace in accord with the creative energies of nature which, for four thousand prehistoric years, anteceded the (next) five thousand-a period James Joyce has termed the "nightmare" (of contending tribal and national interests) from which it is now certainly time for this planet to wake."
-Joseph Campbell, from the Forward to The Language of the Goddess by Marija Gimbutas

The ichnography to which Joseph Campbell refers is the symbolic vocabulary embodied in European and African Neolithic art. Although the written language we use daily evolved from these symbols, we no longer recognize these shared roots. The marginalization of the arts in this country has separated the American "tribes" from a powerful common language. As change gives rise to protective and reactive responses, we must rediscover the power of the arts to translate cultural difference as a common bond. We must also acknowledge and learn from those artists now working as agents of community change and builders of bridges.

As these bridges are built, we should focus on the strength inherent in our growing diversity. In her book, Mixed Blessings: New Art in a Multicultural America, writer/critic Lucy Lippard describes the changed face of America as an "ajiaco" - the flavorful mix of a Latin American soup in which the ingredients retain their own forms and flavors. She describes this new model as "fresher and healthier; the colors…varied; the taste…often unfamiliar" that "calls for an undetermined simmering period of social acclimation."

Many artists in America, particularly those in California, are beginning to manifest the new American aesthetic. Their work is the product of a media age, in which, for the first time, cultural interaction, influence and change have not been tied to man's ability to move physically from place to place. These artistic dialogues and collaborations are models for the new ways we will have to interact as global citizens.

4. The Arts Help Maintain Our Competitiveness in a Technological Age
During the last decade the arts have been dramatically transformed through the introduction of new technologies. In areas such as film, video, music, design and holography, new technologies adapted by artists have produced innovative applications and opened new markets.

As inventors, artists are a breed apart. They are unencumbered by the practical constraints experienced by their more product-minded counterparts. Hardware and software in the artist's hands are merely a technical means to an aesthetic goal. The commercial feasibility of a given solution is often not relevant. But, as has been the case with the artistic exploration of special effects technology and computer graphics, new and unexpected applications emerge. In some ways, the interface of the arts and technology has created an unintended research and development arm for commercial high tech concerns.

The roles of the artist and the technological innovator are often interchangeable. In his book The Paradox of the Silicon Savior, Grant Venerable points out "that the very best engineers and technical designers (in the Silicon Valley) are, nearly without exception, practicing musicians."

In education, the melding of the arts and technology provide a unique training ground for the high-tech demands of the 21st Century. Innovative curricula in video, electronic music, and computer graphics provide an opportunity for students to experience technology as a creative resource. This provides students a particularly accessible and non-threatening way to learn and explore their possibilities. These new technologies are complex tools that will require increasingly facile and creative minds to put them to their best use.

Students who are familiar with the creative applications of new and emerging technology will be an invaluable resource in the new industrial age. John Scully, Chairman and CEO of Apple Computer, Inc., speaks forcefully on this point: "As a chief executive of a technology company that thrives on creativity, I want to work with people whose imaginations have been unleashed and who tackle problems as challenges rather than obstacles. An education enriched by the creative arts should be considered essential for everyone."

5. The Arts are a Proven Strategy for Healing. Prevention and Empowerment
"They speak of changes; changes in attitude, changes in self image and often changes in behavior. They say it is as if some new power, positive, creative and constructive, had at long last forced itself into their consciousness, an expression from the heart and soul of the artists's experience."
-Senator Henry Mello, from the catalog for 1988 prison art exhibition, Light From Another Country

Artmaking-the study and practice of the creative process-is inherently empowering. Each day the artist engages the muse, he/she does battle with the new and unexplored. All artists-student or master, young, old or infirm-are creative pioneers and adventurers. The challenge is to work honestly, with self-discipline, owning the success or failure of one's endeavors.

In the early '70s, a time when traditional arts education was beginning its decline, many professional artists began to look to society's neglected corners for a new constituency. The results of their work with youth at risk, people with physical and mental disabilities, prisoners, patients, seniors and others have shown that the arts can make a significant positive impact in the lives of these largely forgotten citizens.

In California, the establishment of permanent comprehensive arts programming by the Departments of Corrections, Youth Authority and Mental Health is testimony to the effectiveness of these efforts.
The variety of problems being addressed by the increasing numbers of artists engaged in this work has valuable implications for educators, social service providers, and community leaders. Artists working and succeeding in these "other places" have generated a new technology for problem solving, communicating, building self-esteem and much more.

A significant body of research in the field shows the practice of the arts is, in itself, a healing, transformational, therapeutic activity that, in some cases, may be more effective than traditional approaches. Documentation further shows the arts to be an effective and cost-beneficial resource for reducing violence, recidivism and psychopathology.

6. The Arts Help Us Communicate about Transcendent Values and Issues
"The artist as shaman becomes a conductor of forces that go far beyond those of his own person, and is able to bring art back in touch with its sacred sources.…(The shaman) develops not only new forms of art, but new forms of living."
-Suzi Gablick, Has Modernism Failed?

In the dying shadows of the prehistoric ritual fire, the shaman beseeches the gods on behalf of the gathered tribe. The year's final hunt is about to begin. The future of the community rests on the potency of the shaman's powers.

Today, although the artist has been cast out from the center of community life, he/she continues to sustain a vital link to the transcendent-to provide the imaginative sustenance and vision for the quest for truth and meaning, beyond the material. The artist, says psychologist James Hillman, "bears sensate witness to what is fundamentally beyond human comprehension."

The trivialization of the arts in America has produced many negatives. But none has been so damaging as the undermining of this connection between man and the artistic illumination he needs to explore the transcendent. Losing it, Hillman continues, "diminishes our ability to love the world." Our alienation from and abuse of what artist Isamu Noguchi has called "our temple," the earth, is but one symptom of this condition. The artist at work in these realms mediates the moral, the rational and the spiritual; the artist sensitizes us to the presence of social and material toxicity.

There is no doubt that a new artistic process has started asserting itself in response to what many feel is a spiritual vacuum. Critic Suzi Gablick sees great hope in the work of artists such as Anselm Keifer and Joseph Beuys, who have "placed primary value on (the artist's) function as a…bridge builder between the material and the spiritual worlds. Beuys and Keifer are part of the long but largely ignored history of "artist shamans" working in a century that has been dominated by science and material progress.

As we tire of our fascination with material flash and velocity, the need intensifies for the aesthetic bridge to what Alexis de Tocqueville termed "the mystical forces that govern ordinary events." A connection, he declared, which is "functionally necessary to society." In the Greek cosmology the gods could not appear in the material world without the presence of Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, love, and fertility. She made manifest the divine mind. In the 21st Century, that presence will be needed as never before, as we continue to lift the veil on the mystery of creation and struggle to stop ourselves from destroying our temple.

ß---------------------------------à

Note: Emphasis Added Above: Ok, ok,…sometimes I get a little over-the-top in this; but there are some key points in the discussion above that we can all gain something from.

EU Won't Recognize Changes in Israel's 1967 Border
Thu Mar 25, 2004 08:02 PM ET

BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union said on Thursday it will not recognize any unilateral change in Israel's borders from before the 1967 Middle East war. The EU took the stance in an apparent bid to reject any effort by Israel to use the security barrier it is building in the West Bank to change borders unilaterally.

Israel says the barrier is vital to keep out Palestinian suicide bombers, but the Palestinians have branded it a land-grab that deprives them of territory they want for a state. "The European Union will not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties," said a draft statement approved by EU foreign ministers for issue on Friday at a bloc summit.

The statement condemned Israel's "extra-judicial killing" of Hamas's spiritual leader and founder Ahmed Yassin on Monday and said a cycle of violence had taken the region further away from a negotiated settlement.

It urged President Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Authority to do more to fight terrorism and for Israel to reverse its settlement policy, dismantle settlements built since March 2001 and reverse construction of the barrier.

The EU reiterated a policy set last month that any unilateral Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip must be a step toward a two-state solution, must not involve a transfer of settlement activity to the West Bank and must involve an organized and negotiated handover to the Palestinian Authority.

U.S. Vetoes UN Vote Condemning Israel Over Yassin
Thu Mar 25, 2004 07:16 PM ET ORE
By Grant McCool

UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - The United States on Thursday vetoed a U.N. Security Council resolution by Arab nations to condemn Israel for assassinating Hamas leader Ahmed Yassin. The Bush administration, alone among major powers in not condemning Monday's assassination as an extrajudicial killing, rejected the resolution because it did not also denounce Yassin's group Hamas for suicide bombings in Israel.

The vote was 11 in favor, three abstentions and the U.S. veto.

"Israel's action has escalated tensions in Gaza and the region, and could set back our effort to resume progress toward peace," U.S. Ambassador John Negroponte said in a statement before the vote. "This Security Council does nothing to contribute to a peaceful settlement when it condemns one party's actions and turns a blind eye to everything else occurring in the region," Negroponte said.

Washington's "no" vote killed the resolution because it is one of the five permanent members of the council with veto power. Britain, Germany and Romania abstained after Algeria, negotiating for Arab nations, rejected an amendment they wanted that would have condemned "atrocities" against Israelis.

The measure was supported by China, Russia, France, Angola, Chile, Pakistan, Spain, Algeria, Benin, Brazil and the Philippines. Israel dismissed a growing international outcry over the assassination of Yassin, the quadriplegic spiritual leader of Hamas, killed in an air strike outside a mosque in Gaza City.

Hamas, which is bent on Israel's destruction, said it would target Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and other top officials to avenge Yassin's death. Khaled Meshaal, Hamas's political chief living in exile in Syria, said on Thursday attacks would be confined to Israel and the Palestinian territories despite U.S. warnings to its citizens of a heightened security risk.

Note: The Bush Administration publically condemned Israel's extra-legal assasinations in the daily news cycle; but then takes actions that neutralize their comments by in this case, vetoing the UN Security Council Resolution. And why is this not front page news in any of the major market newspapers in America when it is in most other leading international newspapers? Even liberal bloggers like Eric Alterman and Paul Krugman say nothing about it. Being Jewish is not a justifiable excuse for failing to denounce Israel's illegal actions any more than being American would be an excuse for acquiescing to the assasination of Fidel Castro, or Saddam, or Gadaffi by the CIA.

Hopefully sometime in the future our country's leaders will demand adherence to International law by it's "friends" as well as by it's "enemies".

The Medicare Muddle
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: March 26, 2004

In advance of Tuesday's reports by the Social Security and Medicare trustees, some credulous journalists wrote stories based on tips from advocates of Social Security privatization, who claimed that the report would offer a radically downgraded vision of the system's future. False alarm: projections for Social Security are about the same as last year. Projections for Medicare, however, have worsened: last year the trustees predicted that the hospital insurance trust fund would last until 2026, and now they've moved it back to 2019.

How should we react to this news?

It has become standard practice among privatizers to talk as if there is some program called Socialsecurityandmedicare. They hope to use scary numbers about future medical costs to panic us into abandoning a retirement program that's actually in pretty good shape. But the deteriorated outlook for Medicare says nothing, one way or another, about either the sustainability of Social Security (no problem) or the desirability of private retirement accounts (a lousy idea.)

Even on Medicare, don't panic. It's not like a private health plan that will go belly up when it runs out of money; it's just a government program, albeit one supported by a dedicated tax. Nobody thinks America's highways will be doomed if the gasoline tax, which currently pays for highway maintenance, falls short of the system's needs — if politicians want to sustain the system, they will. The same is true of Medicare. Rising medical costs are a very big budget issue, but 2019 isn't a drop-dead date.

The trustees' report does, however, give one more reason to hate the prescription drug bill the administration rammed through Congress last year. If deception, intimidation, abuse of power and giveaways to drug companies aren't enough, it turns out that the bill also squanders taxpayer money on H.M.O.'s.

A little background: conservatives have never mounted an attack on Medicare as systematic as their effort to bully the public into privatizing Social Security. They do, however, often talk about Medicare "reform." What this amounts to, in practice, is a drive to replace the traditional system, in which Medicare pays doctors and hospitals directly, with a system in which Medicare subcontracts that role to private H.M.O.'s.

In 1997 Congress tried to take a big step in that direction, requiring Medicare to pay per-person fees to private health plans that accepted Medicare recipients. There was much talk about the magic of the marketplace: private plans, so the theory went, would be far more efficient than government bureaucrats, offering better health care at lower cost.

What actually happened was that private plans skimmed the cream, accepting only relatively healthy retirees. Yet Medicare paid them slightly more per retiree than it spent on traditional benefits. In other words, instead of saving money by subcontracting its role to private plans, Medicare was in effect required to pay H.M.O.'s a hefty subsidy.

The only thing that kept this "reform" from being a fiscal disaster was the fact that after an initial rush into the Medicare business, many H.M.O.'s pulled out again. It turns out that private plans are much less efficient than the government at providing health insurance because they have much higher overhead. Even with a heavy subsidy, they can't compete with traditional Medicare.

There's a lesson in this experience. Sometimes there's no magic in the free market — in fact, it can be a hindrance. Health insurance is one place where government agencies consistently do a better job than private companies. I'll have more to say about this when I write about the general issue of health care reform (soon, I promise!).

But whether because of ideology or because of H.M.O. campaign contributions, the people now running the country refuse to learn that lesson. As part of last year's prescription drug bill, they tried again, offering an even bigger subsidy to private plans.

And that turns out to be an important reason for the deterioration in Medicare's prospects: of the seven years lopped off the life of the trust fund, two are the result of increased subsidies mandated by last year's law, mainly in the form of higher payments to H.M.O.'s.

So what did we learn this week? Social Security is in decent shape. Medicare has problems, but ill-conceived "reform" has only made those problems worse. And let's rip up that awful prescription drug bill and start over.

Dust and Seas
Science Magazine
Copyright (c) 2004 by the American Association for the Advancement of
Science
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How were such dry conditions of the "Dust Bowl" drought of the 1930s maintained for so long over such an extensive area? Schubert et al. (p. 1855) use an atmospheric-land general circulation model to show that the root cause was the combination of anomalous tropical sea surface temperatures (SSTs)--warm in the Atlantic and cold in the Pacific--that prevailed at the time. Proxy records, mostly from tree rings, show that similarly severe droughts have occurred once or twice a century during the last 400 years. Whether we can expect a similar episode soon is unclear, say the authors, because climate models still cannot make detailed enough SST predictions for more than 1 year or so in advance.

Cycle of vengeance must be broken
South China Morning Post
March 24, 2004

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Hamas leader Sheikh Ahmed Yassin was no angel and no friend of Zionism. He called for a complete dismantling of the Israeli state and advocated violence to achieve this aim. But the Israeli assassination of Yassin this week represented yet another wrong turn in Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's increasingly unrealistic attempt to end attacks on his countrymen by cracking down on Palestinian militants and their leaders. The government-sponsored murder is not only illegal and immoral, it is hypocritical when coming from a democratic state that professes adherence to international laws and human rights principles.

The greater significance, however, lies in Yassin's status as the second-most popular Palestinian leader and a respected cleric. Mr Sharon has taken a gamble in ordering his death, and in targeting other Hamas leaders, believing this will weaken the militant factions and pave the way for the Palestinian Authority to take control when Israel withdraws from parts of Gaza and the West Bank. Such deaths could just as likely have the opposite effect: mobilising Palestinian opposition to Israel's plans.

This possibility was demonstrated in the massive street protests Yassin's death provoked and the promises of further suicide bombings. If Hamas had no lack of volunteers for its suicide bombing missions before this event, recruitment could now become that much easier. Meanwhile, the peace process launched this time last year with a road map backed by the United States and Britain, one that envisaged both countries living in peace and security, is rarely mentioned anymore.

The Yassin affair follows Mr Sharon's announcement of his plan to fence Israelis off from much of the Palestinian population and his earlier attempts to expel Palestinian Authority leader Yasser Arafat. But as long as the border he foresees leaves Palestinians with less than half of the territory most agreements provide them, he will stand accused of making a grab for land. His idea that Israel can be secure behind a fence that provokes Palestinian anger is a fantasy, while methods that favour guns over diplomacy can only bring international condemnation.

No one expects Mr Sharon to negotiate with Hamas. Yet there is also no visible engagement with moderate Palestinians, such as prime minister Ahmed Qorei. Closing off the avenues moderates offer while conducting aggressive raids and targeting leaders such as Yassin can only be a recipe for stronger resistance - and much bloodshed on both sides. Getting back to the negotiating table after the events of this year will not be easy. But if Mr Sharon, Mr Arafat and Mr Qorei want to save the road map, this is the only option.

U.S. Will Give Cold Fusion Second Look, After 15 Years
By KENNETH CHANG
NY Times
Published: March 25, 2004

Cold fusion, briefly hailed as the silver-bullet solution to the world's energy problems and since discarded to the same bin of quackery as paranormal phenomena and perpetual motion machines, will soon get a new hearing from Washington. Despite being pushed to the fringes of physics, cold fusion has continued to be worked on by a small group of scientists, and they say their figures unambiguously verify the original report, that energy can be generated simply by running an electrical current through a jar of water.

Last fall, cold fusion scientists asked the Energy Department to take a second look at the process, and last week, the department agreed.

Fusion, the process that powers the Sun, combines hydrogen atoms, releasing energy as a byproduct. In March 1989, Drs. B. Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann, two chemists at the University of Utah, said they had generated fusion in a tabletop experiment using a jar of heavy water, where the water molecules contain a heavier version of hydrogen, deuterium, and two palladium electrodes. A current running through the electrodes pulled deuterium atoms into the electrodes, which somehow generated heat, the scientists said. Dr. Fleischmann speculated that the heat was coming from fusion of the deuterium atoms.

Some cold fusion scientists now say they can produce as much as two to three times more energy than in the electric current. The results are also more reproducible, they say. They add that they have definitely seen fusion byproducts, particularly helium in quantities proportional to the heat generated.

Update on Pres. Clinton's Boyhood Home For Sale on eBay

One of former President Clinton's childhood homes was put on eBay, and was promptly attacked by bogus bidders who bid it up over $10M before the auction was ended with administrative oversight actions by eBay. The home was relisted later under secure bidding terms. The new eBay item number is: 2389796022, and ends April 2nd, 2004

"The Wal-Mart You Don't Know". More info on what effect the giant retailer has on companies it does business with.

Ecunet Note #36277 from VHCHILD to UCCHRIST CHATTER:
At 9:05 AM -0500 3/24/04, Sharon Warnock wrote:

"My question to the group is are you experiencing that some of your congregants who have been welcoming to the gay community are now feeling very threatened by the word "marriage"."

Virginia Child's Reply:
"The short answer? yes! There's something very emotional about the word "marriage" for some folks. I also think some homophobic people have latched onto the word "marriage" and are hiding their bigotry behind this emotional issue."

Another Look at Church and State

From VHCHILD on UCCHRISTNET
March 24, 2004

"Remember, that particularly in Massachusetts and Connecticut, colonial-era towns were required to have a church before they could organize as a legal entity. So, the older the town,the more likely the church is to be positively intertwined with town life. it's also true that in many small towns the church was the largest building in town and thus was used to hold Town Meetings. I can imagine that led to some folks seeing the church as the religous arm of the secular government. I don't see that happening today, in my town.

But the original inter-twining of church and state led, in the early days, to the development of a method of church organization unique to the parts of the US where we were the "state church" . Part 1 was an "ecclesiastical society" which welcomed every voter in town - governed by the trustees - budget voted at Town Meeting; and Part 2 was a "church" which was composed of those who had owned the covenant - governed by the deacons - budget voted by the covenanted members.

There is still at least one church in the Mass conference with a dual organization, tho I don't know how their budget is handled. My church abandoned the dual organization within the past 10-15 years, and we still have a two-level membership system.

The church I serve is in a small town, and self-consciously sees the building as a community resource. it is used 6-7 days a week for meetings of one sort or another - Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, Power Squadron, Women's Club, AA, Al-Anon, OA, play groups, music for toddlers, retreat space for teachers, police, etc. If the event is non-profit, we usually don't charge rent. We'd do a food pantry but the RC church next door does that, and we'd have a clothes closet, but have a problem with persistent dampness.

In my experience, there's not much difference between being a community resource here and being a community resource outside New England. I think it's rare for a church today to see itself as a part of the Town organization -- and if they did, that'd be an unhealthy, unchurch-ly mind set. I think it's healthy for a church to see its facilities as a resource, healthier than not allowing anyone to use the building.

White House dismisses former adviser's charges
Clarke's allegations of pre-9/11 failures called politically driven
Sunday, March 21, 2004 Posted: 10:11 PM EST (0311 GMT)
Richard Clarke speaks at a security conference in San Jose, California, in 2002.

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The White House is dismissing as a "red herring" charges from the Bush Administration's former counter-terrorism coordinator that President Bush has been more focused on Iraq than al Qaeda.

Richard Clarke detailed his allegations that Bush has done "a terrible job" battling terrorism during an interview Sunday night on CBS's "60 Minutes" and in a book to be published Monday. A White House spokesman said Clarke is motivated by politics.

"He has chosen at this critical time, in the middle of a presidential campaign, to inject himself into the political debate," spokesman Dan Bartlett said. "And he has every right to do so. But in so doing, his judgments -- his actions, or the lack thereof -- should also come under scrutiny."

Clarke said he asked for a Cabinet-level meeting in January 2001, shortly after the president took office, to discuss the threat al Qaeda posed to the United States. "That urgent memo wasn't acted on," Clarke told CBS. Instead, he said, administration officials were focused on issues such as missile defense and Iraq.

Clarke said Bush "probably" shares some of the blame for the attacks. He is scheduled to testify this week before the independent commission investigating 9/11. "Frankly, I find it outrageous that the president is running for re-election on the grounds that he's done such great things about terrorism," Clarke said in the CBS interview. "He ignored it. He ignored terrorism for months, when maybe we could have done something to stop 9/11. Maybe. We'll never know."

According to a White House statement issued Sunday night, "The president recognized the threat posed by al Qaeda, and immediately after taking office, the White House began work on a comprehensive new strategy to eliminate al Qaeda." The statement said National Security Council deputies and second-ranking officials met frequently between March and September 2001 to work on that goal.

Note: Ah, so a White House spokesman says the NSC worked for six months on a plan to eliminate Al Qaeda, and came up with [ ??? ]

red herring: n 1: any diversion intended to distract attention from the main issue 2: a dried and smoked herring having a reddish color. Let's see: The White House dismisses Clarke's charges because the charges distract attention from the main issue which is [ ??? ]. Or was the spokesman saying the charges are a fish? Sounds to me like Mr. Bartlett, (no relation to Jed Bartlett, the fictional President on West Wing), needs a bit more work on his use of metaphors and/or similes.

Orgasms, Game Theory, Probabilities, and the Fifth Amendment

The Economics of Faking Orgasm
No, really.
By Steven E. Landsburg
Posted Friday, March 19, 2004, at 9:55 AM PT

Hugo Mialon is a graduate student who spends a lot of time thinking about orgasms. This by itself is perhaps not terribly atypical. But Mialon, at least part of the time, thinks about orgasms in connection with his dissertation research.

I won't go into the details, because I know you're eager to get to the bit about the orgasms. But Mialon's key point is that you can't analyze the Fifth Amendment without considering the fact that defendants sometimes lie, and juries sometimes try to figure out when they're lying. That's where the orgasms come in. Lovers sometimes fake orgasms, and their partners sometimes try to figure out when they're faking. So it's only natural that an intellectual journey around the Fifth Amendment should include a side trip into the economics of faking orgasm.

According to the 2000 Orgasm Survey (did you know there was a 2000 Orgasm Survey?), 72 percent of women have faked at least once in their current or most recent relationship, and 55 percent of men say they can tell when their partner's faking.

Apparently someone's deluded, though it's not clear whether it's the woman who overestimates her acting ability or the man who overestimates his perceptiveness. Be that as it may, Mialon uses game theory to investigate why women (sometimes) fake and why men (sometimes) doubt them. I'm not sure I buy all his assumptions, but he makes a reasonable first pass at the problem.

The obvious reason to fake is to please your partner. But what about a woman who doesn't particularly care about her partner? Might she still fake? Mialon concocts a scenario—though a contrived one—where the answer is yes. Suppose Adam is very insecure and always suspects Eve of faking. Suppose the one thing Eve really hates is having a partner who's always wrong. Then since Adam always thinks she's faking, she has to fake to make him right. Eve's fakery reinforces Adam's skepticism and Adam's skepticism reinforces Eve's fakery, so we have what economists call equilibrium.

On the other hand, this equilibrium holds up only if Adam has a good reason to be insecure in the first place. Why might Adam be insecure? Well, it's thought that women reach the peak of their sexual responsiveness around age 30. So if Eve is very far from age 30 in either direction, her age might be enough to trigger Adam's insecurity. Thus Mialon predicts that very young and very old women are more likely to fake than women in their 30s.

Things get much more complicated—and much more realistic—if Adam and Eve are in love, in which case they care about each others' happiness and care about keeping each other interested. A bit of elementary game theory leads Mialon to conclude that women are more likely to fake when they're in love, and that this effect is magnified when women are far from the age of 30.

And yes, some men fake orgasms too—24 percent of them, according to the Orgasm Survey. Mialon's game theory tells him that love has less effect on men's probability of faking than on women's. These and other testable predictions are borne out by the results of the Orgasm Survey, which also reveals the curious fact that highly educated women are the most likely to fake their orgasms.

And there's more. Orgasms are not infrequently associated with conversation, either before or after. The next chapter of Mialon's dissertation is on the economics of conversation—the way sentences convey information and our decisions about how much information we want to convey.

My old friend Steve Zucker (now a math professor at Johns Hopkins) used to say that sex and academic research complement each other nicely, since you can do either one while thinking about the other. I don't know what Hugo Mialon thinks about when he's having sex (perhaps if he were asked, he'd take the Fifth), but he's certainly thought about sex in a highly original way, which, after all the attention the topic has gotten these past thousands of years, is no small accomplishment.

Bushism of the Day
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Tuesday, March 16, 2004, at 12:47 PM PT

"Recession means that people's incomes, at the employer level, are going down, basically, relative to costs, people are getting laid off."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 19, 2004 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau)

Global Crossing Exec Gets off for 10 Cents on the Dollar...and No Jail Time !!

Ex - Global Crossing Officers to Settle Suit
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 19, 2004
Filed at 9:47 p.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Gary Winnick and other former officers of Global Crossing Ltd. agreed Friday to pay a combined $325 million to settle a class action law suit by investors against a company synonymous with the boom and bust of the telecommunications industry.

Winnick, the founder and former chairman who sold $123 million worth of Global Crossing stock as the company spiraled toward one of the biggest bankruptcy filings in U.S. history, will pay $55 million of the settlement. While Winnick did not admit wrongdoing in the settlement, lawyers for the investors described his payment as a crucial victory in resolving the case.

``His participation was an essential aspect of the settlement. We would have refused to settle without a contribution from him,'' said Jay Eisenhofer, partner at Grant & Eisenhofer PLC of Delaware.

The $55 million, which Eisenhofer described as ``the largest payment I'm aware of ever paid by an individual in settling a securities class action,'' includes the $25 million that Winnick had previously pledged to pay to replace retirement savings lost by Global Crossing employees.

The Securities and Exchange Commission is still investigating whether Winnick and other former officials knowingly misled investors and took advantage of their inside knowledge of the company's faltering health.

Winnick cashed in Global Crossing stock worth $734 million over a period of several years.

``This settlement says a lot about Gary Winnick's character,'' said Howard J. Rubenstein, a spokesman for Winnick. ``Clearly, he does feel badly about all those who were hurt by Global Crossing's collapse -- both shareholders and employees.''

Lawyers for other defendants and parties to the settlement could not be reached.

The settlement also includes a $19.5 million payment from Global Crossing's law firm, Simpson, Thacher & Bartlett LLP, which was not a defendant in the case, but which had been accused of conflicts of interest and neglect in investigating allegations of fraudulent accounting, according to Grant & Eisenhofer.

The plaintiffs, led by the Public Employees Retirement System of Ohio and the State Teachers' Retirement System of Ohio, had accused Winnick and other Global Crossing officers of defrauding them by distorting the company's financial reports with questionable dealings and deceptive comments.

Another $195 million of the settlement will be paid by insurance companies on behalf of the other directors who were insured against liability by the company, Grant & Eisenhofer said.

The settlement does not resolve claims against other defendants in the case, including former Global Crossing auditor Arthur Andersen and Wall Street underwriters who helped sell the company's securities.

Global Crossing emerged from bankruptcy protection in December, erasing all but $200 million of the $11 billion the company owed when it filed for Chapter 11 in January 2002. At that point, it was the largest telecom bankruptcy in U.S. history, but that mark was dwarfed just six months later with the $41 billion bankruptcy filing by WorldCom.

Global Crossing spent billions during the telecom and Internet boom building a 100,000-mile network of undersea cables and fiber-optic lines, but demand failed to materialize as quickly as the company had hoped.

Note: What ??? Winnick stole over $500 million from Global Crossing investors, so now he, "and others" will be settling a class action lawsuit by paying back a total of $123 Million but only $55 million of that comes from Winnick himself. Ten cents on the dollar. Remember, Martha may serve time for her "insider trading/lying to Federal A**holes) that had a $45K valuation, while Winnick agreed to repay over a THOUSAND TIMES LARGER fine/penalty/settlement for his actions...and he gets no jail time! and doesn't even apparently need to be concerned about having to spend time in one of those small rooms. Disgusting !!

Bagle Worm: New Reason for MS Outlook/Express Users to be Concerned

March 18, 2004
New Bagle Worm Infects Without File Attachments
By Gregg Keizer Courtesy of TechWeb News

A new round of Bagle worms blitzed the Internet Thursday, and takes advantage of a five-month-old vulnerability in Internet Explorer that let them infect computers without having to convince users to open a file attachment. Bagle.q -- which was quickly followed by three variants, dubbed Bagle.r, Bagle.s, and Bagle.t -- follows in the footsteps of earlier editions of the persistent, pernicious worm by arriving as e-mail, opening a backdoor to the system so it can be re-infected or loaded with other malicious code, and attaching itself to executable files found on the hard drive to make it even more difficult to dislodge.

The big difference in this newest Bagle wave, said security experts, is that it can infect unpatched PCs without the usual file attachment.

If the message arrives on a machine that's not been patched against the Internet Explorer Object Data Remote Execution vulnerability -- disclosed in early October, 2003 -- Outlook and Outlook Express users who simply open or view the e-mail are automatically infected.

This same vulnerability was exploited in attacks in the fall of 2003.

"The latest wave of Bagle attacks reveals a significant update," said Ken Dunham, director of malicious code research for iDefense, in an e-mailed statement. "It appears that the authors have now migrated to a new method for spreading their worm in the wild, an auto-execute vulnerability against [Internet Explorer]."

Like their immediate predecessors, Bagle.q, Bagle.r, Bagle.s, and Bagle.t also disable a huge number of anti-virus and firewall programs, another tactic hackers have used to slip by defenses.

Dunham said that activity on the ports that these new Bagle worms leave open -- port 2556 for Bagle.q and Bagle.r; backdoor ports for the others have not yet been confirmed -- has been on the upswing over the past 24 hours. "It appears that multiple commands are being issued to infected Bagle computers," he said. "There's more going on here than meets the eye at first glance." Among the possible explanations offered by Dunham: the Bagle authors are trying to update their array of already-infected computers.

"The war of worms has just gotten worse," Dunham said. "It looks like we're in for a very busy malicious code scene for 2004. E-mail worms are almost becoming as common as spam in some situations."

Users who haven't already patched IE, should do so immediately. "If you don't patch yourself against these kind of threats, you shouldn't be surprised if a worm bites you on the backside," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at Sophos, a U.K.-based anti-virus firm.

The patch for the IE vulnerability is available here for versions 5.01, 5.5, 6.0, and 6.0 for Windows Server 2003 of the Microsoft Web browser.

For the moment, most anti-virus firms have assigned the new Bagles with relatively low threat levels. Symantec, for instance, tagged all four with a "2" in its 1 through 5 scale. Rival Network Associates, meanwhile, labeled the quartet as a "low" threat. Trend Micro and Panda Software, however, marked Bagle.q as a more significant "medium" and "moderate" threat, respectively.

US 53701082: ARVN 1968: Big Red One: 1st MP Batallion

Sen. John McCain disputes the charges of fellow Republicans that likely Democratic nominee John Kerry is weak on national security.

BY CHARLES BABINGTON
Washington Post Service

WASHINGTON - Republican Sen. John McCain Thursday defended Sen. John Kerry's record on national security, undercutting the Bush-Cheney campaign's latest attacks on the Democratic presidential nominee and frustrating conservatives hoping for a unified front against the challenger from Massachusetts.

''I do not believe that he is, quote, weak on defense,'' McCain, R-Ariz., said on NBC's Today show.

Asked on the CBS Early Show if he agreed with Vice President Dick Cheney's claim that Kerry is a threat to national security, McCain said: ``I don't think that. I think that John Kerry is a good and decent man. . . . I think he has different points of view on different issues, and he will have to explain his voting record. But this kind of rhetoric, I think, is not helpful in educating and helping the American people make a choice.''

Although McCain restated his support of Bush's reelection bid, Democrats welcomed his remarks during a week in which the Bush-Cheney campaign sharpened its attacks on Kerry's record on military and diplomatic matters.

McCain, who lost a sometimes bitter GOP presidential nomination battle to Bush four years ago, is well-known for opposing Republican orthodoxy on campaign finance laws and other issues. An authority on military affairs, he is a hero to many veterans familiar with his years of torture as a North Vietnamese prisoner of war.

Two associates close to McCain said he refuses to join what he considers unfair attacks on Kerry, a friend and fellow decorated Vietnam War veteran.

''John Kerry is his friend,'' McCain's chief of staff Mark Salter said. ``He's not going to attack his friend.'' On the Today show, McCain urged the Kerry and Bush campaigns to adopt more civil tones on terrorism and national security.

''Both sides have been beating up on the other in the most negative campaign earlier than I've ever seen,'' he said. ``I'd like to see it stop. I'd like to see a serious discussion about Medicare, Social Security, education, what we're going to do about the deficit and overspending.''

On the Early Show, he said, ``I think we ought to have open and honest debates on those issues. I think the president has led this nation with clarity since Sept. 11th. I'm supporting his reelection. But I would certainly hope that we could raise the level of this debate. Otherwise we're going to have very low voter turnouts in November.''

The Spanish Electorate

Taken for a Ride
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: March 19, 2004

"Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists." So George Bush declared on Sept. 20, 2001. But what was he saying? Surely he didn't mean that everyone was obliged to support all of his policies, that if you opposed him on anything you were aiding terrorists.

Now we know that he meant just that.

A year ago, President Bush, who had a global mandate to pursue the terrorists responsible for 9/11, went after someone else instead. Most Americans, I suspect, still don't realize how badly this apparent exploitation of the world's good will — and the subsequent failure to find weapons of mass destruction — damaged our credibility. They imagine that only the dastardly French, and now maybe the cowardly Spaniards, doubt our word. But yesterday, according to Agence France-Presse, the president of Poland — which has roughly 2,500 soldiers in Iraq — had this to say: "That they deceived us about the weapons of mass destruction, that's true. We were taken for a ride."

This is the context for last weekend's election upset in Spain, where the Aznar government had taken the country into Iraq against the wishes of 90 percent of the public. Spanish voters weren't intimidated by the terrorist bombings — they turned on a ruling party they didn't trust. When the government rushed to blame the wrong people for the attack, tried to suppress growing evidence to the contrary and used its control over state television and radio both to push its false accusation and to play down anti-government protests, it reminded people of the broader lies about the war.

By voting for a new government, in other words, the Spaniards were enforcing the accountability that is the essence of democracy. But in the world according to Mr. Bush's supporters, anyone who demands accountability is on the side of the evildoers. According to Dennis Hastert, the speaker of the House, the Spanish people "had a huge terrorist attack within their country and they chose to change their government and to, in a sense, appease terrorists."

So there you have it. A country's ruling party leads the nation into a war fought on false pretenses, fails to protect the nation from terrorists and engages in a coverup when a terrorist attack does occur. But its electoral defeat isn't democracy at work; it's a victory for the terrorists.

Notice, by the way, that Spain's prime minister-elect insists that he intends to fight terrorism. He has even said that his country's forces could remain in Iraq if they were placed under U.N. control. So if the Bush administration were really concerned about maintaining a united front against terrorism, all it would have to do is drop its my-way-or-the-highway approach. But it won't.

For these denunciations of Spain, while counterproductive when viewed as foreign policy, serve a crucial domestic purpose: they help reestablish the political climate the Bush administration prefers, in which anyone who opposes any administration policy can be accused of undermining the fight against terrorism.

This week the Bush campaign unveiled an ad accusing John Kerry of, among other things, opposing increases in combat pay because he voted against an $87 billion appropriation for Iraq. Those who have followed this issue were astonished at the ad's sheer up-is-down-ism.

In fact, the Bush administration has done the very thing it falsely accuses Mr. Kerry of doing: it has tried repeatedly to slash combat pay and military benefits, provoking angry articles in The Army Times with headlines like "An Act of `Betrayal.' " Oh, and Mr. Kerry wasn't trying to block funds for Iraq — he was trying to force the administration, which had concealed the cost of the occupation until its tax cut was passed, to roll back part of the tax cut to cover the expense.

But the bigger point is this: in the Bush vision, it was never legitimate to challenge any piece of the administration's policy on Iraq. Before the war, it was your patriotic duty to trust the president's assertions about the case for war. Once we went in and those assertions proved utterly false, it became your patriotic duty to support the troops — a phrase that, to the administration, always means supporting the president. At no point has it been legitimate to hold Mr. Bush accountable. And that's the way he wants it.

Note: Mr. Friedman made a slightly different argument saying:

Axis of Appeasement
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: March 18, 2004

The new Spanish government's decision to respond to the attack by Al Qaeda by going ahead with plans to pull its troops from Iraq constitutes the most dangerous moment we've faced since 9/11...

Yes, we can still win this, but right now, despite Paul Bremer's heroic success in helping Iraqis forge a progressive interim constitution, we can still lose it. If we do, it will be largely due to the Pentagon's inability to secure Iraq, which has encouraged Iraqis to turn to sectarian militias for security, undermining nation-building and planting the seeds of civil war. Second, it will be because we have so few real allies. As Spain proves, we had a few friendly governments, but most people in Europe and Asia have never been with the Bush team — especially when it continues to insist that we are going to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to justify the war. It's time for the Bush team to admit it was wrong about this and move on.

Spain is planning to do something crazy: to try to appease radical evil by pulling Spain's troops out of Iraq — even though those troops are now supporting the first democracy-building project ever in the Arab world. I understand that many Spanish voters felt lied to by their rightist government over who was responsible for the Madrid bombings, and therefore voted it out of office.

But they should now follow that up by vowing to keep their troops in Iraq — to make clear that in cleaning up their own democracy, they do not want to subvert the Iraqis' attempt to build one of their own. Otherwise, the Spanish vote will not be remembered as an act of cleansing, but of appeasement. The notion that Spain can separate itself from Al Qaeda's onslaught on Western civilization by pulling its troops from Iraq is a fantasy. Bin Laden has said that Spain was once Muslim and he wants it restored that way.

Note: It would be instructive to review the status of the Spanish Election forecasts to see whether the Spanish electorate was poised to toss out the Aznar government and possibly remove their Iraqi forces before the train bombing. How much swing was there in voters preferences between the pre and post bombing moods, the election, and the Socialists stated position of forcing a realignment of their Iraqi forces. Was it because the Spanish voteres were scared after becoming a victim of terrorism? Or just that "something popped" and they threw out the government that had ignored their plainly stated wishes and the Aznar Administration which had acquiesced to the Bush Administration's Iraqi invasion and occupation.

It seems most obvious the Aznar Administration just lost the trust of their electorate. Voters decided to "throw the bums out" and seek a government which would address terrorism and the Iraqi War in a manner more in tune with their country's stated preferences. While Mr. Blair may not be susceptible to a similar fate, Mr. Bush most probably is, or soon will be.

Outsourcing: A Report, and My Reflections

Note: Detailed Research Report from UC Berkeley Fisher Center for Real Estate and Urban Economics entitled: "The New Wave of Outsourcing" provides observations and statistics on some very unpleasant developments and trends. The report estimates that 10% of the current 140 million wage earners in the United States are at risk of having their jobs outsourced within five years. And that the migration seen in textiles, electronics, computer hardware and software will soon include significant numbers from other heretofor unaffected industries, such as health care, business services, legal, insurance, and credit/banking administration.

Just as the Japanese migrated from copying American kitsch items in the 1960's to the attainment of a superior stance in automobile manufacturing technology in the 1990's, the Bangalore Indian call centers of the 1990's are migrating into the very heart of capitalist business processes in the first years of the new millenieum. One is reminded of Martin Niemoller's famous words which can serve as a warning: "...when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out for me".

Within fifteen years, the combined populations of India and China will make up almost half of the total planet's inhabitants. Maybe this is the best hope we have: trying to assist in the creation of democratic principles in these two countries while we can, and before they cease to have any interest in what we as a country have to say about anything that affects them.

A worthly goal to be sure; but are you ready to give up your job to see it happen?

New Law Has Little Effect on Spam E-Mail-Survey
Wed Mar 17, 2004 06:35 PM ET

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - "Spam" e-mail is proving more irritating than ever to U.S. Internet users since a national anti-spam law took effect Jan. 1, according to a survey released on Wednesday. Internet users are more likely to say e-mail is less trustworthy and less reliable than when they were surveyed in June, the Pew Internet and American Life Project found.

Internet users also are more likely to say spam has made the online experience unpleasant, the nonprofit research group said. Get-rich-quick schemes, miracle cures and other unsolicited bulk messages accounted for 62 percent of all e-mail in February, according to filtering company Brightmail Inc.

The 1,371 Internet users surveyed by Pew between Feb. 3 and March 1 said they have seen little change since the law took effect. Slightly more than half said they saw no change in the amount of spam they received at home or work. Twenty-nine percent said they had reduced their use of e-mail because of spam, up from 25 percent who said so last June. Sixty-three percent said spam made them less trusting of e-mail in general, up from 52 percent, and 77 percent said the flood of spam made the act of being online unpleasant and annoying, up from 70 percent.

Are You Ready for $3 a Gallon Gasoline !!

Oil Ends at Highest Price in 13 Years
Wed Mar 17, 2004 03:57 PM ET

NEW YORK (Reuters) - U.S. oil prices roared to its highest closing price in over 13 years on Wednesday as a drop in already low gasoline inventories sharpened the threat of a supply crunch that could hurt economic growth. U.S. light crude futures (CLc1: Quote, Profile, Research) rose 70 cents to settle at $38.18 a barrel, nearly two percent higher. In London, May Brent crude (COK4: Quote, Profile, Research) ended 85 cents, or 2.6 percent, up at $33.53. It was the highest settlement for U.S. crude since October 1990.

Prices jumped after the Energy Information Administration, an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy, released its latest snapshot on the world's biggest oil market. The report showed a further 800,000 barrels decline in gasoline stocks to 199.6 million barrels. U.S. gasoline supplies are running 5 percent below the five-year average, sparking concerns refineries will struggle to build supplies in time for summer holiday driving demand.

U.S. light crude prices have averaged almost $35 a barrel so far in 2004, well above 2003's average price of $31, which was the highest in more than two decades. At the day's settlement, crude futures had risen $4.31, or nearly 13 percent, since Feb. 10, when OPEC decided it would cut official production quotas by 4 percent from April 1.

OPEC cuts plans and rocketing Asian demand from China and India have combined to push prices to levels which consuming countries fear could hurt economic growth. The head of Germany's export industry association said on Tuesday that oil prices pose a bigger risk to Germany's economic recovery than the euro's exchange rate.

The surge in price led the United States to spend an extra $200 million on oil in January versus December, even though it imported eight million fewer barrels, according to the U.S. Commerce Department. In January, the U.S. trade deficit widened to a record $43.1 billion. Economists say the oil price surge was the spoiler.

Is it Really a War?

US vs. Europe: two views of terror
By Howard LaFranchi | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – Ever since George W. Bush's first reaction to Sept. 11 was that this is "war," debate has simmered over whether fighting terrorism is best handled as a military operation or as law-enforcement, using intelligence cooperation, police work, and the courts. Now that controversy is flaring again, both in the US in the context of the presidential election and among America's allies in the aftermath of the Madrid bombings.

With President Bush set to emphasize in a speech Friday that the war in Iraq is a cornerstone of his war on terrorism, the White House is leaving no doubt about its view that the battle against terror, as practiced in this century, is indeed a war. But that view has not caught on with America's European allies - and has only met with more vehement rejection as the Bush administration has equated the terror war with the Iraq war.

After decades of battling terrorism on their own soil, Europeans continue to believe that the best counterterrorism work is done through police intelligence and cooperation. And they believe that characterizing the fight as a "war" only antagonizes the populations that have produced terrorist groups and makes it harder to address the root causes of terrorism.

What may have changed now is the arrival of the same kind of terrorism in the heart of Europe that prompted America's sense of urgency, some experts say. But they add that transatlantic cooperation will be enhanced only if the US dictates less what Europe's response should be, and instead sits down to more fully understand Europe's sense of facing a new threat.

"There is now on the other side of the Atlantic a better sense of the urgency of the threat, and our convergence of views should mean a better opportunity to work together against the threat," says Simon Serfaty, a global security specialist at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington. Noting the differences that linger, he adds, "It doesn't mean we must do everything together, but that together we can do everything."

In response to the Madrid bombings that took more than 200 lives a week ago - bombings that increasingly look to be the work of an Al Qaeda-affiliated terror cell - German Interior Minister Otto Schily has called for a meeting Friday of the European Union's interior and justice ministers. But Mr. Schily did not summon defense ministers. While the meeting is expected to produce measures for more cooperation and intelligence-sharing among Europe's law-enforcement agencies, few observers expect the Madrid bombings to draw Europe closer to the idea that this is "war."

"We have always had a different definition of terrorism, in that we never call it a 'war' on terrorism. We call it the fight or battle against terrorism, and we do think the distinction makes a difference," says one European official in Washington.

"Madrid will certainly lead to a more dynamic look at counterterrorism operations and cooperation, but terrorism in Europe is not a new phenomenon, so this will not suddenly be seen as a war," adds the official, who asked not to be named. "This is not Europe's 9/11."

More troubling, the official says, is the "sense" among some experts that by reminding the two sides of the Atlantic of their differences, the Madrid bombings might mean more troubled relations between the two. Noting that many European governments are determined that any cooperation with the US won't appear to be agreement on the terror war-Iraq war equation, the official says, "There is a feeling we are drifting further apart."

At the same time, the Madrid bombings could yet act as a catalyst for greater cooperation, some experts say. In their scenario, last week's events could serve as a wake-up call to both sides that what unites the two is greater than the differences.

"There's just as much chance that this [Madrid] could act as a glue as it could a wedge, but it will really depend on how the US responds," says Thomas Sanderson, deputy director of the transnational-threats initiative at CSIS.

Spain may indeed pull its troops out of the coalition in Iraq, but Mr. Sanderson says the US should not assume that means Spain is "turning tail" on the fight against terror. "Spain is not leaving the war on terror. They are leaving a war of choice in Iraq," he says.

In response, the US should work to redirect Spain's efforts - to join other Europeans in stabilizing Afghanistan, for example, where there is virtually no controversy about US intentions, says Sanderson.

He also notes that the US is worried other countries will join Spain in pulling out of Iraq - which is likely to figure in Bush's speech Friday to the ambassadors of countries that the US deems partners in the terror war.

Mr. Serfaty says the election of a Socialist government in Spain does mean a strengthening of what the Bush administration refers to as "old Europe": the Europe that is most opposed to US policy in Iraq and to the US characterization of a "war" on terror. "Italy and Poland are going to find this trend difficult to resist," he says, "because they cannot afford politically not to do so." But he says the US can still develop international cooperation by focusing less on differences and more on "complementarity of actions."

Still, with the White House trumpeting the president's leadership since Sept. 11, no one expects the Bush campaign to back off from the emphasis on the "war" on terror.

At a campaign event earlier this month in New York State, Bush made that point clear. "Some are skeptical that the war on terror is really a war at all," Bush said, referring to Sen. John Kerry's preference for calling the fight more of a law-enforcement and intelligence operation.

Insider Trading: Fleet Boston & Bank of America

FleetBoston, BofA to Pay $675 Million
The record settlement ends charges that the banks allowed improper trades by favored clients.
LA Times Headlines
By Josh Friedman, Times Staff Writer

Bank of America Corp. and FleetBoston Financial Corp. agreed Monday to pay $675 million in fines and restitution in the biggest settlement yet in the scandal over mutual fund trading abuses.

Bank of America also agreed to measures that would force eight of 10 directors off the board of its mutual funds unit, Nations Funds, within a year. It was the first time board reforms were a condition of a settlement since the industry probes began last year.

The pact with the Securities and Exchange Commission and New York Atty. Gen. Eliot Spitzer resolves civil fraud charges that the banks let privileged investors engage in trading practices that hurt regular shareholders.

In exchange for allowing late trades or the rapid in-and-out buying known as market timing, the banks received big, longer-term investments that generated handsome fees, regulators said.

The agreement settles unrelated cases but was made jointly because BofA is buying FleetBoston. The firms neither admitted nor denied the allegations, but analysts said the deal cleared a major uncertainty surrounding the proposed $48-billion takeover.

By including action at the board level, Spitzer's office said Monday's agreement marked a new phase in its effort to clean up the mutual fund industry. Aides said Spitzer would continue pushing for fund governance reforms, just as he had insisted on fee reductions in settling other fund cases.

"You can expect to see more of this," said Juanita Scarlett, a spokeswoman for the attorney general. "It's a critical new direction for our approach to the mutual fund investigations."

The settlement is the fourth since state and federal regulators started probing the $7.5-trillion fund industry in September. Regulators are investigating the trading and sales practices of at least 20 fund companies.

Fund companies have agreed to pay $1.7 billion to date, eclipsing the value of last year's $1.4-billion settlement with Wall Street investment banks regarding tainted stock research.

Monday's deal provides for payments of $250 million in restitution and $125 million in penalties by Charlotte, N.C.-based BofA. Boston-based Fleet will pay $70 million in restitution and $70 million in penalties.

BofA also agreed to governance reforms including term limits and a mandatory retirement age for its fund board. The agreement will force the departure of eight trustees by May 2005, spokesman Robert Stickler said.

In a separate accord with Spitzer's office only, the banks agreed to cut the fees they charge investors by a total of $160 million over a five-year period. Recently, Spitzer and the SEC have clashed over mandating fee reductions.

The banks said Monday that they welcomed the accords.

"These agreements represent Bank of America's good-faith effort to resolve this matter and [are] in the best interests of our customers, associates and shareholders," said Kenneth D. Lewis, BofA's chief executive, in a statement.

"We have worked closely with regulatory authorities to determine the facts on market-timing activity and to discipline those responsible," said Chad Gifford, FleetBoston's chief executive. "Any activity which disadvantaged customers is offensive, even though limited to a small number of individuals."

Analysts said the size of Monday's settlement — eclipsing a $600-million deal reached in December between Spitzer and Alliance Capital Management — was consistent with a belief that BofA was one of the worst offenders to have surfaced so far.

In his Sept. 3 complaint against hedge fund Canary Capital Partners, which touched off the scandal, Spitzer claimed Bank of America went out of its way to accommodate late trading and market timing.

The bank installed special computer equipment in Canary's office that allowed it to buy and sell Nations Funds and hundreds of other funds at the 4 p.m. daily closing price until 6:30 p.m. Regulators liken this practice to betting on a horse race after it's over. In return, Canary agreed to leave millions of dollars in Bank of America's bond funds on a long-term basis, Spitzer alleged.

On Monday, Spitzer scolded BofA's directors for allowing Canary's market timing, saying they "clearly failed to protect the interest of investors."

In a separate case filed last month, FleetBoston was accused of allowing market timing by various traders in its Columbia fund lineup.

Timing, which exploits small pricing inefficiencies, isn't illegal. But most fund companies officially discourage it, saying it can siphon profits from long-term shareholders and drive up costs shared by all.

By contrast, late trading is clearly illegal. It involves after-hours fund trades processed at that day's price, rather than the next day's price. By buying or selling at a stale price, late traders can take advantage of after-hours news, such as a bombshell earnings announcement.

"A lot of firms allowed market-timing schemes, but few allowed the more egregious practice of late trading," said Craig Woker, an analyst at Morningstar Inc. "There is no gray area there."

Still, some analysts said the governance twist to the latest settlement may send a muddled message.

"These settlements look ad hoc, like they're making them up as they go along," said Roy Weitz, editor of FundAlarm.com in Tarzana. "It's a little unclear why this board is being forced out and others have not."

Note: Yes, and isn't it something that Martha's facing several years in jail for her "insider trading" episode; but nothing happens to the principals of Fleet Boston/BoA. Apparently you can cheat people and just get a fine; but if you misrepresent the truth to some government agent you can expect to be thrown in jail post haste.

The War In Iraq: Who Said What, When

Rep. Henry Waxman's site that catalogues the Bush Administration's Public Statements on Iraq, complete with search engine.

Bill Clinton's Boyhood Home on EBay
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: March 16, 2004
Filed at 6:16 p.m. ET

HOPE, Ark. (AP) -- Gary Johnson and his mother, Elaine, have lived in the ``little bitty house'' at 321 E. 13th St. for about 10 years. Now married, Johnson is looking for a bigger house. But selling the neatly-maintained corner lot residence where Bill Clinton lived for three years as a child is taking some time.

"The house was for sale 10 years ago for a long time because nobody wanted it,'' Johnson said. ``As I recall, there was a man from Canada who was finally interested. And my mother and I just thought that was terrible if someone from another country took the little house.

``Now it's long past his presidential days, and I just don't see anybody local being interested in it.'' Johnson decided to go worldwide and auction off the home on eBay. He won't say how many inquiries he has had since posting the home on the Internet site a week ago, but said he has had some serious inquiries. Johnson has left it up to his father to screen prospective buyers. (Note: The eBay Auction Item Number is: 2385914027, and is scheduled to close on April 7th, 2004. ed.)

``He called yesterday morning before we went to church all excited that there were 14 bids that had come in overnight,'' Johnson said. The former president was born in Hope on Aug. 19, 1946, and his birthplace home has been turned into a museum. Clinton lived at the 13th Street residence from 1951-1953 before moving to Hot Springs.

Johnson believes he's helped preserve the integrity of the home. ``It has had a lot of cosmetic surgery done on it because of President Clinton living there,'' he said. ``If it hadn't been for that, it would probably be a run-down, late-40s little rent house.''

Johnson said the original floor plan remains intact despite the addition of siding, carpeting and new ceilings. The house is about 950-square feet. It has three bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, living room and one bath room.

The house basically is the same as it was when Clinton lived there. But Johnson said the historical connection of the house has been largely overlooked. ``In all the years we have lived there, I have never had anyone come to me and say in a serious sense 'We need to make this a tourist site,''' Johnson said.

Bushism's

The Complete Bushisms
Updated frequently.
By Jacob Weisberg
Updated Monday, March 15, 2004, at 9:23 AM PT

"God loves you, and I love you. And you can count on both of us as a powerful message that people who wonder about their future can hear."—Los Angeles, Calif., March 3, 2004 (Thanks to Tanny Bear)

"The march to war affected the people's confidence. It's hard to make investment. See, if you're a small business owner or a large business owner and you're thinking about investing, you've got to be optimistic when you invest. Except when you're marching to war, it's not a very optimistic thought, is it? In other words, it's the opposite of optimistic when you're thinking you're going to war." —Springfield, Mo., Feb. 9, 2004 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.)

"See, one of the interesting things in the Oval Office—I love to bring people into the Oval Office—right around the corner from here—and say, this is where I office, but I want you to know the office is always bigger than the person."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"More Muslims have died at the hands of killers than—I say more Muslims—a lot of Muslims have died—I don't know the exact count—at Istanbul. Look at these different places around the world where there's been tremendous death and destruction because killers kill."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"In an economic recession, I'd rather that in order to get out of this recession, that the people be spending their money, not the government trying to figure out how to spend the people's money."—Tampa, Fla., Feb. 16, 2004

"King Abdullah of Jordan, the King of Morocco, I mean, there's a series of places—Qatar, Oman—I mean, places that are developing—Bahrain—they're all developing the habits of free societies."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004

"But the true strength of America is found in the hearts and souls of people like Travis, people who are willing to love their neighbor, just like they would like to love themselves."—Springfield, Mo., Feb. 9, 2004 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"My views are one that speaks to freedom."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2004

"In my judgment, when the United States says there will be serious consequences, and if there isn't serious consequences, it creates adverse consequences."

"There is no such thing necessarily in a dictatorial regime of iron-clad absolutely solid evidence. The evidence I had was the best possible evidence that he had a weapon."

"The recession started upon my arrival. t could have been—some say February, some say March, some speculate maybe earlier it started—but nevertheless, it happened as we showed up here. The attacks on our country affected our economy. Corporate scandals affected the confidence of people and therefore affected the economy. My decision on Iraq, this kind of march to war, affected the economy."—Meet the Press, Feb. 8, 2004

"I was a prisoner too, but for bad reasons."—To Argentine President Nestor Kirchner, on being told that all but one of the Argentine delegates to a summit meeting were imprisoned during the military dictatorship, Monterrey, Mexico, Jan. 13, 2004

"[T]he illiteracy level of our children are appalling."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 23, 2004 (Thanks to Lewell Gunter.)

"Just remember it's the birds that's supposed to suffer, not the hunter."—Advising quail hunter and New Mexico Sen. Pete Domenici, Roswell, N.M., Jan. 22, 2004

"One of the most meaningful things that's happened to me since I've been the governor—the president—governor—president. Oops. Ex-governor. I went to Bethesda Naval Hospital to give a fellow a Purple Heart, and at the same moment I watched him—get a Purple Heart for action in Iraq—and at that same—right after I gave him the Purple Heart, he was sworn in as a citizen of the United States—a Mexican citizen, now a United States citizen."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 9, 2004

"I want to thank the astronauts who are with us, the courageous spacial entrepreneurs who set such a wonderful example for the young of our country."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 14, 2004

"And if you're interested in the quality of education and you're paying attention to what you hear at Laclede, why don't you volunteer? Why don't you mentor a child how to read?"—St. Louis, Mo., Jan. 5, 2004

"So thank you for reminding me about the importance of being a good mom and a great volunteer as well."—St. Louis, Jan. 5, 2004

"I want to remind you all that in order to fight and win the war, it requires an expenditure of money that is commiserate with keeping a promise to our troops to make sure that they're well-paid, well-trained, well-equipped."

"See, without the tax relief package, there would have been a deficit, but there wouldn't have been the commiserate—not 'commiserate'—the kick to our economy that occurred as a result of the tax relief."

"[T]he best way to find these terrorists who hide in holes is to get people coming forth to describe the location of the hole, is to give clues and data."

"Justice was being delivered to a man who defied that gift from the Almighty to the people of Iraq."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 15, 2003

"[A]s you know, these are open forums, you're able to come and listen to what I have to say."—Washington, D.C., Oct. 28, 2003

"The ambassador and the general were briefing me on the—the vast majority of Iraqis want to live in a peaceful, free world. And we will find these people and we will bring them to justice."—Washington, D.C., Oct. 27, 2003 (Thanks to Robert Hack.)

"[W]hether they be Christian, Jew, or Muslim, or Hindu, people have heard the universal call to love a neighbor just like they'd like to be called themselves."—Washington, Oct. 8, 2003 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"See, free nations are peaceful nations. Free nations don't attack each other. Free nations don't develop weapons of mass destruction."—Milwaukee, Wis., Oct. 3, 2003

"[W]e've had leaks out of the administrative branch, had leaks out of the legislative branch, and out of the executive branch and the legislative branch, and I've spoken out consistently against them, and I want to know who the leakers are."—Chicago, Sept. 30, 2003

"Washington is a town where there's all kinds of allegations. You've heard much of the allegations. And if people have got solid information, please come forward with it. And that would be people inside the information who are the so-called anonymous sources, or people outside the information—outside the administration."—Chicago, Sept. 30, 2003 (Thanks to Andy Bowers.)

"[T]hat's just the nature of democracy. Sometimes pure politics enters into the rhetoric."—Crawford, Texas, Aug. 8, 2003 (Thanks to Inigo Thomas.)

"I glance at the headlines just to kind of get a flavor for what's moving. I rarely read the stories, and get briefed by people who are probably read the news themselves."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 21, 2003

"I'm so pleased to be able to say hello to Bill Scranton. He's one of the great Pennsylvania political families."—Drexel Hill, Penn., Sept. 15, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"We had a good Cabinet meeting, talked about a lot of issues. Secretary of State and Defense brought us up to date about our desires to spread freedom and peace around the world."—Washington, D.C., Aug. 1, 2003 (Thanks to Tanny Bear.)

"Security is the essential roadblock to achieving the road map to peace."—Washington, D.C., July 25, 2003

"Our country puts $1 billion a year up to help feed the hungry. And we're by far the most generous nation in the world when it comes to that, and I'm proud to report that. This isn't a contest of who's the most generous. I'm just telling you as an aside. We're generous. We shouldn't be bragging about it. But we are. We're very generous."—Washington, D.C., July 16, 2003

"It's very interesting when you think about it, the slaves who left here to go to America, because of their steadfast and their religion and their belief in freedom, helped change America."—Dakar, Senegal, July 8, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"My answer is bring them on."—On Iraqi militants attacking U.S. forces, Washington, D.C., July 3, 2003

"You've also got to measure in order to begin to effect change that's just more—when there's more than talk, there's just actual—a paradigm shift."—Washington, D.C., July 1, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"I urge the leaders in Europe and around the world to take swift, decisive action against terror groups such as Hamas, to cut off their funding, and to support—cut funding and support, as the United States has done."—Washington, D.C., June 25, 2003

"Iran would be dangerous if they have a nuclear weapon."—Washington, D.C., June 18, 2003

"Now, there are some who would like to rewrite history—revisionist historians is what I like to call them."—Elizabeth, N.J., June 16, 2003

"I am determined to keep the process on the road to peace."—Washington, D.C., June 10, 2003 (Thanks to Tanny Bear.)

"The true strength of America happens when a neighbor loves a neighbor just like they'd like to be loved themselves."—Elizabeth, N.J., June 16, 2003

"We are making steadfast progress."—Washington, D.C., June 9, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"I'm the master of low expectations."—Aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

"I'm also not very analytical. You know I don't spend a lot of time thinking about myself, about why I do things."—Aboard Air Force One, June 4, 2003

"I recently met with the finance minister of the Palestinian Authority, was very impressed by his grasp of finances."—Washington, D.C., May 29, 2003

"Oftentimes, we live in a processed world—you know, people focus on the process and not results."—Washington, D.C., May 29, 2003

"I've got very good relations with President Mubarak and Crown Prince Abdallah and the King of Jordan, Gulf Coast countries."—Washington, D.C., May 29, 2003

"All up and down the different aspects of our society, we had meaningful discussions. Not only in the Cabinet Room, but prior to this and after this day, our secretaries, respective secretaries, will continue to interact to create the conditions necessary for prosperity to reign."—Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003

"First, let me make it very clear, poor people aren't necessarily killers. Just because you happen to be not rich doesn't mean you're willing to kill."—Washington, D.C., May 19, 2003

"We ended the rule of one of history's worst tyrants, and in so doing, we not only freed the American people, we made our own people more secure."—Crawford, Texas, May 3, 2003 (Thanks to Tony Marciniec.)

"We've had a great weekend here in the Land of the Enchanted."—Albuquerque, N.M., May 12, 2003 (New Mexico's state nickname is "Land of Enchantment.")

"We've got hundreds of sites to exploit, looking for the chemical and biological weapons that we know Saddam Hussein had prior to our entrance into Iraq."—Santa Clara, Calif., May 2, 2003 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"I think war is a dangerous place."—Washington, D.C., May 7, 2003

"I don't bring God into my life to—to, you know, kind of be a political person."—Interview with Tom Brokaw aboard Air Force One, April 24, 2003

"You're free. And freedom is beautiful. And, you know, it'll take time to restore chaos and order—order out of chaos. But we will."—Washington, D.C., April 13, 2003

"Perhaps one way will be, if we use military force, in the post-Saddam Iraq the U.N. will definitely need to have a role. And that way it can begin to get its legs, legs of responsibility back."—the Azores, Portugal, March 16, 2003

"I know there's a lot of young ladies who are growing up wondering whether or not they can be champs. And they see the championship teams from USC and University of Portland here, girls who worked hard to get to where they are, and they're wondering about the example they're setting. What is life choices about?"—Washington, D.C., Feb. 24, 2003

"Now, we talked to Joan Hanover. She and her husband, George, were visiting with us. They are near retirement—retiring—in the process of retiring, meaning they're very smart, active, capable people who are retirement age and are retiring."—Alexandria, Va., Feb. 12, 2003 (Thanks to Dennis Doubleday.)

"Columbia carried in its payroll classroom experiments from some of our students in America."—Bethesda, Md., Feb. 3, 2003

"And, most importantly, Alma Powell, secretary of Colin Powell, is with us."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 30, 2003

"The war on terror involves Saddam Hussein because of the nature of Saddam Hussein, the history of Saddam Hussein, and his willingness to terrorize himself."—Grand Rapids, Mich., Jan. 29, 2003

"When Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried, and persecuted as a war criminal."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 22, 2003 (Thanks to Chad Conwell.)

"Many of the punditry—of course, not you (laughter)—but other punditry were quick to say, no one is going to follow the United States of America."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 21, 2003

"One year ago today, the time for excuse-making has come to an end."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 8, 2003

"I think the American people—I hope the American–I don't think, let me—I hope the American people trust me."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2002

"The goals for this country are peace in the world. And the goals for this country are a compassionate American for every single citizen. That compassion is found in the hearts and souls of the American citizens."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 19, 2002 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"There's only one person who hugs the mothers and the widows, the wives and the kids upon the death of their loved one. Others hug but having committed the troops, I've got an additional responsibility to hug and that's me and I know what it's like."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2002

"In other words, I don't think people ought to be compelled to make the decision which they think is best for their family."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 11, 2002 (Thanks to Stephanie Nichols.)

"Sometimes, Washington is one of these towns where the person—people who think they've got the sharp elbow is the most effective person." —New Orleans, Dec. 3, 2002 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"The law I sign today directs new funds and new focus to the task of collecting vital intelligence on terrorist threats and on weapons of mass production."—Washington, D.C., Nov. 27, 2002

"These people don't have tanks. They don't have ships. They hide in caves. They send suiciders out."—Speaking about terrorists, Portsmouth, N.H., Nov. 1, 2002

"I know something about being a government. And you've got a good one."—Stumping for Gov. Mike Huckabee, Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 4, 2002

"I need to be able to move the right people to the right place at the right time to protect you, and I'm not going to accept a lousy bill out of the United Nations Senate."—South Bend, Ind., Oct. 31, 2002

"John Thune has got a common-sense vision for good forest policy. I look forward to working with him in the United Nations Senate to preserve these national heritages."

"Any time we've got any kind of inkling that somebody is thinking about doing something to an American and something to our homeland, you've just got to know we're moving on it, to protect the United Nations Constitution, and at the same time, we're protecting you."—Aberdeen, S.D., same day (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"Let me tell you my thoughts about tax relief. When your economy is kind of ooching along, it's important to let people have more of their own money."—Boston, Oct. 4, 2002

"I was proud the other day when both Republicans and Democrats stood with me in the Rose Garden to announce their support for a clear statement of purpose: you disarm, or we will."—Speaking about Saddam Hussein, Manchester, N.H., Oct. 5, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"You see, the Senate wants to take away some of the powers of the administrative branch."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

"We need an energy bill that encourages consumption."—Trenton, N.J., Sept. 23, 2002

"People say, how can I help on this war against terror? How can I fight evil? You can do so by mentoring a child; by going into a shut-in's house and say I love you."—Washington, D.C., Sept. 19, 2002

"I'm plowed of the leadership of Chuck Grassley and Greg Ganske and Jim Leach."—Davenport, Iowa, Sept. 16, 2002

"There's an old saying in Tennessee—I know it's in Texas, probably in Tennessee—that says, fool me once, shame on—shame on you. Fool me—you can't get fooled again."—Nashville, Tenn., Sept. 17, 2002

"There's no doubt in my mind that we should allow the world worst leaders to hold America hostage, to threaten our peace, to threaten our friends and allies with the world's worst weapons."—South Bend, Ind., Sept. 5, 2002

"If you don't have any ambitions, the minimum-wage job isn't going to get you to where you want to get, for example. In other words, what is your ambitions? And oh, by the way, if that is your ambition, here's what it's going to take to achieve it."—Speech to students in Little Rock, Ark., Aug. 29, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"See, we love—we love freedom. That's what they didn't understand. They hate things; we love things. They act out of hatred; we don't seek revenge, we seek justice out of love."—Oklahoma City, Aug. 29, 2002

"There's no cave deep enough for America, or dark enough to hide."—Oklahoma City, Aug. 29, 2002 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"President Musharraf, he's still tight with us on the war against terror, and that's what I appreciate. He's a—he understands that we've got to keep al-Qaida on the run, and that by keeping him on the run, it's more likely we will bring him to justice."—Ruch, Ore., Aug. 22, 2002 (Thanks to Scott Miller.)

"I'm a patient man. And when I say I'm a patient man, I mean I'm a patient man."

"Nothing he [Saddam Hussein] has done has convinced me—I'm confident the Secretary of Defense—that he is the kind of fellow that is willing to forgo weapons of mass destruction, is willing to be a peaceful neighbor, that is—will honor the people—the Iraqi people of all stripes, will—values human life. He hasn't convinced me, nor has he convinced my administration."—Crawford, Texas, Aug. 21, 2002

"I'm thrilled to be here in the bread basket of America because it gives me a chance to remind our fellow citizens that we have an advantage here in America—we can feed ourselves."—Stockton, Calif., Aug. 23, 2002 (Thanks to Christopher Baird.)

"There's no bigger task than protecting the homeland of our country."

"The federal government and the state government must not fear programs who change lives, but must welcome those faith-based programs for the embetterment of mankind."—Stockton, Calif., Aug. 23, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"I love the idea of a school in which people come to get educated and stay in the state in which they're educated."

"There may be some tough times here in America. But this country has gone through tough times before, and we're going to do it again."

"I promise you I will listen to what has been said here, even though I wasn't here."

"I can assure you that, even though I won't be sitting through every single moment of the seminars, nor will the vice president, we will look at the summaries."

"Tommy [Thompson, Health and Human Services secretary,] is a good listener, and he's a pretty good actor, too."

"The trial lawyers are very politically powerful. … But here in Texas we took them on and got some good medical—medical malpractice.""I firmly believe the death tax is good for people from all walks of life all throughout our society."

—Waco, Texas, Aug. 13, 2002

"There was no malfeance involved. This was an honest disagreement about accounting procedures. ... There was no malfeance, no attempt to hide anything."—White House press conference, Washington, D.C., July 8, 2002

"I also understand how tender the free enterprise system can be."—White House press conference, Washington, D.C., July 9, 2002

"Over 75 percent of white Americans own their home, and less than 50 percent of Hispanos and African Americans don't own their home. And that's a gap, that's a homeownership gap. And we've got to do something about it."—Cleveland, Ohio, July 1, 2002

"Whether you're here by birth, or whether you're in America by choice, you contribute to the vitality of our life. And for that, we are grateful."—Washington, D.C., May 17, 2002

"I'd rather have them sacrificing on behalf of our nation than, you know, endless hours of testimony on congressional hill."—National Security Agency, Fort Meade, Maryland, June 4, 2002

"We're working with Chancellor Schröder on what's called 10-plus-10-over-10: $10 billion from the U.S.,$10 billion from other members of the G7 over a 10-year period, to help Russia securitize the dismantling—the dismantled nuclear warheads."—Berlin, Germany, May 23, 2002

"Do you have blacks, too?"—To Brazilian President Fernando Cardoso, Washington, D.C., Nov. 8, 2001

"This is a nation that loves our freedom, loves our country."—Washington, D.C, May 17, 2002

"The public education system in America is one of the most important foundations of our democracy. After all, it is where children from all over America learn to be responsible citizens, and learn to have the skills necessary to take advantage of our fantastic opportunistic society."—Santa Clara, Calif., May 1, 2002

"After all, a week ago, there were—Yasser Arafat was boarded up in his building in Ramallah, a building full of, evidently, German peace protestors and all kinds of people. They're now out. He's now free to show leadership, to lead the world."—Washington, D.C., May 2, 2002 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)

"This foreign policy stuff is a little frustrating."—as quoted by the New York Daily News, April 23, 2002

"I want to thank the dozens of welfare to work stories, the actual examples of people who made the firm and solemn commitment to work hard to embetter themselves."—Washington, D.C., April 18, 2002 (Thanks to George Dupper.)

"And so, in my State of the—my State of the Union—or state—my speech to the nation, whatever you want to call it, speech to the nation—I asked Americans to give 4,000 years—4,000 hours over the next—the rest of your life—of service to America. That's what I asked—4,000 hours." —Bridgeport, Conn., April 9, 2002

"It would be a mistake for the United States Senate to allow any kind of human cloning to come out of that chamber."—Washington, D.C., April 10, 2002

"For a century and a half now, America and Japan have formed one of the great and enduring alliances of modern times."—Tokyo, Japan, Feb. 18, 2002

"We've tripled the amount of money—I believe it's from $50 million up to $195 million available."—Lima, Peru, March 23, 2002

"We've got pockets of persistent poverty in our society, which I refuse to declare defeat—I mean, I refuse to allow them to continue on. And so one of the things that we're trying to do is to encourage a faith-based initiative to spread its wings all across America, to be able to capture this great compassionate spirit."—O'Fallon, Mo., Mar. 18, 2002

"There's nothing more deep than recognizing Israel's right to exist. That's the most deep thought of all. ... I can't think of anything more deep than that right."—Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002


"I understand that the unrest in the Middle East creates unrest throughout the region."—Washington, D.C., March 13, 2002

"The suicide bombings have increased. There's too many of them."—Albuquerque, N.M., Aug. 15, 2001

"Brie and cheese."—Taunting a reporter who recently spent time on the West Coast, Crawford, Texas, Aug. 23, 2001

"You'll hear people say it's racist to test. Folks, it's racist not to test. Because guess who gets shuffled through the system oftentimes? Children whose parents don't speak English as a first language, inner-city kids. It's so much easier to quit on somebody than to remediate."—Referring to his education bill, Independence, Mo., Aug. 21, 2001 (Thanks to Julie Reagan.)

"One of the interesting initiatives we've taken in Washington, D.C., is we've got these vampire-busting devices. A vampire is a—a cell deal you can plug in the wall to charge your cell phone."—Denver, Aug. 14, 2001

"There's a lot of people in the Middle East who are desirous to get into the Mitchell process. And—but first things first. The—these terrorist acts and, you know, the responses have got to end in order for us to get the framework—the groundwork—not framework, the groundwork to discuss a framework for peace, to lay the—all right."—Referring to former Sen. George Mitchell's report on Middle East peace, Crawford, Texas, Aug. 13, 2001 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"My administration has been calling upon all the leaders in the—in the Middle East to do everything they can to stop the violence, to tell the different parties involved that peace will never happen."—Crawford, Texas, Aug, 13, 2001 (Thanks to Michael Shively.)

"You saw the president yesterday. I thought he was very forward-leaning, as they say in diplomatic nuanced circles."—Referring to his meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin, Rome, July 23, 2001 (Thanks to Alex Hernandez.)

''I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe—I believe what I believe is right."—Rome, July 22, 2001

"I can't tell you what it's like to be in Europe, for example, to be talking about the greatness of America. But the true greatness of America are the people."—Visiting the Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., July 2, 2001

"Well, it's an unimaginable honor to be the president during the Fourth of July of this country. It means what these words say, for starters. The great inalienable rights of our country. We're blessed with such values in America. And I—it's—I'm a proud man to be the nation based upon such wonderful values."—Visiting the Jefferson Memorial, Washington, D.C., July 2, 2001

"I want to thank you for coming to the White House to give me an opportunity to urge you to work with these five senators and three congressmen, to work hard to get this trade promotion authority moving. The power that be, well most of the power that be, sits right here."—Washington, D.C., June 18, 2001

"We spent a lot of time talking about Africa, as we should. Africa is a nation that suffers from incredible disease."—Gothenburg, Sweden, June 14, 2001

"I haven't had a chance to talk, but I'm confident we'll get a bill that I can live with if we don't."—Referring to the McCain-Kennedy patients' bill of rights, Brussels, Belgium, June 13, 2001

"Can't living with the bill means it won't become law."—Referring to the McCain-Kennedy patients' bill of rights, Brussels, Belgium, June 13, 2001

"Russia is no longer our enemy and therefore we shouldn't be locked into a Cold War mentality that says we keep the peace by blowing each other up. In my attitude, that's old, that's tired, that's stale."—Des Moines, Iowa, June 8, 2001

"Anyway, I'm so thankful, and so gracious—I'm gracious that my brother Jeb is concerned about the hemisphere as well."—Miami, Fla., June 4, 2001

"It's important for young men and women who look at the Nebraska champs to understand that quality of life is more than just blocking shots."—Remarks to the University of Nebraska women's volleyball team, the 2001 national champions, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2001

"Our nation must come together to unite."—Tampa, Fla., June 4, 2001

"So on behalf of a well-oiled unit of people who came together to serve something greater than themselves, congratulations."—Remarks to the University of Nebraska women's volleyball team, the 2001 national champions, Washington, D.C., May 31, 2001

"If a person doesn't have the capacity that we all want that person to have, I suspect hope is in the far distant future, if at all."—Remarks to the Hispanic Scholarship Fund Institute, Washington, D.C., May 22, 2001

"Thirdly, the explorationists are willing to only move equipment during the winter, which means they'll be on ice roads, and remove the equipment as the ice begins to melt, so that the fragile tundra is protected."—Conestoga, Pa., May 18, 2001

"Presidents, whether things are good or bad, get the blame. I understand that."—Washington, D.C., May 11, 2001 (Thanks to Jay Schlossberg.)

"For every fatal shooting, there were roughly three non-fatal shootings. And, folks, this is unacceptable in America. It's just unacceptable. And we're going to do something about it."—Philadelphia, May 14, 2001 (Thanks to John Brooks.)

"There's no question that the minute I got elected, the storm clouds on the horizon were getting nearly directly overhead."—Washington, D.C., May 11, 2001

"But I also made it clear to [Vladimir Putin] that it's important to think beyond the old days of when we had the concept that if we blew each other up, the world would be safe."—Washington, D.C., May 1, 2001 (Thanks to Gene Mosher.)

"Whatever it took to help Taiwan defend theirself."—On how far we'd be willing to go to defend Taiwan, Good Morning America, April 25, 2001

"First, we would not accept a treaty that would not have been ratified, nor a treaty that I thought made sense for the country."—On the Kyoto accord in an interview with the Washington Post, April 24, 2001

"It's very important for folks to understand that when there's more trade, there's more commerce."—Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

"Neither in French nor in English nor in Mexican."—Declining to answer reporters' questions at the Summit of the Americas, Quebec City, Canada, April 21, 2001

"We must have the attitude that every child in America—regardless of where they're raised or how they're born—can learn."—New Britain, Conn., April 18, 2001 (Thanks to Eric Beerbohm.)

"It is time to set aside the old partisan bickering and finger-pointing and name-calling that comes from freeing parents to make different choices for their children."—Remarks on "parental empowerment in education," Washington, D.C., April 12, 2001 (Thanks to J.R. Taylor.)

I think we're making progress. We understand where the power of this country lay. It lays in the hearts and souls of Americans. It must lay in our pocketbooks. It lays in the willingness for people to work hard. But as importantly, it lays in the fact that we've got citizens from all walks of life, all political parties, that are willing to say, I want to love my neighbor. I want to make somebody's life just a little bit better."—Concord Middle School, Concord, N.C., April 11, 2001

"This administration is doing everything we can to end the stalemate in an efficient way. We're making the right decisions to bring the solution to an end."—Washington, D.C., April 10, 2001

"The Senate needs to leave enough money in the proposed budget to not only reduce all marginal rates, but to eliminate the death tax, so that people who build up assets are able to transfer them from one generation to the next, regardless of a person's race."—Washington, D.C., April 5, 2001

"It would be helpful if we opened up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge). I think it's a mistake not to. And I would urge you all to travel up there and take a look at it, and you can make the determination as to how beautiful that country is."—Press conference, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001

"I've coined new words, like, misunderstanding and Hispanically."—Radio-Television Correspondents Association dinner, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001

"And we need a full affront on an energy crisis that is real in California and looms for other parts of our country if we don't move quickly."—Press conference, Washington, D.C., March 29, 2001




"I assured the prime minister, my administration will work hard to lay the foundation of peace in the Middle—to work with our nations in the Middle East, give peace a chance. Secondly, I told him that our nation will not try to force peace, that we'll facilitate peace and that we will work with those responsible for a peace."—Photo opportunity with Ariel Sharon, Washington, D.C., March 20, 2001 (Thanks to Scott Beber.)

"There are some monuments where the land is so widespread, they just encompass as much as possible. And the integral part of the—the precious part, so to speak—I guess all land is precious, but the part that the people uniformly would not want to spoil, will not be despoiled. But there are parts of the monument lands where we can explore without affecting the overall environment."—Media round table, Washington, D.C. March 13, 2001

"A lot of times in the rhetoric, people forget the facts. And the facts are that thousands of small businesses—Hispanically owned or otherwise—pay taxes at the highest marginal rate."—to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce; Washington, D.C., March 19, 2001

"But the true threats to stability and peace are these nations that are not very transparent, that hide behind the—that don't let people in to take a look and see what they're up to. They're very kind of authoritarian regimes. The true threat is whether or not one of these people decide, peak of anger, try to hold us hostage, ourselves; the Israelis, for example, to whom we'll defend, offer our defenses; the South Koreans."—Media roundtable, Washington, D.C., March 13, 2001 (Thanks to Peter Sagal)

"I do think we need for a troop to be able to house his family. That's an important part of building morale in the military."—Tyndall Air Force Base, Florida, March 12, 2001

"I suspect that had my dad not been president, he'd be asking the same questions: How'd your meeting go with so-and-so? … How did you feel when you stood up in front of the people for the State of the Union Address—state of the budget address, whatever you call it."—Interview with the Washington Post, March 9, 2001

"I think there is some methodology in my travels." —Washington, D.C., March 5, 2001

"I'm also honored to be here with the speaker of the House—just happens to be from the state of Illinois. I'd like to describe the speaker as a trustworthy man. He's the kind of fellow who says when he gives you his word he means it. Sometimes that doesn't happen all the time in the political process."—Chicago, March 6, 2001 (Thanks to Gary Belkin.)

"Ann and I will carry out this equivocal message to the world: Markets must be open."—Swearing-in ceremony for Secretary of Agriculture Ann Veneman, Washington, D.C., March 2, 2001

"Of all states that understands local control of schools, Iowa is such a state."—Council Bluffs, Iowa, Feb. 28, 2001 (Thanks to Peter Sagal)

"Those of us who spent time in the agricultural sector and in the heartland, we understand how unfair the death penalty is."—Omaha, Neb., Feb. 28, 2001

"My pan plays down an unprecedented amount of our national debt."—Budget address to Congress, Feb. 27, 2001

"The budget caps were busted, mightily so. And we are reviewing with people like Judd Gregg from New Hampshire and others some budgetary reform measures that will reinstate—you know, possibly reinstate budgetary discipline. But the caps no longer—the caps, I guess they're there. But they didn't mean much."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 5, 2001 (Thanks to Ehren Meditz)

"I have said that the sanction regime is like Swiss cheese—that meant that they weren't very effective."—White House press conference, Washington, D.C., Feb. 22, 2001

"You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.''—Townsend, Tenn., Feb. 21, 2001

"Home is important. It's important to have a home."—Crawford, Texas, Feb. 18, 2001

"One reason I like to highlight reading is, reading is the beginnings of the ability to be a good student. And if you can't read, it's going to be hard to realize dreams; it's going to be hard to go to college. So when your teachers say, read—you ought to listen to her."—Nalle Elementary School, Washington, D.C., Feb 9, 2001

"It's good to see so many friends here in the Rose Garden. This is our first event in this beautiful spot, and it's appropriate we talk about policy that will affect people's lives in a positive way in such a beautiful, beautiful part of our national—really, our national park system, my guess is you would want to call it."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 8, 2001

"We're concerned about AIDS inside our White House—make no mistake about it."—Washington, D.C., Feb. 7, 2001

"I appreciate that question because I, in the state of Texas, had heard a lot of discussion about a faith-based initiative eroding the important bridge between church and state."—Question and answer session with the press, Jan. 29, 2001 (Thanks to Tim Santry.)

"I confirmed to the prime minister that we appreciate our friendship."—After meeting with Prime Minister Jean Chrétien of Canada, Feb. 5, 2001

"There's no such thing as legacies. At least, there is a legacy, but I'll never see it."—To Catholic leaders at the White House, Jan. 31, 2001

"I am mindful not only of preserving executive powers for myself, but for predecessors as well."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 29, 2001

"My pro-life position is I believe there's life. It's not necessarily based in religion. I think there's a life there, therefore the notion of life, liberty and pursuit of happiness."—Quoted in the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 23, 2001

"Then I went for a run with the other dog and just walked. And I started thinking about a lot of things. I was able to—I can't remember what it was. Oh, the inaugural speech, started thinking through that."—Pre-inaugural interview with U.S. News & World Report, Jan. 22, 2001 issue

"Redefining the role of the United States from enablers to keep the peace to enablers to keep the peace from peacekeepers is going to be an assignment."—Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001 (Thanks to Rachael Contorer.)

"The California crunch really is the result of not enough power-generating plants and then not enough power to power the power of generating plants."—Interview with the New York Times, Jan. 14, 2001

"I'm hopeful. I know there is a lot of ambition in Washington, obviously. But I hope the ambitious realize that they are more likely to succeed with success as opposed to failure."—Interview with the Associated Press, Jan. 18, 2001 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)

"If he's—the inference is that somehow he thinks slavery is a—is a noble institution I would—I would strongly reject that assumption—that John Ashcroft is a open-minded, inclusive person."—NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, Jan. 14, 2001

"She's just trying to make sure Anthony gets a good meal—Antonio."—On Laura Bush inviting Justice Antonin Scalia to dinner at the White House. NBC Nightly News With Tom Brokaw, Jan. 14, 2001

"I want it to be said that the Bush administration was a results-oriented administration, because I believe the results of focusing our attention and energy on teaching children to read and having an education system that's responsive to the child and to the parents, as opposed to mired in a system that refuses to change, will make America what we want it to be—a literate country and a hopefuller country."—Washington, D.C., Jan. 11, 2001

"I would have to ask the questioner. I haven't had a chance to ask the questioners the question they've been questioning. On the other hand, I firmly believe she'll be a fine secretary of labor. And I've got confidence in Linda Chavez. She is a—she'll bring an interesting perspective to the Labor Department."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 8, 2001

"I do remain confident in Linda. She'll make a fine labor secretary. From what I've read in the press accounts, she's perfectly qualified."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 8, 2001

"I mean, these good folks are revolutionizing how businesses conduct their business. And, like them, I am very optimistic about our position in the world and about its influence on the United States. We're concerned about the short-term economic news, but long-term I'm optimistic. And so, I hope investors, you know—secondly, I hope investors hold investments for periods of time—that I've always found the best investments are those that you salt away based on economics."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2001

"The person who runs FEMA is someone who must have the trust of the president. Because the person who runs FEMA is the first voice, often times, of someone whose life has been turned upside down hears from."—Austin, Texas, Jan. 4, 2001

"She is a member of a labor union at one point."—Announcing his nomination of Linda Chavez as secretary of labor. Austin, Texas, Jan. 2, 2001

"Natural gas is hemispheric. I like to call it hemispheric in nature because it is a product that we can find in our neighborhoods."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

"I also have picked a secretary for Housing and Human Development. Mel Martinez from the state of Florida."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 20, 2000

"Let me put it to you this way, I am not a revengeful person."— Interview with Time magazine in the Dec. 25, 2000, issue.

"I am mindful of the difference between the executive branch and the legislative branch. I assured all four of these leaders that I know the difference, and that difference is they pass the laws and I execute them."—Washington, D.C., Dec. 18, 2000

"The great thing about America is everybody should vote."—Austin, Texas, Dec. 8, 2000

"Dick Cheney and I do not want this nation to be in a recession. We want anybody who can find work to be able to find work."—60 Minutes II, Dec. 5, 2000

"I knew it might put him in an awkward position that we had a discussion before finality has finally happened in this presidential race."

—Describing a phone call to Sen. John Breaux. Crawford, Texas, Dec. 2, 2000

"As far as the legal hassling and wrangling and posturing in Florida, I would suggest you talk to our team in Florida led by Jim Baker."—Crawford, Texas, Nov. 30, 2000

"The legislature's job is to write law. It's the executive branch's job to interpret law."—Austin, Texas, Nov. 22, 2000

"They misunderestimated me."—Bentonville, Ark., Nov. 6, 2000

"Think about that. Two hundred and eighty-five new or expanded programs, $2 trillion more in new spending, and not one new bureaucrat to file out the forms or answer the phones?"—Minneapolis, Nov. 1, 2000

"They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it's some kind of federal program."—St. Charles, Mo., Nov. 2, 2000

"They said, 'You know, this issue doesn't seem to resignate with the people.' And I said, you know something? Whether it resignates or not doesn't matter to me, because I stand for doing what's the right thing, and what the right thing is hearing the voices of people who work."—Portland, Ore., Oct. 31, 2000

"Anyway, after we go out and work our hearts out, after you go out and help us turn out the vote, after we've convinced the good Americans to vote, and while they're at it, pull that old George W. lever, if I'm the one, when I put my hand on the Bible, when I put my hand on the Bible, that day when they swear us in, when I put my hand on the Bible, I will swear to not—to uphold the laws of the land."—Toledo, Ohio, Oct. 27, 2000

"It's your money. You paid for it."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

"That's a chapter, the last chapter of the 20th, 20th, the 21st century that most of us would rather forget. The last chapter of the 20th century. This is the first chapter of the 21st century. "—On the Lewinsky scandal, Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

"It's important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It's not only life of babies, but it's life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet."—Arlington Heights, Ill., Oct. 24, 2000

"I don't want nations feeling like that they can bully ourselves and our allies. I want to have a ballistic defense system so that we can make the world more peaceful, and at the same time I want to reduce our own nuclear capacities to the level commiserate with keeping the peace."—Des Moines, Iowa, Oct. 23, 2000

"Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream."—LaCrosse, Wis., Oct. 18, 2000

"If I'm the president, we're going to have emergency-room care, we're going to have gag orders."

"Drug therapies are replacing a lot of medicines as we used to know it."

"It's one thing about insurance, that's a Washington term."

"I think we ought to raise the age at which juveniles can have a gun."

"Mr. Vice President, in all due respect, it is—I'm not sure 80 percent of the people get the death tax. I know this: 100 percent will get it if I'm the president."

"Quotas are bad for America. It's not the way America is all about."

"If affirmative action means what I just described, what I'm for, then I'm for it."—St. Louis, Mo., October 18, 2000

"Our priorities is our faith."—Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000

"I mean, there needs to be a wholesale effort against racial profiling, which is illiterate children."—Second presidential debate, Oct. 11, 2000 (Thanks to Leonard Williams.)

"It's going to require numerous IRA agents."—On Gore's tax plan, Greensboro, N.C., Oct. 10, 2000

"I think if you know what you believe, it makes it a lot easier to answer questions. I can't answer your question."—In response to a question about whether he wished he could take back any of his answers in the first debate. Reynoldsburg, Ohio, Oct. 4, 2000 (Thanks to Peter Feld.)

"I would have my secretary of treasury be in touch with the financial centers, not only here but at home."—Boston, Oct. 3, 2000 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)

"I know the human being and fish can coexist peacefully."—Saginaw, Mich., Sept. 29, 2000

"I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy."—Redwood, Calif., Sept. 27, 2000

"One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected."—Los Angeles, Sept. 27, 2000

"It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas."—Beaverton, Ore., Sep. 25, 2000

"Well, that's going to be up to the pundits and the people to make up their mind. I'll tell you what is a president for him, for example, talking about my record in the state of Texas. I mean, he's willing to say anything in order to convince people that I haven't had a good record in Texas."—MSNBC, Sept. 20, 2000 (Thanks to Gregory H. Monberg.)

"I am a person who recognizes the fallacy of humans."—Oprah, Sept. 19, 2000

"A tax cut is really one of the anecdotes to coming out of an economic illness."—The Edge With Paula Zahn, Sept. 18, 2000

"The woman who knew that I had dyslexia—I never interviewed her."—Orange, Calif., Sept. 15, 2000

"The best way to relieve families from time is to let them keep some of their own money."—Westminster, Calif., Sept. 13, 2000

"They have miscalculated me as a leader."—Ibid.

"I don't think we need to be subliminable about the differences between our views on prescription drugs."—Orlando, Fla., Sept. 12, 2000

"This is what I'm good at. I like meeting people, my fellow citizens, I like interfacing with them."—Outside Pittsburgh, Sept. 8, 2000

"That's Washington. That's the place where you find people getting ready to jump out of the foxholes before the first shot is fired."—Westland, Mich., Sept. 8, 2000

"Listen, Al Gore is a very tough opponent. He is the incumbent. He

represents the incumbency. And a challenger is somebody who generally

comes from the pack and wins, if you're going to win. And that's where

I'm coming from."—Detroit, Sept. 7, 2000 (Thanks to Michael Butler, Houston, Texas.)

"We'll let our friends be the peacekeepers and the great country called America will be the pacemakers."—Houston, Texas, Sept. 6, 2000

"We don't believe in planners and deciders making the decisions on behalf of Americans."—Scranton, Pa., Sept. 6, 2000

"I regret that a private comment I made to the vice presidential candidate made it through the public airways."—Allentown, Pa., Sept. 5, 2000.

"The point is, this is a way to help inoculate me about what has come and is coming."--on his anti-Gore ad, in an interview with the New York Times, Sept. 2, 2000

"As governor of Texas, I have set high standards for our public schools, and I have met those standards."--CNN online chat, Aug. 30, 2000

"Well, I think if you say you're going to do something and don't do it, that's trustworthiness."--Ibid.

"I don't know whether I'm going to win or not. I think I am. I do know I'm ready for the job. And, if not, that's just the way it goes."—Des Moines, Iowa, Aug. 21, 2000

''This campaign not only hears the voices of the entrepreneurs and the farmers and the entrepreneurs, we hear the voices of those struggling to get ahead."—Ibid.

"We cannot let terrorists and rogue nations hold this nation hostile or hold our allies hostile.''—Ibid.

"I have a different vision of leadership. A leadership is someone who brings people together."—Bartlett, Tenn., Aug. 18, 2000 (Thanks to Tarja Black.)

"I think he needs to stand up and say if he thought the president were wrong on policy and issues, he ought to say where."—Interview with the Associated Press, Aug. 11, 2000 (Thanks to Ryan Rhodes.)

"I want you to know that farmers are not going to be secondary thoughts to a Bush administration. They will be in the forethought of our thinking."—Salinas, Calif., Aug. 10, 2000 (Thanks to Kris Sester.)

"And if he continues that, I'm going to tell the nation what I think about him as a human being and a person."—President George H.W. Bush, on the Today show, Aug. 1, 2000

"You might want to comment on that, Honorable."--To New Jersey's secretary of state, the Hon. DeForest Soaries Jr., as quoted by Dana Milbank in the Washington Post, July 15, 2000

"This case has had full analyzation and has been looked at a lot. I understand the emotionality of death penalty cases."--Seattle Post-Intelligencer, June 23, 2000 (Thanks to Johnny Green.)

"States should have the right to enact reasonable laws and restrictions particularly to end the inhumane practice of ending a life that otherwise could live."—Cleveland, June 29, 2000 (Thanks to Douglas Basford.)

"Unfairly but truthfully, our party has been tagged as being against things. Anti-immigrant, for example. And we're not a party of anti-immigrants. Quite the opposite. We're a party that welcomes people."—Cleveland, July 1, 2000 (Thanks to M. Bateman.)

"The fundamental question is, 'Will I be a successful president when it comes to foreign policy?' I will be, but until I'm the president, it's going to be hard for me to verify that I think I'll be more effective."—In Wayne, Mich., as quoted by Katharine Q. Seelye in the New York Times, June 28, 2000

"The only things that I can tell you is that every case I have reviewed I have been comfortable with the innocence or guilt of the person that I've looked at. I do not believe we've put a guilty ... I mean innocent person to death in the state of Texas." All Things Considered, NPR, June 16, 2000 (Thanks to Andy Nouraee.)

"I'm gonna talk about the ideal world, Chris. I've read—I understand reality. If you're asking me as the president, would I understand reality, I do."—On abortion, Hardball, MSNBC; May 31, 2000

"There's not going to be enough people in the system to take advantage of people like me."—On the coming Social Security crisis; Wilton, Conn.; June 9, 2000 (Thanks to Andy Mais.)

"I think anybody who doesn't think I'm smart enough to handle the job is underestimating."—U.S. News & World Report, April 3, 2000 (Thanks to Alfred Stanley, Austin, Texas.)

Bush: "First of all, Cinco de Mayo is not the independence day. That's dieciséis de Septiembre, and ..."

Matthews: "What's that in English?"

Bush: "Fifteenth of September." (Dieciséis de Septiembre = Sept. 16)

—Hardball, MSNBC, May 31, 2000 (Thanks to numerous readers.)

"Actually, I—this may sound a little West Texan to you, but I like it. When I'm talking about—when I'm talking about myself, and when he's talking about myself, all of us are talking about me."—Ibid.

"This is a world that is much more uncertain than the past. In the past we were certain, we were certain it was us versus the Russians in the past. We were certain, and therefore we had huge nuclear arsenals aimed at each other to keep the peace. That's what we were certain of. ... You see, even though it's an uncertain world, we're certain of some things. We're certain that even though the 'evil empire' may have passed, evil still remains. We're certain there are people that can't stand what America stands for. ... We're certain there are madmen in this world, and there's terror, and there's missiles and I'm certain of this, too: I'm certain to maintain the peace, we better have a military of high morale, and I'm certain that under this administration, morale in the military is dangerously low."—Albuquerque, N.M., the Washington Post, May 31, 2000

"He has certainly earned a reputation as a fantastic mayor, because the results speak for themselves. I mean, New York's a safer place for him to be."—On Rudy Giuliani, The Edge With Paula Zahn, May 18, 2000 (Thanks to Peter Goldman.)

"The fact that he relies on facts—says things that are not factual—are going to undermine his campaign."—New York Times, March 4, 2000 (Thanks to Garry Trudeau.)

"I think we agree, the past is over."—On his meeting with John McCain, Dallas Morning News, May 10, 2000

"It's clearly a budget. It's got a lot of numbers in it."--Reuters, May 5, 2000 (Thanks to Allison Fansler.)

GOV. BUSH: Because the picture on the newspaper. It just seems so un-American to me, the picture of the guy storming the house with a scared little boy there. I talked to my little brother, Jeb—I haven't told this to many people. But he's the governor of—I shouldn't call him my little brother--my brother, Jeb, the great governor of Texas.

JIM LEHRER: Florida.

GOV. BUSH: Florida. The state of the Florida.—The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer, April 27, 2000

"I hope we get to the bottom of the answer. It's what I'm interested to know."—On what happened in negotiations between the Justice Department and Elián González's Miami relatives, as quoted by the Associated Press, April 26, 2000 (Thanks to Saul Selzer.)

"Laura and I really don't realize how bright our children is sometimes until we get an objective analysis."—CNBC, April 15, 2000

"You subscribe politics to it. I subscribe freedom to it."—Responding to a question about whether he and Al Gore were making the Elián González case a political issue. In Palm Beach, Fla., as quoted by the Associated Press, April 6, 2000 (Thanks to Helen Kennedy.)

"I was raised in the West. The wesv of Texas. It's pretty close to California. In more ways than Washington, D.C., is close to California."—In Los Angeles as quoted by the Los Angeles Times, April 8, 2000

"Reading is the basics for all learning."—Announcing his "Reading First" initiative in Reston, Va., March 28, 2000 (Thanks to Carl LaRocca.)

"We want our teachers to be trained so they can meet the obligations, their obligations as teachers. We want them to know how to teach the science of reading. In order to make sure there's not this kind of federal—federal cufflink."—At Fritsche Middle School, Milwaukee, March 30, 2000

"Other Republican candidates may retort to personal attacks and negative ads."—Fund-raising letter from George W. Bush, quoted in the Washington Post, March 24, 2000

"I've got a reason for running. I talk about a larger goal, which is to call upon the best of America. It's part of the renewal. It's reform and renewal. Part of the renewal is a set of high standards and to remind people that the greatness of America really does depend on neighbors helping neighbors and children finding mentors. I worry. I'm very worried about, you know, the kid who just wonders whether America is meant for him. I really worry about that. And uh, so, I'm running for a reason. I'm answering this question here and the answer is, you cannot lead America to a positive tomorrow with revenge on one's mind. Revenge is so incredibly negative. And so to answer your question, I'm going to win because people sense my heart, know my sense of optimism and know where I want to lead the country. And I tease people by saying, 'A leader, you can't say, follow me the world is going to be worse.' I'm an optimistic person. I'm an inherently content person. I've got a great sense of where I want to lead and I'm comfortable with why I'm running. And, you know, the call on that speech was, beware. This is going to be a tough campaign."—Interview with the Washington Post, March 23, 2000

"People make suggestions on what to say all the time. I'll give you an example; I don't read what's handed to me. People say, 'Here, here's your speech, or here's an idea for a speech.' They're changed. Trust me."—Interview with the New York Times, March 15, 2000

"It's evolutionary, going from governor to president, and this is a significant step, to be able to vote for yourself on the ballot, and I'll be able to do so next fall, I hope."—In an interview with the Associated Press, March 8, 2000 (Thanks to Joshua Micah Marshall.)

"It is not Reaganesque to support a tax plan that is Clinton in nature.''—Los Angeles, Feb. 23, 2000

"I don't have to accept their tenants. I was trying to convince those college students to accept my tenants. And I reject any labeling me because I happened to go to the university."—Today, Feb. 23, 2000

"I understand small business growth. I was one."—New York Daily News, Feb. 19, 2000

"The senator has got to understand if he's going to have—he can't have it both ways. He can't take the high horse and then claim the low road."—To reporters in Florence, S.C., Feb. 17, 2000

"Really proud of it. A great campaign. And I'm really pleased with the organization and the thousands of South Carolinians that worked on my behalf. And I'm very gracious and humbled."—To Cokie Roberts, This Week, Feb. 20, 2000

"I don't want to win? If that were the case why the heck am I on the bus 16 hours a day, shaking thousands of hands, giving hundreds of speeches, getting pillared in the press and cartoons and still staying on message to win?"—Newsweek, Feb. 28, 2000

"I thought how proud I am to be standing up beside my dad. Never did it occur to me that he would become the gist for cartoonists."—ibid.

"If you're sick and tired of the politics of cynicism and polls and principles, come and join this campaign."—Hilton Head, S.C., Feb. 16, 2000

"How do you know if you don't measure if you have a system that simply suckles kids through?"—Explaining the need for educational accountability in Beaufort, S.C., Feb. 16, 2000

"We ought to make the pie higher."—South Carolina Republican Debate, Feb. 15, 2000

"I do not agree with this notion that somehow if I go to try to attract votes and to lead people toward a better tomorrow somehow I get subscribed to some—some doctrine gets subscribed to me."—Meet The Press, Feb. 13, 2000

"I've changed my style somewhat, as you know. I'm less—I pontificate less, although it may be hard to tell it from this show. And I'm more interacting with people."—ibid

"I think we need not only to eliminate the tollbooth to the middle class, I think we should knock down the tollbooth."—Nashua, N.H., as quoted by Gail Collins in the New York Times, Feb. 1, 2000

"The most important job is not to be governor, or first lady in my case."—Pella, Iowa, as quoted by the San Antonio Express-News, Jan. 30, 2000

"Will the highways on the Internet become more few?"—Concord, N.H., Jan. 29, 2000

"This is Preservation Month. I appreciate preservation. It's what you do when you run for president. You gotta preserve."—Speaking during "Perseverance Month" at Fairgrounds Elementary School in Nashua, N.H. As quoted in the Los Angeles Times, Jan. 28, 2000

"I know how hard it is for you to put food on your family."—Greater Nashua, N.H., Chamber of Commerce, Jan. 27, 2000

"What I am against is quotas. I am against hard quotas, quotas they basically delineate based upon whatever. However they delineate, quotas, I think vulcanize society. So I don't know how that fits into what everybody else is saying, their relative positions, but that's my position.''—Quoted by Molly Ivins, the San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 21, 2000 (Thanks to Toni L. Gould.)

"When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were," he said. "It was us vs. them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they're there."—Iowa Western Community College, Jan 21, 2000

"The administration I'll bring is a group of men and women who are focused on what's best for America, honest men and women, decent men and women, women who will see service to our country as a great privilege and who will not stain the house."—Des Moines Register debate, Iowa, Jan. 15, 2000

"This is still a dangerous world. It's a world of madmen and uncertainty and potential mential losses."—At a South Carolina oyster roast, as quoted in the Financial Times, Jan. 14, 2000

"We must all hear the universal call to like your neighbor just like you like to be liked yourself."—ibid.

"Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning?"—Florence, S.C., Jan. 11, 2000

"Gov. Bush will not stand for the subsidation of failure."—ibid.

"There needs to be debates, like we're going through. There needs to be town-hall meetings. There needs to be travel. This is a huge country."—Larry King Live, Dec. 16, 1999

"I read the newspaper."—In answer to a question about his reading habits, New Hampshire Republican Debate, Dec. 2, 1999

"I think it's important for those of us in a position of responsibility to be firm in sharing our experiences, to understand that the babies out of wedlock is a very difficult chore for mom and baby alike. ... I believe we ought to say there is a different alternative than the culture that is proposed by people like Miss Wolf in society. ... And, you know, hopefully, condoms will work, but it hasn't worked."—Meet the Press, Nov. 21, 1999

"The students at Yale came from all different backgrounds and all parts of the country. Within months, I knew many of them."—From A Charge To Keep, by George W. Bush, published November 1999

"It is incredibly presumptive for somebody who has not yet earned his party's nomination to start speculating about vice presidents."—Keene, N.H., Oct. 22, 1999, quoted in the New Republic, Nov. 15, 1999

"The important question is, How many hands have I shaked?"—Answering a question about why he hasn't spent more time in New Hampshire, in the New York Times, Oct. 23, 1999

"I don't remember debates. I don't think we spent a lot of time debating it. Maybe we did, but I don't remember."—On discussions of the Vietnam War when he was an undergraduate at Yale, Washington Post, July 27, 1999

"The only thing I know about Slovakia is what I learned first-hand from your foreign minister, who came to Texas."—To a Slovak journalist as quoted by Knight Ridder News Service, June 22, 1999. Bush's meeting was with Janez Drnovsek, the prime minister of Slovenia.

"If the East Timorians decide to revolt, I'm sure I'll have a statement."—Quoted by Maureen Dowd in the New York Times, June 16, 1999

"Keep good relations with the Grecians."—Quoted in the Economist, June 12, 1999

"Kosovians can move back in."—CNN Inside Politics, April 9, 1999

"It was just inebriating what Midland was all about then."—From a 1994 interview, as quoted in First Son, by Bill Minutaglio
[Jacob Weisberg is editor of Slate and co-author, with Robert E. Rubin, of In an Uncertain World. ]

The Best P2P Application?

Try BitTorrent. The latest version for Windows is: v3.4.1. A Mac OS/X version, 3.3a works on Panther. Check it out here. For more information on the appeal of BitTorrent for Movie D/L's, read about it on Slate here.

The Never-Ending Story

An Interesting Day: President Bush's Movements and Actions on 9/11
By Allan Wood and Paul Thompson
May 9, 2003

Uncertainty only sure thing in Iraq
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 03/14/2004
by Jay Bookman
� E-mail: jbookman@ajc.com

The year since our invasion of Iraq has not been easy. More than 550 American soldiers have lost their lives. We've spent untallied billions of dollars trying to stabilize Iraq and start its reconstruction. We have tried, with varying degrees of success, to rebuild the traditional alliances strained by our decision to invade.

And what do we have to show for that sacrifice? A chance.

We have bought ourselves and the Iraqi people a chance, perhaps not for a Jeffersonian democracy rising out of the desert, but for something more stable and much more decent than the Iraqis knew under Saddam Hussein.

But making that chance pay off will require the investment of still more American lives, a lot more American money and a lot more time as well. And even if we do all that, the odds of success are mixed at best.
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Flip Flops

Bush's flip flops
by kos
Sun Mar 7th, 2004 at 21:37:53 GMT

So Bush has a site somewhere that tracks Kerry's "flip-flops". Reader TK probably spent three seconds coming up with this list of Bush flip flops. It's not like they're hard to find:

Bush is against campaign finance reform; then he's for it.

Bush is against a Homeland Security Department; then he's for it.

Bush is against a 9/11 commission; then he's for it.

Bush is against an Iraq WMD investigation; then he's for it.

Bush is against nation building; then he's for it.

Bush is against deficits; then he's for them.

Bush is for free trade; then he's for tariffs on steel; then he's against them again.

Bush is against the U.S. taking a role in the Israeli Palestinian conflict; then he pushes for a "road map" and a Palestinian State.

Bush is for states right to decide on gay marriage, then he is for changing the constitution.

Bush first says he'll provide money for first responders (fire, police, emergency), then he doesn't.

Bush first says that 'help is on the way' to the military ... then he cuts benefits

Bush-"The most important thing is for us to find Osama bin Laden. Bush-"I don't know where he is. I have no idea and I really don't care.

Bush claims to be in favor of the environment and then secretly starts drilling on Padre Island.

Bush talks about helping education and increases mandates while cutting funding.

Bush first says the U.S. won't negotiate with North Korea. Now he will

Bush goes to Bob Jones University. Then say's he shouldn't have.

Bush said he would demand a U.N. Security Council vote on whether to sanction military action against Iraq. Later Bush announced he would not call for a vote

Bush said the "mission accomplished" banner was put up by the sailors. Bush later admits it was his advance team.

Bush was for fingerprinting and photographing Mexicans who enter the US. Bush after meeting with Pres. Fox, he's against it.

Unintended Consequences of Legislation?

Mother charged with murder denies accusations
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- The woman at the center of a fetal murder case who allegedly refused a Caesarean section that doctors said would have saved one of her babies denied in a jailhouse interview Friday that she killed the fetus.

Melissa Ann Rowland, 28, rejected claims she refused the surgery because of cosmetic worries. "It was all medical concern. None of it was vanity," Rowland told The Associated Press a day after prosecutors charged her with exhibiting "depraved indifference to human life" in avoiding the C-section. "I never imagined having a stillborn would get me national news coverage or a murder charge," Rowland told the AP during a 30-minute interview at the Salt Lake County jail.

Rowland, who has been in the jail since mid-January on a child endangerment charge involving the surviving twin, said she was informed of the murder charge Thursday evening by reporters. "I feel like I'm getting a lot of attention that (should be) my private business," she said. Critics of the charges say the case could affect abortion rights and open the door to the prosecution of mothers who smoke, fail to follow their obstetrician's diet or take some other action that endangers a fetus.

"It reaches a level that is extraordinary in our legal understanding of bodily integrity and what that means in this country," said Kim Gandy, president of the National Organization for Women and a former prosecutor.

At no time did doctors tell her she needed an emergency procedure, she said, adding she would have had no objections to a C-section since she had two previous ones during the births of her other two young children, ages 7 and 9, who live with the parents of Rowland's estranged husband. She said she was never concerned about her babies' health because in all her hospital visits, she was told they had good heartbeats and were fine.

Rowland's court-appointed attorney, Michael Sikora, did not return two phone calls seeking comment, but has said that Rowland had a history of mental issues, though he was awaiting medical records for confirmation. Rowland said she had twice attempted suicide and spent time in a psychiatric hospital.

The case has won national attention over its potential legal ramifications on the debate over fetal rights. "I see this as part of an overall focus of a certain movement on fetal rights and an effort to elevate fetal rights above the rights of a woman," said NOW's Gandy.

Last month, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, which gives a fetus separate victim's rights in the event of an attack on a pregnant woman. The bill, prompted by the murder of Laci Peterson's son, was hailed by conservative groups as an affirmation of the legal rights of the unborn.

About 30 states, including Utah, have made attempts, most of them unsuccessful, to prosecute women for behavior affecting their fetuses, most of it drug-related, Gandy said.

In a case reminiscent of Rowland's, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals ruled in 1990 on a case involving a terminal cancer patient who died after a lower court ordered doctors to perform a C-section on her to save her 26-week-old fetus, who died after the operation. The surgery was listed as a contributing factor in the woman's death.

The court ruled that a pregnant patient's decision to refuse medical treatment is almost always paramount, even when survival of a fetus is at stake and wrote, "a fetus cannot have rights ... superior to those of a person who has already been born."

In January, the Utah Supreme Court ruled that unborn children at all stages of development are covered under the state's criminal homicide statute. That statute, however, exempts the death of an unborn child caused by an abortion.

NASA Agrees to New Study on Mission to Hubble Telescope
By WARREN E. LEARY
NY Times
Published: March 12, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 11 — The Hubble Space Telescope may have won a reprieve from an early death. Under Congressional pressure, NASA agreed on Thursday to have the National Academy of Sciences examine plans to cancel a space shuttle mission to repair and upgrade it.

Spain Mourns 192 Dead, Probes Al Qaeda Bomb Claim
Thu Mar 11, 2004 08:47 PM ET
Reuters

By Adrian Croft
MADRID (Reuters) - Spaniards mourned the death of 192 people in the country's worst guerrilla attack on Friday as officials looked into a purported al Qaeda claim that it was responsible for the bombings on packed commuter trains. The Spanish government said it believed armed Basque separatist group ETA was most likely to blame for the simultaneous bombings of four trains at Madrid stations on Thursday three days before a general election.

However, Interior Minister Angel Acebes said police were not ruling out any lines of investigation after finding a van containing seven detonators and a tape in Arabic at a town near Madrid where the bombs may have been placed on the trains. Apart from those killed, some 1,421 people were injured in Europe's bloodiest guerrilla attack for more than 15 years.

The picture was clouded late on Thursday when a letter purporting to come from al Qaeda claimed responsibility. "We have succeeded in infiltrating the heart of crusader Europe and struck one of the bases of the crusader alliance," said the letter, a copy of which was faxed by al-Quds newspaper to Reuters. No authentication was available of the letter.

An Interior Ministry source said officials were looking into the claim but ETA remained the first line of investigation. Spain is one of Washington's closest European allies and stood squarely behind President Bush's decision last year to go to war in Iraq. Investigators say there were 10 blasts. The bombs, in rucksacks, each contained around 22 lbs. of explosives.

El Mound newspaper said Madrid had suffered "the worst terrorist attack in Spanish history," calling it "Our September 11." Amid a wave of grief and revulsion, Spaniards placed candles and flowers at the Santa Eugenia station in southeastern Madrid where one of the blasts occurred.

Curiouser and Curiouser: SCO Litigation - Microsoft Money vs Linux & Open Source

Microsoft's Ties To SCO Confirmed By Investment Group
March 11, 2004 (8:14 p.m. EST)
By Antone Gonsalves, TechWeb News

BayStar Capital, which invested $50 million in The SCO Group last October, on Thursday confirmed that Microsoft Corp. introduced it to the small software company that has mounted a court challenge to Linux, the open source operating system that has become a strong rival to Windows.
While confirming the introduction, a spokesman for the Larkspur, Calif., investment firm reiterated earlier statements that Microsoft did not invest any money in Lindon, Utah-based, SCO.

"Microsoft did introduce SCO to BayStar as a possible investment opportunity," the spokesman said. "But, and we said this previously, Microsoft neither participated in the SCO investment back in October, nor is Microsoft an investor in BayStar."

The spokesman declined further details, but said it was not unusual for companies to recommend investments in other businesses. BayStar last year funneled a majority of its investments in life sciences, media and high-tech companies.

Speculation that Microsoft was bankrolling SCO surfaced last week when Eric Raymond, president of the Open Source Initiative, published a leaked internal e-mail thread between Chris Sontag, a senior vice president and general manager of SCO's licensing division; and Mike Anderer, chief executive of Salt Lake City-based strategic consulting firm S2.

In the exchange, which occurred just days before the BayStar investment, Anderer offhandedly claimed that Microsoft had given SCO more than $82 million through various investment vehicles and was willing to put up more. SCO denied the claims, saying Anderer was misinformed. SCO and Microsoft have denied having any investment relationship.

Linux proponents have long speculated that Microsoft is secretly funding SCO's $5 billion lawsuit against IBM and Linux. The suit claims IBM inserted SCO's Unix code into Linux and then distributed it for free under the General Public License governing the use of Linux. IBM denies the allegations.

As a result, SCO is seeking licensing fees for Linux, and filed its first user suit against Memphis, Tenn.-based, AutoZone Inc. last week.

To date, SCO's legal challenges have failed to bring much financial gain. The company reported a net loss of $2.3 million in the first quarter ended Jan. 31 on declining revenues of $11.4 million. Only $20,000 came from its Linux licensing initiative.

While there is no evidence Microsoft is bankrolling SCO's legal battles, there's little doubt as to Linux's growing strength in the market for servers, which are computers used to run business software.

Unit shipments of Linux servers increased 52.5 percent in the fourth quarter of 2003, compared to the same period the prior year; and revenue from the operating system jumped 63.1 percent to $960 million, according to International Data Corp. Unit shipments and revenue from Windows servers also increased.

Bush attends memorial for 9/11 victims, followed by a fund-raiser
SCOTT LINDLAW, Associated Press Writer
Wednesday, March 10, 2004
(03-10) 23:25 PST WASHINGTON (AP) --

President Bush isn't backing down. His response to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, is a centerpiece of his campaign for re-election and he underscores the point Thursday with a visit to a new victims' memorial before headlining a campaign fund-raiser.

Bush used images from the World Trade Center's smoldering wreckage in his first re-election TV commercials last week, and refused to retreat when critics called them crass exploitation of those killed in the attacks.

Bush was to be among the first digging shovels of dirt at the groundbreaking for a new Sept. 11 memorial in East Meadow, N.Y., a Manhattan suburb on Long Island.

The quarrel over the ads was shadowing Bush, as at least two groups announced plans to protest his visit.

"No one's been held accountable for anything about 9-11," said Bill Doyle, who lost his 25-year-old son, Joseph, at the World Trade Center. Doyle, who also criticized the image in Bush's campaign commercial of the flag-draped remains of a victim being carried from ground zero, said he intends to be at the demonstration.

"I have a problem with exploiting death for political gain," he said. "I'd have the same problem if Democrats used images of body bags coming back from Iraq in one of their ads."
<------------------------------------->

Deficit in Trade Tops $43 Billion, Monthly Record
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and ELISABETH BUMILLER
NY Times Business Section
Published: March 11, 2004
Associated Press

The flood of products from China, which had a trade surplus with the United States of $124 billion last year, climbed $1.6 billion in January.

WASHINGTON, March 10 — The United States trade deficit climbed to a monthly record of $43.1 billion in January as imports continued to flood in from China and American exports were hurt by slumping demand from Europe and other parts of the world.

The new data, released Wednesday by the Commerce Department, was slightly worse than economists had expected and intensified the battle over trade and jobs playing out in the 2004 presidential campaign.

Trade analysts said the deficit widened in January in part because of higher prices for imported oil and a drop in meat exports that was tied to fears about a case of mad cow disease in Washington State. Exports of meat and poultry in January dropped by 40 percent, to $379 million, the lowest since November 1993.

But the latest numbers also pointed to more enduring trade problems. The flood of products from China, which had a trade surplus with the United States of $124 billion last year, climbed by $1.6 billion in January compared with January 2003.

Analysts said the new trade report revealed more about the economic weakness in Europe than about the inability of American companies to compete. Imports and exports declined in January, but exports fell more, leading to a 0.9 percent increase in the overall trade deficit, to $43.1 billion in January from $42.7 billion in December. The previous record was $43 billion last March.

American exports to Europe stagnated for the third month in a row, even though the value of the dollar plunged against that of the euro last year. A weak dollar should bolster American exports because it makes American products cheaper abroad.

But China has kept its currency locked at a fixed exchange rate to the dollar, and European consumer demand has yet to revive from the slowdown of the last few years.

"The real problem is that our trading partners are only beginning to recover, so U.S. export growth has really been flat," said James Glassman, a senior economist at J. P. Morgan Chase.

Though the United States has been running trade deficits for many years, the gap between exports and imports has widened sharply over the last few years and reached an annual record of $489.4 billion in 2003 — 4.5 percent of the nation's gross domestic product, up from 4 percent in 2002 and 1.9 percent in 1990.

Many economists say the widening trade gap is at least partly responsible for the weakness of the American job market. The Labor Department reported last week that job creation came to a near standstill last month, and the economy has lost about 2.2 million jobs since January 2001.

In addition to the effect on jobs, the trade deficit has also led to a huge increase in overall United States indebtedness to the rest of the world. The nation's net foreign obligations, which include debt and the claim on American profits by foreign investors, are equal to more than one-quarter of total American output.

The president's latest economic report said that foreign investment in stocks, bonds, factories and funds in the United States had largely balanced the trade deficit, but some economists said this could soon change.

China's trade surplus with the United States is larger than that of any other country, including the entire European Union.

In Congress, Democratic and Republican lawmakers have been pushing President Bush to challenge China's trade practices much more aggressively than he has and to pressure China to let its currency, the yuan, rise in value against the dollar. That would make goods made in China, including those manufactured for American companies, more expensive in the United States and would make American goods easier to buy in China.

President Bush and his likely Democratic challenger, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, spent the day trading accusations over outsourcing, the shifting of American jobs to China and other countries with lower costs, a serious political problem for Mr. Bush

Recent Slide in Stock Steepens, With Dow Falling 160
By ALEX BERENSON
NY Times Business Section
Published: March 11, 2004

Shares continued their recent slide yesterday as investors seemed increasingly worried about weakness in the economy and the prospects for growth in profits.

This week's drop has wiped out the year's gains for the Nasdaq composite index and the Dow Jones industrial average, though the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is still up slightly for the year. But several big investors said that stocks, while no longer cheap, were still reasonably valued and that the possibility of a steep pullback appeared slight.

No single news event accounted for yesterday's slide, economists and professional money managers said. But investors appear concerned that the economy's growth over the last year has come mainly as a result of short-term stimulus from the federal government and Federal Reserve, not because of increased corporate investment or sustainable increases in consumer spending.

Justice Dept. Backs Off Its Demand for Abortion Records
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
NY Times
Published: March 10, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 9 — The Justice Department is dropping its demand, at least for now, that six Planned Parenthood clinics around the country produce medical records on abortions, officials said Tuesday.

The decision, applauded by privacy advocates and supporters of abortion rights, came in response to a decision on Friday by a federal judge in San Francisco, who found that the government's demand for the records was an undue intrusion on patients' rights.

In her decision, Judge Phyllis J. Hamilton of United States District Court threw out the government's demand for the Planned Parenthood records of some 2,700 patients. Judge Hamilton also said she "strongly encouraged the government" to withdraw the subpoenas it had issued to Planned Parenthood for related medical records.

In letters dated Monday, the Justice Department did just that and notified Planned Parenthood affiliates in New York, Pittsburgh, Washington, Los Angeles, San Diego and Kansas City, Mo., that "we will not move at this time" to pursue the subpoenaed records. But the department said it might still "renew our requests if necessary."

Study Finds That Teenage Virginity Pledges Are Rarely Kept
By LAWRENCE K. ALTMAN
NY Times
Published: March 10, 2004

PHILADELPHIA, March 9 — Among teenagers who pledged not to have sex before marriage, a majority did not live up to their vows, according to a national study reported here on Tuesday. The teenagers also developed sexually transmitted diseases at about the same rate as adolescents who had not made such pledges.

But a pledge to refrain from premarital sex, the researchers found, did tend to delay the start of sexual intercourse by 18 months. The adolescents who took virginity pledges also married earlier and had fewer sexual partners than the other teenagers surveyed, said Dr. Peter Bearman, the chairman of the sociology department at Columbia University and the lead author of the study.

Of the 12,000 teenagers included in the federal study, 88 percent of those who pledged chastity reported having had sexual intercourse before they married, Dr. Bearman said at a scientific meeting in Philadelphia on preventing sexually transmitted diseases. The researchers tested the participants for three common sexually transmitted infections — chlamydia, gonorrhea and trichomoniasis — and found that the rates were almost identical for the teenagers who took pledges and those who did not.

Yet the teenagers who had taken pledges were less likely to know they had an infection, raising the risk of their transmitting it to other people, said Dr. Bearman and Hannah Brückner of Yale University, the other author of the report. Dr. Bearman said that telling teenagers "to `just say no,' without understanding risk or how to protect oneself from risk, turns out to create greater risk" of sexually transmitted diseases.

Jimmy Hester, a spokesman for True Love Waits, a campaign begun in 1993 by the Southern Baptist Convention, said, "Signing a pledge card does not mean you are magically protected." Mr. Hester said True Love Waits had followed Dr. Bearman's study for seven years but had not seen the latest findings. He added that what he had heard about the findings caused him concern "because we're not following up on pledges well enough."

True Love Waits says that 2.4 million young people have signed a virginity pledge since the group's founding in 1993.

By age 23, half the teenagers who had made virginity pledges were married, compared with 25 percent of those who had not pledged, the study found. Dr. Bearman said he did not know whether the teenagers who had broken their pledges did so initially with their fiancés or with others, because the data had not yet been analyzed.

But he said, "After they break their pledge, the gates are open, and they catch up," having more partners in a shorter time. Lack of condom use was an important factor in the higher-than-expected rates of sexually transmitted diseases among the pledgers, the study found. Only 40 percent reported having used condoms in the most recent year of the study, compared with 60 percent of the teenagers who had not pledged.

Also, the adolescents who had made pledges were less likely to get tested for sexually transmitted diseases. Among the boys, 5.2 percent had been tested, compared with 9.1 percent of the boys who had not pledged. Among the girls, 14 percent of pledgers had been tested, compared with 28 percent of girls who had not pledged.

Government Perfidy in the Application of Insider Trading Laws

The Fraud of Insider-Trading Law, Part 1
by Sheldon Richman, September 2003 (POSTED NOVEMBER 5, 2003)

Part 2

This article was originally intended as a discussion of the Martha Stewart case. But instead it will be a discussion of insider trading.

Many people think those are one and the same issue. But that is incorrect. After more than a year of associating Martha Stewart with insider trading, the U.S. Justice Department declined to indict the well-known queen of domesticity for that “crime.” In other words, after a year of investigation, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, James Comey, decided that he could not prove to a jury beyond a reasonable doubt that Martha Stewart had illegally traded stock on the basis of material nonpublic information about a publicly held company. (As we’ll see, there’s more to the charge than that.)

That did not stop the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) from making the charge in a civil suit against her. But, of course, a civil suit carries a much lighter burden of proof (a preponderance of the evidence). The SEC’s legal piling-on is explicable when you understand that should Martha Stewart lose, she would be barred for life from sitting on any corporation’s board of directors.

If the U.S. attorney declined to seek an indictment for insider trading, what, then, is in the five-count bill against her? (The media widely report that the bill contained nine counts. Wrong. The government issued a single bill against her and her former Merrill Lynch broker, Peter Bacanovic. The combined charges total nine.)

Instead of being about insider trading, the case against Martha Stewart is, as U.S. Attorney Comey put it at a news conference, “all about lying — lying to the FBI, lying to the SEC, and lying to investors.” Specifically, the charges are obstruction of justice, conspiracy, and securities fraud. (She was not charged with perjury because her statements to the government were not made under oath.) These sound serious. Indeed, all told, they carry a penalty up to 30 years in prison and millions of dollars in fines. Yet, as we’ll see, the case is a house of cards — worse: a house of cards standing on a foundation of quicksand.

First some background. Martha Stewart owned several thousand shares of a company called ImClone, which in 2001 attempted to get the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to approve its anti-cancer drug, Erbitux. The CEO and brains behind ImClone was Sam Waksal, a friend of Stewart’s. In December 2001 Stewart sold nearly 4,000 shares of ImClone for about $220,000. The sale occurred a day or so before the FDA refused to consider ImClone’s application for the drug. It turns out that Waksal learned of the FDA decision before it was made public. According to charges to which he has pled guilty and for which he has been sentenced to seven years in prison, he told family members to sell their stock and attempted to sell his own, although his company’s rules forbade it.

The government does not claim that Waksal tipped Stewart off about the FDA. Instead, it charges that Bacanovic directed his assistant, Douglas Faneuil, to call and tell her that he expected ImClone’s price to drop and that Waksal was selling. Faneuil first left a phone message and then spoke with Stewart. When Stewart was asked about the stock sale, she said she had no information about Waksal and that she had earlier instructed Bacanovic to sell if the price dropped to $60. (It traded at $57 the day she sold.) Bacanovic backs up this account. Faneuil did so at first, but later turned state’s evidence, claiming he was offered inducements to lie.

The government says that Bacanovic’s knowledge of Waksal’s intention to sell his shares constituted insider information, which he passed along to Stewart, which she in turn used as a basis for her sale. It alleges that Stewart misled government investigators by fabricating the $60 sell-order and by repeatedly claiming she spoke with Bacanovic on the day in question rather than Faneuil. (That a very busy woman forgot that she spoke with her broker’s assistant rather than her broker a year earlier apparently is grounds for an obstruction-of-justice charge.) Further she is charged with altering a computer telephone message, from noting that Bacanovic thought the share price was about to fall to the generic “re ImClone.” But in a truly weird aspect of this case, the bill of indictment states that Stewart immediately restored the message to its original form. Is that really a crime?

She is also charged with securities fraud — the most bizarre part of the case of all. The charge has no direct relationship to the sale of her ImClone shares. Her securities fraud, according to the government, consists of her public declarations of her innocence of the government’s public allegations that she had engaged in insider trading. By so declaring, says the government, she misled investors with respect to her publicly traded company, Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia. In other words, the government’s campaign against her was driving down the stock price of her own company and her statements in self-defense were attempts to protect the price by giving false information to investors.

This charge has caused some people to marvel at the government’s innovativeness. Proclaiming one’s innocence can now be regarded as fraud.

The first thing to notice about the government’s case is that its basis is an alleged offense that the government did not ask for an indictment on: insider trading. Stewart stands accused of lying about an activity that the government won’t attempt to prove was illegal. Does this sound proper in a society that touts its devotion to the rule of law?

We have to examine insider trading to understand the case, for without such a concept, there is no case. Henry Manne, dean emeritus of George Mason University Law School, is the authority on this sorry idea of law. (In 1966 he published Insider Trading and the Stock Market.) Manne points out that insider trading was not illegal until the 1960s. Many people think it goes back to the Great Depression and the New Deal, when the SEC was created. But as Manne notes, insider trading could not have been much of an issue during the stock-market crash. If it had been, many insiders would have avoided the disaster.

Then why did it become an issue 30 years later? As Manne told syndicated columnist Larry Elder,

Congress needed some kind of morality story to hinge everything on, and the very phrase, ‘insider trading,’ suggested to people that something evil has been done. The SEC, at least since the 1960s, has been very successful in making this into one of the most egregious evils in the world. If you want to say that anyone’s really done something terrible, it’s not incest, or murder, or treason, it’s insider trading.

Under the U.S. Constitution, Congress is the legislative branch of government. But Congress has long violated the founding document by illegally delegating its legislative powers to so-called independent regulatory agencies. This has been especially egregious with the SEC. Rather than clearly defining “insider trading,” as one would expect under the rule of law, Congress told the SEC to define it any way it liked.

As an aside, after the Michael Milken episode, when Congress held hearings to consider finally defining the term, the SEC and its friends urged Congress not to do so because a clear definition would permit bad people to stay just inside the law. So much for the rule of law, which at a minimum requires that citizens know in advance whether their conduct is illegal.

As the current SEC regulations stand, to be guilty of insider trading one must be “in breach of a duty of trust or confidence that is owed directly, indirectly, or derivatively, to the issuer of that security or the shareholders of that issuer, or to any other person who is the source of the material nonpublic information.”

I leave it to the reader to decide whether this even applies to Martha Stewart. Next month, we’ll go further — to show that insider trading per se violates no one’s rights and is generally beneficial.

Sheldon Richman is senior fellow at The Future of Freedom Foundation, author of Tethered Citizens: Time to Repeal the Welfare State, and editor of Ideas on Liberty magazine. Send him email.
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The Fraud of Insider-Trading Law, Part 2
by Sheldon Richman, October 2003 [Posted January 14, 2004]
Part 1

It is virtually unquestioned in America today that insider trading in the securities markets is a dastardly act. We must make a distinction here between trading by insiders and trading by insiders on the basis of nonpublic information. Insiders are legally allowed to buy and sell stocks. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) requires insiders to disclose their trades, and the financial newspapers report such trading. Investors find this information a source of valuable clues about companies. (It is possible that even without the SEC requirement, shareholders would require their executives and directors to declare their trades.)

But what could be more immoral than someone’s selling or buying stock on the basis of information he knows the other party lacks?

Put that way, maybe it doesn’t seem so immoral after all. The idea that knowledge can ever be evenly distributed is one of those utopian pipe dreams the realization of which would require nothing less than secret police and gulags. Knowledge, like everything else about people, is most definitely unevenly “distributed.” It is not distributed at all. It is acquired — by effort or luck. It’s not as though there is a central knowledge-giver who spitefully shortchanges some of us. This leads to the first observation: if the law prohibits people from exploiting knowledge advantages, they have less incentive to ferret out valuable knowledge and bring it to market. Would that be good?

Those who seek to stamp out insider trading concede this point, so they object only when the knowledge is unavailable to the public. But the line between prohibited inside knowledge and permissible inside knowledge is far from clear. As law professor Daniel Fischel writes in Payback, although inside knowledge of specifics — an earnings report, a pending merger — is an illegal basis for insider trading, more general inside knowledge is not:

Maybe the insider believes that a planned reorganization of a company’s sales force is going better than expected or knows that a key executive is distracted by health or marital problems. Corporate insiders are permitted, even encouraged, to trade on this kind of informed hunch.
Why are stock transactions involving specific inside knowledge bad? The theory is that not only are the ignorant buyers and sellers taken advantage of, but — worse, perhaps — confidence in the securities markets themselves is sabotaged because potential participants, fearing they will be taken advantage of, will stay out of the market, depriving it of capital.

This is a serious charge. What’s the truth?

Markets and prices

A good place to start when inquiring whether an act is a crime is to ask: who’s the victim? Current law has two in mind: the specific buyers or sellers of stock shares who did not possess the inside information and “the market.”

Let’s dispose of the second one first. “The market” cannot be a victim. It’s an abstraction, not a living, breathing being. You can only victimize — that is, violate the rights of — individuals. But what about the claim that insider trading erodes confidence in the market? Even if that were true, it would not turn the act into a crime.

But the assumption that insider trading erodes confidence in markets is false. On the contrary, confidence is increased by the realization that prices reflect up-to-date information. To explain this we must digress briefly to discuss the role of prices.

The price system does more than tell us what we must pay for goods and services. It produces information — in a highly concentrated and economic form — about supply and demand. We all use that information to guide our activities. For example, when a bad hurricane devastates a town and destroys homes, the new demand for plywood by suffering homeowners will bid up the price for the existing supply and attract new supply from other areas. (Unless socialistic laws prohibit “profiteering.”) Whether or not I know about the new acute need for plywood, the higher prices will probably prompt me to postpone my plans to build a doghouse for Rover.

Note the social niceties of free pricing and the free movement of goods in response to price changes. Without making impossible interpersonal comparisons of subjective utility, most people would think that it’s good that my doghouse will probably wait until after people rebuild their homes. The market’s price system accomplishes this without a dictator issuing decrees or secret police shooting the uncooperative. Strangely, the market never gets credit from the intellectuals and “human rights” activists for this not inconsiderable achievement.

Of course, the contrast among most everyday alternatives is not so dramatic, but the principle is the same. The price system enables people to make decisions about scarce resources that take into account individual needs and knowledge spread throughout society, but without burdening them with an unmanageable amount of data.

Stock prices too are generated by supply and demand. But supply and demand for stocks are not disembodied concepts. They are generated, obviously enough, by suppliers and demanders — people with preferences, objectives, expectations, knowledge, and, therefore, plans. Part of what goes into an intention to buy or sell shares in a company is expectations about its future based on knowledge about its management, organization, and so on. These expectations are incorporated into the share price, and changes in expectations bring about changes in price. The more knowledgeable the participants, the more fully do prices perform their communications work. Nothing would undermine confidence in markets more than the belief that prices are out of date.


The Martha Stewart case

Look at Martha Stewart’s ImClone stock sale. Regardless of what she knew, it is a fact that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) was about to deny ImClone’s application for the anti-cancer drug Erbitux. Obviously, the company and its stock would be worth more with FDA approval than without it.

Thus, in the time between the FDA’s decision and its public announcement, ImClone’s share price was unrealistically high. If shareholders with advance notice of the FDA’s rejection sold their stock, they helped bring the price in line with the new set of facts.

The resulting price was a better price because it better reflected the revaluation. The direction of the price movement was also a signal to investors.

This leads to the question of whether particular buyers and sellers of stock are victims of insider trading. Again, let’s look at the Stewart case, which is not about insider trading but relies on the theory. (See part one, Freedom Daily, September 2003.) No victim was named by the U.S. attorney. Stewart ordered her stock sold on December 27, 2001, after allegedly being told that the company’s CEO was trying to sell his shares. (He was unable to sell them.) But she did not go out on the street, buttonhole a hapless pedestrian, and pitch the stock until he agreed to buy it. That’s not how it works. She told her broker to sell, and the broker sold her shares to someone already looking to buy the stock.

This raises several interesting points. Anyone shopping for ImClone stock that day surely knew that a make-or-break decision from the FDA was due any time.

How can that buyer be described as a victim? Perhaps he wanted a long shot and was hedging with other stocks.

Or, since there was short-selling going on, he might have thought the stock would be a good deal in the longer run. (In fact, the stock price has come back because of a favorable Erbitux trial in Europe.)

Thus it is unlikely that a buyer of ImClone that day was naively shopping for stock. At any rate, for the government to assure the most clueless stock buyers that their knowledge is no worse than anyone else’s in the market is to set them up for disappointment and to discourage the market research that any investor should engage in. No one is done any favors when insider trading is outlawed.

The upshot is that the buyers were not victims of Stewart.

By the way, on the day she sold, 7.7 million ImClone shares were traded — five times the volume of the day before. The members of then-CEO Sam Waksal’s family who were tipped off early about the FDA sold only 150,000 shares. Maybe the knowledge wasn’t so “inside” after all.

Note also that sellers of the stock were improving things for any unsophisticated buyers. If dumping their shares depressed the price, the buyers who would have bought anyway suffered a smaller loss than they would have had the stock not been dumped.


Benefits of insider trading

Of course, a naive stock speculator might decide after the fact that because he lacked inside information he bought or sold too soon, or didn’t buy or sell at all. But that was a risk he should have been aware of going in. In contrast, the long-term stockholder, such as the proverbial “little old lady,” who is not buying and selling in response to day-to-day price changes, is unlikely to be harmed by insider trading. On the contrary, this seller will most likely benefit.

“The long-term trend of stock prices is upward, so that, all other things being equal, occasions for good news should exceed those of bad,” Henry Manne writes in Insider Trading and the Stock Market. “Any undeserved risk to investors resulting from insider trading must, therefore, constitute a very small fraction of the total risk assumed by long-term investors.”

Manne points out that insider trading is beneficial in another way. It’s an appropriate method for corporations to compensate internal entrepreneurs for their work, because entrepreneurial insight is difficult to reward properly with bonuses or stock options. Fischel writes that insider trading (buying) can also be useful for letting executives “disclose” good news about the company without giving information away to competitors.

On the other hand, if stockholders dislike the practice, that will be reflected in lower stock prices for corporations that permit it. In the end, this is a matter for the competitive marketplace to sort out.

Insider trading, of course, is a separate issue from the use of proprietary information in violation of a contractual duty. If Stewart’s broker violated his duty to his other clients, they may have grounds for a civil suit and Merrill Lynch would have grounds to fire him. But it would be no cause for an SEC action or criminal indictment. The offense would be breach of contract, not insider trading.

The SCO Saga Continues...thanks to Microsoft??

SCO: Leaked e-mail a 'misunderstanding'
Last modified: March 4, 2004, 5:09 PM PST
By Robert Lemos
Staff Writer, CNET News.com

The SCO Group dismissed a leaked memo that connected Microsoft to $86 million in investments in the company, saying the author of the e-mail misunderstood the venture deal.

The SCO Group on Thursday acknowledged the authenticity of an e-mail sent Oct. 12 from Michael Anderer, CEO of Salt Lake City venture firm S2 Partners, to SCO Vice President Chris Sontag and Chief Financial Officer Robert Bench. The memo appears to be a discussion of the compensation that Anderer received for facilitating venture deals on SCO's behalf.

"Microsoft will have brought in $86 million for us including BayStar," stated the e-mail, which was posted by the Open Source Initiative on its Web site.

Eric Raymond, an open-source software and Linux luminary, added his comments to the memo: "This is the smoking gun. We now know that Microsoft raised at least $86 million for SCO, but according to the SCO conference call (on Wednesday) their cash reserves were $68.5 million. If not for Microsoft, SCO would be at least $15 million in debt today."

SCO acknowledged the memo but dismissed both the author's and Raymond's conclusions. BayStar Capital's $50 million investment in SCO wasn't due to Microsoft's participation, said Blake Stowell, a spokesman for Lindon, Utah-based SCO.

"We believe the e-mail was simply a misunderstanding of the facts by an outside consultant who was working on a specific unrelated project to the BayStar transaction, and he was told at the time of his misunderstanding," Stowell said, reading from a statement. "Contrary to the speculation of Eric Raymond, Microsoft did not orchestrate or participate in the BayStar transaction."

Stowell would not comment beyond the statement and refused to furnish a copy of the memo to CNET News.com. Anderer could not be reached for comment.

SCO has gained the ire of the open-source community and many companies that use Linux because of its claims that it retains copyrights on critical pieces of the Linux code base.

This week, SCO ratcheted up its pressure on Linux users by suing AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler, both which use Linux in their businesses. The company had prepared a complaint against Bank of America, but changed the focus of its target on Feb. 18, according to a document seen by CNET News.com.

The Open Source Initiative made the memo part of its collection of so-called Halloween documents, which are leaked memos from or about Microsoft's attempts to fight the open-source software movement. The name stems from the date on which the first memo--a leaked Microsoft paper on the open-source phenomenon published on Oct. 31, 1998--was originally released.

SCO's blanket dismissal of the leaked memo as the mistaken assumptions of an independent contractor doesn't explain several parts of the letter which seem to indicate knowledge of Microsoft's involvement in SCO's investment search, however.

For example, the memo states that Microsoft apparently wanted to use private investments in public companies to help fund SCO.

"Microsoft also indicated there was a lot more money out there, and they would clearly rather use Baystar 'like' entities to help us get significantly more money if we want to grow further or do acquisitions," the leaked memo stated.

SCO also is involved in suits with IBM, Red Hat and Novell regarding Unix and Linux technology. The cost of these suits and the rest of the company's SCOsource effort to derive more money from its intellectual property was $3.4 million for the company's most recent quarter.

Bob Bench, SCO's chief financial officer, said Wednesday that the company expected the legal costs "at similar levels in upcoming quarters" with increasing revenue from its SCOsource effort.

Other parts of the memo seemed to indicate that the company has been searching for patents on Novell technology to give it leverage in its lawsuit against that company.

Novell declined to comment on the memo.

Late Thursday, a Microsoft representative told CNET News.com that the company is not financially involved in the SCO-BayStar deal, saying its only financial relationship is its license of SCO's intellectual property.

"The details of this agreement have been widely reported and this is the only financial relationship Microsoft has with SCO," the representative said in an e-mail interview. Microsoft "has no financial involvement in the SCO and BayStar agreement, and (Microsoft) has no financial relationship with BayStar."

Stock Manipulators

Posted on Sat, Mar. 06, 2004

A word of sympathy for Martha Stewart
By Mike Cassidy
Mercury News

Listen up. I'm only going to say this once. I feel sorry for Martha Stewart.

Yes, she's self-important and annoying. Yes, she's made thousands, maybe millions, of us feel inadequate by talking about proper ``homekeeping.'' (Hospital corners? Are you kidding me?) Yes, she's cluttered Kmart with chenille and chintz pillows, multi-striped napkin rings and toilet place mats bearing her name.

And well, she did lie to investigators who were looking into how it was she knew to sell her ImClone stock just before it tanked. (``Isn't it nice to have a broker who tells you these things?'') But jail? Going from the well-appointed house to the big house? This isn't a good thing.

I know. Just last week I was skewering Martha for expensing coffee and snacks and anything else she figured she could buy on the corporate dime. Many of you wrote to me to say I was picking on Martha only because she is a woman or because she is rich. That simply isn't true. OK, maybe a little bit because she is rich. I mean, a Hermès Birkin bag (starting price $6,000) as trial accessory? Mostly though, I was picking on Martha because she is famous. And because she's a pill.

Look at the testimony. This is a woman who apparently threatened to switch brokers because she didn't like her money manager's telephone hold music. This was a one-time billionaire who had the company pay for haircuts, a Mexican vacation and a chauffeur for antiquing trips. This was a woman who was not kind to the help.

One of you -- and you know who you are -- wrote me about the time you spotted Martha in New York at a farmers' market. She plucked an organic apple off a cart, took one bite without paying and then threw the rest on the ground. (No word as to whether the apple seller was on the jury.)

But now I worry that maybe prosecutors were also picking on Martha because she is famous and because she's a pill. It's one thing to have a columnist come after you for being a boor, but the feds? This is serious. Martha, who is 62, faces up to 20 years in jail.
...
And for what? Lying to the people who thought Martha Stewart Prison Living was more Martha's speed.

Lying is bad, yes, but hardly the worst of recent corporate shenanigans. We've entered an era in which the executive suite is starting to look like Sing-Sing. There's Enron, WorldCom, Adelphia, and Tyco,(and don't forget: Global Crossing, Arthur Anderson, KPMG, Imclone, Qwest, Halliburton, Merck, Ciena and Xerox: ed. . No convictions of the heavy hitters yet, though a few underlings have pleaded guilty.

These cases are record breakers, involving hundreds of millions of dollars. And Martha? Martha avoided losing about $51,000 by dumping her stock before it crashed. From the looks of the allegations, the real corporate bad boys would steal that much before they got out of bed in the morning.

And they're not in jail. But Martha is on her way, locked up as a high-profile example to others contemplating corporate crime. For that, I can find a spot of sympathy. Even for Martha.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
E-mail Mike Cassidy at mcassidy@mercurynews.com or call (408) 920-5536

Administration Sets Forth a Limited View on Privacy
By ROBERT PEAR and ERIC LICHTBLAU
NY Times
Published: March 6, 2004

WASHINGTON, March 5 — In a sharp departure from its past insistence on the sanctity of medical records, the Bush administration has set forth a new, more limited view of privacy rights as it tries to force hospitals and clinics to turn over records of hundreds and perhaps thousands of abortions.

What began late last year as a fairly modest government effort to obtain records appears to have ballooned into a systematic effort in courts around the country to define the limits of medical privacy.

Health care professionals and privacy advocates say the government's position has broad implications beyond abortion. If patients have no reasonable expectation of privacy, the critics say, the government may be more aggressive in seeking records from hospitals, insurance companies and other businesses in criminal, civil and administrative cases.

The Justice Department says it needs the records to defend a new law that prohibits what opponents call partial-birth abortions. Doctors and clinics have challenged the law, saying it bars them from performing certain medically needed abortions. A spokesman for the White House, Trent D. Duffy, defended the subpoenas. The administration is "strongly committed to medical privacy," and the subpoenas are "completely consistent" with federal privacy rules, Mr. Duffy said. A spokeswoman for the Justice Department, Monica M. Goodling, said, "We are respecting patient privacy by having hospitals delete any information that identifies specific patients."

President Bush was elected on a platform that proclaimed support for medical privacy. In April 2001, he said he would protect "the right of every American to have confidence that his or her personal medical records will remain private." At the time, Tommy G. Thompson, secretary of health and human services, said, "We are giving patients peace of mind in knowing that their medical records are confidential and their privacy is not vulnerable to intrusion."

The federal rules, adopted under a 1996 law, have touched off a quiet revolution in health care. Doctors, hospitals and drugstores routinely give "notices of privacy practices" to patients, assuring them that personal information will be protected. Privacy advocates say the administration has rolled back some safeguards adopted by President Bill Clinton, and the Justice Department says now that the 1996 law is no obstacle to its efforts to obtain abortion records. In court papers, the Justice Department says the records are needed to show that the banned procedure is almost never medically necessary and "poses serious risks."

NAFTA Revisited

December 1992
The Atlantic Monthly
by Jonathan Schlefer
What Price Economic Growth?

To judge by the example of Canada, which began an experiment in free trade with the United States in 1989, the proposed U.S. free-trade agreement with Mexico is a threat to the social comity on which prosperity depends

"Free trade" is shorthand for both an ideology and a theory of the way things are supposed to work out for the best between trading partners.
...
Proponents of the (NAFTA) agreement argue that it will bring economic growth to all three countries. Opponents say that it will erode support for social-welfare programs and aggravate inequality, especially in the United States, where the gap between rich and poor has been widening ominously in recent years. Both sides could be right.
...
NAFTA will both promote the free flow of goods by eliminating tariffs over five to ten years (fifteen for a few sensitive items) and establish rules to foster the flow of investment across borders, and it seeks broadly to increase North American reliance on market forces. All three governments, (Canadiam, Mexican, and the USA) along with most economists and many business groups, share a conviction that this will strengthen the North American economies, largely by making manufacturing, financial firms, and some other services more efficient. Investors will be able to locate enterprises wherever they can operate most effectively--for example, developing advanced software in the United States and producing personal computers with less expensive labor in Mexico. Production can be planned on a broader scale, for the entire North American market, rather than in the piecemeal fashion of today, for particular countries with the hope of export. Products will become both cheaper for North American consumers and more competitive in world markets, according to Rudiger Dornbusch, of MIT, and other economists. These economists foresee few drawbacks to NAFTA.

The question is whether they are right.

...Mexico contains almost a quarter of North America's population. The EC, (EU now), is bringing poorer member countries up to Community standards with billions of dollars of development assistance and the enforcement of common environmental and workplace regulations. The EC economic and political union, if it occurs, will make policies on matters from unemployment assistance to maternity leave at least as consistent as are those of, say, Massachusetts and Alabama today. In contrast, NAFTA proposes that the United States and Canada take Mexico as is, while Mexico pays back a debt of close to $75 billion--a kind of Marshall Plan in reverse. The treaty specifically allows each nation to establish its own environmental and workplace regulations. It is an experiment tried in economics texts but never before in history.

Consider Canada

The Canadian debate over the 1989 free-trade agreement is useful to consider: it set the tone for current NAFTA disputes, and the few years since the agreement was adopted tell something about its effects, and thus what NAFTA's could be. The main issue in the 1988 Canadian elections, the agreement was supported by the Conservatives but opposed by the Liberals and the New Democratic Party--along with the Canadian Labor Congress, the Canadian Teachers Federation, the Canadian Nurses Federation, the Conference of Catholic Bishops, women's groups, anti-poverty organizations, environmental groups, and, as Ernie Lightman and Allan Irving, professors of social work at the University of Toronto, put it, "virtually every non-business interest group in the country." In the end the New Democratic Party and the Liberals split the opposition vote, and the Conservatives, with a plurality of 42 percent, won a majority in the House of Commons. The agreement was ratified, but Canadians, particularly lower-income Canadians, have remained broadly opposed to it in polls.


The concerns of Canadian critics center on erosion of the welfare state, which is much more generous in Canada than in the United States. For example, in Canada both health care and Old Age Security are universal--eligibility for the latter, unlike U.S. Social Security, is based not on work history but on age alone. The differences between Canadian and U.S. unemployment insurance are staggering. In 1988 seventy percent of unemployed Canadians received insurance covering 60 percent of their wages, while 32 percent of Americans received benefits covering 35 percent of their wages. In other words, nearly 70 percent in the United States got nothing. In both countries unions push for broad social programs (which reduce unemployed workers' incentive to break strikes), but Canadian unions represent 36 percent of employed workers (outside agriculture), while U.S. unions represent 18 percent. The whole attitude toward unions is different. Canada Year Book 1992, a more colorful if less figure-packed counterpart to the Statistical Abstract of the United States, features in its chapter on employment a photo of a miners' strike and a chart on "Unions With Largest Membership."


Canadian critics of the free-trade agreement argued that it would prompt firms to desert the country for the United States, particularly for the South, where unions are weak. The firms could thus lower their wage costs and taxes, and ship products duty-free back to Canada. The result would be Canadian job losses, pay cuts, and pressure to curtail social programs paid for by taxes. Employment loss in manufacturing, a sector that accounts for a large portion of trade with the United States, was a particular concern. Polarization between rich and poor, which has become worse in Canada (though it has not yet reached U.S. proportions), would be aggravated as middle-income wages eroded.


Mulroney responded that by strengthening the economy, the agreement would allow Canada to improve welfare programs, and he rashly promised that it would create "250,000 new jobs for young Canadians over and above current predictions." On a more sober note, J. David Richardson, a professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin and a consultant to the Economic Council of Canada, surveyed the various studies projecting the agreement's effects and singled out as "worst-case limits" the loss of a "minuscule 0.2 percent" of Canadian manufacturing employment. Academic economists and the staff of the Ministry of Finance looked forward to the invigorating effects of freer markets and trade and to the prospect of 250 million U.S. consumers who would be able to buy tariff-free Canadian products.


It is hard to apportion blame between the agreement and the recession (yet another candidate is the monetarism of the Bank of Canada, Ottawa's Federal Reserve), but after three and a half years, more than 15 percent of manufacturing jobs are gone. The headline on the April, 1992, Canadian Economic Observer, a government compilation, says, "More cutbacks in manufacturing push unemployment above 11 percent." The most recent figures put unemployment at 11.4 percent. The Canadian Manufacturers Association found that half the members it queried had examined the costs of operating in the United States, and of that half, three quarters had concluded that doing so would be cheaper. The press has been replete with stories of firms moving south for just that reason. The Ministry of Labor in Ontario, a major manufacturing province, found that more than half the layoffs are due to plant closings, so the production is gone for good, whereas less than a quarter of job losses in the 1982 recession had this permanent character. A senior adviser to the Finance Minister, speaking anonymously to the newsweekly Maclean's, concurred: 'The problem now is that we are losing manufacturing activity itself to the United States." This is a far cry from even the direst projections of economists.


Now they say that they were looking at the long run, that four years is too little time to judge the results, and that any manufacturing losses have been caused by the recession. That does not explain why the losses are more serious now than in 1982, or why they are so much worse in Canada than in the United States. While the volume of U.S. manufacturing actually rose 1.6 percent from 1988 to 1991, that of Canadian manufacturing fell 11.4 percent. The explanation for the faulty predictions of the Canadian free-trade models may lie in their assumptions. Economics treats unemployment as a short-run effect of recessions, and according to James Stanford, of the New School for Social Research, the Canadian free-trade models assumed full employment and a fixed volume of investment in both countries. Capital would move to more-productive activities within Canada, but corporations would not widely shut factories and import goods from lower-wage U.S. plants. In short, the assumptions built into the models ignored critics' major concerns, and thus, not surprisingly, the models' conclusions suggested that the concerns were groundless. Stanford notes that the same assumptions are built into most models that predict favorable outcomes for NAFTA.


After the agreement was signed, business leaders began raising a clamor in the press that high taxes as well as labor costs were inhibiting their competitiveness. Mickey Cohen, a former deputy finance minister, told the Toronto Financial Times that Canada faced "greater pressure to harmonize" social programs with the United States: "If we're going to compete, we have to look more like the guys we're competing with." Sure enough, there has been pressure on Canadian social programs. The most significant was on unemployment insurance, which the Mulroney government weakened in November of 1990, so that workers had to be employed longer to be eligible and received benefits for an average of thirteen weeks less. Now the portion of the unemployed who are covered has dropped from 70 percent to 58 percent. Those no longer supported by unemployment insurance get welfare from provinces and local municipalities. But these levels of government are receiving a smaller share of revenue transfers from Ottawa. Some social programs have been trimmed. For example, in 1991 federal payments to Newfoundland, a poor province, were cut by $180 million. The town of Port Aux Basques, in turn, lost $1 million from its hospital budget and laid off a third of the staff. Threats to social programs would have occurred without the free-trade agreement--federal-government budget deficits were a problem before the treaty--and in time those Canadian manufacturers that survive will no doubt improve their productivity. But events have at least partly borne out what the agreement's critics said.



The Mexican Portent


Unions in the United States are well aware of the Canadian experience as they look south toward a country with far lower wages than their own. Last year William J. Cunningham, of the AFL-CIO, told the House Committee on the Budget that 50 to 70 percent of U.S. workers will lose ground under NAFTA. "Farther up the economic ladder, the affluent minority would certainly benefit....Multinational corporations would hit the jackpot" by paying Mexican workers "a small fraction of average U.S. wages" and supplying no workmen's compensation, unemployment insurance, health insurance, or "other essentials of civilized life." The environmental movement has been vocal, particularly about the maquiladora plants set up in Mexico to export to the United States. Some managers privately admit that their plants moved from the United States to evade enforcement of health and environmental laws. A statement in The Wall Street Journal that the maquilas' "very success is helping turn much of the border region into a sinkhole of abysmal living conditions and environmental degradation" has achieved celebrity. Friends of the Earth and other environmental groups say that NAFTA will bring more of the same.


Citizens' groups in Mexico have not similarly debated NAFTA. The Partido Revolucionario Institutional, a party that actually does embrace both revolutionary and institutional elements, has held power since the 1930s, and once the President of Mexico sets a priority, opposition becomes a serious political matter. In the case of NAFTA the opposition has come mainly from a left-of-center political coalition headed by Cuauhtemoc Cardenas. He almost defeated Salinas in the 1988 presidential election. (He may actually have won: the government prevented public scrutiny of almost half the ballots.) Cardenas echoes his northern counterparts on NAFTA: "The exploitation of cheap labor" and "lax environmental protection" should not be "the premises upon which Mexico establishes links with the U.S., Canada, and the world economy." NAFTA will create jobs, but without political reform might not do much for wages, working conditions, or the environment. Despite an increase in foreign investment, manufacturing wages fell 25 percent in the 1980s. Collective action is risky, to put it mildly. If the leaders of a union local call a strike, they may well be ousted from their jobs, often with the cooperation of the main union federation, which is part of the PRI. And violence against organizers is not unusual.


Thus North American opposition to NAFTA (which in Canada has taken up where opposition to the U.S.-Canadian agreement left off) is centrally concerned that the treaty will free investors to roam in search of the lowest wages, weakest environmental and workplace regulations, and most-minimal taxes and other public contributions. NAFTA will, in short, free investors from political sovereignty. Governments, which at least claim to treat all people equally and to represent some common interest, will lose ground to the market, a process that, according to Maude Barlow, the chair of the Council of Canadians, an organization opposed to the agreement, means "weakest to the wall, survival of the fittest."

Advocates of NAFTA do not entirely disagree but want more reliance on market forces and less on government nonetheless. "The bulk of government policies [are] motivated not by the desire to increase overall public welfare," writes Herbert G. Grubel, an economist at Simon Fraser University, in British Columbia. "Rather they are designed to provide benefits for special interest groups in order to secure their financial and voting support." If so, then perhaps the free market is a solution, and NAFTA is a step in that direction. Grubel applauds the way "increased international competition constrains the power of special interest groups."

Growth By Inequality

A curious thing is that the more carefully one considers the NAFTA debate, the less it seems that advocates and critics actually contradict each other. Those who favor the treaty say it will boost economic growth by strengthening the competitiveness of North American manufacturing and other firms in global markets. Opponents say it will threaten moderate-income wages (at least in Canada and the United States), erode social programs, and weaken the economic sovereignty of the state. It is perfectly conceivable that both predictions will be borne out. In the United States in the 1980s, according to government statistics, the growth of manufacturing productivity and of the economy as a whole was higher than it had been in the 1970s and was almost at the level of the 1950s and 1960s--yet 44 to 70 percent of the increase in income went to the richest one percent of all families (the variation depends on whether one adjusts for the declining size of families), and lower-middle-income families and the poor lost ground. Critics are saying that NAFTA will promote more of the same.


This lack of direct disagreement between advocates and critics of NAFTA reflects standard economic theory, which predicts both "gains from trade," meaning higher total income and more efficient production, and "trade adjustments," including job losses and salary cuts for some. "Trade adjustments" sounds pleasantly minor and temporary, but though economists do not like to say so out loud, their texts explicitly confirm that losses can be large and permanent.

In one report on NAFTA, the U.S. International Trade Commission concluded that "U.S. skilled workers and owners of capital services would benefit more from lower prices and thus enjoy increased real income" (these are gains from trade), but that "unskilled workers in the United States would suffer a slight decline in real income" (these are adjustments). The ITC did not say what portion of U.S. workers it considers unskilled, but according to Jeff Faux, of the Economic Policy Institute, the ITC's model, based on the 1980 census, classifies 26 million American workers as skilled and 70 million as unskilled. Moreover, the ITC's assessment of a "slight decline" depends on timing.

Standard economic theory says that wages in a given line of work converge totally and forever. (An adjustment for productivity remains: if productivity is 25 percent higher in one country, that country's income is 25 percent higher. But Mexico has, for example, auto and electronics export plants with productivity at U.S. levels.) Certainly it will take a long time for capital to move and for the changes in wage levels to occur. How long depends on judgments of investors which no one can quantify. But it could be a long way down for many Canadian and U.S. workers. There could also be substantial improvement for workers in Mexico, if political suppression of wage demands abates.


Economics leaves the debate at this impasse--a prediction of "gains" from overall growth but "adjustments" potentially harming large groups--because its most basic premises have to do only with gross income. In economic equations a dollar is a dollar, as long as it is adjusted for inflation, whether it accrues to a homeless person or a millionaire. The discipline has no means of comparing one person's additional "utility" from a dollar with another's. It can only be sure that more national income yields greater utility. Economists prefer a higher national income because, in principle, governments can redistribute it to achieve equity and leave everyone better off. Many economists advocate such redistribution, but they are the first to admit that this is a "normative" judgment quite separate from the discipline of economics itself. If NAFTA raises national income (as advocates promise) but distributes it in an inequitable fashion that governments will not remedy (as opponents believe), then the treaty poses a trade-off that economics, by its own assumptions, cannot address.



The Conditions of Well-Being


If we accept this framework, the question becomes one of means and ends. Should the end be to promote the fastest possible growth, or is some adequate level of economic activity a means to broad material well-being? In both the United States and Canada, as mentioned, the 1980s saw rapid economic growth that went predominantly to the wealthy. The result in the United States has been a widespread sense of discontent, made vivid in the specter of homeless people and the worst urban riot in decades. The result in Canada has been similar though more moderate. Certainly the end should be broad material well-being for society, and though at other times and in other places the means would be different, the United States and Canada now need greater equity. If faster growth must be sacrificed to achieve that, so be it. The matter is not so clear-cut for Mexico. It needs both substantial economic growth, which could come from investments brought by NAFTA, and a more equitable distribution of income, which requires political reform.


The framework of the question posed this way remains limited, however. Textbook economics has been so thoroughly melded into what we accept as common sense that even critics of NAFTA rarely dispute the claim that freer trade will promote economic growth. A typical example is the labor leader William Cunningham's statement that "the affluent minority would certainly benefit" and "multinational corporations would hit the jackpot." In the end, will they really? The reasoning that leads to this conclusion is based on a conception of society as a set of individuals each maximizing his or her utility. Any divergence from that situation is, in the terminology of economics, an "imperfection." Simply put, the argument is that the less individuals are hindered from maximizing their utility, the more they will do just that, and the greater will be the sum of their utility, which is the gross national product.


Suppose society is actually more than a collection of individuals. It may be that some measure of equity is in fact required for the cooperation on which long-term economic growth depends. The late Chilean economist Fernando Fajnzylber studied this relationship. (No wonder he was interested: his country both grew slowly and had an inequitable income distribution, even by Latin American standards.) In a comparison of Japan, West Germany, and the United States, Fajnzylber found that since the mid-1960s income distribution has been most equitable in Japan, second most in West Germany, and least in the United States. Japan grew the fastest, Germany the second fastest, and the United States the slowest. He noted that in level of savings as well as growth, Japan was first, Germany second, and the United States last. And by various measures (civilian research and development as a percentage of national income, productivity growth in manufacturing, and others) Japanese manufacturing was the most competitive, German the second most, and the United States' least. When economic leaders take too great a share of production and contribute too little to society, they lack the authority needed to guide patient, long-term growth.


That is a problem in the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and one that NAFTA will only aggravate. As investment moves south, it will wind up in Mexico, undoubtedly providing some benefits there. Yet looking at long-term prospects, even Mexico might not do particularly well hitching itself to a North American trading bloc that is more inequitable and less farsighted than either Europe or East Asia. The culprit is not wider trade but the way NAFTA will achieve it, by allowing investors to desert countries with better wages, stronger environmental and workplace regulations, and higher taxes. The EC, to which proponents often compare NAFTA, is increasing trade through a diametrically opposite project: the strengthening of common economic sovereignty, not the undermining of what exists. That is the sort of cohesive effort North America needs.



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Copyright © 1992 by Jonathan Schlefer. All rights reserved.
The Atlantic Monthly; December 1992; What Price Economic Growth?; Volume 270, No. 6; pages 113-118.

Exploiting 9-11, Badly

The Online Beat
The Nation, March 5th, 2004
by John Nichols

It should not come as a surprise to anyone who has watched American politics over the past several years that George W. Bush has begun his formal reelection campaigning by exploiting the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, for political advantage. This is, after all, the president whose aides schemed on the day of the attacks to use them to get Congress to grant Bush "Fast Track" authority to negotiate a sweeping Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement. And it is the president whose political czar, Karl Rove, conspired with Republican Senate candidates in 2002 to employ 9-11 images as tools to attack the patriotism of Democrats, such as Georgia Senator Max Cleland, a decorated and disabled Vietnam veteran.

Everyone expected the Bush-Cheney reelection campaign to begin its television advertising campaign by branding Bush as the 9-11 candidate. The only surprise is that the Bush political team would, after more than two years of preparation, perform the task so gracelessly.

Was there no one in the close confines of the Bush campaign with enough awareness of the sensitivities that remain -- especially among the friends, families and colleagues of the dead -- to suggest that it might be inappropriate to produce campaign advertisements featuring images of the dead being removed from the wreckage of the World Trade Center?

By any measure, the much-heralded opening of the Bush-Cheney Version 2.0 campaign has been a disaster for the president.

The point of the sort of gauzy, flag-flapping political advertisements that the Bush campaign has begun airing was to raise the president's approval ratings after a Democratic primary season in which Massachusetts Senator John Kerry and his rivals landed some serious blows to Bush's reelection prospects. Bush aides had planned to use the advertisements and a busy schedule of appearances by the president and Vice President Dick Cheney to regain dominance of the media coverage of the 2004 campaign.

Instead, the "story" of the week in which Bush was supposed to be reintroducing himself to the voters focused on the anger of people like Kristen Breitweiser over the Bush ads. "After 3,000 people were murdered on his watch, it seems that that takes an awful lot of audacity," declared Breitweiser. "Honestly, it's in poor taste."

What a nightmare for the Bush campaign crew when New York City firefighter Tommy Fee was asked by a reporter about the ads and responded, "It's as sick as people who stole things out of the place. The image of firefighters at Ground Zero should not be used for this stuff, for politics." And Fee was not alone. Tom Ryan, a 20-year veteran with the city's Fire Department, reacted to the use of footage from a fireman's funeral in one of the ads bysaying, "As a firefighter who spent months at Ground Zero, it's deeply offensive to see the Bush campaign use these images to capitalize on the greatest American tragedy of our time."

Suddenly, family members, friends and colleagues of 9-11 victims were all over television, radio and the newspapers echoing the sentiments of Monica Gabrielle, whose husband died in the collapse of the Twin Towers. "It's a slap in the face of the murders of 3,000 people," Gabrielle said of the use of images of the removal of the 9-11 dead for political purposes. "It's unconscionable."

By Friday, just a day after the commercials began airing in battleground states, the September 11th Families for Peaceful Tomorrows group was circulating the names of a long list of family members and firefighters who were objecting to the ads. Spouses, parents and siblings of 9-11 victims were holding press conferences in New York to call for the ads to be taken down. And the critics weren't just talking about the ads; they were making very public note of the president's failure to cooperate with the 9-11 commission that is charged with investigating how and why the attacks occurred.

The Bush campaign had tested the ads with focus groups. They knew the use of the 9-11 images was risky; but they very much wanted to begin the process of branding 9-11 as a campaign issue and they thought they could easily dismiss any criticisms as partisan bickering. What the Bush camp failed to anticipate was the speed and the intensity of the negative response to the ads.

As the firestorm built, team Bush went into immediate damage-control mode. Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was dispatched to defend the ads as a reflection of America's "shared experience" during Bush's term. But Giuliani refused to say whether he would exploit 9-11 images in a similar way if he was running for office, so his did not prove to be a particularly effective defense.

The Bush campaign has been counting on Karen Hughes, one of the president's closest and most camera-friendly aides, to provide the first line of spin. She did a round of television talk shows to defend the commercials as tasteful and necessary. But, as usual, Hughes pushed the Bush line harder than was appropriate, or useful.

"I can understand why some Democrats not might want the American people to remember the great leadership and strength the president and First Lady Laura Bush brought to our country in the aftermath of (the attacks)," she grumped on "The Early Show" on CBS.

Does Hughes seriously mean to suggest that Americans have forgotten the details of September 11, 2001, or of the president's actions in the weeks and months that followed? That's a stretch. Even Hughes admitted, in the same interview, that, "September 11 was not just a distant tragedy." And what aspect of the president's "leadership" is highlighted by incorporating images of the dead being removed from Ground Zero into a campaign commercial?

More importantly, why would Hughes, an expert in the choice of words, choose to dismiss the widows, relatives and comrades of the dead as "some Democrats"? The answer speaks volumes about the thinking within the closed confines of the president's inner circle. The Bush team's view is that anyone who criticizes the president, even someone who lost a family member or colleague in the collapse of the twin towers, is automatically an anti-Bush partisan.

That's a serious miscalculation by the Bush campaign. And a surprising one. Hughes and others are allowing intense loyalty to their boss to cloud their judgement. Does this mean that the Bush team, which is made up of some of the ablest political minds that money can buy, is destined to blow this reelection campaign -- just as the able team of Bush's father blew the previous president's 1992 reelection campaign? Not necessarily; it is still a long way to Election Day and this campaign will take many unexpected turns over the next eight months. But it does suggest that the people who dressed the president up in flight-suit drag to declare the Iraq War mission accomplished last May are still off their game. In a week when they had planned to claim control of the political discourse, they lost it. Badly.
<------------------------------------->

Social Security Scares
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times
Published: March 5, 2004

The annual report of the Social Security system's trustees reveals a system in pretty good financial shape. In fact, it would take only modest injections of money to maintain that system's current benefit levels for at least the next 75 years. Other reports, however, appear to portray a system in deep financial trouble. For example, a 2002 Treasury study, described on Tuesday in The New York Times, claims that Social Security and Medicare are $44 trillion in the red. What's the truth?

Here's a hint: while even right-wing politicians insist in public that they want to save Social Security, the ideologues shaping their views are itching for an excuse to dismantle the system. So you have to read alarming reports generated by people who work at ideologically driven institutions — a list that now, alas, includes the U.S. Treasury — with great care.

First, two words — "and Medicare" — make a huge difference. According to the Treasury study, only 16 percent of that $44 trillion shortfall comes from Social Security. Second, the supposed shortfall in both programs comes mainly from projections about the distant future; 62 percent of the combined shortfall comes after 2077.

So does the Treasury report show a looming Social Security crisis? No.

Social Security's problem, such as it is, is a matter of demography: as the population ages, the number of retirees will rise faster than the number of workers. As a result, benefit costs will rise by about 2 percent of G.D.P. over the next 30 years, and creep up slowly thereafter. By comparison, making the Bush tax cuts permanent would reduce revenue by at least 2.5 percent of G.D.P., starting now. That — combined with the fact that Social Security, unlike the rest of the federal government, is currently running a surplus — is why the Bush tax cuts are a much bigger problem for the nation's fiscal future than the Social Security shortfall.

Medicare, though often lumped in with Social Security, is a different program facing different problems. The projected rise in Medicare expenses is mainly driven not by demography, but by the rising cost of medical care, which in turn mainly reflects medical progress, which allows doctors to treat a wider range of conditions.

If this trend continues — which is by no means certain when we are considering the very long run — we may face a real long-term dilemma that involves all medical care, not just care for retirees, and is as much moral as economic. It may eventually be the case that providing all Americans with the full advantages of modern medicine will force the government to raise much more money than it now does. Yet not providing that care will mean watching poor and middle-class Americans die early or suffer a greatly reduced quality of life because they can't afford full medical treatment.

But this dilemma will be there regardless of what we do to Social Security. It's not even clear that we should try to resolve the dilemma now. I'm all for taking the long view; when the administration makes budget projections for only five years to hide known costs just a few years further out, that's an outrage. By all means, let's plan ahead. But let's set some limits. When people issue ominous warnings about the cost of Medicare after 2077, my question is, Why should fiscal decisions today reflect the possible cost of providing generations not yet born with medical treatments not yet invented?

The biggest risk now facing Social Security is political. Will those who hate the system use scare tactics and fuzzy math to bring it down?

After Alan Greenspan's call for cuts in Social Security benefits, Republican members of Congress declared that the answer is to create private retirement accounts. It's amazing that they are still peddling this snake oil; it's even more amazing that journalists continue to let them get away with it. Yesterday in The Wall Street Journal, a writer judiciously declared that "personal accounts alone won't cure Social Security's ills." I guess that's true; similarly, eating doughnuts alone won't cause you to lose weight. Why is it so hard to say clearly that privatization would worsen, not improve, Social Security's finances?

Should we consider modest reforms that reduce the expenses or widen the revenue base of Social Security? Sure. But beware of those who claim that we must destroy the system in order to save it.

Kids In Church

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A little boy was overheard praying:
"Lord, if you can't make me a better boy, don't worry about it. I'm having a real good time like I am."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A Sunday school class was studying the Ten Commandments. They were ready to discuss the last one. The teacher asked if anyone could tell her what it was. Susie raised her hand, stood tall, and quoted, "Thou shall not take the covers off the neighbor's wife."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
After the christening of his baby brother in church, Jason sobbed all the way home in the back seat of the car. His father asked him three times what was wrong. Finally, the boy replied, "That preacher said he wanted us brought up in a Christian home, and I wanted to stay with you guys."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Six-year-old Angie and her four-year-old brother Joel were sitting together in church. Joel giggled, sang, and talked out loud. Finally, his big sister had had enough. "You're not supposed to talk out loud in church." "Why? Who's going to stop me?" Joel asked. See those men standing by the door? They're hushers."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A mother was preparing pancakes for her sons, Kevin, 5, Ryan 3. The boys began to argue over who would get the first pancake. Their mother saw the opportunity for a moral lesson. "If Jesus were sitting here, He would say, 'Let my brother have the first pancake, I can wait.'" Kevin turned to his younger brother and said, "Ryan, you be Jesus!"
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
A wife invited some people to dinner. At the table, she turned to their six-year-old daughter and said, "Would you like to say the blessing?" "I wouldn't know what to say," the girl replied. "Just say what you hear Mommy say," the wife
answered. The daughter bowed her head and said, "Lord, why on earth did I invite all these people to dinner?"
<------------------------------------->
Submitted by Martie LNU

John Edwards Speech to Supporters: March 3rd, 2004

John and Elizabeth Edwards returned home to Raleigh, N.C. on Wednesday afternoon. Senator Edwards spoke to friends, family, campaign supporters, volunteers, and staff in the Broughton High School Gymnasium.

Here is the text of Senator Edwards' speech:

"It's good to be home!
Thank you all so much for being here. I have never loved my country more than I do today. You know, the truth is, all my life, America has smiled at me and today I am smiling right back!

More than anything, I love the American people. The people I have listened to; the people I have embraced, the people who made me laugh, inspired me, inspired you. People who made me think. People who have made me reach.

And today, I see their faces. I see the faces of the men and women who worked in the mill in Robbins, North Carolina - the mill my father worked in, the mill I worked in. I can picture their faces as clear as they are in front of me right now, lint in their hair an grease on their faces, men and women who represent the best of what America is.

They went to work day after day, decade after decade in the mill because they believed that if they worked hard and did what was right, they could build a better life for themselves and their families.

I see the faces of the workers at Tower Automotive in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. They are wondering where do they go after the doors to their factory close? What do they do? Have they not done the right things in America? Have they not worked hard, been responsible, raised their kids? Where do they go now and will they have a president and an administration who understands their lives and who will stand up for them?

I see the faces of the young men and women that I met in Afghanistan, at night. They are proud of their country, proud of serving their country, but worried about their families back home. They are worried about what would happen when they went back.

I see the men and women at Page Belting in Concord, New Hampshire who wonder if anyone understands the struggles that they face and most Americans face every day in their lives.

And I also see the earnest, young, wise faces from central high school in Des Moines to Pomona College in California. Young people, looking desperately for inspiration - looking for someone who will lift them up, make them believe again that in our America, with their help, with their energy, and their enthusiasm, everything is possible.

Most of all I see all these faces, turning from skepticism and despair to inspiration and hope, because they believe in this country. They believe in themselves and they know that you and I together are going to change this country, and build one America that works for all of us.

It has been my greatest honor to have walked with you. From the beginning, this has never been my campaign. This has been your campaign. And I am blessed to have been a part of it. And I'm also blessed to be back here at Broughton High School with so many friends and family, members of my community.

Today I've decided to suspend my campaign for the presidency of the United States.

But I want to say a word about a man who is a friend of mine, somebody who I believe has great strength and great courage, my friend Senator John Kerry. He has fought for and will continue to fight for the things that all of us believe in: more jobs, better health care, cleaner air, cleaner water, a safer world. The truth is these are the causes of our party, the Democratic Party. They are the causes of America. And they are the reasons we will prevail, come November, and take back this country.

You know, it wasn't very long ago that all the pundits and pollsters said, by the time we get to "Super Tuesday," there won't be a John even competing much less fighting for the nomination. And we proved those pundits and pollsters wrong and we are going to prove them all wrong come November when we take back this country.

And I want to say a personal word about my friend John Kerry, who I know very well. This is a man who from the time he served this country courageously in Vietnam, and all the way through this campaign, is a man who is a fighter. I know him. I saw what we went through in November, December, and back in the summer when everyone said he didn't have a chance. But he showed the strength, resilience, and courage that he has shown his entire life when he fought for us and for our country in Vietnam. He has fought just as hard throughout this campaign.

The truth of the matter is that John Kerry has what it takes, right here in his heart, to be president of the United States. And I for one, intend to do everything in my power to make him the next president of the United States, and I ask you to join me in this cause. For our country, for our America!

Somewhere in America a little boy or little girl plays on a sandy lot. It might be in a mill village like where I played. It might be in a barrio, or on a farm, or it might be a vacant lot on a city. We want that child to have big dreams about what he or she can do, where he or she can go.

In this great country, all things should be possible for that child-- as they have been for me.

As I leave this stage today, I leave it to you to make certain that in our American, our children can prosper and dream. This cause, this challenge to change America, belongs to you. You should not step back. You should step up.

It is up to you to make certain that in our American, our children can prosper and reach and dream.

It is up to you to choose a president who will end our two Americas so that every child can have the same chance I had.

It is up to you to make sure that the 35 million Americans living in poverty are never ignored again.

It is up to you to make this generation the generation that grows up in an America that is no longer divided by race.

It is up to you to demand a campaign that is about attacking people's problems, not politicians attacking one another.

Those of you who cast your votes for me cast your votes for a new kind of politics. You wanted a positive campaign and you got one for a change.

I couldn't ask for better company today. With the love of my life by my side. To have your life blessed with four beautiful children, and family and friends, you couldn't ask for anything more.

To my staff and my supporters, thank you from the bottom of my heart. I will never forget all of your hard work and all that you did to help change your country. To everyone who gave their time, their heart, and their soul to this campaign, thank you. You deserve nothing short of a huge round of applause!

Like most Americans, in my life, I have learned two great lessons: one that there will always be heartache and struggle, and two, that people of strong will can make a difference. One lesson is sad, and the other is inspiring. And what makes us Americans is that we choose to be inspired.

We can change America so that the America I love, the America you love can be again that bright, shining star, that beacon that stirs our hearts when we hear our anthem or see our flag. We can make it so. We are greater and stronger than anything that stands between us and that destiny.

We should never settle for less than our highest aspirations in our leaders and for our country. Because we are America - where all things are possible.

And our message today is this: we want to change America and we will!
<------------------------------------->

The Chairman Sees The Future and Says Social Services Spending is The Looming Problem

Testimony of Chairman Alan Greenspan
Economic outlook and current fiscal issues
Before the Committee on the Budget, U.S. House of Representatives
February 25, 2004

Mr. Chairman and members of the committee, I am pleased to be here today and to offer my views on the outlook for the economy and current fiscal issues. I want to emphasize that I speak for myself and not necessarily for the Federal Reserve.

...just like Pres. Bush could appear anywhere and "speak for 'himself', and not necessarily as President of the United States

As you know, the U.S. economy appears to have made the transition from a period of subpar growth to one of more vigorous expansion. Real gross domestic product (GDP) rose briskly in the second half of last year, fueled by a sizable increase in household spending, a notable strengthening in business investment, and a sharp rebound in exports. Moreover, productivity surged, prices remained stable, and financial conditions improved further. Overall, the economy has lately made impressive gains in output and real incomes, although progress in creating jobs has been limited.

In macroeconomic terms, the US Economy appears to be expanding favorably; however in microeconomics terms the average family has increased their debt substantially, had more difficulty finding good jobs that pay a living wage, still had not recovered their losses from the steep declines in equity they held in stocks and mutual funds, paid more for health care per person than any other country in the world, and seen their share of the countries wealth decline with the addition of several million more families living in poverty, but being far out-weighed by the assention of several dozen multi-millionaires who obtained their wealth by virtue of their positions within public companies that had filed for bankruptcy.

...At the same time, increases in efficiency and a significant level of underutilized resources both onshore and offshore should help keep a lid on inflation.

This favorable short-term outlook for the U.S. economy, however, is playing out against a backdrop of growing concern about the prospects for the federal budget. As you are well aware, after having run surpluses for a brief period around the turn of the decade, the federal budget has reverted to deficit. The unified deficit swelled to $375 billion in fiscal 2003 and appears to be continuing to widen in the current fiscal year. According to the latest projections from the Administration and the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), if current policies remain in place, the budget will stay in deficit for some time.

In part, the recent deficits have resulted from the economic downturn in 2001 and the period of slow growth that followed, as well as the sharp declines in equity prices. The deficits also reflect a significant step-up in spending on defense and higher outlays for homeland security and many other nondefense discretionary programs. Tax reductions--some of which were intended specifically to provide stimulus to the economy--also contributed to the deterioration of the fiscal balance.

Yes, there's the rub...which of the above was MOST responsible for the deficits? The several billion dollars erased from the Treasury in tax cuts? The immoral, criminal, corporate blowups that removed hundreds of billions of dollars from the economy, the $100+ Billion spent in Iraq, or the several hundred million dollars spent on homeland security?
...
In recent years, budget debates have turned to choices offered by those advocating tax cuts and those advocating increased spending. To date, actions that would lower forthcoming deficits have received only narrow support, and many analysts are becoming increasingly concerned that, without a restoration of the budget enforcement mechanisms and the fundamental political will they signal, the inbuilt political bias in favor of red ink will once again become entrenched.

The only Administration of the past dozen to actually decrease Federal spending for "discretionary spending" expenses as a percent of GDP has been ... ah... President Clinton's.

The budget scenarios considered by the CBO in its December assessment of the long-term budget outlook offer a vivid--and sobering--illustration of the challenges we face as we prepare for the retirement of the baby-boom generation. These scenarios suggest that, under a range of reasonably plausible assumptions about spending and taxes, we could be in a situation in the decades ahead in which rapid increases in the unified budget deficit set in motion a dynamic in which large deficits result in ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years. The resulting rise in the federal debt could drain funds away from private capital formation and thus over time slow the growth of living standards.

In other words, financing the budgetary deficits slows the growth of living standards.

...Moreover, although productivity has no direct link to Medicare spending, historical experience suggests that the demand for medical services increases with real income, which over time rises in line with productivity.

Well we have witnessed the measured increase in productivity, the demand for medical services has increased several fold; but US individual personal income has been flat or declined for most of the past twenty years.

Today, federal outlays under Social Security and Medicare amount to less than 7 percent of GDP. In December, the CBO projected that these outlays would increase to 12 percent of GDP by 2030 under current law, using assumptions about the growth of health-care costs similar to the intermediate assumptions of the Medicare trustees; when spending on Medicaid is added in, the rise in the ratio is even steeper. To be sure, the rise in these outlays relative to GDP could be financed by tax increases, but the CBO results suggest that, even if other non-interest spending is constrained fairly tightly, ensuring fiscal stability would require an overall federal tax burden well above its long-term average.

Even if it rose to 20% of GDP it would still be considerably less than is currently being spent by any of the other eight major world democracies for Healthcare & Social Services spending similar in intent to these US programs.

Most experts believe that the best baseline for planning purposes is to assume that the demographic shift associated with the retirement of the baby-boom generation will be permanent--that is, it will not reverse when that cohort passes away. Indeed, so long as longevity continues to increase--and assuming no significant changes in immigration or fertility rates--the proportion of elderly in the population will only rise. If this fundamental change in the age distribution materializes, we will eventually have no choice but to make significant structural adjustments in the major retirement programs.

One change the Congress could consider as it moves forward on this critical issue is to replace the current measure of the "cost of living" that is used for many purposes with respect to both revenues and outlays with a more appropriate price index.

Another possible adjustment relates to the age at which Social Security and Medicare benefits will be provided.

The degree of uncertainty about whether future resources will be adequate to meet our current statutory obligations to the coming generations of retirees is daunting. The concern is not so much about Social Security, where benefits are tied in a mechanical fashion to retirees' wage histories and we have some useful tools for forecasting future outlays.

Ah, so current Social Security provisioning is effectively working and supportable. Glad to hear it from you Mr. Chairman.

In view of this upward ratchet in government programs and the enormous uncertainty about the upper bounds of future demands for medical care, I believe that a thorough review of our spending commitments--and at least some adjustment in those commitments--is necessary for prudent policy. I also believe that we have an obligation to those in and near retirement to honor what has been promised to them. If changes need to be made, they should be made soon enough so that future retirees have time to adjust their plans for retirement spending and to make sure that their personal resources, along with what they expect to receive from the government, will be sufficient to meet their retirement needs.

Yup...no disagreement there, and well said financial advise.

I certainly agree that the same scrutiny needs to be applied to taxes. However, tax rate increases of sufficient dimension to deal with our looming fiscal problems arguably pose significant risks to economic growth and the revenue base. The exact magnitude of such risks is very difficult to estimate, but they are of enough concern, in my judgment, to warrant aiming to close the fiscal gap primarily, if not wholly, from the outlay side.

Oops...like Ted Kazinski's document...the discourse sounds fine, rational, ok, then all of a sudden it's the Twilight Zone !! Why not consider both income and outgo as part of a sound economic plan. Certainly not wholly from the income side; but it should be part of the plan. If wage earners can be taxed with the Alternative Minimum Tax why not corporations, businesses, trusts, high income individuals, off-shore subsidaries of US Companies with measureable deficits in their human resources portfolios, and passive investments by tax exempt entities.

The dimension of the challenge is enormous. The one certainty is that the resolution of this situation will require difficult choices and that the future performance of the economy will depend on those choices. No changes will be easy, as they all will involve lowering claims on resources or raising financial obligations. It falls on the Congress to determine how best to address the competing claims. In doing so, you will need to consider not only the distributional effects of policy change but also the broader economic effects on labor supply, retirement behavior, and private saving.

History has shown that, when faced with major challenges, elected officials have risen to the occasion. In particular, over the past twenty years or so, the prospect of large deficits has generally led to actions to narrow them. I trust that the recent deterioration in the budget outlook and the fast-approaching retirement of the baby-boom generation will be met with similar determination and effectiveness.

The Chairman was being unduly gracious with these last lines, as there has been little effective, efficient, timely, appropriate response in the past several years to this looming problem, else we would not be in this position we have been discussing the past few minutes.
(Italics added by Editor: rp)

Roe v Wade Syllabus

Syllabus

A pregnant single woman (Roe) brought a class action challenging the constitutionality of the Texas criminal abortion laws, which proscribe procuring or attempting an abortion except on medical advice for the purpose of saving the mother's life.

A licensed physician (Hallford), who had two state abortion prosecutions pending against him, was permitted to intervene. A childless married couple (the Does), the wife not being pregnant, separately attacked the laws, basing alleged injury on the future possibilities of contraceptive failure, pregnancy, unpreparedness for parenthood, and impairment of the wife's health.

A three-judge District Court, which consolidated the actions, held that Roe and Hallford, and members of their classes, had standing to sue and presented justiciable controversies. Ruling that declaratory, though not injunctive, relief was warranted, the court declared the abortion statutes void as vague and overbroadly infringing those plaintiffs' Ninth and Fourteenth Amendment rights.

The court ruled the Does' complaint not justiciable. Appellants directly appealed to this Court on the injunctive rulings, and appellee cross- appealed from the District Court's grant of declaratory relief to Roe and Hallford.

The key portion of the ruling advances an Individual versus State's interest framework directly related to specific segments of a trimester gestation period.

State criminal abortion laws, like those involved here, that except from criminality only a life- saving procedure on the mother's behalf without regard to the stage of her pregnancy and other interests involved violate the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, which protects against state action the right to privacy, including a woman's qualified right to terminate her pregnancy.

Though the State cannot override that right, it has legitimate interests in protecting both the pregnant woman's health and the potentiality of human life, each of which interests grows and reaches a "compelling" point at various stages of the woman's approach to term. Pp. 147-164.

(a) For the stage prior to approximately the end of the first trimester, the abortion decision and its effectuation must be left to the medical judgment of the pregnant woman's attending physician. Pp. 163, 164.

(b) For the stage subsequent to approximately the end of the first trimester, the State, in promoting its interest in the health of the mother, may, if it chooses, regulate the abortion procedure in ways that are reasonably related to maternal health. Pp. 163, 164.

(c) For the stage subsequent to viability the State, in promoting its interest in the potentiality of human life, may, if it chooses, regulate, and even proscribe, abortion except where necessary, in appropriate medical judgment, for the preservation of the life or health of the mother. Pp. 163-164; 164-165.

Abotion rates in women 15 - 44 years in the US currently ranges from 2.7% for whites to 5.7% for blacks, with over 80% of the abortions obtained by unmarried women, and over 90% are performed in the first trimester.

Adoption is Not The Answer.
Nationwide, the number of children in foster care has reached staggering proportions. There are approximately 542,000 children in foster care in the United States, and over 126,000 of these children are currently available for adoption because parental rights have been terminated. Yet, only 20 to 25 percent of foster children waiting for adoption will ever leave foster care and join an adoptive family before aging out of governmental care at age 18.


Nor are Foster Homes plentiful enough, and of sufficient quality to serve the needs of an escalating segment of the population.

The SCO v IBM Legal Tussle

Ars Technica Newsdesk
Posted 03/03/2004 @ 11:53 PM, by Eric Bangeman
SCO gets 45 days to turn over offending code to IBM

Potentially buried in today's announcement of lawsuits filed by SCO against DaimlerChrysler and AutoZone were some significant developments in the ongoing SCO vs. IBM court battle. The lawsuit had been bogged down in discovery, and back in December, the presiding judge gave SCO 30 days to produce the particular Linux code it claims is in violation of their copyrights. Becoming fed-up with the lack of progress in the case, the judge has now ordered SCO fully comply with IBM's discovery demands within 45 days. This means that SCO needs to cough it up:

SCO has 45 days to identify "all specific lines of code" they allege IBM put into Linux from AIX or Dynix; identify and provide "with specificity all lines of code in Linux that it claims rights to; provide and identify with specificity the lines of code that SCO distributed to other parties, and this is to include "where applicable the conditions of release, to whom the code was released, the date and under what circumstances such code was released."

For its part, IBM has the same amount of time to provide some of the information requested by the SCO: "the releases of AIX and Dynix consisting of 'about 232 products' as was represented by Mr. Marriott at the February 6, 2004 hearing." Essentially, the judge is rejecting SCO's argument that they need IBM to first fork over AIX and Dynix in order to answer IBM's request. Instead, the two litigants will have to work in tandem to satisfy one another's discovery requests.

At this point, the burden is on SCO to comply in order for the case to move forward. It is a lock that the rest of the Linux world will be watching to see if SCO finally divulges the exact code that Linux allegedly copied. Continued foot-dragging on the part of SCO will provide more impetus for their opponents to vigorously contest SCO's claims - do not look for AutoZone and DaimlerChrysler to settle with SCO. At any rate, in 45 days, it will become apparent if SCO is holding four of a kind or if they have gone all-in with nothing in the hole.

By The Numbers

The Bush Administration is putting forth a defense of their record by pointing to numbers. Here are a couple of other numbers to consider.

1st:   The record for the most bankruptcies filed in a single year (1.57 Million) set in 2002, was reset again in 2003 with a projected 1.66 Million cases. Of these 98% were for individuals with 80% of these filing "no asset" claims; and the remaining 2% were for business bankruptcies with an average endebtedness of $1 Million each.

36%:   Increase in the number of desertions from the US Army since 1999

$1.5 Billion:   The average daily increase in the US National Debt during the period Jan 1, 2001 - Jan 1, 2004

100:   Number of fund-raisers attended by President Bush or Vice President Chaney during 2003

90%:   Percentage of American citizens who said they approved of the way George Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 26 September, 2001

53%:   Percentage of American citizens who approved of the way Bush was handling his job as president when asked on 16 January, 2004

130:   Number of countries (out of total of 191 recognized by the United Nations) with an American military presence

$100 billion: Estimated cost of the war in Iraq to American citizens by the end of 2003
$13 billion: Amount other countries have committed toward rebuilding Iraq (mostly in loans) as of Oct. 2003

88%: Percentage of American citizens who will save less than $100 on their 2006 federal taxes as a result of 2003 cut in capital gains and dividends taxes

$42,000: Average savings members of Bush's cabinet are expected to enjoy in 2003 as a result in the cuts in capital gains and dividends taxes

$42,228: Median household income in the US in 2001
$10.9 million: Average wealth of the members of Bush's original 16-person cabinet

87%: Percentage of the counties in the United States that do not have a single abortion provider

537:   In 2000, number of votes George W Bush needed to win the vote in Florida to overtake Democrat candidate Al Gore and claim the election.

166:   Number of days George W Bush has spent at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, from Jan 2001 to August 2003? It works out to 17.4% of his term has been spent at Crawford.

2.6 Million:  Number of "jobs lost" during the current Bush Administration

57%:   Percentage of Americans who believe that the Bush administration "exaggerated pre-war intelligence about Iraq's weapons in order to rally support for the war".

17: In 1996, the total number of judicial nominees confirmed by the Republican-led Senate
169: From Jan. 2001 to Aug. 2003 the total number of judicial nominees confirmed by the the Republican-led Senate
3: Number of years it has taken Pres. Bush to attain the same number of judicial appointments as Pres. Clinton did during either of his four year terms.


$29,000:   Sen. John Kerry's Individual Contributions as reported by Federal Election Commission
$0:   Pres. George W. Bush's Individual Contributions as reported by Federal Election Commission
$200 Million:   Pres. Bush's "War Chest" Goal for his re-election campaign, with $130 Million on hand as of Feb. 2004

Truly Disgusting !!

Maestro of Chutzpah
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times
Published: March 2, 2004

The traditional definition of chutzpah says it's when you murder your parents, then plead for clemency because you're an orphan. Alan Greenspan has chutzpah.

Last week Mr. Greenspan warned of the dangers posed by budget deficits. But even though the main cause of deficits is plunging revenue — the federal government's tax take is now at its lowest level as a share of the economy since 1950 — he opposes any effort to restore recent revenue losses. Instead, he supports the Bush administration's plan to make its tax cuts permanent, and calls for cuts in Social Security benefits.

Yet three years ago Mr. Greenspan urged Congress to cut taxes, warning that otherwise the federal government would run excessive surpluses. He assured Congress that those tax cuts would not endanger future Social Security benefits. And last year he declined to stand in the way of another round of deficit-creating tax cuts.

But wait — it gets worse.

You see, although the rest of the government is running huge deficits — and never did run much of a surplus — the Social Security system is currently taking in much more money than it spends. Thanks to those surpluses, the program is fully financed at least through 2042. The cost of securing the program's future for many decades after that would be modest — a small fraction of the revenue that will be lost if the Bush tax cuts are made permanent.

And the reason Social Security is in fairly good shape is that during the 1980's the Greenspan commission persuaded Congress to increase the payroll tax, which supports the program.

The payroll tax is regressive: it falls much more heavily on middle- and lower-income families than it does on the rich. In fact, according to Congressional Budget Office estimates, families near the middle of the income distribution pay almost twice as much in payroll taxes as in income taxes. Yet people were willing to accept a regressive tax increase to sustain Social Security.

Now the joke's on them. Mr. Greenspan pushed through an increase in taxes on working Americans, generating a Social Security surplus. Then he used that surplus to argue for tax cuts that deliver very little relief to most people, but are worth a lot to those making more than $300,000 a year. And now that those tax cuts have contributed to a soaring deficit, he wants to cut Social Security benefits.

The point, of course, is that if anyone had tried to sell this package honestly — "Let's raise taxes and cut benefits for working families so we can give big tax cuts to the rich!" — voters would have been outraged. So the class warriors of the right engaged in bait-and-switch.

There are three lessons in this tale.

First, "starving the beast" is no longer a hypothetical scenario — it's happening as we speak. For decades, conservatives have sought tax cuts, not because they're affordable, but because they aren't. Tax cuts lead to budget deficits, and deficits offer an excuse to squeeze government spending.

Second, squeezing spending doesn't mean cutting back on wasteful programs nobody wants. Social Security and Medicare are the targets because that's where the money is. We might add that ideologues on the right have never given up on their hope of doing away with Social Security altogether. If Mr. Bush wins in November, we can be sure that they will move forward on privatization — the creation of personal retirement accounts. These will be sold as a way to "save" Social Security (from a nonexistent crisis), but will, in fact, undermine its finances. And that, of course, is the point.

Finally, the right-wing corruption of our government system — the partisan takeover of institutions that are supposed to be nonpolitical — continues, and even extends to the Federal Reserve.

The Bush White House has made it clear that it will destroy the careers of scientists, budget experts, intelligence operatives and even military officers who don't toe the line. But Mr. Greenspan should have been immune to such pressures, and he should have understood that the peculiarity of his position — as an unelected official who wields immense power — carries with it an obligation to stand above the fray. By using his office to promote a partisan agenda, he has betrayed his institution, and the nation.

Marriage Jokes

Barbara Cornelio wrote:

Subject: Marriage (Part I) Typical macho man married typical good-looking lady and after the wedding, he laid down the following rules: "I'll be home when I want, if I want and at what time I want-and I don't expect any hassle from you. I expect a great dinner to be on the table unless I tell you that I won't be home for dinner. I'll go hunting, fishing, boozing and card-playing when I want with my old buddies and don't you give me a hard time about it. Those are my rules. Any comments?"

His new bride said, "No, that's fine with me. Just understand that there will be sex here at seven o'clock every night... whether you're here or not."
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Marriage (Part II) Husband and wife had a bitter quarrel on the day of their 40th wedding anniversary! The husband yells, "When you die, I'm getting you a headstone that reads, 'Here Lies My Wife - Cold As Ever.'

"Yeah?" she replies. "When you die, I'm getting you a headstone that reads, "Here Lies My Husband Stiff At Last.'"
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Marriage (Part III) Husband (a doctor) and his wife are having a fight at the breakfast table. Husband gets up in a rage and says, "And you are no good in bed either," and storms out of the house. After sometime he realizes he was nasty and decides to make amends and rings her up. She comes to the phone after many rings, and the irritated husband says, "what took you so long to answer the phone?"

She says, "I was in bed." "In bed this early, doing what?" "Getting a second opinion!"
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Marriage (Part IV) A man has six children and is very proud of his achievement. He is so proud of himself, that he starts calling his wife," Mother of Six" in spite of her objections. One night, they go to a party. The man decides that it's time to go home and wants to find out if his wife is ready to leave as well. He shouts at the top of his voice, "Shall we go home 'Mother of six?"

His wife, irritated by her husband's lack of discretion shouts right back, "Anytime you're ready, Father of Four."
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God may have created man before woman but there is always a rough draft before the masterpiece.

Naughties

What is the best thing about dating a homeless woman?
You can drop her off anywhere.

What is the difference between in-laws and outlaws?
Outlaws are wanted.

What should a woman say to a man she's just had sex with?
Whatever she wants. He's sleeping.

Where does virgin wool come from?
Ugly sheep.

How do you spot the blind man at a nudist colony?
It isn't hard.

How can you piss off your wife while making love?
Call her from your cell phone.

What does the bride of a Polish man get that's long and hard on her wedding night? ...
His last name.

What's the down side to a threesome?
You'll likely disappoint two women instead of just one.

How do you know you're really ugly?
Dogs close their eyes when they're humping your leg.

Why are hurricanes named after women?
Because they arrive wet and wild, then leave with your house and car.

Scientific Advisors Serve at the Pleasure of the President

Bush Replaces Advisers on Cloning, Medical Issues
Fri Feb 27, 2004 11:57 PM ET

By Maggie Fox, Health and Science Correspondent
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President Bush reshuffled his advisory council on cloning and related medical issues on Friday, adding a prominent neurosurgeon known for his work on conjoined twins and two conservatives who have spoken out strongly against cloning. He replaced one of the most prominent scientists on his Council on Bioethics, cell biology expert Elizabeth Blackburn of the University of California San Francisco. The Australian- born Blackburn has spoken in favor of so-called therapeutic cloning in which cloning technology is used for medical and biological research.

The new members of the panel are Dr. Benjamin Carson of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a pediatric neurologist; Peter Lawler, a government professor at Berry College in George; and Diana Schaub, a political scientist at Loyola College of Maryland. A White House spokeswoman said Blackburn's and May's terms had expired. "We decided to appoint other individuals at this point with different experience and expertise," she said.

But supporters of therapeutic cloning said they were stunned by the move and said it showed the White House was not interested in hearing neutral scientific advice. "The American people deserve the right science, not right-wing ideology, on critical issues facing their health," Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy, a Democrat, said in a statement. "By firing two of the committee's most distinguished members, the administration is choosing once again the most divisive and ideological course, instead of seeking consensus."

Daniel Perry, executive director of the Alliance for Aging Research and president of the Coalition for the Advancement of Medical Research, also expressed reservations. "We are concerned with this sort of Friday night late decision to replace what we know is at least one of the stronger voices on behalf of moving the research forward and replacing her with what appear to be more ideological soulmates who would reflexively oppose this research," Perry said in a telephone interview.

Earlier this month 60 leading scientists and philosophers, including Nobel laureates, backed a Union of Concerned Scientists report that accused the Bush administration of distorting scientific advice to fit ideological goals.

The White House denied this and said it was seeking a variety of opinions on medical and scientific subjects. At issue is the future of stem cell research, which seeks to harness the body's master cells to create new tissues to treat diabetes, Parkinson's, cancer and a range of other ills. One approach would use cloning technology to try to find ways to allow tailor-made treatments based on a patient's own cells. Bush opposes this and has severely limited the use of federal funds in such research. South Korean scientists announced earlier this month they had cloned human embryos and extracted from them stem cells for this very purpose, making clear they intend to continue with the research.

EU Sanctions

EU Hits U.S. Goods with Sanctions
Mon Mar 1, 2004 05:14 PM ET

By Doug Palmer and Patrick Lannin
WASHINGTON/BRUSSELS (Reuters) - The European Union on Monday slapped hundreds of millions of dollars in annual economic sanctions on U.S. jewelry, textiles, food, equipment and other exports, stepping up pressure on Washington to repeal corporate tax breaks that violate world trade rules.

The move could cost U.S. companies some $315 million this year in extra duties on exports to Europe, and $666 million in 2005, unless Congress scraps the tax breaks. It was the first time the EU has levied trade sanctions on the United States since the World Trade Organization was formed in 1995. The EU has promised to lift the sanctions as soon as the U.S. Congress passes legislation repealing the tax breaks.

President Bush, who has faced criticism from Democrats for 2.8 million lost manufacturing jobs since he took office, urged lawmakers to redirect the $50 billion in current tax breaks for exporters to "American manufacturers and other job creating-sectors of the U.S. economy." "I urge Congress to take up and pass ... legislation that reforms the tax code, removes the underlying reason for the tariffs that have been imposed today on American exports, and further advances the competitiveness of American manufacturers and job creators," he said in a statement.

The WTO, in a case dating back to the late 1990s, has repeatedly ruled the U.S. tax breaks amount to illegal export subsidies under international trade rules. "We understand why the European Union took its action. We regret it, but we understand it," Secretary of State Colin Powell said at a briefing with EU counterparts.

European External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten told reporters Brussels very much hoped Congress would act quickly so it could end the sanctions "in the next few weeks." The disputed tax loopholes, valued at about $5 billion annually, benefit a wide cross-section of U.S. exporters, from Boeing, Microsoft and Caterpillar to Eastman Kodak, grain company Cargill and food processor Archer Daniels Midland Co.

EU Trade Commissioner Pascal Lamy said the EU had "no choice" but to resort to the sanctions after the United States missed a final March 1 deadline for repealing the provisions

Whatchamacallit

Virus

n. [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses,
via SF] A cracker program that searches out other programs and
`infects' them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they
become Trojan horses.

When these programs are executed, the
embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the `infection'.
This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a worm, a
virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is
propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their
friends (see SEX).

The virus may do nothing but propagate itself
and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after
propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like
writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with
the display (some viruses include nice display hacks). Many nasty
viruses, written by particularly perversely minded crackers, do
irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files.

In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially
among Wintel and Macintosh users; the lack of security on these
machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the
operating system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such
attacks).

The production of special anti-virus software has become
an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused
outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend to blame
_everything_ that doesn't work as they had expected on virus
attacks.

Accordingly, this sense of `virus' has passed not only
into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often
incorrectly used to denote a worm or even a Trojan horse). See
phage; compare back door; see also Unix conspiracy.

Wanna guess what OS the author of this definition is using ??
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