Citing Pullback, Antigraft Team Quits Teamsters
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
AP
Published: April 30, 2004

The former federal prosecutor who heads the Teamsters' internal anticorruption program resigned yesterday, along with 20 other investigators and lawyers involved in that effort, saying the union's president was not fully committed to fighting corruption.

The former prosecutor, Edwin H. Stier, sent a sharply worded letter that accused James P. Hoffa, the Teamsters president, of blocking a broad investigation into possible union corruption in Chicago and of dragging his feet in a case of alleged embezzlement by a Teamsters leader in Houston. "In spite of our efforts to convince General President Jim Hoffa to remain committed to fighting corruption," Mr. Stier wrote, "I have concluded that he has backed away from the Teamsters' anticorruption plan in the face of pressure from self-interested individuals."

The anticorruption program was created five years ago by Mr. Hoffa in an effort to persuade the federal government to abandon its longtime oversight of the union. The Teamsters had agreed to far-reaching federal supervision in 1989 to settle a federal racketeering lawsuit charging the union with being controlled by organized crime. The resignations could jeopardize the union's push to end federal oversight.

One Year Later, and ...

In Front of Your Nose
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 30, 2004

We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: the only check on it is that sooner or later a false belief bumps up against solid reality, usually on a battlefield." That's from George Orwell's 1946 essay "In Front of Your Nose." It seems especially relevant right now, as we survey the wreckage of America's Iraq adventure.

Tomorrow a year will have passed since George Bush's "Mission Accomplished" carrier landing. Throughout that year — right up to the surge in violence this month — administration officials assured us that things were going well in Iraq. Living standards, they said, were steadily improving. The resistance, they insisted, consisted of a handful of dead-enders aided by a few foreign infiltrators — and each lull in attacks brought pronouncements that the campaign against the insurgents had turned the corner.

So they lied to us; what else is new? But there's more at stake here than the administration's credibility. The official story line portrayed a virtuous circle of nation-building, one that could eventually lead to a democratic Iraq, allied with the U.S. In fact, we seem to be faced with a vicious circle, in which a deteriorating security situation undermines reconstruction, and the lack of material progress adds to popular discontent. Can this situation be saved?

Even among harsh critics of the administration's Iraq policy, the usual view is that we have to finish the job. You've heard the arguments: We broke it; we bought it. We can't cut and run. We have to stay the course.

I understand the appeal of those arguments. But I'm worried about the arithmetic.

All the information I've been able to get my hands on indicates that the security situation in Iraq is really, really bad. It's not a good sign when, a year into an occupation, the occupying army sends for more tanks. Western civilians have retreated to armed enclaves. U.S. forces are strong enough to defend those enclaves, and probably strong enough to keep essential supplies flowing. But we don't have remotely enough troops to turn the vicious circle around. The Iraqi forces that were supposed to fill the security gap collapsed — or turned against us — at the first sign of trouble.

And all of the proposals one hears for resolving this ugly situation seem to be either impractical or far behind the curve.

Some say we should send more troops. But the U.S. military doesn't have more troops to send, unless it resorts to extreme measures, like withdrawing a large part of the forces currently in South Korea. Did I mention that North Korea is building nuclear weapons, and may already have eight?

Others say we should seek more support from other countries. There may once have been a time — say, last summer — when the U.S. could have struck a deal: by ceding a lot of authority to the U.N., we might have been able to persuade countries with large armies, like India, to contribute large numbers of peacekeeping troops. But it's hard to imagine that anyone will now send significant forces into the Iraqi cauldron.

Some pin their hopes on a political solution: they believe that violence will subside if the U.N. is allowed to appoint a caretaker government that Iraqis don't view as a U.S. puppet.

Let's hope they're right. But bear in mind that right now the U.S. is still planning to hand over "sovereignty" to a body, yet to be named, that will have hardly any power at all. For practical purposes, the U.S. ambassador will be running the country. Americans may believe that everything will change on June 30, but Iraqis are unlikely to be fooled. And by the way, much of the Arab world believes that we've been committing war crimes in Falluja.

I don't have a plan for Iraq. I strongly suspect, however, that all the plans you hear now are irrelevant. If America's leaders hadn't made so many bad decisions, they might have had a chance to shape Iraq to their liking. But that window closed many months ago.

Former Navy Secretary unleashes tide of Iraq criticism
By Eric Weslander, Journal-World
LJ World
Thursday, April 29, 2004

A critical question for citizens and journalists to ask the U.S. government right now is this: "Under what circumstances will the United States military withdraw from Iraq?"

That's according to James Webb, the novelist, decorated Vietnam veteran and Reagan-administration Secretary of the Navy, who spoke Wednesday night at Kansas University. Webb says he's never heard a good answer from the Bush administration to the question about troop withdrawal.

"What are the conditions?" Webb asked a crowd of more than 300 people in Woodruff Auditorium in the Kansas Union. "If you can't answer the question, then you shouldn't have been there in the first place."

There's a simple explanation

Note: What is it that ties together several of the perceptions about George W. Bush that would provide a simple explanation for his actions, and inactions? How about cowardice?

Cow"ard*ice\ (-[i^]s), n. [F. couardise, fr. couard. See Coward.] Want of courage to face danger; extreme timidity; pusillanimity; base fear of danger or hurt; lack of spirit.

Applied to his: "Bring it On" comment, which suggest the opposite, just what a coward would seek to project.
Applied to his National Guard Duty wherein no-one seems to remember him.
Applied to his zeal to go after basically defenseless foes.
Applied to his 'not-there' status on Sept 11th, 2001
Applied to his avoidance of remaining in Washington versus his affinity to staying at his ranch.
Applied to his fondness for using surrogates to attack politcal adversaries.
Applied to his demand to appear before the 9/11 Commission only in consort with VP Cheney.
Applied to his donning of a aviator flight suit for a photo op session where there was no danger
Applied to his early adulthood drinking binges.
Applied to his preference for meeting other powerful people on his home turf.
And lastly, applied to his lack of willingness to deal constructively with issues at odds with his peer groups' positions.
Makes sense to me.
<------------------------------------->

CLAIM VS. FACT
New Database Launched

The Center for American Progress today launched a new, searchable database to help journalists, activists and the public compare conservatives' rhetoric to factual truth. The Claim vs. Fact database, found at www.claimvfact.org, contains more than 400 separate quotes on all kinds of issues from top conservatives including Bush administration officials, members of Congress and Fox News personalities. The database contrasts these quotes with well-documented facts. And you don't have to take our word for the facts we cite – in as many places as possible, we include direct Web links to primary source materials.

WE NEED YOUR HELP: We are soliciting the public to help us build this database by submitting examples of conservatives' distortions and dishonesty not already documented in the database. Simply go to the submission page, and fill out the form. And please pass on the Web address www.claimvfact.org to as many people as possible.

UN chief hits at oil-for-food claims
By Mark Turner at the United Nations
Published: April 29 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: April 29 2004 5:00

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary-general, took the offensive yesterday against continuing allegations of corruption in Iraq's oil-for-food programme, saying the UN was being blamed for areas over which it had no control and that national governments shared responsibility for any lack of oversight.

"Some of the comments that I have read have been rather outrageous and exaggerated," he said.

"When you read the reports, it looks as if the Saddam regime had nothing to do with it: [that] it was all the UN." But Mr Annan said there was "no way" the UN could have stopped illegal oil smuggling, which accounted for $5.7bn (€4.8bn, �3.2bn) of an estimated $10.1bn in illegal revenues acquired by the Iraq regime.

National governments, through a committee of UN Security Council officials, had had a significant role in approving contracts, through which Iraq diverted an estimated $4.1bn in illegal surcharges and kickbacks.

"We had no mandate to stop oil smuggling," Mr Annan said. "There was a maritime taskforce that was supposed to do that. They were driving the trucks through northern Iraq to Turkey. The US and the British had planes in the air. We were not there. Why is all this being dumped on the UN?"

As for the approval of contracts, "of course the member states are not coming out, saying we had a role, or we had an oversight responsibility, so all is dumped on the secretariat", he said. "Be that as it may, these allegations are doing damage and we need to face it sternly."

Some of the accusations have hit close to home, focusing on the relationship between Kojo, Mr Annan's son, and Cotecna, the company that monitored imports. Yesterday Mr Annan explicitly denied any familial wrongdoing.

"There is nothing in the accusations about my son. He joined the company, even before I became secretary-general, as a 22-year-old, as a trainee in Geneva. He was assigned to work for them in west Africa, mainly in Nigeria and Ghana," he said.

"Neither he nor I had anything to with the [Iraq] contract for Cotecna. That was done in strict accordance with UN rules."

But UN officials remain concerned at the possibility that some staff were on the take. "If at the end any UN staff members are found guilty of wrongdoing we will deal with them," Mr Annan said.

"In some situations we may even want to lift immunity, so that we do not impede the judicial process."
Note: Yes, indeed. And the US Government should also lift immunity from prosecution against those who made the charges in the first place. Make the claimants prove their claims have some merit, and are not willful figments of Karl Rowe's imagination.There should be some punishment for willful lying about dishonesty and theft by Governmental agents and bureaus by other Governmental agents and agencies, especially if the lying supports the Junta's politically motivated fabrications.
<------------------------------------->

The Human Cost

They were sent to fight for their country. But some GIs didn't have all they
needed to protect themselves

U.S. Air Force-thememoryhole.org Resting place:  A soldier prepares coffins of U.S. military personnel returning home at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware

By Melinda Liu, John Barry and Michael Hirsh

Newsweek

May 3 issue - The inaugural mission of the 1st
Cavalry's 2d Battalion, 5th Cavalry Regiment was, in its humble way, a bid for
hearts and minds. It was to safely dispose of Iraqi sewage. Having arrived in
Iraq in late March, a 19-man patrol from the battalion, traveling in four
Humvees, had just finished escorting three Iraqi "honey wagons" on
their rounds in the grim slum of Sadr City, where vendors stash eggs and
chickens in bamboo crates next to puddles of viscous black mud. ("You're
lucky if it's mud," joked one U.S. officer.) Suddenly the street became
"a 300-meter-long kill zone," recalls platoon leader Sgt. Shane
Aguero, courtesy of gunmen from the Mahdi militia of Shiite rebel Moqtada al-Sadr.
The Humvees swerved and ran onto sidewalks, rolling on the rims of flat tires,
as gunmen kept up the barrage of bullets. Sgt. Yihjyh (Eddie) Chen, gunner in
the lead vehicle, was shot dead. Another soldier was hit and began bleeding
from the mouth. As they'd been drilled to do, the soldiers set out to strip
the disabled vehicles of sensitive items and to "zee off the
radio"—to see that codes and equipment don't fall into enemy hands.
When another group got ambushed nearby, an enemy round came through the
Humvee's right rear door—through retrofitted panels that the soldiers had
been told would repel AK-47 rounds. Miraculously, none of the three people
inside were hit. Then a third Humvee sputtered to a halt: debris had pierced
the fuel tank. "It just wouldn't start; we coasted the last 50 yards out
of the kill zone," said its driver, Spc. Dee Foster. At last an armored
Bradley fighting vehicle arrived, and its steel ramp opened to scoop him and
his buddies to safety.

For the Bush administration it has been a mantra, one the president intones
repeatedly: America's troops will get whatever they need to do the job. But as
Iraq's liberation has turned into a daily grind of low-intensity combat—and
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld grudgingly raises troop levels—many
soldiers who are there say the Pentagon is failing to protect them with the
best technology America has to offer. Especially tanks, Bradleys and other
heavy vehicles, even in some cases body armor. That has been the tragic lesson
of April, a month in which a record 115 U.S. soldiers have died so far and 879
others have been wounded, 560 of them fairly seriously. Those numbers greatly
exceed the tallies in the combat-heavy weeks of the invasion last spring. And
the impact of those deaths was felt more fully last week when blogger Russ
Kick, after filing a Freedom of Information Act request, won the release of
photos showing coffins returning to Dover Air Force Base in Delaware.

Soldiers in Iraq complain that Washington has been
too slow to acknowledge that the Iraqi insurgency consists of more than
"dead-enders." And even at the Pentagon many officers say Rumsfeld
and his brass have been too reluctant to modify their long-term plans for a
lighter military. On the battlefield, that has translated into a lack of
armor. Perhaps the most telling example: a year ago the Pentagon had more than
400 main battle tanks in Iraq; as of recently, a senior Defense official told
NEWSWEEK, there was barely a brigade's worth of operational tanks still there.
(A brigade usually has about 70 tanks.)

In continuing adherence to the Army's "light is
better" doctrine, even units recently rotated to Iraq have left most of
their armor behind. These include the I Marine Expeditionary Force, which has
paid dearly for that decision with an astonishing 30 percent-plus casualties
(45 killed, more than 300 wounded) in Fallujah and Ar Ramadi. The Army's 1st
Cavalry Division—which includes the unit in Sadr City—left five of every
six of its tanks at home, and five of every six Bradleys.

A breakdown of the casualty figures suggests that
many U.S. deaths and wounds in Iraq simply did not need to occur. According to
an unofficial study by a defense consultant that is now circulating through
the Army, of a total of 789 Coalition deaths as of April 15 (686 of them
Americans), 142 were killed by land mines or improvised explosive devices,
while 48 others died in rocket-propelled-grenade attacks. Almost all those
soldiers were killed while in unprotected vehicles, which means that perhaps
one in four of those killed in combat in Iraq might be alive if they had had
stronger armor around them, the study suggested. Thousands more who were
unprotected have suffered grievous wounds, such as the loss of limbs.

 

Maurizio Gambarini / EPA In harm's way: A U.S. Marine driving a bullet-riddled Humvee in Iraq in early April

The military is 1,800 armored Humvees short of its own stated requirement for
Iraq. Despite desperate attempts to supply bolt-on armor, many soldiers still
ride around in light-skinned Humvees. This is a latter-day jeep that, as Brig.
Gen. Mark P. Hertling, assistant division commander of the 1st Armored
Division, conceded in an interview, "was never designed to do this ... It
was never anticipated that we would have things like roadside bombs in the
vast number that we've had here." One newly arrived officer, Lt. Col.
Timothy Meredith, says his battalion had just undergone months of training to
rid itself of "tank habits" and get used to the Humvees. "We
arrived here expecting to do a lot of civil works," says Meredith.

According to internal Pentagon e-mails obtained by NEWSWEEK, the Humvee
situation is so bad that the head of the U.S. Army Forces Command, Gen. Larry
Ellis, has urged that more of the new Stryker combat vehicles be put into the
field. Sources say that the Army brass back in Washington have not yet
concurred with that. The problem: the rubber-tire Strykers are thin-skinned
and don't maneuver through dangerous streets as well as the fast-pivoting,
treaded Bradley. According to a well-placed Defense Department source, the
Army is so worried about the Stryker's vulnerability that most of the
300-vehicle brigade currently in Iraq has been deployed up in the safer
Kurdish region around Mosul. "Any further south, and the Army was afraid
the Arabs would light them up," he said.

Other quick fixes are being rushed in. In Ohio,
O'Gara-Hess and Eisenhardt Armoring Co. says it is flush with new orders to
crank out 300 "up-armored" Humvees per month. And Rumsfeld has just
approved a quiet plan to fly 28 M1A1 tanks from Germany into Iraq by April 27,
NEWSWEEK has learned. The move comes as the military is planning for a final
assault on the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah. Meanwhile, soldiers are
rushing to jury-rig their Humvees with anything hard they can find: bolt-on
armor, sandbags, even plywood panels, creating what one senior officer calls
"Mad Max-mobiles." But Pentagon sources say many of the retrofitted
Humvees cannot take the extra weight, and their suspension or transmission
systems fail. Another method is to spray shock-absorbing polyurethane
foam—one popular brand name is called Rhino—to the inside or outside of
unarmored vehicles.

The biggest problem, perhaps, is that the insurgents—whoever they
are—continue to be quick to spot vulnerabilities. It is probably no
coincidence that attacks have picked up significantly in April as the Marines,
the 1st Cav and other fresh—and untried—troops have rotated in. U.S.
bomb-disposal personnel generally succeed in discovering and disarming about
half of the homemade bombs that are planted. In March, an estimated 600 to 700
attacks involving homemade devices were either discovered or foiled. In April,
one administration source said, as many as 1,000 homemade bomb attacks have
been attempted.

The need for more armor—and possibly
troops—erupted as an issue on Capitol Hill last week in combative hearings
of the Senate and House Armed Services committees. "We are not structured
for the security environment we're in," Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen.
Richard Myers told senators and congressmen, including some angry Republicans.
As part of his 2005 budget request, Rumsfeld had originally cut the Army
budget by 6 percent. But the Army has identified nearly $6 billion in unfunded
requests—and more are on the way. "The costs are going to be
staggering," says Sen. Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat who has
pestered the Pentagon for months for better estimates. Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told the House committee that military operations in
Iraq are now costing about $4.7 billion a month—a sum that approaches the $5
billion a month (on average) that the Vietnam War cost, adjusted for
inflation.

Sen. John McCain says the Pentagon needs an
additional division beyond the 20,000 men it is leaving in Iraq for 90-day
extensions. Another senator and Vietnam vet, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, even
suggested the nation might have to take a long-term look at reviving the
draft. Few others went that far, but one knowledgeable Army officer points out
that Rumsfeld's standing "stop-loss" order—basically a freeze on
retirements—is a "silent draft." It is not expected to be lifted
"for the foreseeable future," the officer said. On Capitol Hill,
Myers spoke of transforming old field-artillery and air-defense battalions
into new units. But the Pentagon has yet to come to grips with its armor
crisis—or its human cost.

With Babak Dehghanpisheh in Baghdad, Mark
Hosenball and Tamara Lipper in Washington and T. Trent Gegax in New York

Chicago Tribune: AP: 10 U.S. Contractors in Iraq Penalized

By MATT KELLEY
Associated Press Writer

April 26, 2004, 10:16 PM CDT

WASHINGTON -- Ten companies with billions of dollars in U.S. contracts for Iraq reconstruction have paid more than $300 million in penalties since 2000 to resolve allegations of bid rigging, fraud, delivery of faulty military parts and environmental damage. "

Scandal: Oil for Food

Scandal With No Friends
By WILLIAM SAFIRE
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 19, 2004

WASHINGTON — How fares the multination cover-up of the richest rip-off in world history?

Obstruction of justice has never had it so good. Last month, after some badgering in this space and elsewhere, the House International Relations Committee announced it would look into the $5 billion kickback scandal in the United Nations' six-year Iraqi oil-for-food program, the largest humanitarian aid effort ever undertaken.

Note: Point of Order Mr. Safire: With the current US Military direct cost of $4.5 billion per month, and the over $150 billion thus far spent in Iraq by America does it seem to you that the UN Oil for Food Scandal approaches the magnitude of the Bush Administration Scandals, such as the overcharges by hand-picked US suppliers like Halliburton, the inappropriate diversion of $700 million from the Afgan War, the sequestering of Chalabi's INC organization, the improper favors shown to the Saudi monarchy, or the adopted disdain for a balanced solution to the Palestinian situation?

Really Sir, five billion dollars in questionable spending over six years by the UN, does not begin to compare to an estimated $300 billion over six years in questionable spending for the Iraq invasion to be paid by America? Scandal and major league ripoff is in the eye of the beholder.

It seems to this reader that you are trying a bit of diversion by pointing to an alledged weakness in a UN program which may be used domestically as a cover for the Bush Administration's Mid-East policies. Put the House hearings in context, and scale. Your guys have been wrong, have refused to admit it, and have not come up with any internationally supportable way out of the quagmire your guys took us into!

Dr. Anthony Cordesman from the Center for Stategic & International Studies

Dec 2002: Planning for a Self-Inflicted Wound: US Policy to Reshape a Post-Saddam Iraq

April 2004: Iraq: On the Precipice of Failure?

April 2004: The Impact of President Bush's Speech/Press Conference

In References by Paul Krugman April 2004:
What Went Wrong?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 23, 2004

It's now widely accepted that the administration "failed dismally to prepare for the security and nation-building missions in Iraq," to quote Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies — not heretofore known as a Bush basher. Just as experts on peacekeeping predicted before the war, the invading force was grossly inadequate to maintain postwar security. And this problem was compounded by a chain of blunders: doing nothing to stop the postwar looting, disbanding the Iraqi Army, canceling local elections, appointing an interim council dominated by exiles with no political base and excluding important domestic groups.

Cronyism and corruption are major factors in Iraq's downward spiral. This week the public radio program "Marketplace" is running a series titled "The Spoils of War," which documents a level of corruption in Iraq worse than even harsh critics had suspected. The waste of money, though it may run into the billions, is arguably the least of it — though military expenses are now $4.7 billion a month. The administration, true to form, is trying to hide the need for more money until after the election; Mr. Cordesman predicts that Iraq will need "in excess of $50-70 billion a year for probably two fiscal years."

More important, the "Marketplace" report confirms what is being widely reported: that the common view in Iraq is that members of the U.S.-appointed Governing Council are using their positions to enrich themselves, and that U.S. companies are doing the same. President Bush's idealistic language may be persuasive to Americans, but many Iraqis see U.S. forces as there to back a corrupt regime, not democracy.

Now what? There's a growing sense of foreboding, even panic, about Iraq among national security experts. "This is an extremely uncertain struggle," says Mr. Cordesman, who, to his credit, also says the unsayable: we may not be able to "stay the course." But yesterday Condoleezza Rice gave Republican lawmakers what Senator Rick Santorum called "a very upbeat report." That's very bad news. The mess in Iraq was created by officials who believed what they wanted to believe, and ignored awkward facts. It seems they have learned nothing.

A Shorter Version of: "Against All Enemies"

The Wrong Debate on Terrorism
By RICHARD A. CLARKE
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 25, 2004

The last month has seen a remarkable series of events that focused the public and news media on America's shortcomings in dealing with terrorism from radical Islamists. This catharsis, which is not yet over, is necessary for our national psyche. If we learn the right lessons, it may also prove to be an essential part of our future victory over those who now threaten us.

But how do we select the right lessons to learn? I tried to suggest some in my recent book, and many have attempted to do so in the 9/11 hearings, but such efforts have been largely eclipsed by partisan reaction.

One lesson is that even though we are the world's only remaining superpower — as we were before Sept. 11, 2001 — we are seriously threatened by an ideological war within Islam. It is a civil war in which a radical Islamist faction is striking out at the West and at moderate Muslims. Once we recognize that the struggle within Islam — not a "clash of civilizations" between East and West — is the phenomenon with which we must grapple, we can begin to develop a strategy and tactics for doing so. It is a battle not only of bombs and bullets, but chiefly of ideas. It is a war that we are losing, as more and more of the Islamic world develops antipathy toward the United States and some even develop a respect for the jihadist movement.

I do not pretend to know the formula for winning that ideological war. But I do know that we cannot win it without significant help from our Muslim friends, and that many of our recent actions (chiefly the invasion of Iraq) have made it far more difficult to obtain that cooperation and to achieve credibility.

What we have tried in the war of ideas has also fallen short. It is clear that United States government versions of MTV or CNN in Arabic will not put a dent in the popularity of the anti-American jihad. Nor will calls from Washington for democratization in the Arab world help if such calls originate from a leader who is trying to impose democracy on an Arab country at the point of an American bayonet. The Bush administration's much-vaunted Middle East democracy initiative, therefore, was dead on arrival.

We must also be careful, while advocating democracy in the region, that we do not undermine the existing regimes without having a game plan for what should follow them and how to get there. The lesson of President Jimmy Carter's abandonment of the shah of Iran in 1979 should be a warning. So, too, should we be chastened by the costs of eliminating the regime of Saddam Hussein, almost 25 years after the shah, also without a detailed plan for what would follow.

Other parts of the war of ideas include making real progress on the Israel-Palestinian issue, while safe-guarding Israeli security, and finding ideological and religious counter-weights to Osama bin Laden and the radical imams. Fashioning a comprehensive strategy to win the battle of ideas should be given as much attention as any other aspect of the war on terrorists, or else we will fight this war for the foreseeable future. For even when Osama bin Laden is dead, his ideas will carry on. Even as Al Qaeda has had its leadership attacked, it has morphed into a hydra, carrying out more major attacks in the 30 months since 9/11 than it did in the three years before.

The second major lesson of the last month of controversy is that the organizations entrusted with law enforcement and intelligence in the United States had not fully accepted the gravity of the threat prior to 9/11. Because this is now so clear, there will be a tendency to overemphasize organizational fixes. The 9/11 commission and President Bush seem to be in a race to propose creating a "director of national intelligence," who would be given control over all American intelligence agencies. The commission may also recommend a domestic security intelligence service, probably modeled on Britain's MI-5.

While some structural changes are necessary, they are a small part of the solution. And there is a risk that concentrating on chain-of-authority diagrams of federal agencies will further divert our attention from more important parts of the agenda. This new director of national intelligence would be able to make only marginal changes to agency budgets and interactions. The more important task is improving the quality of the analysts, agents and managers at the lead foreign intelligence agency, the Central Intelligence Agency.

In addition, no new domestic security intelligence service could leap full grown from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Department of Homeland Security. Indeed, creating another new organization while we are in a key phase in the war on terrorism would ignore the lesson that we should have learned from the creation of Homeland Security. Many observers, including some in the new department, now agree that the forced integration and reorganization of 22 agencies diverted attention from the missions of several agencies that were needed to go after the terrorists and to reduce our vulnerabilities at home.

We do not need another new agency right now. We do, however, need to create within the F.B.I. a strong organization that is vastly different from the federal police agency that was unable to notice the Al Qaeda presence in America before 9/11. For now, any American version of MI-5 must be a branch within the F.B.I. — one with a higher quality of analysts, agents and managers.

Rather than creating new organizations, we need to give the C.I.A. and F.B.I. makeovers. They cannot continue to be dominated by careerists who have carefully managed their promotions and ensured their retirement benefits by avoiding risk and innovation for decades. The agencies need regular infusions throughout their supervisory ranks of managers and thinkers from other, more creative organizational cultures.

In the new F.B.I., marksmanship, arrests and skill on the physical training obstacle course should no longer be prerequisites for recruitment and retention. Similarly, within the C.I.A. we should quash the belief that — as George Tenet, the director of central intelligence, told the 9/11 commission — those who have never worked in the directorate of operations cannot understand it and are unqualified to criticize it.

Finally, we must try to achieve a level of public discourse on these issues that is simultaneously energetic and mutually respectful. I hoped, through my book and testimony, to make criticism of the conduct of the war on terrorism and the separate war in Iraq more active and legitimate. We need public debate if we are to succeed. We should not dismiss critics through character assassination, nor should we besmirch advocates of the Patriot Act as fascists.

We all want to defeat the jihadists. To do that, we need to encourage an active, critical and analytical debate in America about how that will best be done. And if there is another major terrorist attack in this country, we must not panic or stifle debate as we did for too long after 9/11.

Richard A. Clarke, former head of counterterrorism at the National Security Council, is the author of "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror."
<------------------------------------->

Texas Salesman

A young guy from Texas moves to California and goes to a big mega-department store looking for a job. The manager says, "Do you have any sales experience?" The kid says, "Yeah, I was a salesman back home in Texas."

Well, the boss liked the kid so he gave him the job. "You can start tomorrow. I'll come down after we close and see how you did." His first day on the job was rough, but he got through it. After the store was locked up, the boss came down.

"How many sales did you make today?" the boss asked.The kid says, "One." The boss says, "Just one? Our sales people average 20 to 30 sales a day. How much was the sale for?"

The kid says, $101,237.64.

The boss says, $101,237.64? What the hell did you sell?" The kid says, "First I sold him a small fish hook. Then I sold him a medium fish hook. Then I sold him a larger fish hook. Then I sold him a new fishing rod.

Then I asked him where he was going fishing and he said down the coast, so I told him he was going to need a boat, so we went down to the boat department and I sold him that twin engine Chris Craft.

Then he said he didn't think his Honda Civic would pull it, so I took him down to the automotive department and sold him that 4 x 4 Blazer."

The boss said, "A guy came in here to buy a fish hook and you sold him a boat and truck?"

The kid says, "No, he came in here to buy a box of tampons for his wife and I said, "Well, your weekend's shot -- you might as well go fishing."

You Go Joe !!

CEO Pay Went Up 19% Last Year. Three Cheers for The Economy Recovery
By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPoliticstoday.com

I love the Wall Street Journal.

Here’s what I love most. They speak truth to financial power. And they do it from their unique vantage in the rarified atmosphere of lower Manhattan where so much of the world’s wealth and corporate decision-making is managed. It's not uncommon to see on the Journal's news pages the toughest and most carefully documented articles published anywhere about corporate and accounting fraud, economic mismanagement and other violations of the capitalist system.

What triggers this love note to the Journal is a whole section it published April 12 about executive pay, based on an annual survey by Mercer Human Resource Consulting. Many CEOs and their corporate boards are likely to have seen this report and then looked at their shoes with embarrassment. Let’s hope. They should.

Example:

The median white collar worker made $46,100 in 2003, an increase of 3.3% from the previous year. By contrast, the median CEO at 350 of the nation’s largest corporations, made $3.6 million, an increase of 19% from the previous year.

The disparity hardly needs further explanation, but the Journal goes on to note that it’s even worse than it looks. If you factor in stock and options the typical CEO receives, the average jumps to $6.2 million. As Journal columnist Jesse Eisinger points out after looking at these numbers, “Most of the top CEOs didn’t invent anything, nor are they entrepreneurs. They are custodians. Yes, they are caretakers with big responsibilities—but not that big.”

Drilling down into the numbers we quickly find Rueben Mark, the CEO of Colgate-Palmolive with total compensation in 2003 of $141 million. (above average, as Garrison Keeler might say on Prairie Home Companion. Shareholders of Mr. Mark’s company didn’t share in his good fortune. They lost 2.5% last year.

David Dorman, CEO of AT&T, presides over a company whose share value has declined 17% over 5 years, and even lost 2.6% in 2003—when most stocks enjoyed robust growth. Dorman took home about $7.5 million for his contribution to this performance.

The Journal neglected to point out that 2003 was also a year when more companies than ever shipped jobs overseas and cut back on employee health benefits to "cut operating costs and become more competitive." I don't think it's off point to mention those details here.

One of the drivers of such high CEO pay is the issuance of stock options. Volumes have been written during the past few years about how tying CEO and other top executive pay to an increase in stock price has led to shareholder calamities such as Enron, Worldcom and the other fast-Eddie businesses that are now in the process of “reorganization."

The Wall Street Journal’s Executive Pay edition has a lot to say about stock options—noting that fewer companies are granting them and that shareholders voted on a record 201 CEO pay limiting resolutions in 2003, 49 of which passed. Remarkable, since most corporate votes resemble Cuba's, where you don't need exit polls to know the results in advance.

On the bright side, the Journal's Executive Pay edition features John Faraci, chairman and CEO of International Paper who dropped options in favor of performance-based shares. Faraci and his top executives designed a plan where they can only sell their shares if the company achieves better return on investment and total shareholder return better than the median player in its peer group.

Performance-based rewards? What will they think of next?

Not everyone is for changing the system, as you might imagine. The powerful Washington Business Roundtable looked at executive compensation last year and warned compensation committees to “resist an over-reliance on surveys and other statistical analyses in determining compensation levels….Company specific factors should be given significant weight in determining executive compensation.” Read between the lines—"how cozy are the board members with the CEO."

Despite the hold-outs there’s no question that a new sense of shareholder activism, driven mainly by large pension funds and organized labor, has been having an impact on what up until lately has been a tightly circular system: The CEO maneuvers a friendly board into a lush contract, and the board, in turn is rewarded with lush perks.

But a number of obstacles have popped up in the way of that relationship.

--With the Internet and high speed communications, many more people are much better informed about the inner workings of the company than ever before.
--The accounting and corporate scandals of the past few years have shot down the stars in the eyes of investors who thought they could depend on institutional protections.
--The gaps between them on top and the rest of us is widening, and the blatant unfairness of a CEO who takes home megabucks more than the average company worker is too hard to miss.

Michael Eisner’s dismissal as CEO of Disney was a high visibility shot across the bow. Even with all of the evident waste and mismanagement at Disney, Eisner might have kept his mouse ears on if the corporate environment in general had not changed.

Other CEOs are also biting the dust. Hit lists of Board members are widespread. In this age of outsourcing, maybe Eisner and some of his fellow CEOs and corporate insiders might be re-trained after losing their jobs. That's certainly the solution the economists try to stuff down the throats of displaced workers lower down on the pay scale.

Maybe they can be trained in a new and expanding manufacturing field, like fast food management.
<------------------------------------->
Joe Rothstein, editor of USPoliticstoday.com, is a former daily newspaper editor and long-time national political strategist based in Washington, D.C.

A 100 Person Village

THIS PUTS OUR WORLD INTO PERSPECTIVE:

If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following:

There would be...

57 Asians
21 Europeans
14 from the Western Hemisphere, north & south
8 Africans
52 would be female
48 would be male
70 would be nonwhite
30 would be white
70 would be non-Christian
30 would be Christian
89 would be heterosexual
11 would be homosexual
6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth, and all 6 would be from the United States
80 would live in substandard housing
70 would be unable to read
50 would suffer from malnutrition
1 would be near death
1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education
1 would own a computer.

When one considers our world from such a compressed perspective, the need for acceptance, understanding and education becomes glaringly apparent.
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Empires' Collapse if Not Tended To Vigorously

Losing Our Edge?
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 22, 2004

I was just out in Silicon Valley, checking in with high-tech entrepreneurs about the state of their business. I wouldn't say they were universally gloomy, but I did detect something I hadn't detected before: a real undertow of concern that America is losing its competitive edge vis-à-vis China, India, Japan and other Asian tigers, and that the Bush team is deaf, dumb and blind to this situation.

Several executives explained to me that they were opening new plants in Asia — not because of cheaper labor. Labor is a small component now in an automated high-tech manufacturing plant. It is because governments in these countries are so eager for employment and the transfer of technology to their young populations that they are offering huge tax holidays for U.S. manufacturers who will set up shop. Because most of these countries also offer some form of national health insurance, U.S. companies shed that huge open liability as well.

Other executives complained bitterly that the Department of Homeland Security is making it so hard for legitimate foreigners to get visas to study or work in America that many have given up the age-old dream of coming here. Instead, they are studying in England and other Western European nations, and even China. This is leading to a twofold disaster.

First, one of America's greatest assets — its ability to skim the cream off the first-round intellectual draft choices from around the world and bring them to our shores to innovate — will be diminished, and that in turn will shrink our talent pool. And second, we could lose a whole generation of foreigners who would normally come here to study, and then would take American ideas and American relationships back home. In a decade we will feel that loss in America's standing around the world.

Still others pointed out that the percentage of Americans graduating with bachelor's degrees in science and engineering is less than half of the comparable percentage in China and Japan, and that U.S. government investments are flagging in basic research in physics, chemistry and engineering. Anyone who thinks that all the Indian and Chinese techies are doing is answering call-center phones or solving tech problems for Dell customers is sadly mistaken. U.S. firms are moving serious research and development to India and China.

The bottom line: we are actually in the middle of two struggles right now. One is against the Islamist terrorists in Iraq and elsewhere, and the other is a competitiveness-and-innovation struggle against India, China, Japan and their neighbors. And while we are all fixated on the former (I've been no exception), we are completely ignoring the latter. We have got to get our focus back in balance, not to mention our budget. We can't wage war on income taxes and terrorism and a war for innovation at the same time.

Craig Barrett, the C.E.O. of Intel, noted that Intel sponsors an international science competition every year. This year it attracted some 50,000 American high school kids. "I was in China 10 days ago," Mr. Barrett said, "and I asked them how many kids in China participated in the local science fairs that feed into the national fair [and ultimately the Intel finals]. They told me six million kids."

For now, the U.S. still excels at teaching science and engineering at the graduate level, and also in university research. But as the Chinese get more feeder stock coming up through their high schools and colleges, "they will get to the same level as us after a decade," Mr. Barrett said. "We are not graduating the volume, we do not have a lock on the infrastructure, we do not have a lock on the new ideas, and we are either flat-lining, or in real dollars cutting back, our investments in physical science."

And what is the Bush strategy? Let's go to Mars. Hello? Right now we should have a Manhattan Project to develop a hydrogen-based energy economy — it's within reach and would serve our economy, our environment and our foreign policy by diminishing our dependence on foreign oil. Instead, the Bush team says let's go to Mars. Where is Congress? Out to lunch — or, worse, obsessed with trying to keep Susie Smith's job at the local pillow factory that is moving to the Caribbean — without thinking about a national competitiveness strategy. And where is Wall Street? So many of the plutocrats there know that the Bush fiscal policy is a long-term disaster. They know it — but they won't say a word because they are too greedy or too gutless.

The only crisis the U.S. thinks it's in today is the war on terrorism, Mr. Barrett said. "It's not."
<------------------------------------->

Another View of Outsourcing

Outsourcing Failures?
By: Michael F. Corbett & Associates, Ltd.

The power of outsourcing to transform organizations and deliver improved business performance is well understood and well documented. Outsourcing is now the “preferred option” over internal investments in non-core areas at many of today’s leading technology companies—from industry powerhouse Microsoft to fast-growing upstarts like Outercurve Technologies and Vertical Networks.

Long-time Fortune 500 companies, such as American Express, General Motors and United Technologies are adopting outsourcing at an accelerating pace. At the same time, the outsourcing industry itself is flourishing, lead by companies such as Arthur Andersen, Xerox, Trammell Crow Company, Salience, Pitney Bowes, Ikon, Fluor Global Services, and hundreds of others. These firms are successfully providing sophisticated outsourcing solutions across technology, facilities operations, logistics, manufacturing, finance, and human resources—literally every conceivable aspect of a modern business operation.

Interestingly, against this backdrop the topic that’s arising with increasing regularity is outsourcing failures. How often do outsourcing relationships fail? What are the reasons? What can be done to avoid these failures? Do the companies actually bring the work back in-house or do they move to another provider? What are the ramifications? Are there high-profile examples that can be examined in detail and from which we can learn?

What Surveys Tell Us
There are a number of surveys that report what appears on the surface to be an alarming rate of outsourcing failures.

One place these figures show up is in the, Dun & Bradstreet Barometer of Global Outsourcing that D&B researches and publishes annually. The 2000 study was based on telephone interviews with 2,200 companies with revenue of $10 million or more in sales, plus banks and hospitals. Another 1,000 interviews were conducted with smaller firms. D&B drew from its database of more than 57 million companies worldwide to select its sample.

The Barometer found that it appeared that global spending on outsourcing would increase 25 percent in 2000 alone, reaching US$1 trillion annually—an extraordinary number. A full 90 percent of the companies reported that they planned to increase their outsourcing spending in 2000. Thus, spending growth in this area in the U.S. continues at the very healthy pace of 15 percent a year, while spending in Asia is expected to increase by 50 percent. In the U.S. the functional areas of administration, marketing and sales, human resources, and manufacturing are showing the fastest growth.

While this would seem to present quite a rosy outlook, the Barometer also found that 25 percent of all firms’ functions report an outsourcing relationship failure within the past two years. “Failure” was defined as the termination by the client of a contract before its expiration date for contracts that had been in place for at least one year. The idea that one-quarter of all executives experience an outsourcing failure, by this definition, is most certainly a matter of real concern.

Another study, published by Dataquest, reported that more than half (53 percent) of all outsourcing customers surveyed said that they had renegotiated an outsourcing contract, and in nearly one-quarter of these renegotiations the provider lost the account. While this is a much less dismal picture, it still might give pause to those who view outsourcing contracts as stable long-term relationships.

Another angle from which to consider outsourcing failures is the provider side—this offers a look at a measurement called the annual client retention rate. While this rate, on the industry average, is generally thought to be about 90 percent, some providers enjoy annual retention rates as high as 95 percent-plus. But that still means that the average provider loses about 10 percent of its contracts annually. This figure includes normal contract expirations that aren’t renewed, customers that go out of business or disappear through mergers and acquisitions, as well as straight-out cancellations for whatever the reason may be.

This 90 percent number is more or less in line with a recent survey we conducted in association with Facility Design and Management magazine. This survey found a 90 percent satisfaction rate among customers of a wide range of facilities outsourcing services. If 90 percent of these customers are satisfied, and if they are representative of outsourcing customers across other functional areas, then the reports of higher failure rates seem out of line. Then again, satisfaction does not necessarily mean that a contract won’t be prematurely terminated; it takes a lot more than simple satisfaction to keep customers today.

Perhaps the best way to put all of this in perspective is to compare all of these statistics/conclusions with other business-related statistics. According to KPMG, just one in five mergers lives up to its promise—an 80 percent failure rate—and Business Week recently (December 11, 2000) profiled 10 M&As that had been extremely costly to the companies’ shareholders. Then there’s the growing turnover rate for CEOs and other top executives. During 2000, CEOs at 39 of the 200 largest U.S. companies left their jobs by the fall of the year, compared to a total of 23 who left the 200 biggest during all of 1999. One could interpret this as representing a 20 percent-plus “failure rate” for CEOs.

While these comparisons bring some perspective to the issue, this is not to suggest that there isn’t a problem. No matter what the precise outsourcing failure rate may be, one thing is clear—even a single failure is costly to both parties.

What Is the Cause of Outsourcing Failures?
Putting the discussion of the failure rate aside and turning to the underlying reasons, Dun & Bradstreet, in its 2000 study, went on to ask customers just why the contracts were terminated. Although the responses were expressed in many different ways, the main underlying issue seemed to be that customers simply did not see the return that they had expected. Sometimes the services were reported as being “too expensive.” In other instances, cancellation was because the provider “did not perform” or the customer concluded they could “do it better themselves.”

Basically, when outsourcing relationships fail it is most often due to a disconnect between the customer’s expectations and the perceived results. We don’t know whether it’s a matter of too-high expectations or too-low performance, and we don’t know to what extent it’s the provider or the customer who is contributing to these misperceptions. What can be said with certainty is that both customers and providers alike need to do a better job of setting expectations at the beginning of the relationship and then executing and measuring outcomes against those expectations. This is something which would seem to be easy enough to accomplish, but in the real world—especially one moving at Internet speed with markets that severely punish missed expectations—it is increasingly difficult.

What’s the Good News?
The good news is that although outsourcing relationships can be rocky at times, larger outsourcing relationships almost never fail to the point of cancellation. In fact, there are probably only one or two really high-profile outsourcing contracts cancelled in recent memory with a return of the resources and employees to the customer. What does seem to be true, however, is that there is a certain amount of re-negotiation taking place in contracts of all sizes and some level of churn—that is switching of providers—in smaller relationships. While the larger strategic deals may have their rocky periods, they involve such a large investment and so much management attention that the problems almost always get worked out.

The best news of all is that the management disciplines for ensuring outsourcing success are actually well documented. “Best Practices In Managing the Outsourcing Relationship,” developed with the support of The Outsourcing Research Council and published by Michael F. Corbett & Associates, Ltd., is one source. Other excellent books and guides to successful outsourcing are out there as well -- in particular, works by Quinn, Jones, Lacity and Willcocks.

Some of the keys to avoiding failures are to:

� Approach the relationship as a strategic investment, not as a purchasing decision.

� Make the investment to truly understand and align the interests of both parties.

� Establish an objective, measurable scorecard in advance and use it as a cornerstone of the management process.

� Define the process for escalating problems and negotiating changes and make them part of the regular, ongoing management of the relationship.

� Put experienced people in place to manage the relationship—people who have the personal, professional and economic incentives to make it work.

Where Do We Go from Here?
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U.S. offers employers ways around overtime pay

Labor Dept. Revises Plans to Cut Overtime Eligibility
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
NY Times
Published: April 21, 2004

Facing a deluge of criticism in an election year, the Bush administration yesterday scaled back its plans to deny overtime coverage to hundreds of thousands of American workers.

With many police officers, firefighters and higher-paid blue-collar workers fearing that the administration's draft regulations would make them exempt from overtime pay, Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao announced revised regulations that she said would ensure those workers still qualified.

The administration also said workers earning more than $100,000 a year would almost automatically be disqualified for overtime pay, increasing that threshold from the $65,000 it proposed a year ago. There currently is no ceiling.

Ms. Chao said the new rules, the first broad revision of overtime regulations in 50 years, would protect workers and would merely modernize and simplify regulations governing more than 100 million working people.

"Our intent is always to strengthen overtime protections," Ms. Chao said at a news conference in Washington. "We do not expect that many people will lose their overtime."

But many Democratic officials and labor leaders said the new rules favored corporate America and denied overtime pay to many middle-class workers just when they were feeling an economic squeeze.

When the Bush administration proposed new overtime rules a year ago, Labor Department officials estimated that an additional 644,000 workers would be ineligible for overtime pay. But the liberal Economic Policy Institute said the administration had deliberately underestimated the number, predicting that eight million workers would lose eligibility.

Ms. Chao said yesterday that the new rules, which take effect in 120 days, would deny eligibility to only 107,000 workers. But the administration's critics asserted that she was again underestimating the number.

"This is an administration that had no reservations about repealing overtime for eight million workers," said Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Democratic leader. "So it's hard for us to believe that they now have some transformation in that position and have been converted to an advocacy of overtime for these people."

In a statement, Senator John Kerry, the likely Democratic presidential nominee, said, "The Bush administration's changes to overtime pay strike a severe blow to what little economic security working families have left as a result of Bush's failed policies."

Under the Fair Labor Standards Act, workers are generally to receive time-and-a-half pay when they work more than 40 hours a week, except when they are salaried workers in certain executive, administrative or professional positions.

The new rules modify the tests determining who qualifies for overtime pay, with the criteria including the amount of managerial responsibility and professional training.

The pay level below which workers are automatically eligible for overtime pay will rise to $23,660, from $8,060. The administration said this threshold would guarantee overtime eligibility to 1.3 million workers who do not now receive it.

Under the current regulations, many assistant store and restaurant managers with salaries of about $20,000 do not qualify for overtime pay, even when they work 60-hour weeks.

Corporate and union officials acknowledged that it was unclear which workers earning between $23,660 and $100,000 would still qualify for overtime pay.

American corporations have pressed President Bush to revise the overtime rules, saying those regulations were so unclear that they encouraged hundreds of lawsuits in which low-level managers asserted that they deserved overtime pay.

"We're pleased that after having to live with 50-year-old regulations that no longer fit today's workplace, we finally face an update," said Katherine Lugar, vice president for legislative and political affairs with the National Retail Federation. "I expect at the end of the day we'll have more clarity."

Critics and supporters of the new rules, which are 500 pages long, said it would take days to assess exactly how many workers would be disqualified from overtime pay.. There was widespread agreement that fewer would lose eligibility than under the original proposals.

Saying the administration was heeding political concerns, Bill Samuel, the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s legislative director, said, "We think there are some partial fixes in areas where the Labor Department was under attack."

The Labor Department received more than 75,000 e-mail messages and letters commenting on its draft proposal.

Ms. Chao said the new rules would continue to provide overtime eligibility to police officers, firefighters, emergency medical technicians, blue-collar workers and licensed practical nurses, groups that said language in the draft regulations might have exempted them.

The new rules indicate that some workers earning between $23,660 and $100,000 will almost automatically be exempted, including claims adjusters, funeral directors and many computer administrators.

The original proposals angered veterans' groups because they said that training received in the military could be counted as professional education that might disqualify workers from overtime pay. The new regulations omitted that language.

Under the new rules, white-collar employees who earn at least $100,000 will be exempt from overtime pay if they regularly perform some duties of an executive, administrative or professional employee. But white-collar workers earning more than $100,000 will still receive overtime pay if covered by a union contract that provides for it.

Mark Harden's Artchive: "Artchive"; an online site devoted to fine art, and the artists who made it happen.

Artist sprays iceberg blood red
BBC - UK Edition

The crew worked in freezing conditions A controversial Danish artist has sprayed an iceberg off the coast of western Greenland in blood red. "We all have a need to decorate Mother Nature because it belongs to us," Chilean-born Marco Evaristti told the Associated Press news agency.

"This is my iceberg; it belongs to me," Mr Evaristti added.

He used 3,000 litres of paint diluted with sea water, three fire hoses, two icebreakers and a 20-man crew to complete the task in about two hours.

The crew was working on Wednesday in temperatures as cold as -23C, to spray the tip of the iceberg, which was about 900 square metres (1,080 square yards) in size.

The sea water was coloured with the same dye used to highlight meat, the artist said.

Mr Evaristti said he and his crew sailed from the small town of Illullissat and only managed to find the perfect iceberg after zigzagging among slow-moving ice floes for about 30 minutes.

There was no immediate reaction from the local Greenland authorities. Mr Evaristti is well-known for his controversial art shows. In 2000, his art display in a Danish gallery invited the public to put live goldfish through food blenders. Visitors were told they could press the "on" button if they wanted. At least one visitor did, killing two goldfish.

SCO's Status Today !

SCO Group Asked to Repay $20 Million
LA Times Headlines
From Associated Press

A lender is calling due $20 million in loans to SCO Group Inc., a Lindon, Utah, company that has made headlines with suits over Linux-related copyright and licensing claims. In a letter to SCO on Thursday, Larkspur, Calif.-based BayStar Capital cited unspecified breaches of the loan's terms in calling the loans.

"This came as a surprise to us," SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said. "We are seeking more info from BayStar on exactly how they feel we breached the agreement. We feel like we've held to the terms completely." Shares of SCO fell 60 cents to $7.77 on Nasdaq.

Artos Hotel Interlaken, Suisse, Compare Rates

How to earn $3.5 trillion and pay zero taxes
Christian Science Monitor
By David R. Francis

The April 2 release of a General Accounting Office report on corporate taxes could hardly have been better timed to get press attention. Just as millions of Americans were filling out their federal 2003 tax forms to beat the April 15 deadline, the GAO study indicated that most corporations owed no taxes from 1996 to 2000, a boom period for corporate profits. Those untaxed corporations earned $3.5 trillion of revenues.

For years, companies and their representatives, such as the National Association of Manufacturers, have complained that businesses are overtaxed. The latest studies of corporate taxation suggest that, in general, this is not true. "The usual arguments may be baloney," says Piatt.

The GAO study found that 71 percent of foreign-controlled corporations operating in the United States paid no taxes in those five years; nor did 61 percent of US-controlled companies.

The basic corporate tax rate stands officially at 35 percent. In reality, it's far below that for most companies. And the importance of corporate tax revenues for Uncle Sam has shrunk. That's shown by the numbers.

Corporate taxes have fallen from 5 percent of gross domestic product, the nation's output of goods and services, in 1946 to 1.4 percent now.

As a percentage of all federal tax revenues, corporate tax payments have declined from 23 percent in 1960 to 13 percent in 1980 and 8 percent today.

Using data from the financial statements of publicly traded companies, the average effective tax rate was 12 percent in 2002, down from 15 percent in 1999, and 18 percent in 1995, according to a study by John Graham, a finance professor at Duke University's Fuqua School of Business.

And Washington is not doing as much as it has in the past to see that companies pay their tax bills. In 2003, the Internal Revenue Service conducted face-to-face audits of only 29 percent of the largest firms - those with assets of more than $250 million. That compares with 34.7 percent in 1999, notes a report by Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a government watchdog group. The IRS says it's stepping up tax shelter investigations, and adding 250 examiners to its corporate division this year.

Other factors reducing the corporate tax burden in recent years include more tax shelters, new tax breaks, and the transfer of profits by multinational companies to low-tax foreign nations, figures Martin Sullivan, an economist with Tax Notes, a prominent tax publication. Companies have also written off the cost of stock options from their tax liability, yet largely ignore their cost in their profit and loss statements. Proposed changes in accounting rules may stop this practice.

The issue of corporate taxes was also thrust into the presidential campaign by Democratic Sen. John Kerry's criticisms of President Bush for failing to crack down on corporate tax dodgers. As for Senator Kerry's proposal to trim corporate income taxes by 5 percent, Richard Du Boff, a professor emeritus of economics at Bryn Mawr College, outside Philadelphia, calls it a "bad idea." Kerry has mentioned offsetting any revenue loss by "eliminating tax loopholes that push jobs overseas."

Mr. Du Boff remains unimpressed: "In every way, shape, and form," both Democrats and Republicans have been "doing their best to lower the corporate tax burden," he says. Curiously, economists on both the right and left agree on the need to close corporate tax loopholes.

But members of the congressional tax committees have milked the tax code for years to obtain campaign money, he says. The corporate research and development tax credit, for instance, is only renewed for a year or two at a time. That encourages firms that benefit from the credit to continue to make party donations.

Who bears the brunt of corporate taxes has always been something of a mystery to economists. Do the taxes paid by firms get shifted to consumers in the form of higher prices, to employees in the form of lower wages, or to shareholders by lower dividends and profits? Or to all of them?

"We really don't know," says Sullivan. But if Washington decides more revenues are essential, corporations may not be able to duck the tax man next time

Questions of Interest
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 20, 2004

Yes, the republic is in danger," a friend said. "But what's going to happen to interest rates?" O.K., let's take a break from politics.

Over the past two years, interest rates have been very low. Last June the 10-year bond rate hit a 48-year low. Even three weeks ago the rate was still below 4 percent, a level last seen in 1963.

If the economy fully recovers — or even if investors just think it will — interest rates will rise sharply. In its World Economic Outlook report, to be issued tomorrow, the International Monetary Fund urges the Federal Reserve to prepare the economy for higher rates to "avoid financial market disruption both domestically and abroad."

But how far will rates rise? Let's not get into Greenspan Kremlinology, parsing the chairman's mumbles for clues about the Fed's next move. Let's ask, instead, how much rates will rise if and when normal conditions of supply and demand resume in the bond market.

My calculations keep leading me to a 10-year bond rate of 7 percent, and a mortgage rate of 8.5 percent — with a substantial possibility that the numbers will be even higher. Current rates are about 4.3 and 5.8 percent, respectively; you can see why the I.M.F. is worried about "financial market disruption."

Why 7 percent? Well, in the past 20 years the average yield on 10-year bonds has, in fact, been about 7 percent. Why shouldn't we think of that as the norm?

Some people say that unlike past interest rates, future interest rates won't include a premium for expected inflation. Indeed, over the past 20 years the average inflation rate was 3 percent, considerably higher than recent experience. But in the first three months of 2004, prices rose at an annual rate of more than 5 percent. That number included soaring gasoline prices, but even the "core" price index, which excludes food and energy, rose at a 2.9 percent rate.

More to the point, investors expect considerable inflation over the next 10 years. The spread between "inflation protected" bonds, whose payments are indexed to the Consumer Price Index, and ordinary bonds indicates an expected inflation rate of 2.5 percent during the next decade.

So you can't claim that interest rates will be far below historical levels because inflation is gone. And on the other side, we need to think about the impact of budget deficits.

That last sentence will send the deficit apologists to battle stations (sorry, I can't avoid politics completely). For many years, advocates of tax cuts have insisted that the normal laws of supply and demand don't apply to the bond market, and that government borrowing — unlike borrowing by families or businesses — doesn't affect interest rates. But there's no argument among serious, nonideological economists. For example, a textbook by Gregory Mankiw, now the president's chief economist, declares — in italics — that "when the government reduces national saving by running a budget deficit, the interest rate rises."

The Congressional Budget Office estimates this year's structural budget deficit — what the deficit would be if cyclical factors like a depressed economy went away — at 3.9 percent of G.D.P. That's almost twice the average during the past 20 years. Standard estimates say this should push up 10-year interest rates by around one percentage point.

Finally, there's the upside risk. As I've pointed out before, the twin U.S. budget and trade deficits would set alarm bells ringing if we were a third world country. For now, America gets the benefit of the doubt, but if financial markets decide that we have turned into a banana republic, the sky's the limit for interest rates.

Now for the obvious point: many American families and businesses will be in big trouble if interest rates really do go as high as I'm suggesting. That's why the I.M.F. is urging the Fed to get the word out.

And one suspects that the fund, which, like Alan Greenspan, tends to convey messages in code, is firing a shot across Mr. Greenspan's bow. A number of analysts have accused Mr. Greenspan of fostering a debt bubble in recent years, just as they accuse him of feeding the stock bubble during the 1990's. Just two months ago, Mr. Greenspan went out of his way to emphasize the financial benefits of adjustable-rate, as opposed to fixed-rate, mortgages. Let's hope that not too many families regarded that as useful advice.

EIA Consumer Education Initiative

Frequently Asked Questions about Electronics Recyling.

From: Resource Recycling Magazine
Australian TV recovery system

With the support of major television manufacturers, the state environment ministers in Australia have under consideration a plan to impose an $18.75 recycling fee ($US) on the sale of new TVs.

The collected funds would be used to develop and operate a nationwide recycling scheme. Industry members expect the fee level to drop once the recycling system has taken care of the units currently backlogged.

Kerry hits back at his accusors: He accuses Dick Cheney and Karl Rove of avoiding the Vietnam draft, as the debate on national defense turns bitingly personal.

By Matea Gold, Times Staff Writer

PHILADELPHIA — Sen. John F. Kerry, responding to Republican adversaries who call him weak on defense, lashed out Friday at Vice President Dick Cheney and White House political advisor Karl Rove, accusing them of avoiding military service.

The Massachusetts senator made the remark during a raucous rally attended by an estimated 10,000 people at the University of Pittsburgh. "I'm tired of these Republicans who spend so much time denigrating Democrats and other people's commitment to the defense of our nation," said Kerry, a Vietnam veteran, in what appeared to be an unplanned comment.

"I'm tired of Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, [Saxby Chambliss] and a bunch of people who went out of their way to avoid their chance to serve when they had the chance." "I went," he added. "I'm not going to listen to them talk to me about patriotism and how asking questions about the direction of our country somehow challenges patriotism. Because asking questions about the direction of our country is patriotism."

As the debate over the war in Iraq has taken center stage in the election, heated exchanges between the campaigns about national security policy have quickly morphed into arguments about patriotism.

"It's going to be one of those polarizing issues that I suspect is not going to go away in a very intense, charged election," said University of Pennsylvania political science professor Marie Gottschalk. "The question of who sacrificed and what they sacrificed will be central to this election."

Cheney had several student deferments and, after the birth of his first child, a marriage deferment. Rove drew a low draft number when he graduated from high school in 1969, and then received a student deferment when he entered the University of Utah, the Bush campaign said.

Rove lost his deferment when he transferred schools and was for a short period at the front of the line to be drafted, the campaign said. But he was never called up for service.

Kerry, pressed later Friday on why he believed Rove tried to avoid going to war, the candidate said merely, "He didn't serve."

"I'm just not going to be accused by any of these people of not being strong on defense, period," he said on his campaign plane on a flight from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia.

Given his record, it's not surprising Kerry is using it to connect with voters, said Jack Pitney, who teaches political science at Claremont McKenna College. "His service in Vietnam is something very clear that people can relate to."

Kerry promised in February that he would not raise questions about Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard.

But a week later, after being heavily criticized about his defense record, he said Republicans had no business questioning his commitment to the country's security.

"I don't know what it is … these Republicans who didn't serve in any war have against those of us who are Democrats who did," the senator told reporters in Atlanta on Feb. 21.

Asked if he was alluding to Bush's National Guard service, Kerry said at the time he was referring to Georgia Sen. Saxby Chambliss, Cheney "and a whole bunch of people [who] are so busy challenging the patriotism of Democrats."

At the rally in Pittsburgh on Friday, Kerry offered an invocation of his tour in Vietnam.

"You see that great Stars and Stripes back there?" he asked the audience, pointing to a massive American flag draped on a stage behind the crowd.

"I fought under that flag. I fought under that flag and I saw that flag draped over the coffin of friends.

"…. Well, I'll tell you something: The political bombs may be bursting in air today around us as they try to distort the truth, but when I look up, that flag is still there," he said. "And it belongs to all of Americans, not to them … it belongs to us."

Kerry completed his daylong swing through Pennsylvania with a fundraiser in Pittsburgh and two in Philadelphia, which raised $1.5 million for his campaign, bringing his total for the week to nearly $15 million.

World leaders condemn Bush-Sharon agreement
By Times Online - UK
April 16th, 2004

International leaders have condemned President Bush and Ariel Sharon today for excluding the Palestinians from an agreement which would see Israel retain large swaths of the West Bank as part of any Middle East peace accord.

Mr Bush endorsed the Israeli Prime Minister's plan yesterday for a unilateral withdrawal from the Gaza Strip, but the closure of only four of the 140 Jewish settlements in the West Bank. The President also implicitly rejected the "right of return" to Israel of Palestinians.

Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary-General, said that final status issues should be resolved between Israel and the Palestinians, based on relevant UN Security Council resolutions. "He strongly believes that they [the US and Israel] should refrain from taking any steps that would pre-empt the outcome of such talks," Mr Annan's spokesman said.

Javier Solana, the EU Foreign Minister, cautioned: "The EU remains committed to a negotiated agreement resulting in two viable, sovereign and independent states, Israel and Palestine, as the only way to achieve a permanent peace and an end to the occupation that began in 1967.

"Final status issues can only be resolved by mutual agreement between the parties."

Palestinian leaders, who have been excluded from negotiations, reacted with fury after the US and Israeli leaders exchanged letters of agreement at the White House.

Yassir Arafat, the Palestinian leader, declared that no peace deal would be possible with the Israelis until the "complete end" of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Mr Arafat said: "Our destiny is to defend our land, holy sites, Jerusalem and our right to freedom, independence and the right of refugees to return to their homeland."

He also requested an emergency meeting of the 57-member Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest grouping of Muslim states, to discuss the change in US policy.

Malaysia, which currently holds the OIC chair, brought forward its planned meeting in the light of the request. Syed Hamid Albar, the Malaysian Foreign Minister, said: "We want to organise the meeting earlier because we now feel the urgency of the new development."

Ahmed Qureia, the Palestinian Prime Minister, who was excluded from the negotiations, said: "We as Palestinians reject that, we cannot accept that, we reject it and we refuse it."

Mr Qureia also accused the US President of an "unacceptable" violation of the US-backed "road map" peace plan, saying issues such as borders and the status of refugees must be decided in negotiations involving all sides, not just the US and Israel.

"It cannot be decided by the President of the United States what is realistic and what is not realistic … This is a real violation of the roadmap."

Tony Blair last night welcomed the agreement and urged the Palestinians to accept it. But he was urged by Nabil Shaath, the Palestinian Foreign Minster, today to tell Mr Bush to change his mind when they meet in Washington on Friday.

In Gaza today, an Israeli helicopter fired a rocket at a crowd of Palestinians during an army incursion into the refugee camp at Rafah, leaving 20 Palestinians wounded, some seriously.

The helicopter opened fired after a crowd gathered while Israeli troops were bulldozing their houses and destroying them with dynamite.

Israeli radio reported the troops were trying to destroy tunnels which run into Gaza from neighbouring Egypt, and which Israel claims are used to smuggle weapons.

Mr Sharon must now persuade his Likud Party to accept his "disengagement plan" in a vote on May 2. Some hardliners in his own party are openly hostile to the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza.

SignOnSanDiego.com > News > Military -- Retired Marine Corp. General Zinni assails U.S. policy on Iraq

The Housing Bubble

There Goes the Neighborhood
Why home prices are about to plummet--and take the recovery with them.
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
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In Washington, where words are the currency, where imprecise verbs threaten the loss of a political career and misapplied nouns can doom a movement, there remain a few figures who get a general pass not just for a certain degree of verbal imprecision, but for a fairly deep-seated degree of intellectual wackiness, a penchant for regularly saying very odd things. Newt Gingrich is one of these public figures, Robert Byrd another; Helen Thomas has her moments, too.

You'll be sitting in the audience listening to a sensible speech by, say, Gingrich, and all of a sudden you get the notion that aliens have captured his brain. Befuddled, you'll turn to your friend next to you, the libertarian true-believer, and he'll shrug his shoulders and whisper back: "Oh, it's just Newt." And then, a few minutes later, the speaker's episode will subside, the aliens return the brain, and the speech continues on its before-we-were-so-rudely-interrupted track.

No one says a word. The capital's press gives these folks a pass from its usual lawyerly scrutiny because they are regarded as sages who can be relied upon to speak some kind of unusual and valuable truth, whose occasional episodes of profound intellectual oddness are thought to stem from the same deep source as their general brilliance.

One of these spells flared up during the last week in February, when Greenspan recommended that the home-owning public take a good hard look at switching from fixed-rate mortgages, under whose terms payments stay the same no matter what interest rates do, to adjustable rate mortgages (ARMs), where payments fluctuate along with interest rates--which, right now, makes close to zero sense. Interest rates are lower than they've been in 30 years, and, with all economists predicting a general economic upturn, and Bush's budget deficit and the weak dollar sucking up capital, little doubt exists that interest rates must rise, in which case, switching from a fixed-rate to adjustable-rate mortgage would be pretty costly for any family naïve enough to take Greenspan at his word.

The episode did not pass completely without critical notice. It was "the strangest bit of advice ever to be proffered by an American central banker," Jim Grant, publisher of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, told the San Francisco Chronicle. Then the press moved on: "Oh, it's just Greenspan."

But sometimes wacko ideas can betray deeper truths. It is tempting to ask what stake the chairman might have in trying to convince millions of people to do something so contrary to their own interest. One theory floated by Fed-watchers is that the chairman is trying to help out his classic institutional constituency, the big banks, which hold trillions of dollars in fixed-rate mortgage paper. There may be something to that theory, but there is almost certainly a deeper and more important motive behind this curious advice. Quite simply, Greenspan is trying to keep a wobbly and fragile recovery alive--and using mortgage refinancing to do it.

There are many strange things about the choppy recovery we're in, but among the most curious is that it is being fueled largely by consumer spending. Why consumers should continue to spend, and why they've done it throughout the recession, is not immediately obvious. After all, average income growth has been puny in the last few years. There's been a big falloff in jobs. Health care and tuition costs have only been going up. And the stock market has spent the last three years unsuccessfully huffing and puffing to get back to the level where it was in early 2001. Why have consumers been spending so much?

Economists have advanced two main reasons. One is that Americans have so lost their moorings that they've had few qualms about going deep into debt. That's certainly true. The average person's debt as a percentage of his income is now higher than it's ever been. But there's another reason, too: Americans have been using their homes as ATM machines, refinancing their mortgages in order to fund their spending. This, of course, makes sense. The one sector of the economy that has consistently swelled has been housing prices. This has intrigued and surprised many economists, because housing is supposed to operate in sync with the economy, expanding during flush times and contracting when things go poorly. But even in a down economy, prices have soared.

Because of these rising prices, people have felt that despite all the ups and downs in stocks and salaries, that their overall situation was okay. Homes are the biggest asset most families own, and their value has been rising nicely. For that reason, Americans have felt more comfortable buying big-ticket items, from SUVs to new computers to Disney World vacations. Much of that spending has gone right onto the VISA card. But that debt has been kept somewhat manageable by another factor in housing prices: mortgage refinancing.

With home prices rising and the Fed keeping rates low, a mortgage refinancing industry that barely existed 15 years ago exploded into one of the fastest growing sectors of the financial services industry. Last year, one-third of all homeowners used cash-out mortgages to refinance their homes, a rate roughly consistent over the past five years. Savvy investors, says Harvard economist William Apgar, are likely to have refinanced "two or three times in the last two years." Each time they do, they have either been able to lower their monthly payments, or walk away with a chunk of cash. And where does that extra cash go? The ubiquitous Ditech TV ads say it all: "I just refinanced my home and paid off my credit cards!" American homeowners have gained $1.6 trillion in cash from refinancing in the last five years, and those gains have flowed almost wholly into purchases of consumer goods. The resulting spending, says Wharton's Susan Wachter, is "propping up" the American economy.

Greenspan has played enabler to this boom. But with the Fed fund's rate at 1 percent, the chairman can't do much more to sustain it. Tens of millions of Americans have already refinanced their mortgages, and at current rates, can't be induced to do so again. This small window is closing, fast: For six months, refinancing has been tapering off, and economists expect it to narrow further--many economists have argued the gains from refinancing are likely to halve ths year. Moreover, as soon as interest rates rise (as Greenspan himself has said they will within the next year), virtually all refinancing will cease.

Greenspan's rather ham-handed effort to get them to go for ARMs, is a sign not of the chairman's own eccentricity or advanced age, but, instead, of the economy's current unsteadiness. Greenspan knows, perhaps better than anyone, that this economy is perched nervously on top of a wobbly, Dr. Seuss-like tower. Our recovery is propped up by consumer spending, which is in turn propped up by mortgage refinancing, and if that refinancing dries up before more props can be put in, the whole edifice could fall. "Since long-term interest rates cannot fall low enough to facilitate another wave of fixed-rate refinancings, he is trying to encourage homeowners to refinance one last time: fixed to ARM," Peter Schiff, president of Euro Pacific Capital in Los Angeles told the San Francisco Chronicle.

Let's assume for a moment that enough people get fooled, and the refinancing boom gets extended for another year. Then what? The real problem hits. Because if you think Greenspan's being cagey on refinancing, the truth he's really avoiding talking about is that we're in the midst of a huge housing bubble, on a scale only seen once before since the Depression. Worse, the inflated housing market is now in an historically unique position, as the motor of the rest of the economy. Within the next year or two, that bubble is likely to burst, and when it does, it very well may take the American economy down with it.

House bound

Whether or to what extent American home prices will plummet soon is open to some debate, but not much. Even the professionally optimistic housing economists employed by the real-estate industry are now admitting that the good times may be over: "What we would ask for is kind of a slow slowdown," Jeff Culbertson, president of Coldwell Banker-Northern California, told Knight Ridder at the beginning of March. Virtually every housing economist is concerned that prices may be unstable, and growing numbers are becoming outright alarmed. To understand why that is--and why warnings of a coming housing collapse haven't been front-page news--just look at the numbers.

Truth is, in most of the country there's no housing bubble. Perhaps the crucial ratio from which economists determine whether housing markets are out of whack is the ratio of home prices to annual income. In most of the country, it is modest, 2.4:1 in Wisconsin, 2.2:1 in Kentucky, 2.9:1 in Illinois.

Only in about 20 metro areas, mostly located in eight states, does the relationship of home price to income defy logic. The bad news is that those areas contain roughly half the housing wealth of the country. In California, the price of a home stands at 8.3 times the annual family income of its occupants; in Massachusetts, the ratio is 5.9:1; in Hawaii, a stunning, 10.1:1. To some extent, there are sound and basic economic reasons for this anomaly: supply and demand.

Salaries in these areas have been going up faster than in the nation as a whole. The other is supply: These metro areas are "built out," with zoning ordinances that limit the ability of developers to add new homes. But at some point, incomes simply can't sustain the prices. That point has now been reached. In California, a middle-class family with two earners each making $50,000 a year now owns, on average, an $830,000 home. In the late 80s, the last time these eight states saw price-to-income ratios this high, the real estate market collapsed.

By other measures, too, the market is badly bloated. One index of housing inflation is the difference between house prices and rents. In a healthy market, driven by demand, rents and sale prices ought to track roughly together. But while sale prices have soared, rents have stayed flat; and in some of the most overheated markets, like San Francisco and Seattle, they have actually been declining.

Such a gap, the economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written, suggests "that people are now buying houses for speculation rather than merely for shelter," evidence that he called a "compelling case" for a housing bubble. "Within the next year or so," The Economist argued in a May 2003 editorial, these regional "bubbles are likely to burst, leading to falls in average real home prices of 15-20 percent" across America. And, of course, in the most heated markets the drop is likely to be steeper yet.

When housing bubbles burst, they can hurt more than their sector of the economy. Studies have shown that they exercise twice the effect on consumer spending as comparable declines in stock prices. So, a 20 percent drop in housing prices would have the same, shriveling effect on the economy as a 40 percent crash in the stock market. When investors lose value in their houses, many of them pull money out of other investments, like stocks. Then, too, jobs in construction, real estate, and other fields that depend on new home sales die off.

What can Alan Greenspan or anyone else do about this? The answer is, not much. Prices are so stratospheric that even modest hikes in long-term interest rates could burst the bubble. And with federal deficits soaking up so much capital, interest rates are likely to rise as the economy heats up and demand for capital increases. Of course, Greenspan could argue for rescinding some of President Bush's tax cuts, which he's long defended, to bring down the deficit. But even that probably won't forestall a collapse in home prices.

Given the lateness of the hour, and the near-inevitability of the coming crash, there's really only one thing left for concerned citizens to do. Start assigning blame.

Blowing bubbles

Fortunately, the bad actors responsible for this manic inflation are pretty easy to recognize. They look remarkably like the ones who puffed up the tech bubble in the late 90s. In both cases, the unfettered optimism of the buying public was fueled by a brokerage industry almost wholly concerned with making a sale, independent analysts with an incentive to hype prices, and major accounting fraud.

What drives most appreciation in housing prices is the universal human desire to own a slightly larger and more expensive place than one can really afford; a desire restrained in normal times by the universal desire of those who lend money to get paid back.

Getting a home loan used to be a particularly nerve-wracking and unpleasant process. A stern loan officer behind a big mahogany desk would pore over your income and credit, suspiciously probing your portfolio for weaknesses. And sensibly enough: The bank that lent you the money would have to collect on the mortgage for the next 30 years and had to make sure you were really good for it. It hired independent appraisers to make sure the price was in line. This process was a little stingy, and meant some people on the low end of the income scale couldn't buy a home and many others got less home than they might have wanted, but the system usually kept prices in check.

The one exception to this general process was mortgages sold on the secondary market. In the 1930s, Congress created the Federal National Mortgage Corporation (Fannie Mae) to encourage banks to make loans to low-income Americans by agreeing to purchase those mortgages from the banks. In 1970, Congress created a second agency, the Federal Home Loan Mortgage Corporation (Freddie Mac), to do much the same thing. By the late 1980s, these two entities, which belong to the category known as Government Sponsored Entities (GSEs), were buying up and reselling 30 percent of new mortgages and packaging the mortgages to be sold as securities.

Fannie and Freddie's market share was limited by their ability to attract investment capital. But in 1989, Congress instituted some modest-seeming technical changes that made Freddie and Fannie much more attractive to investors, and able to draw much more capital. Under the new rules, for instance, they were allowed to customize securities at different levels of risk and return to meet more precisely the demands of different sectors of the capital market. Then, too, bank regulators let pension funds and mutual funds class Fannie's debt as low-risk.

As a consequence, during the 1990s, investors practically threw money at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which became enormously, steadily profitable. The GSEs used the new capital to buy up every mortgage they could, and banks were only too happy to sell off the mortgage paper. The price cap on the mortgages Fannie and Freddie could insure was raised. As a result of all these changes, Fannie and Freddie went from buying mostly mortgages for low-end homes to those of the middle- and upper-middle class. And the share of the nation's conventional mortgage debt which they insure has swelled, to more than 70 percent today, double its share in 1990.

This shift has had two crucial, if under-appreciated, consequences. First, in little more than a decade, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have gone from handling one trillion dollars in mortgages to four trillion, with virtually no changes in oversight. Second, their dominance of the mortgage market has profoundly undermined the discipline that once kept housing prices in check.

Once banks knew they could automatically hand off the mortgages they wrote to Fannie and Freddie with basically no risk, the old incentive system dissolved. "Banks and other mortgage lenders are not watching home prices carefully because they rarely hold onto the mortgage paper they create--they just sell it upstream to mortgage investors," John R. Talbott, a housing researcher at UCLA's Anderson School of Business, has argued. "It is a dangerous situation indeed when neither home buyers nor the institutions that finance them are concerned with the ultimate price being paid for the housing asset."

In most markets, buyers and sellers rely on independent experts to bring sanity to prices. In the stock markets during the 1990s, that role had traditionally been played by stock analysts, whose opinions were famously bought off by the investment banks they worked for. Something similar has happened to appraisers, the independent contractors banks hire to determine the worth of a home for the purposes of a mortgage loan. In a recent survey conducted by the October Research Group, more than half of all appraisers said that they personally felt pressured to overstate loans, and "nearly all" said they knew a colleague who had actually done so. The pressure to inflate, October's publisher Joe Casa said, "is much worse now than it's ever been." Industry analysts have estimated that between 15 and 30 percent of houses nationally are over-valued.

It's not just the discipline of banks that keeps people from buying more than they can afford, but also the buyers' own fear and guilt. But in an environment where home prices continue to spiral up, fear and guilt are replaced by a sense that you're a fool not to buy the most house you can possibly get away with.

A particular kind of speculative frenzy ensues, captured in a recent story in The Washington Post which detailed a new phenomenon: home buyers camping out overnight for the chance to be the first in the next morning's open house, ready to buy $700,000 houses in built-out, lush-lawned suburbs like Arlington. The phenomenon has created temporary, yuppie tent cities. The story's authors interviewed several buyers in the tented line who planned to sell their purchases back into a steadily rising market, and concluded, dryly: "There is an element of speculation to the lines."

What makes the current frenzy especially dangerous is that every relevant institution has an incentive to play along. Who, after all, is likely to say stop? Not the realtors. Not the banks, any longer. Not Fannie and Freddie or the private secondary-mortgage operators, who are turning vast profits on the backs of the bubble. Certainly not the Federal Reserve or the Treasury Department, while the economy depends on a sustained housing boom.

By 2000, some acute observers, like Jane D'Arista, a former chief economist for the House Financial Services committee and now a federal funds researcher with the Financial Markets Center, had begun to warn that the situation was untenable. By 2002, a few major players, like Steve Roach, Morgan Stanley's chief economist, had picked up on the concerns about a bubble and Fannie and Freddie's sprawling influence. But Greenspan, Treasury, and GSE officials, in interviews and testimony, denied that housing inflation posed a problem. And, sure enough, in the next year, not only did the bubble fail to deflate, but it also expanded--the housing sector posted its best year ever.

Then, last summer, came a warning no one should have missed: news of major accounting fraud at Freddie Mac. In stocks, corporate accounting scandals appeared after the market plunged, too late to signal danger. But the fraudulent accounting at Freddie Mac was, or should have been, a wake-up call, though the details of this scandal were distinctly different. Instead of hiding losses, as happened at Worldcom and Enron, the accountants at Freddie Mac had been hiding embarrassingly large profits.

They feared that higher-than-expected returns might incite more risk-taking and a more volatile housing market than investors in Freddie Mac would like. A number of senior executives were canned, and spooked foreign investors sold off Freddie and Fannie's debt. A sense was emerging, among politicians as well as economists, that Fannie and Freddie were not just running amok, says Tom Stanton, an attorney specializing in government sponsored enterprises, but that they "were showing a combination of high leverage, fast growth, and weak oversight of just two companies that held or guaranteed several trillion dollars of mortgages between them and posed potential systemic risk to the American economy."

Testifying before Congress on July 16, Greenspan did not discuss any of this, nor did he mention a bubble. Instead, he chose to praise the economic benefits of low interest rates and home refinancing. The boom continued unabated. By October, homebuyers were able to refinance to a 30-year fixed-rate loan with a rate of just 4.99 percent.

Eleventh-hour warnings

Still, the accounting scandals, carrying with them a vague, unsavory whiff of Enron, made reforms in the housing market impossible to ignore. Even Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae's chairman, admitted that the GSEs needed to be reined in. In the fall, the House dipped its toes into the water, with a bill that established a single regulator in the Treasury Department with broader authority to make sure the GSEs had their finances in order. At the White House's behest, the Senate Banking Committee began hearings on the same issue in February. The goal of most of the debate in Congress has so far been how to ensure the GSEs financial viability; there has been very little talk about how to reduce their role in the housing markets.

That job fell to Greenspan: Finally, on Feb. 24, testifying before the Senate Banking Committee, he came clean about the risks of the housing market, in a speech reminiscent of his 1996 warning about "irrational exuberance" in the stock market. In his familiar, glum posture, his bald head slouching low over the table, he warned that the GSEs weren't just unstable, but also posed a "systemic risk" to the economy of the United States. He suggested debt caps, to reduce Fannie and Freddie's role in the market, and urged stricter regulation.

The chairman's proposals were both brave and right, the best plan for resolving the structural problems with GSEs that's been put forward yet. But given the political situation, his reforms won't be enacted anytime soon. The day after his testimony, his suggestions were brushed off by everyone from Fannie and Freddie's chief executives to Republicans and Democrats on the Hill. Oh, it's just Greenspan.

Both political parties have bought into the idea that a vast, unfettered Fannie and Freddie are good for the country, and have only amplified the GSEs' "American Dream" rhetoric. Republicans are still invested in the deregulation of Fannie and Freddie they helped engineer in the late 1980s. Democrats, generally the party of more regulation, have historically been Fannie and Freddie's best friends, and the GSEs' lush executive suites are packed with former Democratic staffers: Raines was Clinton's director of the Office of Management and Budget, and his predecessor, James A. Johnson, a longtime aide to Walter Mondale, is now leading John Kerry's search for a running mate. In the hearings on the Hill, neither Democrats nor Republicans have seemed favorably disposed to strict regulation of Fannie and Freddie, and American Banker has concluded that the GSEs' lobbying power is strong enough that no regulatory bill will pass without their okay.

Greenspan, of course, knows all this. He knows his reform initiatives stand little chance politically right now, and he knows that even if, miraculously, they were put into place, they likely won't keep the housing market from crashing. Why even bother to bring it up? Two reasons, say Fed-watchers. First, though he didn't explicitly warn against the housing bubble, Greenspan wants to be able to claim, after the bubble bursts, that he gave fair warning, even though these warnings came at the eleventh hour. But at a less cynical level, the chairman knows that in the American political process real reforms only get put into place after a crisis and not before, but that you stand a better chance of getting them if you publicize them early.

So, why then didn't he bring these issues up even earlier? The answer may be that he simply couldn't afford to--he was relying on a supercharged housing sector to get the economy as a whole through the recession. Indeed, he still is. On the very day that he suggested his reforms of the secondary market, he was trying to squeeze a little more juice out of refinancing with his bizarre advice to consumers about ARMs. And that, ultimately, is the ironic and uncomfortable position that this economy has forced Greenspan into. To get out of the recession, he had to rely on, stay mum about, and even encourage a housing bubble. Now, that very bubble may be the thing that destroys the recovery he has sought to create.

The Vietnam Analogy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 16, 2004

Iraq isn't Vietnam. The most important difference is the death toll, which is only a small fraction of the carnage in Indochina. But there are also real parallels, and in some ways Iraq looks worse.

It's true that the current American force in Iraq is much smaller than the Army we sent to Vietnam. But the U.S. military as a whole, and the Army in particular, is also much smaller than it was in 1968. Measured by the share of our military strength it ties down, Iraq is a Vietnam-size conflict.

And the stress Iraq places on our military is, if anything, worse. In Vietnam, American forces consisted mainly of short-term draftees, who returned to civilian life after their tours of duty. Our Iraq force consists of long-term volunteers, including reservists who never expected to be called up for extended missions overseas. The training of these volunteers, their morale and their willingness to re-enlist will suffer severely if they are called upon to spend years fighting a guerrilla war.

Some hawks say this proves that we need a bigger Army. But President Bush hasn't called for larger forces. In fact, he seems unwilling to pay for the forces we have.

A fiscal comparison of George Bush's and Lyndon Johnson's policies makes the Vietnam era seem like a golden age of personal responsibility. At first, Johnson was reluctant to face up to the cost of the war. But in 1968 he bit the bullet, raising taxes and cutting spending; he turned a large deficit into a surplus the next year. A comparable program today — the budget went from a deficit of 3.2 percent of G.D.P. to a 0.3 percent surplus in just one year — would eliminate most of our budget deficit.

By contrast, Mr. Bush, for all his talk about staying the course, hasn't been willing to strike anything off his domestic wish list. On the contrary, he used the initial glow of apparent success in Iraq to ram through yet another tax cut, waiting until later to tell us about the extra $87 billion he needed. And he's still at it: in his press conference on Tuesday he said nothing about the $50 billion-to-$70 billion extra that everyone knows will be needed to pay for continuing operations.

This fiscal chicanery is part of a larger pattern. Vietnam shook the nation's confidence not just because we lost, but because our leaders didn't tell us the truth. Last September Gen. Anthony Zinni spoke of "Vietnam, where we heard the garbage and the lies," and asked his audience of military officers, "Is it happening again?" Sure enough, the parallels are proliferating. Gulf of Tonkin attack, meet nonexistent W.M.D. and Al Qaeda links. "Hearts and minds," meet "welcome us as liberators." "Light at the end of the tunnel," meet "turned the corner." Vietnamization, meet the new Iraqi Army.

Some say that Iraq isn't Vietnam because we've come to bring democracy, not to support a corrupt regime. But idealistic talk is cheap. In Vietnam, U.S. officials never said, "We're supporting a corrupt regime." They said they were defending democracy. The rest of the world, and the Iraqis themselves, will believe in America's idealistic intentions if and when they see a legitimate, noncorrupt Iraqi government — as opposed to, say, a rigged election that puts Ahmad Chalabi in charge.

If we aren't promoting democracy in Iraq, what are we doing? Many of the more moderate supporters of the war have already reached the stage of quagmire logic: they no longer have high hopes for what we may accomplish, but they fear the consequences if we leave. The irony is painful. One of the real motives for the invasion of Iraq was to give the world a demonstration of American power. It's a measure of how badly things have gone that now we're told we can't leave because that would be a demonstration of American weakness.

Again, the parallel with Vietnam is obvious. Remember the domino theory?

And there's one more parallel: Nixonian politics is back.

What we remember now is Watergate. But equally serious were Nixon's efforts to suppress dissent, like the "Tell It to Hanoi" rallies, where critics of the Vietnam War were accused of undermining the soldiers and encouraging the enemy. On Tuesday George Bush did a meta-Nixon: he declared that anyone who draws analogies between Iraq and Vietnam undermines the soldiers and encourages the enemy.

SCO, BayStar, Microsoft - Three Stooges At Play

BayStar Seeks to Pull SCO Investment
By Matt Hicks
April 16, 2004

UPDATED: The SCO Group says BayStar is alleging a breach in the companies' investment agreement and wants 20,000 of its SCO shares redeemed.

In the latest twist in The SCO Group Inc.'s funding saga, BayStar Capital Management LLC is trying to pull out its SCO investment, claiming a breach in the terms of the agreement between the companies. Lindon, Utah-based SCO said Friday that it has received a letter from BayStar requesting that it redeem BayStar's 20,000 shares of SCO's series A-1 convertible preferred stock. BayStar is alleging that SCO breached sections of February agreement among SCO, BayStar and the Royal Bank of Canada.

SCO spokesman Blake Stowell said the letter points to four different sections of the agreement that were violated and that deal mainly deal with misrepresentations of SCO's past and present business finances and its future plans.

SCO has no immediate plans to redeem the shares, which would amount to BayStar's $20 million investment, Stowell said, because SCO does not believe it violated any sections of the agreement. SCO also has not received details about how it allegedly broke the agreement, he said. "It's our belief that they'd have to prove we breached the agreement before we'd redeem those shares," Stowell said. "We're still in an information gathering mode ourselves, and we're trying to find out where we stand."

BayStar spokesman Bob McGrath, reached late Friday, said that BayStar had no comment on the letter or its allegations.

In October, SCO announced that BayStar was leading a $50 million cash infusion for SCO that would help it shore up its finances and fund its intellectual property initiatives.

SCO, which owns the license to Unix code, has sued, among others, IBM and two enterprises over their use of the Linux operating system in one of the most-watched IT legal battles. SCO alleges that Linux contains portions of its Unix code.

At that time, BayStar of Larkspur, Calif., was to own an aggregate of about 2.95 million shares of SCO common stock, or 17.5 percent of the company's outstanding shares.

In March, BayStar confirmed that Microsoft Corp. had led it to SCO following widespread speculation that Microsoft had played a role in the investment. Microsoft in the past year has been stepping up its battle against Linux, which is a threat to its Windows operating system.

Here's a Picture...

Imagine Bush, Rice, Tenet, And the Others Across the Table from Trump on 'The Apprentice.' After Hearing Their Excuses, What Would He Say?
By Joe Rothstein
Editor, USPoliticstoday.com

On one of the most popular current TV shows, wannabe young business types are given such mundane assignments as figuring out how to sell lemonade. Teams compete against one another, and the show closes with Donald Trump telling someone that he’s (or she’s) “fired.”

Why are they fired? Because they didn’t do the job. Or maybe they did do the job, but not as well as someone else. It’s a tough business. But as Trump keeps telling the contestants, if you want to succeed you have to be accountable for your mistakes.

This week the latest in a long line of witnesses is scheduled to appear before the commission investigating 9/11. So far we have heard that the people who run the airlines and the airports were not accountable for letting terrorists board their flights because no one told them to be more careful. The FAA’s leaders have assured us they feel just terrible about what happened, and they might have taken stronger measures to prevent it, but existing laws, restrictions, lack of financing and a lack of urgency from the top got in the way.

George Tenet and others from the CIA have warded off responsiblity because the CIA’s principal job is foreign intelligence operations and there were restrictions on their activities inside the U.S. The Immigration Service wasn’t responsible for permitting the hijackers to enter the U.S. and remain here for a whole laundry list of reasons.

Last week we heard from Condoleezza Rice that she wasn’t accountable for the 9/11 tragedy because her office was doing everything it could to develop a new and better strategy for dealing with al Qaeda than the previous administration had.

Now we’re about to hear from the FBI about why, even though the President was told by the Washington office that 70 ongoing al Qaeda investigations were under way, the FBI officers in the field didn’t think so. And, of course, we will have the Bush-Cheney tag team appearance before the commission. They already have disclaimed responsibility, even though they received the famous August 6, 2001 Presidential Briefing Document entitled, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.”

In her testimony, Condoleezza Rice said the memo was a “historical” document. She testified that the memo revealed “no new threat information, it was not a warning.”

Here are the exact words of the memo, as released by the White House:

“FBI information indicates patterns of suspicious activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the U.S. that it considers bin Laden related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of bin Laden supporters were in the U.S. planning attacks with explosives.”

If this information was not new, then we have to assume that Rice and the President knew all this before August 6. Whenever they learned it, there’s no evidence they treated it with any sense of urgency.

If this was not a threat warning, how much closer to the mark did they expect the warning to be? Is it only “actionable intelligence,” if the information includes the exact targets, the day of the planned attack and the names and addresses of the conspirators?

The U.S. spends upwards of $50 billion a year on intelligence gathering and covert activities for the express purpose of digging out information from leads like those in the PBD and then following up to stop the threat before it succeeds. Isn’t that what we pay them to do?

The only person so far who has admitted failure is Richard Clarke. As the counter-terrorism chief, his job was to stop 9/11 or anything like it. The terrorists defeated every defense we had in place. It was his job to protect us. Why shouldn’t he apologize? Why should his be the only apology?

And it’s ironic that of all the people in responsible positions on 9/11, Clarke seems to be the one who was most alert to the danger, and now he’s the only one no longer on the bridge. From the President on down, those who had the responsibility for protecting us from such attacks as 9/11, and failed, and are unapologetic, are all still in place---disclaiming responsibility.

If you take their arguments at face value, there was nothing anyone could have done to anticipate the attacks or to have defeated them.

None of those wannabe business executives would get by Donald Trump with that argument. Those on TV lose their jobs for failing to place their lemonade stand on the right street corner. What would Donald Trump say if Bush, Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Tenet, Mueller, and the others in charge on 9/11 were sitting across the conference table giving him the same story they are giving the 9/11 commission and the rest of us?

What would Trump say?

Come on. You know. All together now, “You’re _ _ _ _ _!”

Definitions: [???] A true believer

dogmatic:adj., Relating to, characteristic of, or resulting from dogma. Characterized by an authoritative, arrogant assertion of unproved or unprovable principles.

Definition: [???] A religious conservative

fundamentalism: n., A usually religious movement or point of view characterized by a return to fundamental principles, by rigid adherence to those principles, and often by intolerance of other views and opposition to secularism. An organized, militant Evangelical movement originating in the United States in the late 19th and early 20th century in opposition to Protestant Liberalism and secularism, insisting on the inerrancy of Scripture. Adherence to the theology of this movement.

Definition: [???] Person who sees themselves as being always right

autocratic: 1: offensively self-assured or given to exercising usually unwarranted power; "an autocratic person"; "autocratic behavior"; "a bossy way of ordering others around"; "a rather aggressive and dominating character"; "managed the employees in an aloof magisterial way"; "a swaggering peremptory manner" [syn: bossy, dominating, high-and-mighty, magisterial, peremptory] 4: characteristic of an absolute ruler or absolute rule; having absolute sovereignty; "an authoritarian regime"; "autocratic government"; "despotic rulers"; "a dictatorial rule that lasted for the duration of the war"; "a tyrannical government" [syn: authoritarian, dictatorial, despotic, tyrannical]

Definition: [???], an earnest supporter of existing royal and ecclesiastical authority

Tory \To"ry\, n.; pl. Tories. [ Properly used of the Irish bogtrotters who robbed and plundered during the English civil wars, professing to be in sympathy with the royal cause; hence transferred to those who sought to maintain the extreme prerogatives of the crown; probably from Ir. toiridhe, tor, a pursuer; akin to Ir. & Gael. toir a pursuit.] 1. (Eng.Politics) A member of the conservative party, as opposed to the progressive party which was formerly called the Whig, and is now called the Liberal, party; an earnest supporter of existing royal and ecclesiastical authority.

Note: The word Tory first occurs in English history in 1679, during the struggle in Parliament occasioned by the introduction of the bill for the exclusion of the duke of York from the line of succession, and was applied by the advocates of the bill to its opponents as a title of obloquy or contempt. The Tories subsequently took a broader ground, and their leading principle became the maintenance of things as they were. The name, however, has for several years ceased to designate an existing party, but is rather applied to certain traditional maxims of public policy. The political successors of the Tories are now commonly known as Conservatives. --New Am. Cyc.

Sharon Comes to Washington - Leaves with Bush's support in expropriation of Palestinian land

Palestinians Assail Bush for New Stand Backing Israel
By GREG MYRE
NY Times
Published: April 15, 2004

JERUSALEM, April 14 — Palestinian leaders were sharply critical of President Bush on Wednesday, saying his support for Israeli positions dealt a crippling and perhaps fatal blow to what remains of current Middle East peace efforts.

The Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qurei, and other prominent Palestinians said Mr. Bush had now gone further than any American president in backing Israel on the most contentious issues — Jewish settlements, future borders and the fate of Palestinian refugees. "I believe President Bush declared the death of the peace process today," said Yasser Abed Rabbo, a former Palestinian information minister.

Mr. Bush met with Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, at the White House and afterward reaffirmed his support for an Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip and the establishment of a Palestinian state.

But Palestinians focused on new positions that Mr. Bush articulated: that Israel should not have to return to borders it held before the 1967 war, suggesting it could retain some settlements built on West Bank land, and that Palestinian refugees should be settled in a future Palestinian state, which would undercut their demand to return to their former land, which is now part of Israel.

President Bush "is the first president who has legitimized the settlements in the Palestinian territories," Mr. Qurei said in Abu Dis, just outside Jerusalem. "We as Palestinians reject that, we cannot accept that."

Reactions elsewhere in the Arab world were also hostile to Mr. Bush.

In Syria, Imad Fawzi Shueibi, a professor of political sociology at Damascus University, called Mr. Bush's statements "a bad declaration, especially at this time."

President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, who arrived in Texas last week to visit President Bush, spoke Wednesday at Rice University. Though his remarks were warmly supportive of Mr. Bush, he was critical of the president's support of Israel's plans, saying, "Unilateral steps can't be substituted for international solutions."

Palestinians said Mr. Bush's comments broke with longstanding United States policy not to prejudge such sensitive issues. "For the first time, American policy violates the basic conditions for peace," said Hanan Ashrawi, a leading Palestinian legislator and spokeswoman.

Mr. Abed Rabbo contrasted Mr. Bush's statements with a letter that George H. W. Bush sent to the Palestinians when he was president in 1991. "The letter contained a very clear statement that key issues would be determined through negotiations, and not through unilateral Israeli decisions," Mr. Abed Rabbo recalled. Palestinians said Mr. Bush's remarks would encourage Mr. Sharon to continue building settlements in the West Bank. They say large clusters of Jewish settlers will make it difficult, if not impossible, to create a viable Palestinian state.

Another sensitive issue for the Palestinians is the status of Palestinian refugees who fled or were driven from their homes in the 1948-49 war, which erupted just after Israel's founding. Along with their descendants, they now total some four million.

Israel says a flood of refugees would undermine the Jewish character of the state, and has always firmly resisted any large-scale return. Mr. Bush sided with the Israelis, saying the refugees should be accommodated in a Palestinian state. Mr. Bush "wants the refugees to return to a Palestinian state that will not exist," said Mr. Abed Rabbo.

President Bush spends 40% of time out of the office.
Note: In a Corporate environment, a CEO that approaches his position in that manner would not have a job before long, especially when his attendance is combined with his abysmal record on "being a uniter, not a divider", strategic and tactical planning for National Security, job creation, economic stewardship of the Nations wealth, adherence to rules of international law, and a host of other concerns.

We're not talking either about Bush busily working on the nations business on his ranch...instead the press reports he: "cleared some brush...went fishing...cut down some trees, etc". Yetch ! Just what we need, a figurehead President with the Administratiion being run by the Vice President. Kinda like what we had under Reagan it's it?

But all that doesn't matter, since Bush can count on the support of Southern whites, evangelical Christians, financial manipulators, and other Tories to hinder progressive governance. And given his support for fundamentalist concerns maybe it's better he say out of Washington longer. Most likely, that's exactly what will happen after November 04.

Missed; but not forgotten

The-Darwin-Awards-A-Complete-Archive.html
Posted By Richard (04 August, 2003)

The Darwin Award Nominees
The Darwin Awards are awarded to individuals who through acts of extreme stupidity kill themselves and thus remove their defective gene from the human gene pool. Here are some of the nominees:
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A young Canadian man, searching for a way of getting drunk cheaply, because he had no money with which to buy alcohol, mixed gasoline with milk. Not surprisingly, this concoction made him ill, and he vomited into the fireplace in his house. This resulting explosion and fire burned his house down, killing both him and his sister.
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A 34-year-old white male found dead in the basement of his home died of suffocation, according to police. He was approximately 6'2" tall and weighed 225 pounds. He was wearing a pleated skirt, white bra, black and white saddle shoes, and a woman's wig. It appeared that he was trying to create a schoolgirl's uniform look. He was also wearing a military gas mask that had the filter canister removed and a rubber hose attached in its place. The other end of the hose was connected to a one end of a hollow wooden tube approx. 12" long and 3" in diameter. The tube's other end was inserted into his rear end for reasons unknown, and was the cause of his suffocation. Police found the task of explaining the circumstances of his death to his family very awkward.
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Three Brazilian men were flying in a light aircraft at low altitude when another plane approached. It appears that they decided to moon the occupants of the other plane, but lost control of their own aircraft and crashed. They were all found dead in the wreckage with their pants around their ankles.
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A police officer in Ohio responded to a 911 call. She had no details before arriving, except that someone had reported that his father was not breathing. Upon arrival, the officer found the man face down on the couch, naked. When she rolled him over to check for a pulse and to start CPR, she noticed burn marks around his genitals. After the ambulance arrived and removed the man - who was declared dead on arrival at the hospital - the police made a closer inspection of the couch, and noticed that the man had made a hole between the cushions. Upon flipping the couch over, they discovered what caused his death. Apparently the man had a habit of putting his penis between the cushions, down into the hole and between two electrical sanders (with the sandpaper removed, for obvious reasons). According to the story, after his orgasm the discharge shorted out one of the sanders, electrocuting him.
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A 27-year-old French woman lost control of her car on a highway near Marseilles and crashed into a tree, seriously injuring her passenger and killing herself. As a commonplace road accident, this would not have qualified for a Darwin nomination, were it not for the fact that the driver's attention had been distracted by her Tamagotchi key ring, which had started urgently beeping for food as she drove along. In an attempt to press the correct buttons to save the Tamagotchi's life, the woman lost her own.
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A 22-year-old Reston, VA man was found dead after he tried to use octopus straps to bungee jump off a 70-foot railroad trestle. Fairfax County police said Eric Barcia, a fast-food worker, taped a bunch of these straps together, wrapped an end around one foot, anchored the other end to the trestle at Lake Accotink Park, jumped and hit the pavement. Warren Carmichael, a police spokesman, said investigators think Barcia was alone because his car was found nearby. "The length of the cord that he had assembled was greater than the distance between the trestle and the ground", Carmichael said. Police say the apparent cause of death was "Major trauma".
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A man in Alabama died from rattlesnake bites. It seems that he and a friend were playing a game of catch, using the rattlesnake as a ball. The friend - no doubt, a future Darwin Awards candidate - was hospitalized.
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Employees in a medium-sized warehouse in west Texas noticed the smell of a gas leak. Sensibly, management evacuated the building, extinguishing all potential sources of ignition lights, power, etc. After the building had been evacuated, two technicians from the gas company were dispatched. Upon entering the building, they found they had difficulty navigating in the dark. To their frustration, none of the lights worked (you can see what's coming, can't you?). Witnesses later described the sight of one of the technicians reaching into his pocket and retrieving an object, that resembled a cigarette lighter. Upon operation of the lighter-like object, the gas in the warehouse exploded, sending pieces of it up to three miles away. Nothing was found of the technicians, but the lighter was virtually untouched by the explosion. The technician suspected of causing the blast had never been thought of as 'bright' by his peers.
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James Brian Wise, 20, of 390 Davenport Ave., Valparaiso, was twirling a gun at some friends' house in Fort Walton Beach on Friday night when it went off and shot him in the head, according to a report from the Okaloosa County Sheriff's Office.

The incident occurred at 1821 Whispering Oaks Lane, Fort Walton Beach. The Sheriff's Office responded at about 9:40 p.m. Jessica Nicole James, 18, was the primary witness cited in the report.

According to the report, James said Wise was in the kitchen of her home when she noticed a gun sticking out of his waistband. When she commented about it, he unloaded the gun and handed it to her for examination. She gave it back; he reloaded it and began twirling it in his right hand. The gun went off and shot him in the head. Wise died the next day. Wise, an employee at Brooks Auto Body in Crestview, was born in Tampa and graduated from Niceville High School this year.
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A Jacksonville, Florida woman recently had to summon emergency help after dragging her husband down the street behind their pickup truck. Chief Petty Officer Roman Styles, U.S. Coast Guard Station Jacksonville, was treated and released with a slight concussion and scrapes and bruises. It seems that Styles decided to repair damaged shingles on his house himself, instead of paying a contractor to do it for him. Prior to climbing up on his steep roof, Officer Styles tied a safety rope to the trailer hitch of his truck. Once on the peak of his roof he secured the other end of the line around his waist. He then slid over the top of the roof to repair the shingles. As luck would have it, right after he started to work, his teenage son called for a ride home from a Boy Scout trip. Jane Styles yelled to her husband she'd be right back and pulled away. "I didn't see the rope," Mrs. Styles said, "until I saw it in the rear-view mirror. By then I was half-way down the street." Bill Schlimm, a next door neighbor, said, "I'll never forget the look on Roman's face as he came sailing over the peak of that house. If it hadn't been for that tall cedar tree he would have been really hurt."
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A would-be shoplifter in London attempted to steal two lobsters. The ingenious felon stuffed the lobsters into his trousers and headed for the door of the supermarket. Near the exit, our larcenous Londoner doubled over in excruciating pain and lay on the floor screaming. It seems that the lobster's claws were not tied down and one of the tasty crustaceans decided to have the thief's family jewels for lunch. The paramedics were called in to remove the carnivorous crustacean from the very sensitive portion of this thief's anatomy. After they stopped laughing, a pair of pliers successfully accomplished the removal much to the relief of our suffering suspect. No information was available on the extent of the member's (sic) injuries or his future fatherhood potential.
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San Jose, CA. March 26, 1999: 1923hrs. Police, Fire and ambulance respond on a call for unknown medical emergency - turns out to be a DOA. Further investigation reveals it to be a suicide. Quite successful. Further investigation reveals this sequence of events:

27 yr old male gets a circular saw blade, cuts holes in the side to fit the lug nuts on his car. He mounts the saw blade to one of the front wheels in place of the tire.

Jacks the car up with a hydraulic jack. Starts the motor and puts something on the accelerator to spin the front wheels. Lays down below the spinning saw blade, which is above his neck.

Reaches out and unlocks the hydraulic jack.
You can guess the rest.
Thanks to Dave Larton
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An Iraqi terrorist , Khay Rahnajet, didn't pay enough postage on a letter bomb. It came back with "return to sender" stamped on it. Forgetting it was the bomb, he opened it and was killed in the resulting explosion.
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BUCHAREST (Reuters) - Romanian first division soccer player Mario Bugeanu and his girlfriend died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car after making love, police said Tuesday. Gloria Bistrita midfielder Bugeanu, 24, and his 23-year-old girlfriend Mirela Iancu died after having sex Sunday in a garage with the car running, police colonel Dumitru Secrieru said. "They appeared to be unaware of the dangers of carbon monoxide," Secrieru said. The couple was discovered by the player's father Monday morning.
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In Van Nuys, California, Anita French, an aspiring zoo keeper, loved reptiles. She kept 10 deadly snakes and six piranhas as pets in her mobile home. She wasn't afraid of them; apparently she had been bitten several times without fatal consequences. Finch trusted her snakes so much that she would let them loose as she cleaned their cages.

Her reptilian friends included a Gabon Viper, a Hog-Nosed Sand Viper a 3-foot Western rattler, two 4-foot Eastern diamondback rattlers, a South Pacific rattlesnake, considered extremely rare, one King snake, a gopher snake, and two copperheads.

Anita Finch, 33, was found dead in her mobile home by a friend and the lot manager Wednesday, Dec 15, evening. Charlene McMorris, manager of the Vicabob Trailer Park Village at 7560 Woodman PLace, said her tenant loved her snakes and feared city inspectors would confiscate them. She believes Finch was searching for a missing snake because her home was turned "upside down", with the refrigerator moved and pans scattered around the kitchen.
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"The government must crack down on this disgusting craze of 'Pumping'", a spokesman for the Nakhon Ratchasima hospital told reporters. "If this perversion catches on, it will destroy the cream of Thailand's manhood."

He was speaking after the remains of 13 year-old Charnchai Puanmuangpak had been rushed into the hospital's emergency room. "Most 'Pumpers' use a standard bicycle pump," he explained, "inserting the nozzle far up their rectum, giving themselves a rush of air, creating a momentary high. This act is a sin against God."

It appears that the young Charnchai took it further still. He started using a two-cylinder foot pump, but even that wasn't exciting enough for him, so he boasted to friends that he was going to try the compressed air hose at a nearby gasoline station. They dared him to do it, so, under cover of darkness, he snuck in. Not realizing how powerful the machine was, he inserted the tube deep into his rectum, and placed a coin in the slot. As a result, he died virtually instantly, leaving passers-by still in shock.

One woman thought she was watching a twilight fireworks display, and started clapping. "We still haven't located all of him", say the police authorities. "When that quantity of air interacted with the gas in his system, he nearly exploded. It was like an atom bomb went off or something."

"Pumping is the devil's pastime, and we must all say no to Satan," Ratchasima concluded. "Inflate your tires by all means, but then hide your bicycle pump where it cannot tempt you."
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Ljubljana, Slovenia - A passionate angler at an eastern Slovenian lake caught a fish so big that he drowned trying to reel it in, the state-run news agency reported Tuesday.

Determined to land the sheatfish, a typoe of catfish, the 47-year-old fisherman walked into the lake after hooking it and refused to let go when it pulled him under, the STA news agency, quoted a friend of Franc Filipic as saying.

The friend, who was not identified, said Filipic's last words before he drowned were: "Now I've got him!" Police and divers found his body after a two-day search. The fish was not found.
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In unincorporated Fox Lake, Illinois, 28-year-old Daniel Wyman drowned after he and a companion inadvertently blew a hole in the bottom of their boat with an M-250 firecracker. The M-250 firecracker is the equivalent of one-fourth of a stick of dynamite. Daniel Wyman and his friend threw the firecracker into the water near their 14-foot aluminum rowboat. The boat was caught by a gust of wind that pushed the boat over the explosive. The boat was not equipped with life preservers; Wyman, who could not swim, drowned when the boat sank. His companion swam to shore and was taken to Northern Illinois Medical Center in McHenry for observation.

Fox Lake Fire Capt. Thomas Preidis said that the device probably had floated back to the surface when it exploded; otherwise the cushion of water between the explosive and the boat probably would have prevented a breach of the hull.

"We really don't know why it happened," Preidis said. "It's getting close to the 4th of July, and people like to blow off fireworks. When you throw an M-250 in the water it makes a nice big geyser. Then again, they may have been trying to scare fish to the surface."
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BUXTON, N.C. A man died on a beach when an 8-foot-deep hole he had dug into the sand caved in as he sat inside it. Beachgoers said Daniel Jones,21, dug the hole for fun, or protection from the wind, and had been sitting in a beach chair at the bottom Thursday afternoon when it collapsed, burying him beneath 5 feet of sand. People on the beach on the Outer Banks used their hands and shovels, trying to claw their way to Jones, a resident of Woodbridge, Va., but could not reach him. It took rescue workers using heavy equipment almost an hour to free him while about 200 people looked on. Jones was pronounced dead at a hospital. You just wouldn't believe the outpouring of concern, people digging with their hands, using pails from kids," Dare County Sheriff Bert Austin said.
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In February, Santiago Alvarado, 24, was killed in Lompoc, Calif., as he fell face-first through the ceiling of a bicycle shop he was burglarizing. Death was caused when the large flashlight he had placed in his mouth (to keep his hands free) crammed against the base of his skull as he hit the floor.
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According to police in Dahlonega, Ga., ROTC cadet Nick Berrena, 20, was stabbed to death in January by fellow cadet Jeffrey Hoffman, 23, who was trying to prove that a knife could not penetrate the flak vest Berrena was wearing.
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Sylvester Briddell, Jr., 26, was killed in February in Selbyville, Del., as he won a bet with friends who said he would not put a revolver loaded with four bullets into his mouth and pull the trigger.
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In February, according to police in Windsor, Ont., Daniel Kolta, 27, and Randy Taylor, 33, died in a head-on collision, thus earning a tie in the game of chicken they were playing with their snowmobiles.
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A 49-year-old San Francisco stockbroker, who "totally zoned when he ran," according to his wife, accidentally jogged off of a 200-foot-high cliff on his daily run.
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In Detroit, a 41-year-old man got stuck and drowned in two feet of water after squeezing headfirst through an 18-inch-wide sewer grate to retrieve his car keys.
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A 7-year- old boy fell off a 100-foot-high bluff near Ozark, Ark., after he lost his grip swinging on a cross that marked the spot where another person had fallen to his death in 1990.
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A WWII-vintage bomb dug up from under a house in the Philippines exploded Monday, December 7, 1998, killing the owner of the house and three others. Philippine police said that carpenters were installing a septic tank 15 DAYS AGO when the found a bomb under the house in Tacloban, 360 miles southeast of Manila. The 1,000-pound bomb went off as they were tinkering with it, instantly killing the four and destroying the house.

When someone "tinkers" with a 1,000 pound bomb for 15 days they deserve to be removed from the gene pool, and the great news is that four geniuses were removed!
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Police in George, WA issued a report on the events leading up to the deaths of Robert Uhlenake (24) and his friend, Ormond D. Young (27) at the Metallica concert last Friday. Uhlenake and Young were found dead at the Gorge Amphitheater after the show. Uhlenake was in pickup that was on top of Young at the bottom of a 20 ft drop. Young was found with severe lacerations, numerous fractures, contusions, and a branch in his anal cavity. He also had been stabbed and his pants were in a tree above him, some 15 ft off the ground; adding to the mystery of the heretofore unexplained scene.

According to Commissioner-In-Charge Inoye Appleton, Uhlenake and Young had tried to get tickets for the sold-out concert. When they were unable to get any tickets, the two decided to stay in the lot and drink. Once the show began, and after the two had consumed 18 beers between the two of them, they hit upon the idea of scaling the 7 foot wooden security fence around the perimeter of the site and sneak in. They apparently moved the truck up to the edge of the fence and decided that Young would go over first and assist Uhlenake later. They had not counted on the fact that while it was a 7 foot fence on the parking lot side, there was a 23 foot drop on the other side.

Young, who weighed 255 lbs and was quite inebriated, had jumped up and over the fence and promptly fell about half the 23 foot distance before a large tree branch broke his fall AND his left forearm; unfortunately, he also managed to get his shorts caught on the branch. Since he was now in a lot of pain and with no way to extricate himself and his shorts from the tree, he decided, seeing bushes down below, to cut his shorts off and fall to the ground. Upon cutting the last bit of fabric from himself, he suddenly plummeted to earth, losing grip of the knife. The "soft" bushes were actually holly bushes and landing in them caused a massive number of cuts. He also had the misfortune of landing squarely on a holly bush branch; effectively impaling himself. The knife, which he had accidentally released 15 ft up, now landed and stabbed him in his left thigh. Apparently, he was in a lot of pain.

Enter his friend Robert. Uhlenake had apparently observed the last bit of this and, despite his inebriated state, realized that Young was in trouble. He hit upon the idea of lowering a rope to his friend and pull him up and over the fence. This was complicated by the fact that Uhlenake was outweighed by his friend by a good 100 lbs. Again, despite his state he realized he could use their truck to pull Young out. Unfortunately, because of his state, Uhlenake put the truck in reverse, rather than drive, broke through the fence, landed on Young (killing him), was thrown out of the truck and subsequently died of internal injuries.

"So that's how a dead 255 lb man with no pants on, with a truck on top of him and a stick up his ass came to be" said Commissioner Appleton.
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[AP, Mammoth Lakes, CA] A San Anselmo man died yesterday when he hit a lift tower at the Mammoth Mountain ski area while riding down the slope on a foam pad, authorities said. Matthew David Hubal, 22, was pronounced dead at Centinela Mammoth Hospital. The accident occurred about 3 a.m., the Mono County Sheriff's Department said. Hubal and his friends apparently had hiked up a ski run called Stump Alley and undid some yellow foam protectors from the lift towers, said Lieutenant Mike Donnelly of the Mammoth Lakes Police Department. The pads are used to protect skiers who might hit the towers. The group apparently used the pads to slide down the ski slope and Hubal crashed into a tower. It has since been investigated that the tower he hit was the one with its pad removed.
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[AP, St. Louis, MO] Robert Puelo, 32, was apparently being disorderly in a St. Louis market. When the clerk threatened to call police, Puelo grabbed a hot dog, shoved it in his mouth, and walked out without paying for it. Police found him unconscious in front of the store: paramedics removed the six-inch wiener from his throat, where it had choked him to death.
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[UPI, Spain] To poacher Marino Malerba, who shot a stag standing above him on an overhanging rock - and was killed instantly when it fell on him.
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[Associated Press, Kincaid, W. VA] Man Loses Face at Party. A man at a party popped a blasting cap into his mouth and bit down, triggering an explosion that blew off his lips, teeth and tongue, state police said Wednesday. Jerry Stromyer, 24, of Dincaid, bit the blasting cap as a prank during a party late Tuesday night, said Cpl. M.D. Payne. "Another man had it in an aquarium, hooked to a battery, and trying to explode it," Payne said. "It wouldn't go off and this guy said, "I'll show you how to set it off." "He put it in his mouth and bit down. It blew all his teeth off, his tongue and his lips." Payne said. Stromyer was listed in guarded condition Wednesday with extensive facial injuries, according to a spokesman at Charleston Area Medical Division. "I just can't imagine anyone doing something like that," Payne said.
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[UPI, Portland, OR] Doctors at Portland's University Hospital said that Wednesday an Oregon man shot through the skull by a hunting arrow is lucky to be alive, and will be released soon from the hospital. Tony Roberts, 25, lost his right eye last weekend during an initiation into a men's rafting club, Mountain Men Anonymous, in Grants Pass, Ore. A friend tried to shoot a beer can off his head, but the arrow entered Roberts' right eye. Doctors said had the arrow gone 1millimeter to the left, a major blood vessel would have cut and Roberts would have died instantly. Neurosurgeon Dr. Johnny Delashaw at the university Hospital in Portland said the arrow went through 8 to 10 inches of brain, with the tip protruding at the rear of his skill, yet somehow managed to miss all major blood vessels. Delashaw also said had Robert tried to pull the arrow out on his own he surely would have killed himself. Roberts admitted afterwards he and his friends had been drinking that afternoon. Said Roberts, "I feel so dumb about this." No charges have been filed but the Josephine County district attorney's office said the initiation stunt is under investigation.
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[AP, Arkansas] Pillsbury DoughBoy Wanted for Attempted Murder. A woman named Linda went to Arkansas last week to visit her in-laws, and while there, went to a store. She parked next to a car with a woman sitting in it, her eyes closed and hands behind her head, apparently sleeping. When Linda came out a while later, she again saw the woman, her hands still behind her head but with her eyes open. She looked very strange, so Linda tapped on the window and said "Are you okay?" The woman answered "I've been shot in the head, and I am holding my brains in." Linda didn't know what to do; so she ran into the store where store officials called the paramedics. They had to break into the car because the door was locked. When they got in, they found that the woman had bread dough on the back of her head and in her hands. A Pillsbury biscuit canister had exploded, apparently from the heat in the car, making a loud explosion like that of a gunshot, and hit her in the head. When she reached back to find what it was, she felt the dough and thought it was her brains. She passed out from fright at first, then attempted to hold her brain in!
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Unknown, 25 March - A terrible diet and room with no ventilation are being blamed for the death of a man who was killed by his own gas. There was no mark on his body but autopsy showed large amounts of methane gas in his system. His diet had consisted primarily of beans and cabbage (and a couple of other things). It was just the right combination of foods. It appears that the man died in his sleep from breathing from the poisonous cloud that was hanging over his bed. Had he been outside or had his windows been opened, it wouldn't have been fatal. But the man was shut up in his near airtight bedroom. He was 22...a big man with a huge capacity for creating this deadly gas. Three of the rescuers got sick and one was hospitalized.
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Reuters, Mississauga, Ontario - Man slips, falls 23 stories to his death. A man cleaning a bird feeder on his balcony of his condominium apartment in this Toronto suburb slipped and fell 23 stories to his death, police said Monday. Stefan Macko, 55, was standing on a wheeled chair Sunday when the accident occurred, said Inspector Arcy Honer of the Peel regional police. It appears the chair moved and he went over the balcony, Honer said. One of those freak accidents. No foul play is suspected.
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UPI, Toronto - Police said a lawyer demonstrating the safety of windows in a downtown Toronto skyscraper crashed through through a pane with his shoulder and plunged 24 floors to his death. A police spokesman said Garry Hoy, 39, fell into the courtyard of the Toronto Dominion Bank Tower early Friday evening as he was explaining the strength of the building's windows to visiting law students. Hoy previously had conducted demonstrations of window strength according to police reports. Peter Lauwers, managing partner of the firm Holden Day Wilson, told the Toronto Sun newspaper that Hoy was one of the best and brightest members of the 200-man association.
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The Arizona Highway Patrol came upon a pile of smoldering metal embedded into the side of a cliff rising above the road at the apex of a curve. The wreckage resembled the site of an airplane crash, but it was a car. The type of car was unidentifiable at the scene. The lab finally figured out what it was and what had happened.

It seems that a guy had somehow gotten hold of a JATO unit (Jet Assisted Take Off - actually a solid fuel rocket) that is used to give heavy military transport planes an extra "push" for taking off from short airfields. He had driven his Chevy Impala out into the desert and found a long, straight stretch of road. Then he attached the JATO unit to his car, jumped in, got up some speed and fired off the JATO!

The facts as best as could be determined are that the operator of the 1967 Impala hit JATO ignition at a distance of approximately 3.0 miles from the crash site. This was established by the prominent scorched and melted asphalt at that location. The JATO, if operating properly, would have reached maximum thrust within 5 seconds, causing the Chevy to reach speeds well in excess of 350 mph and continuing at full power for an additional 20-25 seconds. The driver, soon to be pilot, most likely would have experienced G-forces usually reserved for dog-fighting F-14 jocks under full afterburners, basically causing him to become insignificant for the remainder of the event. However, the automobile remained on the straight highway for about 2.5 miles (15-20) seconds before the driver applied and completely melted the brakes, blowing the tires and leaving thick rubber marks on the road surface, then becoming airborne for an additional 1.4 miles and impacting the cliff face at a height of 125 feet leaving a blackened crater 3 feet deep in the rock.

Most of the driver's remains were not recoverable; however, small fragments of bone, teeth and hair were extracted from the crater and fingernail and bone shards were removed from a piece of debris believed to be a portion of the steering wheel.
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Who can repair journalism's image? | csmonitor.com: "Who can repair journalism's image?

By Randy Dotinga | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

The past year has been the most miserable in the history of modern American journalism. First came Jayson Blair, the brash young New York Times reporter who made up details, pilfered prose and repeatedly snookered his bosses.

Then, like a long row of click-clacking dominoes, a rogue's gallery of other journalists fell to accusations of plagiarism and fakery. Reporters in Colorado, Georgia, and Missouri allegedly stole material from other publications. In Houston, a sportswriter copied one of his own old columns, and a Chicago Tribune correspondent changed a source's name to protect him.

And in the biggest blow to the industry since Mr. Blair, USA Today last month exposed star foreign correspondent Jack Kelley's long history of deceit in his travels from Cuba to Israel. 'It's bad right now,' says Kansas University journalism professor Peggy Kuhr. 'It's shocking.'

Bush May Accept a Settlement Plan
By STEVEN R. WEISMAN
NY Times
Published: April 14, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 13 — President Bush is planning to issue a declaration on Wednesday that his aides say will recognize Israel's right to retain some Jewish settlements in the West Bank as part of any peace accord with the Palestinians.

Bad Idea Mr. President !! Ask anyone other than the Israeli Government.

The New York Times > Business > 24-Hour Test Drives Seem to Pass Carmakers' Test as a Sales Tool

Microsoft Identifies Serious New Security Flaws (TechNews.com)

Snares and Delusions
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 13, 2004

In his Saturday radio address, George Bush described Iraqi insurgents as a "small faction." Meanwhile, people actually on the scene described a rebellion with widespread support.

Isn't it amazing? A year after the occupation of Iraq began, Mr. Bush and his inner circle seem more divorced from reality than ever.

Events should have cured the Bush team of its illusions. After all, before the invasion Tim Russert asked Dick Cheney about the possibility that we would be seen as conquerors, not liberators, and would be faced with "a long, costly and bloody battle." Mr. Cheney replied, "Well, I don't think it's likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators." Uh-huh.

But Bush officials seem to have learned nothing. Consider, for example, the continuing favor shown to Ahmad Chalabi. Last year the neocons tried to install Mr. Chalabi in power, even ferrying his private army into Iraq just behind our advancing troops. It turned out that he had no popular support, and by now it's obvious that suspicions that we're trying to put Mr. Chalabi on the throne are fueling Iraqi distrust. According to Arnaud de Borchgrave of U.P.I., however, administration officials gave him control of Saddam's secret files — a fine tool for blackmail — and are letting him influence the allocation of reconstruction contracts, a major source of kickbacks.

And we keep repeating the same mistakes. The story behind last week's uprising by followers of Moktada al-Sadr bears a striking resemblance to the story of the wave of looting a year ago, after Baghdad fell.

In both cases, officials were unprepared for an obvious risk. According to The Washington Post: "One U.S. official said there was not even a fully developed backup plan for military action in case Sadr opted to react violently. The official noted that when the decision [to close Sadr's newspaper] was made, there were very few U.S. troops in Sadr's strongholds south of Baghdad."

If we're lucky, the Sadrist uprising will eventually fade out, just as the postwar looting did; but the occupation's dwindling credibility has taken another huge blow.

Meanwhile, Mr. Bush, who once challenged his own father to go mano a mano, is still addicted to tough talk, and still personalizes everything.

Again and again, administration officials have insisted that some particular evildoer is causing all our problems. Last July they confidently predicted an end to the insurgency after Saddam's sons were killed. In December, they predicted an end to the insurgency after capturing Saddam himself. Six weeks ago — was it only six weeks? — Al Qaeda was orchestrating the insurgency, and Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was the root of all evil. The obvious point that we're facing widespread religious and nationalist resentment in Iraq, which is exploited but not caused by the bad guy du jour, never seems to sink in.

The situation in Falluja seems to have been greatly exacerbated by tough-guy posturing and wishful thinking. According to The Jerusalem Post, after the murder and mutilation of American contractors, Mr. Bush told officials that "I want heads to roll." Didn't someone warn him of the likely consequences of attempting to carry out a manhunt in a hostile, densely populated urban area?

And now we have a new villain. Yesterday Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez declared that "the mission of the U.S. forces is to kill or capture Moktada al-Sadr." If and when they do, we'll hear once again that we've turned the corner. Does anyone believe it?

When will we learn that we're not going to end the mess in Iraq by getting bad guys? There are always new bad guys to take their place. And let's can the rhetoric about staying the course. In fact, we desperately need a change in course.

The best we can realistically hope for now is to turn power over to relatively moderate Iraqis with a real base of popular support. Yes, that mainly means Islamic clerics. The architects of the war will complain bitterly, and claim that we could have achieved far more. But they've been wrong about everything so far — and if we keep following their advice, Iraq really will turn into another Vietnam.

Kerry's Foreign Policy Team Hawkish

Is Iraq our Next Vietnam?

Several articles have been written lately using the "q" word, quagmire, to describe America's occupation of Iraq, and to show certain similarities between the Vietnam War and Gulf War II. While there are some common strands, there appears to be a much more obvious, and ominous conflict parallel: Israel's defeat in Southern Lebanon by Hezbollah's resistance fighters.

Incidentally, note also the predominate use of the word "arrest" when our Government speaks about the capture of any of the insurgents; yet refuses to acknowledge that the CPA and American forces in Iraq are attempting to do police work, not classically defined military conquest or pacification. And additional bad-sign occurred last week when the ICDC, (Iraqi Civil Defense Corp) refused to join with American forces in Nasiriyah and Falluja in controlling insurgent violence.

Whoever is responsible for the atrocious strategic and tactical planning for the War's aftermath should be relieved of command access immediately. Our country cannot afford to be guided in War or National Defense by such incompetents ! The insurgents appear to be geniuses compared to US forces in their ability to adapt to changing circumstances. Roadside bombs, abductions, RPG's, targeted assassinations, factional militias, hatred of occupiers, all this was eminently knowable long before the War started, yet the Administration took us into this quagmire with it's eyes wide shut, and now has the audacity to suggest we have no option other than to commit more US resources to a solution. If this War/Occupation were a football game, we would already be down twenty-one to zip, and it would still be the first quarter!

Gas prices climb to new record high
Lundberg: Drivers paying 31.5 cents more than in December
Sunday, April 11, 2004 Posted: 7:42 PM EDT (2342 GMT)

(CNN) -- Gas prices rose on average 2.5 cents a gallon in the past two weeks, with no near-term sign of relief, the publisher of a national survey on gas prices said Sunday. The national average for a gallon of regular unleaded gasoline sold at self-service pumps was $1.79, according to the Lundberg Survey of more than 7,000 U.S. filling stations taken on April 9.

Trilby Lundberg, publisher of the Lundberg Survey, said the new record high comes from an upward trend fueled by higher crude oil prices globally, increased demand for gas caused by economic growth in the United States and increased refinery costs resulting from seasonal changes in refinery processes mandated by environmental rules.

U.S. motorists are paying an average 31.5 cents per gallon more, [equivalent to 20.9%] since December 2003, Lundberg said.

Barring an unexpected drop in crude oil prices, more increases are possible as the high-demand summer driving season approaches, Lundberg said. As in the last survey, taken March 26, San Diego, California, remained the most expensive place to fill up a tank, with a gallon of self-serve regular now $2.22 -- 10 cents higher than two weeks earlier. Tulsa, Oklahoma, remained the cheapest city for gas, at $1.59 cents a gallon -- a penny less than two weeks before.

IRS is auditing fewer businesses, more individuals
Mary Dalrymple, Associated Press
April 12, 2004IRS0412

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- The Internal Revenue Service audited fewer corporations, small businesses and partnerships last year but more individual taxpayers, according to a study of government data.

Syracuse University's Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, in its analysis of IRS data, concluded that the audit rate for businesses of all sizes slipped last year to 2.1 audits for every 1,000 businesses, down from 2.2 audits per 1,000 businesses the previous year.

At the same time, the IRS audited 14 percent more individual tax returns. The audit rate for individuals increased last year to 6.5 audits for every 1,000 taxpayers. Official audit rates released by the IRS last month show a similar trend.

Researchers said the declining audits of businesses exposes a flaw in the administration's tough stance against corporate wrongdoing.

"These and a number of other measures -- documented by the agency's own data -- indicate that the actual performance of the IRS differs in significant ways from some of the Bush administration claims when it comes to cracking down on corporate scofflaws," the report said.

Researchers point specifically to declining audits of the largest corporations and a type of business organization that passes income and taxes on to its shareholders or partners -- an arrangement found to have been improperly used in some corporate accounting scandals.

IRS Commissioner Mark Everson said that the agency's broad attack on corporate tax evasion does not show up in the audit numbers.

"Am I satisfied with the numbers? No. I want to see them go up," he said. "I'm not surprised that that's lagging the other indicators. And while I think it's an important indicator, it doesn't tell the whole story."

Some advocates said the trend appears troubling.

"What struck me first was the commissioner earlier this week said that they'd increased enforcement and then I look at these numbers and say, 'What is he talking about?' " said David Keating, senior counselor for the National Taxpayers Union. "It really opens up a credibility gap."

In a detailed written response, the IRS said the study ignores the reasons for the decline in corporate audits and other enforcement actions taken against businesses.

The IRS said the decline can be attributed partly to the explosive growth in tax shelters, which make audits more intricate and time-consuming. Tax collectors worked more than 2,200 corporate tax shelter returns in 2003. Each takes an average 7½ months longer than other corporate returns, and their number is growing.

Corporate vs Individual Income Tax

More corporations shirk their share of tax burden
USA Today
Posted 4/11/2004 10:18 PM Updated 4/11/2004 10:32 PM

In his annual letter to shareholders earlier this year, Berkshire Hathaway Chairman Warren Buffett made an unusual admission: Next year, he hopes that his company will pay more than the $3.3 billion in corporate taxes it paid for 2003. Buffett sees higher taxes as the logical consequence of higher profits, which keep rolling into his Omaha-based holding company.

Although Buffett is widely admired for business acumen, his perspective on corporate taxes isn't shared in many corner offices nationwide. In fact, the percentage of federal tax receipts from corporate income taxes has been in decline since the 1950s, from over 30% to under 10%. And the General Accounting Office reported last week that 61% of U.S. corporations paid no taxes during the booming period from 1996 through 2000.

Here's a point to remember as you pay your taxes this week: When companies find ways to exploit the tax code to reduce or eliminate their tax liabilities, individuals pay more. And the public faith in the tax code's basic fairness is undercut when profitable companies opt out of their responsibilities.

Yet companies have convinced Congress to give them generous exemptions, credits and deductions. And repeated tinkering to provide narrowly targeted tax breaks has created a code that's so complex, it provides companies numerous ways to avoid taxes.

Among the causes of the decline in corporate taxes:

� The 2002 and 2003 tax cuts were billed largely as cuts for individuals. But they also slashed an estimated $175 billion in corporate taxes through 2005. Pending in Congress now are a transportation spending bill that contains an unrelated cut to the corporate alternative minimum tax and a trade bill with cuts for manufacturing firms.

�The Internal Revenue Service and congressional investigators have uncovered the widespread use of legal corporate tax-avoidance schemes. In one, companies pay to lease roads and bridges from municipalities and then charge the same municipalities for their use. The tactic has no purpose other than providing tax write-offs. Another popular practice, which is legal in most cases, is for companies to create paper transactions with offshore subsidiaries. That way, companies can claim that their profits were earned in countries with no income tax.

Business groups deny they are unfairly avoiding taxes. They say corporate taxes are down because more companies structure themselves as partnerships or other types of businesses not required to pay taxes. The profits of these firms are reported on their owners' individual returns.

While such companies are growing in number, they don't account for the precipitous decline in corporate tax receipts. Nor would they explain why companies such as Wachovia paid no income taxes in 2002, despite reported profits of $4.1 billion. A Wachovia spokeswoman says the company did nothing wrong and that the company paid more than $900 million in taxes in 2003.

Berkshire Hathaway is increasingly becoming the exception to a highly troubling rule. This year, it will pay 2.5 cents of every dollar the government collects in corporate income tax. The corporate tax burden is one that's best shared fairly and not left to a declining number of companies — even companies as successful as Buffett's.

"Framing": Argument Mechanisms for Spinners

Note: Have you listened to a political argument recently that reminds you of a logical fallacy from your freshman logic class? Something along the lines of: "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" The dictionary suggests the word concept: 'mu', to refer to a worthy response to these kinds of arguments.

From dictionary.com comes this definition:

2. /moo/ The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions".

For more background on the concept, see this article about "framing"

Simple Framing: George Lakoff's tutorial on framing

Carry out the following directive:
Don't think of an elephant!

It is, of course, a directive that cannot be carried out — and that is the point. In order to purposefully not think of an elephant, you have to think of an elephant. There are four morals.

Moral 1. Every word evokes a frame.
A frame is a conceptual structure used in thinking. The word elephant evokes a frame with an image of an elephant and certain knowledge: an elephant is a large animal (a mammal) with large floppy ears, a trunk that functions like both a nose and a hand, large stump-like legs, and so on.

Moral 2: Words defined within a frame evoke the frame.
The word "trunk" as in the sentence Sam picked up the peanut with his trunk evokes the Elephant Frame and suggests that "Sam" is the name of an elephant.

Moral 3: Negating a frame evokes the frame.

Moral 4: Evoking a frame reinforces that frame.
Every frame is realized in the brain by neural circuitry. Every time a neural circuit is activated, it is strengthened.

Conservatives Know about Framing.
On the day that George W. Bush took office, the words "tax relief" started appearing in White House communiqués to the press and in official speeches and reports by conservatives. Let us look in detail at the framing evoked by this term.

The word relief evokes a frame in which there is a blameless Afflicted Person who we identify with and who has some Affliction, some pain or harm that is imposed by some external Cause-of-pain. Relief is the taking away of the pain or harm, and it is brought about by some Reliever-of-pain.

The Relief frame is an instance of a more general Rescue scenario, in which there a Hero (The Reliever-of-pain), a Victim (the Afflicted), a Crime (the Affliction), A Villain (the Cause-of-affliction), and a Rescue (the Pain Relief). The Hero is inherently good, the Villain is evil, and the Victim after the Rescue owes gratitude to the Hero.

The term tax relief evokes all of this and more. Taxes, in this phrase, are the Affliction (the Crime), proponents of taxes are the Causes-of Affliction (the Villains), the taxpayer is the Afflicted Victim, and the proponents of "tax relief" are the Heroes who deserve the taxpayers' gratitude.

Every time the phrase tax relief is used and heard or read by millions of people, the more this view of taxation as an affliction and conservatives as heroes gets reinforced.

Last week, President Bush started using the slogan "Tax relief creates jobs." Looking at the Relief Frame, we see that afflictions and pain can be quantified, and there can be more or less relief. By the logic of framing (NOT the logic of economics!), if tax relief creates jobs, then more tax relief creates more jobs. That is just how the president has been arguing for increasing tax cuts from $350 billion to $550 billion. The new frame incorporates the old Tax Relief frame into a new TaxReliefCreatesJobs frame

Now suppose that a Democratic Senator goes on one of those Fox News shows in which there is a conservative and a liberal arguing. The way these shows work is that the conservative host states an issue using a conservative framing of that issue. The conservative host says: "President Bush has observed that more tax relief creates more jobs. You have voted against increased tax relief. Why?"

The Senator is caught. Any attempt to answer the question as asked simply reinforces both the Tax Relief Frame and the TaxReliefCreatesJobs Frame. The question builds in a conservative worldview and false "facts". Even to deny that "tax relief creates jobs" accepts the Tax Relief frame and reinforces the TaxReliefCreatesJobs frame.

The only response is to reframe. But you can't do it in a soundbite unless an appropriate Democratic language has been built up in advance. With more time, one can bridge to another frame. But that frame has to be comprehensible in advance.

Long-term Reframing
Conservatives have worked for decades to establish the metaphors of taxation as a burden, an affliction, and an unfair punishment – all of which require "relief." They have also, over decades, built up the frame in which the wealthy create jobs, and giving them more wealth creates more jobs.

The power of these frames cannot be overcome immediately. Frame development takes time and work. Democrats have to start reframing now and keep at it. Democratic reframing must express fundamental Democratic values: empathy, responsibility, fairness, community, cooperation, doing our fair share.

Progressives have to articulate over and over the moral basis for progressive taxation. They have to overcome the outrageous conservative myth that wealthy people have amassed their wealth all by themselves.

The truth is that the wealthy have received more from America than most Americans — not just wealth but the infrastructure that has allowed them to amass their wealth: banks, the Federal Reserve, the stock market, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the legal system, federally-sponsored research, patents, tax supports, the military protection of foreign investments, and much much more. American taxpayers support the infrastructure of wealth accumulation. It is only fair that those who benefit most should pay their fair share.

Reframing is telling the truth as we see it – telling it forcefully, straightforwardly, articulately, with moral conviction and without hesitation. The language must fit the conceptual reframing — a reframing from the perspective of Democratic morality. It is not just a matter of words, though the right words do help evoke a Democratic frame: paying their fair share, those who have received more, the infrastructure of wealth, and so on.

Reframing requires a rewiring of the brain. That may take an investment of time, effort, and money. The conservatives have realized that. They made the investment and it is paying off. Moral: The truth alone will not set you free. It has to be framed correctly.

Taxation is not an affliction. The president's tax cuts will not create jobs. These are truths, but negating them as we just did just reinforces his frames. The right framing for the truth must be available and used for the truth be heard.

If the truth doesn't fit the existing frame, the frame will stay in place and the truth will dissipate.

It takes time and a lot of repetition for frames to become entrenched in the very synapses of people's brains. Moreover, they have to fit together in an overall coherent way for them to make sense.

Effective framing on a single issue must be both right and sensible. That is, it must fit into a system of frames (to be sensible) and must fit one's moral worldview (to be right).

Framing vs. Spin
Every word comes with one or more frames. Most frames are unconscious and have just developed naturally and haphazardly and have come into the public's mind through common use. But, over the past 40 years, conservative Republicans — using the intellectuals in their think tanks — have consciously and strategically crafted an overall conservative worldview, with a conservative moral framework. They have also invested heavily in language — in two ways:

Language that fits their worldview, and hence evokes it whenever used. "Tax relief" is a good example.
Deceptive language, that evokes frames they don't really believe but that public approves of. Saying "Tax relief creates jobs" is an example — or referring to their environmental positions as being "clean," "healthy" and "safe."

The Rockridge Institute advises against the use of deceptive language and we will not engage in it. We belief that honest framing both accords with Democratic values and is the most effective strategy overall.

An Example
There is a bill being introduced in the California legislature that will use the state's economy of scale to purchase health care relatively cheaply for workers whose employers don't provide it. Small businesses would contribute to a state fund and be able to purchase health insurance through the state at rates previously offered only to very large businesses. The state would be helping small business compete with large businesses in this way.

The question arose as to what to call it. The issue is still not settled. Names suggested were "Play or Pay," Healthy Workers," and so on. "Play or Pay" frames it as the unions strong-arming all employers into paying. "Healthy Workers" sounds like socialist realism. The issue is not settled, but I have proposed "Earned Care." The idea is simple: If you work, part of what you earn is affordable health care.

It fits our belief system as Democrats that health care is earned by people who work. Naming matters. The naming of legislation should reflect our values.

Responding to "Tort Reform" in Texas
Conservatives have been battering progressives on what they have framed as "tort reform" – legislation to cap awards in tort cases. They have been most aggressive in Texas, where they have used the following language::
Litigation Lottery, Lawsuit Abuse, Lawsuit Abuse Tax, Frivolous Lawsuits, Greedy Trial Lawyers, Out of Control Juries, Runaway Juries, Jackpot Awards

The term "reform" is defined in the Corruption Frame, "lottery" in the Gambling Frame, and so on. Opposites are defined with respect to the frame, but given opposite values, one positive, the other, negative. When you say your opponent is frivolous, it is rhetorically implied that you are the opposite, serious. If your opponent is a gambler, then you are fiscally responsible. And so on. That's how Republicans were framing Democrats.

These words evoke frames that, as they are used in context, evoke conservative values:
You alone are responsible for whatever happens to you.
You shouldn't get what you haven't earned.
You should be disciplined, prudent, orderly.

We crafted a response that allowed the trial lawyers to take the moral high ground — in a way that fit what they believe. We took out a copy of Moral Politics and listed progressive values. Then we followed a systematic procedure:

Pick out the relevant core values for this issue.
Write down how your position follows from these values.
Articulate the facts and their consequences within this moral framing.
Define us and them within this moral frame.
Here's how the issue looks from a progressive moral perspective:

Tort law is the public's last defense against irresponsible, if not downright immoral, corporate behavior that harms the public. It is only the threat of huge punitive damages that has any effect on companies that put profit ahead of public health and well-being. Without that threat — with a small cap on awards — irresponsible companies can fold the relatively low cost of potential lawsuits into the cost of doing business and go on selling dangerous products unchecked. Public safety requires keeping the courts open for juries to make awards appropriate not just to the suffering of the victims, but to the threat to the public. It is a matter of protection.

The proposal to cap awards would effectively take the power to punish away from juries, and would make it hard for those harmed to sue, since lawyers would have a financial disincentive to take such a case. This would have the practical effect of closing off the courts to those seeking redress from corporate harm. Justice requires open courts.

The fundamental progressive values are:
We are empathetic; we care about people.
Be responsible
Help, Don't Harm
Protect the powerless

These led to the following language to describe conservative Republicans and the relevant corporations in this case:
The Corporate Immunity Act;
Corporate Raid on Responsibility;
Accountability Crisis;
Closed Courts;
The New Untouchables;
Rewards Greed and Dishonesty;
Protects the guilty, punishes the innocent.

Taking this moral-based approach changes both how you think as well as talk about tort cases and open courts:
Talk about Responsibility instead of Victimhood; about Accountability instead of Grievances; about Citizens instead of Consumers; about Open Courts instead of Money.

The Texas legislature is ovewhelmingly Republican and will not be swayed by this reframing. However, Democrats in the legislature have been given a powerful tool to express their values, the major newpapers in the state have adopted this framing enthusiastically and now support the Democrats' position, and it appears that the proposed Republicans' constitutional amendment will fail.

Communicative, Conceptual, and Moral Framing
Communication itself comes with a frame. The elements of the Communication Frame include: A message, an audience, a messenger, a medium, images, a context, and especially, higher-level moral and conceptual frames. The choice of language is, of course, vital, but it is vital because language evokes frames — moral and conceptual frames.

Frames form a system. The system has to be built up over time. It takes a long-range effort. Conservative think tanks have been at it for 40 years. Most of this system development involves moral and conceptual frames, not just communicative frames. Communicative framing involves only the lowest level of framing.

Framing is an art, though cognitive linguistics can help a lot. It needs to be done systematically.

Negative campaigns should be done in the context of positive campaigns. To avoid negating the opposition's frame and thus activating it, do the following: Start with your ideal case of the issue given. Pick frames in which your ideal case is positively valued. The contrast will attribute the negatively valued opposite quality to the opposition as a nightmare case.

Incredible !!

Note: It is really incredible that a significant portion of our electorate professes to know about Chaos theory, the Heisenberg Principle, the stategic logic of suicide bombers, Guerilla warfare, binomial social and political segregations, micro-economics, employee testing, management dynamics, and modern warfare and can still support George Bush as President.

From an article in the International Herald Tribune:

"Dying to kill: The strategic logic of suicide bombers
Robert A. Pape NYT Tuesday, September 23, 2003

CHICAGO Suicide terrorism has been on the rise around the world for two decades, but there is great confusion as to why. Since many such attacks - including, of course, those of Sept. 11, 2001 - have been perpetrated by Muslim terrorists professing religious motives, it might seem obvious that Islamic fundamentalism is the central cause. This presumption has fueled the belief that future Sept. 11's can be avoided only by a wholesale transformation of Muslim societies, which in turn was a core reason for broad public support in the United States of the invasion of Iraq.
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However, this presumed connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism is wrongheaded, and it may be encouraging domestic and foreign policies that are likely to worsen America's situation.
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I have spent a year compiling a database of every suicide bombing and attack around the globe from 1980 to 2001 - 188 in all. It includes any attack in which at least one terrorist killed himself or herself while attempting to kill others, although I excluded attacks authorized by a national government, such as those by North Korea against the South. The data show that there is little connection between suicide terrorism and Islamic fundamentalism, or any religion for that matter. In fact, the leading instigator of suicide attacks is the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka, a Marxist-Leninist group whose members are from Hindu families but who are adamantly opposed to religion (they have committed 75 of the 188 incidents).
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Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland. Religion is rarely the root cause, although it is often used as a tool by terrorist organizations in recruiting and in other efforts in service of the broader strategic objective.
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Three general patterns in the data support my conclusions. First, nearly all suicide terrorist attacks occur as part of organized campaigns, not as isolated or random incidents. Of the 188 separate attacks in the period I studied, 179 could have their roots traced to large, coherent political or military campaigns.
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Second, liberal democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists. The United States, France, India, Israel, Russia, Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of almost every suicide attack of the past two decades, and each country has been a democracy at the time of the incidents.
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Third, suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective. From Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya, the sponsors of every campaign have been terrorist groups trying to establish or maintain political self-determination by compelling a democratic power to withdraw from the territories they claim. Even Al Qaeda fits this pattern. Although Saudi Arabia is not under American military occupation per se, the initial major objective of Osama bin Laden was the expulsion of American troops from the Gulf.
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Most worrisome, my research shows that the raw number of suicide attacks has been climbing at an alarming rate, even while the rates of other types of terrorism actually declined. The worldwide annual total of terrorist incidents has fallen almost in half; there were 348 attacks in 2001 as opposed to 666 incidents in 1987. Yet the number of attacks in which the terrorists intend to kill themselves along with their victims has grown from an average of three per year in the 1980s, to 10 per year in the 1990s, to more than 25 in both 2000 and 2001.
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And in terms of casualties, suicide attacks are far and way the most efficient form of terrorism. From 1980 to 2001, suicide attacks accounted for only 3 percent of terrorist incidents, but caused almost half of total deaths due to terrorism - even if one excludes as an aberration the unusually large number of fatalities on Sept. 11, 2001.
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How should democracies respond? In the past, they have tended to react with heavy military offensives, only to find that this tends to incite more attacks and to stir public sympathy for the terrorists without hampering their networks (this has clearly been the case in the West Bank and Chechnya). In their frustration, some terrorized countries have then changed tacks, making concessions to political causes supported by terrorists.
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Yet this doesn't work either: One likely reason suicide terrorism has been rising so rapidly in recent years is that terrorist groups have learned that the strategy pays off. Suicide terrorists were thought to compel American and French military forces to abandon Lebanon in 1983, Israeli forces to leave most of Lebanon in 1985, Israeli forces to quit the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in 1994 and 1995, and the Turkish government to grant measures of autonomy to the Kurds in the late 1990s. In all but the case of Turkey, the terrorists' political cause made far greater political gains after they resorted to suicide operations.
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When one considers the strategic logic of suicide terrorism, it becomes clear that America's war on terrorism is heading in the wrong direction. The close association between foreign military occupations and the growth of suicide terrorist movements shows the folly of any strategy centering on conquering countries that sponsor terrorism or in trying to transform their political systems. At most, occupying countries will disrupt terrorist operations in the short term. But over time it will simply increase the number of terrorists coming at America.
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Unfortunately, negotiating concessions with the terrorists is also not a solution. The current failure of that approach in Israel is an all-too-common pattern. Concessions are usually incremental and deliberately staggered - thus they fail to satisfy the nationalist aspirations of the suicide terrorists, yet encourage terrorist leaders to see their enemies as vulnerable to coercion.
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In the end, the best approach for the states under fire is probably to focus on their own domestic security while doing what they can to see that the least militant forces on the terrorists' side build a viable state on their own. Israel, for example, would be well advised to abandon the territory it holds on the West Bank but to go ahead with building the immense wall to physically separate it from the Palestinian population. This would create real security for Israel and leave the West Bank for a true Palestinian state.
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For the United States, especially in light of its growing occupation of the Gulf region, it is crucial to immediately step up border and immigration controls. In the medium term, Washington should abandon its visions of empire and allow the United Nations to take over the political and economic institutions in Iraq. And in the long run, America must move toward energy independence, reducing the need for troops in the Gulf. Even if U.S. intentions in Iraq are good, the presence of Americans there will continue to help terrorist groups recruit more people willing to blow themselves up in the war against America.

The above seems so patently obvious as to not require affirmation...but millions of Americans have been sold a social bill of goods from the Bush Administration that they cannot see the forest, nor the trees...all they seem to be able to see is black and white, blue skies, and cherubic images. Here's a image these folks should see.

Fighting Halts Briefly in Falluja; U.S. Convoy Hit Near Baghdad
By JOHN F. BURNS
NY Times
Published: April 10, 2004

BAGHDAD, Iraq, April 9 — An American cease-fire on Friday in the besieged city of Falluja lowered at least briefly the gathering drumbeat of warfare across central and southern Iraq that has created the worst crisis of the American occupation and left hundreds of Iraqis and scores of Americans dead.

One year to the day after American troops captured Baghdad, both Sunni and Shiite insurgents continued sporadic but widespread attacks, including an ambush of fuel trucks on a highway near Falluja, just as the cease-fire began.

Detailed Analysis of Public Statements by the Bush Administration: Jan - Sep 2001 regarding Terrorism and al Qaeda

Detailed Timeline of Administration Statements On National Security
From January 20 to September 10, 2001, Al Qaeda Mentioned Only Once
April 5, 2004

The Center for American Progress has compiled an exhaustive, day-by-day overview of the Bush administration's public statements on national security, defense and international issues from Jan. 20 to Sept. 10, 2001. The 50-page compilation includes all official news releases, press briefings, press availabilities, news advisories, speeches, public addresses, executive orders, and proclamations posted by the White House, the Department of Defense, the Department of State, and the Department of Justice, as well as transcripts of major media appearances by top Bush administration officials, in the eight months prior to 9/11.

While the Bush administration maintains it was focused extensively on terrorism, our analysis of 557 public statements reveals only one mention of al Qaeda by the administration over the 8-month period. Notably, this single mention of al Qaeda was found in a signed notice from President Bush continuing an executive order – issued by President Clinton – prohibiting transactions with the Taliban. Osama bin Laden was mentioned only 19 times during the same period, 17 of which occurred in the context of press briefings or questions from journalists.

The record clearly shows that terrorism and the threat from al Qaeda were not on the list of priorities for the Bush administration in early 2001. At a time when al Qaeda was finalizing its plans to attack America, the Bush administration was focused on Iraq and national missile defense rather than the threat from extremist terrorist groups.

This document shows that top Bush administration officials discussed Iraq and Saddam Hussein in 104 separate statements and missile defense in 101 statements. Weapons of mass destruction were discussed in 65 separate statements, [and al Qaeda mentioned once].

The document also includes a day-by-day overview of President Bush's schedule after Aug. 6, 2001 – the day the White House received a "hair raising" warning about imminent attacks from al Qaeda.

Download in PDF: Detailed Timeline of Administration Statements On National Security From Jan. 20, 2001 to Sept. 10, 2001

The Empty Room
By BOB HERBERT
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 9, 2004

Condi Rice was in Washington trying to pass her oral exam before the 9/11 commission yesterday, and the president was on vacation in Texas. As usual, they were in close agreement, this time on the fact that neither they nor anyone else in this remarkably aloof and arrogant administration is responsible for the tragic mess unfolding in Iraq, and its implications for the worldwide war on terror.

The president called Ms. Rice from his pickup truck on the ranch to tell her she had done a great job before the panel. It doesn't get more surreal than that. Mr. President, there's a war on. You might consider hopping a plane to Washington.

It's hard to imagine that the news out of Iraq could be more dreadful. After the loss of at least 634 American troops and the expenditure of countless billions of dollars, we've succeeded in getting the various Iraqi factions to hate us more than they hate each other.

The administration has no real plan on how to proceed. It doesn't know how many troops are needed. It doesn't know, in the long term, where they will come from. It doesn't know whether it can meet the June 30 deadline for turning over sovereignty to the Iraqis. (It doesn't know what sovereignty in this context even means. June 30 was an arbitrary date selected with this year's presidential campaign in mind.) It doesn't have a cadre of Iraqi leaders to accept the handoff of sovereignty. And so on.

When you open the door to get a look at the Bush policy on Iraq, you find yourself staring into an empty room. Meanwhile, people are dying.

When the president challenged Iraqi militants last summer with the now-famous taunt "bring 'em on," he betrayed a fundamental lack of understanding of the horror of war in general, and the incredible complexity of the situation in Iraq.

Instead of behaving as though he is responsible, as commander in chief, for the life of every man and woman who is sent into combat, Mr. Bush has behaved on more than one occasion as though he's at the controls of a video game. He does not appear to be taking this great tragedy nearly as seriously as he should.

Perhaps if he went to a few less fund-raisers and a few more funerals . . .

One of the things soldiers on the ground in Vietnam learned is that while there were many South Vietnamese who were genuinely fearful of the Communist North and were anxious to embrace the values that the U.S. stood for, it was difficult to get them to fight for their freedom with the ferocity that the Americans expected. Among other things, we underestimated the strength of the ethnic and cultural bonds that the Vietnamese felt with one another, whatever their political inclinations.

When the Americans — foreigners — with their superior technology and firepower went to work tearing up the landscape and mowing down the enemy (not to mention the so-called collateral damage of innocent South Vietnamese civilians), any chance of winning the hearts and minds of the country at large was lost.

Now we are trying to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis with an unprovoked war that began with a televised bombing campaign advertised to the world as "shock and awe," and that continues with the devastating firepower of Super Cobra helicopters and laser-guided missiles.

Thousands of innocent Iraqis have died, including small children, but we don't seem to give that much thought. And we've insisted, despite profound cultural and religious differences, that we are going to install an American-style democracy, whether the various elements of the Iraqi people want it or not. And we're going to do it fast.

Mr. Bush and his advisers need to regroup and rethink this fiasco. If we were dealt this hand in a poker game, we'd fold. But with 135,000 troops on the ground and no real Iraqi government in sight, that's not an option.

It's heartbreaking to think that brave American troops have once again been put into such an untenable situation. The president, who led us into this wholly unnecessary war, has an obligation to step up and level with the American people, to take full responsibility for the current disaster and to summon help from a genuine international coalition, which is the only feasible route to a resolution in Iraq.

One Good Month
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 9, 2004

At last, a favorable surprise on jobs: estimated payroll employment rose 308,000 in March, above almost everyone's expectations. You can't blame the administration for trying to play up the good news, and for being dismayed when the sound of popping Champagne corks was drowned out by the crackle of gunfire. But has the economy, after so many false starts, finally started to deliver?

For perspective, it helps to remember what solid job growth looks like. During Bill Clinton's eight years in office, the economy added 236,000 jobs per month. But that's just an average: a graph of monthly changes looks like an electrocardiogram. There were 23 months with 300,000 or more new jobs; in March 2000, the economy added 493,000 jobs. This tells us not to make too much of one month's data; payroll numbers are, as economists say, noisy. It also tells us that by past standards, March 2004 was nothing special

Networks to Air Rice Testimony Live Thursday
Tue Apr 6, 2004 06:00 PM ET
Reuters

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The three major U.S. broadcast networks said on Tuesday they will broadcast live National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice's testimony before the commission investigating the Sept. 11 2001 attacks.

ABC, NBC and CBS said they would go live at 9 a.m. EDT on Thursday to broadcast the appearance, which comes amid controversy over whether she failed to focus on the threat posed by al Qaeda in the weeks before the Sept. 11 2001 attacks on the world Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Privatization: A Challenge to the Common Good

The United Church of Christ has an excellent resource booklet, in PDF format, that covers many of the current threads in the arguments for and against privatization. Check it out here for more information and faith reflections on privatization.

Fighting Fundamentalism
by Anne McConney (reprinted from Episcopal Life)

...The only comfort we can take, and a cold comfort it seems to be, is that we have seen it all before. We know, as a friend of mine likes to say, the holes in the riverbed. And, I think, we are beginning to suspect that the biggest and most dangerous hole - the one that could swallow us all - must be dealt with now. Its name is fundamentalism.

Not liberalism. Not conservatism. These are opinions, and those who hold them can have reasoned and insightful dialogue with one another. Such dialogue, in fact, is necessary to our integrity, for no idea should be completely trusted until it has been tried and tempered and hammered out on the anvil of debate with its opposite.

Fundamentalism is something quite different. Bart Giamatti, once president of Yale, defined it as "the true belief as propounded by the true believer" and called it "the terrorism of the mind." Fundamentalism has no use for debate and no capacity for dialogue; fundamentalism, by necessity, relies on intimidation and sometimes violence.

We see this clearly, of course, in such institutions as the Taliban. But this is all the more reason that we never should delude ourselves into believing that fundamentalism exists only in other faith traditions or that it is comfortably confined to the other side of the world. It shows its ugly face in our own society and within our own congregations. It is probably the most dangerous movement in our world today.

For the danger of fundamentalism is not its narrow world view nor its rulebook belief system nor even its grievous tendency to exclude; its danger lies in its insistence that everyone must be compelled, by law or force if necessary, to hold the "beliefs of the true believer." It destroys the creative tension of the community and sets in its place a community based on drab uniformity, where problems can not be acknowledged.

I firmly believe that when our children and grandchildren look back on our era, they will see that the world, the society and the church they inherited from us were irrevocably shaped by how well we ourselves were able to deal with fundamentalism. Will we find the courage and vision to move forward, or will we allow our own fears to drive us from one bleak landscape into another?

Fear is the taproot of fundamentalism, and no one knew this better than Jesus. The boy who at the age of 12 astounded the priests in the Temple surely was destined - or so those ancient rabbis must have thought - to find a place in the religious structure of his time. If they remembered him at all some 18 years later, it must have been with a sad shaking of heads: Such a promising lad he was, only to waste himself as an itinerant preacher! Yet that was the path Jesus chose.

It was a dangerous choice and yet - as Jesus knew, as his followers have known for 20 centuries - the only possible way. Entrenched fear, cobbling together its barricades of rules and ritualism, cannot be challenged on its own terms nor fought with its own weapons. It can only be overcome by preaching - and showing forth in our lives - a love openly available to all, a God whose hands are safe and sure, a kingdom where men and women live in justice and equality, and a vision only the free and fearless mind can attain.

From Cynthia Tucker's OpEd in the AJC: April 2004

"It is disappointing to see black ministers -- several of whom are old enough to remember the lash of Jim Crow -- brandishing the Bible against gays the same way Bull Connor wielded a billy club against civil rights marchers. Of course, they adamantly resist comparisons of the crusade for gay rights to the movement for civil rights. In a statement opposing same-sex unions, several black ministers wrote: "To equate a lifestyle choice to racism demeans the work of the entire civil rights movement."

But U.S. Rep. John Lewis (D-Ga.), who faced down billy clubs and firehoses, begs to differ. Supporting gay rights before a U.S. Senate committee, Lewis said, "We have been down this road before in this country. The right to liberty and happiness belongs to each of us and on the same terms, without regard to either skin color or sexual orientation."

So does Coretta Scott King, widow of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Speaking at a gay pride rally in Atlanta several years ago, she said, "I wanted . . . to reaffirm my wholehearted support of freedom from discrimination for lesbian and gay people. I do so because I believe that all forms of persecution are wrong.

"As my husband said, 'I have fought too long and hard against segregated public accommodations to end up segregating my moral concerns. Justice is indivisible.' "

Edmund Burke: "The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing."

'Power must always be defeated'
By RICHARD HALICKS
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 04/02/04

As he approaches his 70th birthday in July, Wole Soyinka can look back on a life of great struggle and greater accomplishment. The Nigerian intellectual is poet, playwright, novelist, memoirist, essayist, renowned university professor and winner of the Nobel Prize for literature.

Wole Soyinka speaks of the "sense of absolute infallbility" of President Bush and Osama bin Laden, the idea that "I'm doing the will of God, and therefore anything goes."

But as he concludes his first seven decades, he is what he has always been: a fighter. "If a fanatic comes to kill me, I consider it my duty to try to kill him first," Soyinka tells a cheering crowd at an Emory University lecture. "I am not interested in dialoguing with the fanatic."

Soyinka, who taught at Emory until last fall, returned there last week to deliver the last in a series of five lectures commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corp. and called, collectively, "Climate of Fear." Last week's lecture — "I Am Right; You Are Dead" — discussed the lethal dangers of fanaticism.

Although his bravado delighted the crowd, his comparison of President Bush with Osama bin Laden drew wintry glares from some in the small university theater (and a few cheers, as well).

At one point during the follow-up Q&A, Soyinka hailed the bloodless disarmament of Libya and spoke of how diplomacy had won the day. Referring to photos that day of Tony Blair with Moammar Gadhafi, BBC host Sue Lawley wondered aloud: "If Blair can go into the tent with Gadhafi, can Bush go into the cave with bin Laden?"

Said Soyinka, "I think if Bush goes into the cave, he will not come out."

Earlier that day, the writer sat for an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The conversation ranged widely, going back to Soyinka's imprisonment in the 1960s for more than two years — much of it in solitary confinement — simply for proposing peace talks to end the Nigerian civil war. He spent those long months teaching himself how to make ink by grinding up plants he collected in the exercise yard, making pens from bones and other found items, hoarding toilet paper and cigarette paper to write on.

"One day a crow flew over the prison and dropped a feather. I was so grateful to that crow. I wrote a poem for him."

Soyinka also spoke of his mighty disdain for political correctness, and of the impact of Islamic law in his home country. Here are some highlights of that conversation.

Q: You've talked about the "you're with us or you're against us" mentalities of Osama bin Laden and George W. Bush. In that respect, at least, you've likened the two, using the expression "the twin strain of the same fanatic spore."

A: It has always struck me very forcibly every time I listen to George Bush — including his State of the Union address in January — he dismissed the disapproval of the rest of the world by saying that the nation was serving the will of God. When people use that kind of language, you are listening to a kind of fundamentalist streak in that person. . . .

So it's that kind of strain I'm talking about, the sense of absolute infallibility. I'm doing the will of God, and therefore anything goes. No! In a society, the social order depends on consent, on debate, discussion, not from an externally derived authority. And that kind of language to me is very dangerous from anyone. And that's what I'm referring to. It is the same with bin Laden. He claims the right to liberate me — one of his speeches included Nigeria on a list of those nations to be liberated. I said, "This man is nuts!"

Q: It does seem that the "God is on our side" statement permeates so much of the dialogue today.

A: What I find is that zealotry breeds counter-zealotry. People say the only instrument I can use against this force or this position which claims external authority is by surmounting that level of conviction from the same kind of amorphous authority. I refer to people like Timothy McVeigh, to the anti-abortion activists who believe they're carrying out the will of God by shooting down abortion doctors, even patients, police guards. And they insist they are carrying out the will of God.

It is that kind of language that society should not tolerate. People should accept responsibility for themselves, in themselves. Say, "All right, this is what I believe. It's my duty to kill doctors." Go ahead. And then take your punishment. Don't try to invoke the authority of an external force which not everybody recognizes.

Q: And you're seeing the same thing in some of the northern states of Nigeria, yes?

A: Yes, absolutely. For instance, one of the politicians there has said the Quran is superior to the constitution. I say, "You're talking nonsense. . . . You say your Quran is superior. I have the right to say that the book of Ifa, which is the scripture of the Yoruba religion, is superior to the constitution and superior to your Quran and superior to your Bible. So that kind of language must be abandoned if we agree that there is to be a social order. A social order is viable only through some kind of agreement which is a secular constitution.

Q: Nigeria is about 50 percent Muslim?

A: Well, the tendency is to say that it's 50 percent Muslim and 50 percent Christian. People forget that there's a very large percentage of so-called indigenous religions — animists, Orisa worshippers, ancestor worship. Even some of those who call themselves practicing Christians or practicing Muslims take insurance by giving traditional religion its due, just in case that's where the supreme deity really is. They go to mosque on Fridays, and you see them at the festivals of the traditional deities and on to church on Sundays. So I've never accepted that 50-50 division.

Q: Can you talk about the impact of Sharia [the traditional Islamic legal code, which has been adopted by some Nigerian states] in your country?

A: [Even in] states which have declared themselves to be Sharia states, it's a contentious issue because Sharia is not supposed to apply to non-Muslims. We have a very tense situation where some states go to the extreme and insist that all those who live within the borders of that state are subject to Sharia. This is a provocation. It's an assault on the constitution, an assault on individual rights and even group rights. It leads, of course, to religious intolerance under the banner of Sharia. There's been a greater increase in assaults on churches and on Christians. And, of course, Christians will then retaliate wherever they can.

Since Sharia was introduced, the harmonious coexistence between different groups has really sunk to abysmal levels. It's always been a political ploy. The Sharia was introduced by a governor who needed something emotive to appeal to the electorate in his state. He admitted as much. He didn't have the money to match the more powerful political party, he saw this instrument which he needed to use, so he used it. And left devastating results on the psyche of the population of Nigeria.

Q: In "The Rhetoric That Binds and Blinds," the third lecture, you talk about the "ecstasy of losing oneself in the sound-cloned crowd driving the most ordinary being to jettison all moral code and commit unthinkable acts." And I thought that was a very apt description of Nazi Germany.

A: Absolutely. In fact, in the lecture I point to Nazi Germany.

Q: But also very much alive today.

A: It is. Let me give you an instance. Take Ceausescu . . . after the fall of Ceausescu, I went to Romania and spoke to some of the writers there, you know, really intelligent people. And I remember one of them saying, "You know something . . . I used to go to these nationalist rallies just to watch. I actually at one stage found myself being swept up by the fervor of the rally." Like there was something inside it that was real, that was almost palpable. He confessed that he experienced this nebulous force which can actually sweep a crowd . . . this annihilation of individuation within the crowd. In most cases, when people leave that scene of excitation, they recover themselves, analyze the event, use their heads. But for others, the chants continue to ring, and the chants become the truth in their heads, leading them to do things at which moral intelligence would recoil. . . .

Q: You've spoken out rather forcefully about the impact of political correctness.

A: Political correctness, or rather the original social, positive motivation of a new kind of conduct, a new kind of relationship between groups in society — which was a very noble endeavor — has really degenerated to the most absurd levels, especially in the United States and Canada. In Canada, where I teach occasionally, you had a situation at a university, which shall be nameless, where the head of the art department told an artist, a lecturer in the department, that he was not allowed to draw a female figure because this was sexist. Yes! This is real. This is a real instance!

Political correctness has become a kind of fascism. It has taken on fascist colors and fascistic dimensions. Language is being distorted. . . . Even in shops, nowadays people are no longer called workers. They're partners. Politically correct language. Partners, my foot! They will sack the partner without blinking an eye. Workers are workers. Bosses will always be bosses. The class struggle will continue until we all die. The fact is that there are employees and there are employers. Why are you pretending somebody is a partner? We are not partners.

The language is sanctimonious and sickening, and it's infectious. . . . I say now political correctness has become a disease. There's a kind of minute-by-minute self-censorship that destroys human spontaneity. There's a new fundamentalism sweeping Canada and the United States, and it's called political correctness.

Q: You've spent a lot of your life struggling against long odds. I'm borrowing this from an earlier interview you did at Berkeley, but I love this quotation. It's from [the memoir of your childhood] Aké. Your grandfather is advising you on how to deal with bullies: "Wherever you find yourself, don't run away from a fight. Your adversary will probably be bigger, he will trounce you the first time. Next time you meet him, challenge him again. He will beat you all over again. The third time I promise you this, you will either defeat him or he will run away. Are you listening to what I'm telling you?" Has that proven to be true?

A: Well, I haven't attempted to follow it literally!

Q: But the spirit of what he was telling you certainly seems to be the way you have lived your life.

A: Yes. Although I don't think I've counted how many times I've been trounced [laughing], or gone back, or what the ultimate result was. My conviction simply is that power must always be defeated, that the struggle must always continue to defeat power. I don't go looking for fights. People don't believe this, I'm really a very lazy person. I enjoy my peace and quiet. There's nothing I love better than just to sit quietly somewhere, you know, have a glass of wine, read a book, listen to music, that really is my ideal existence. I don't go looking for fights. I promise you.

Q: People don't believe you.

A: Nobody believes me! But it's true! (Laughing).

Q: So much of what you have done has had severe consequences for you. And I wonder where that strength of character, that courage, has come from. For example, when you stand up in public and say, "I think we should have peace talks," and you wind up in prison for more than two years. How does that happen?

A: That's a very difficult question. I usually answer, "It was something I ate as a child." I don't know. And in prison I had lots of time to ponder, "Why do I do things that get me into trouble?" I didn't find an answer. I also, to my surprise, didn't incur any internal suggestion that, when I get out of this one, I will stop. It has never occurred to me to stop.

Smear Without Fear
By PAUL KRUGMAN
NY Times Op-Ed
Published: April 2, 2004

A funny thing happened to David Letterman this week. Actually, it only started out funny. And the unfunny ending fits into a disturbing pattern.

On Monday, Mr. Letterman ran a video clip of a boy yawning and fidgeting during a speech by George Bush. It was harmless stuff; a White House that thinks it's cute to have Mr. Bush make jokes about missing W.M.D. should be able to handle a little ribbing about boring speeches.

CNN ran the Letterman clip on Tuesday, just before a commercial. Then the CNN anchor Daryn Kagan came back to inform viewers that the clip was a fake: "We're being told by the White House that the kid, as funny as he was, was edited into that video." Later in the day, another anchor amended that: the boy was at the rally, but not where he was shown in the video.

On his Tuesday night show, Mr. Letterman was not amused: "That is an out and out 100 percent absolute lie. The kid absolutely was there, and he absolutely was doing everything we pictured via the videotape."

But here's the really interesting part: CNN backed down, but it told Mr. Letterman that Ms. Kagan "misspoke," that the White House was not the source of the false claim. (So who was? And if the claim didn't come from the White House, why did CNN run with it without checking?)

In short, CNN passed along a smear that it attributed to the White House. When the smear backfired, it declared its previous statements inoperative and said the White House wasn't responsible. Sound familiar?

On Tuesday, I mentioned remarks by CNN's Wolf Blitzer; here's a fuller quote, just to remove any ambiguity: "What administration officials have been saying since the weekend, basically, that Richard Clarke from their vantage point was a disgruntled former government official, angry because he didn't get a certain promotion. He's got a hot new book out now that he wants to promote. He wants to make a few bucks, and that his own personal life, they're also suggesting there are some weird aspects in his life."

Stung by my column, Mr. Blitzer sought to justify his words, saying that his statement was actually a question, and also saying that "I was not referring to anything charged by so-called unnamed White House officials as alleged today." Silly me: I "alleged" that Mr. Blitzer said something because he actually said it, and described "so-called unnamed" officials as unnamed because he didn't name them.

Mr. Blitzer now says he was talking about remarks made on his own program by a National Security Council spokesman, Jim Wilkinson. But Mr. Wilkinson's remarks are hard to construe as raising questions about Mr. Clarke's personal life.

Instead, Mr. Wilkinson seems to have questioned Mr. Clarke's sanity, saying: "He sits back and visualizes chanting by bin Laden, and bin Laden has a mystical mind control over U.S. officials. This is sort of `X-Files' stuff." Really?

On Page 246 of "Against All Enemies," Mr. Clarke bemoans the way the invasion of Iraq, in his view, played right into the hands of Al Qaeda: "Bush handed that enemy precisely what it wanted and needed. . . . It was as if Usama bin Laden, hidden in some high mountain redoubt, were engaging in long-range mind control of George Bush." That's not " `X-Files' stuff": it's a literary device, meant to emphasize just how ill conceived our policy is. Mr. Blitzer should be telling Mr. Wilkinson to apologize, not rerunning those comments in his own defense.

Look, I understand why major news organizations must act respectfully toward government officials. But officials shouldn't be sure — as Mr. Wilkinson obviously was — that they can make wild accusations without any fear that they will be challenged on the spot or held accountable later.

And administration officials shouldn't be able to spread stories without making themselves accountable. If an administration official is willing to say something on the record, that's a story, because he pays a price if his claims are false. But if unnamed "administration officials" spread rumors about administration critics, reporters have an obligation to check the facts before giving those rumors national exposure. And there's no excuse for disseminating unchecked rumors because they come from "the White House," then denying the White House connection when the rumors prove false. That's simply giving the administration a license to smear with impunity.

Inventory Shows an Uneven Distribution of School Computers
By ELISSA GOOTMAN
NY Times
Published: April 3, 2004

Computers are distributed among the New York City schools in a wildly uneven manner, a Department of Education inventory released yesterday found. In the Bronx alone, for example, Community School 234 has 40 computers for its 576 students, while Middle School/High School 368, which has a special emphasis on technology, has 543 computers for its 720 students.

But City Council members, who were given glimmerings of the survey at a hearing yesterday by the Education Committee, were skeptical of its chief finding: that there is one working computer for every six children in the public schools. Council members and principals said that figure seemed unrealistically rosy.

"I rarely go into a school that has more than 10 to 15 percent of its computers working," said Councilwoman Eva S. Moskowitz, chairwoman of the Education Committee. The Department of Education paid Dell, the computer company, $2 million to conduct the inventory, which was completed in February. Department officials and a Dell spokesman said they stood by the findings.

Kathleen Grimm, the education department's deputy chancellor for finance and administration, and Charles Niessner, its chief information officer, told the Education Committee that the Dell inventory identified 178,000 working computers in the city's more than 1,200 schools. The survey also identified another roughly 22,000 computers in department headquarters and regional offices, and 14,000 broken school computers.

The inventory found that there were more computers in elementary and middle schools, with one computer for every 4.98 students in kindergarten through eighth grades, but an average of 7.69 high school students sharing each computer. Those figures include computers in school offices that students do not use.

[Two Technology Administrators]. Ms. Grimm and Mr. Niessner testified that the education department spent $270.8 million on information technology during the 2003 fiscal year, about 14 percent of which went to maintenance and support.

Ms. Grimm told council members that officials were surprised by the age of the computers in city schools. "We have counted them, and that's the first step," she said. "Step 2 has to be an effort to upgrade the equipment and, of course, repair it." Ms. Moskowitz said she was also concerned with lower-tech issues, like the fact that most school computers are far from telephone lines, making it difficult to call help lines for simple problems.

Stymied by Politicians, Wal-Mart Turns to Voters
By JOHN M. BRODER
NY Times
Published: April 5, 2004

INGLEWOOD, Calif., April 2 — As Wal-Mart continues its march across the American landscape, this Los Angeles suburb of 112,000 people is the latest testing ground for the company's exercise of political and marketing muscle.

Inglewood voters go to the polls on Tuesday to decide whether to turn over 60 acres of barren concrete adjacent to the Hollywood Park racetrack to Wal-Mart to create a megastore and a collection of chain shops and restaurants.

The ballot initiative is sponsored by Wal-Mart, which collected more than 10,000 signatures to put the question to voters after the Inglewood City Council blocked the proposed development last year, citing environmental, traffic, labor, public safety and economic concerns.

While Wal-Mart has turned to the ballot in a number of cities and towns to win the right to build its giant emporiums, the Inglewood initiative is significantly different. The proposal would essentially exempt Wal-Mart from all of Inglewood's planning, zoning and environmental regulations, creating a city-within-a-city subject only to its own rules. Wal-Mart has hired an advertising and public relations firm to market the initiative and is spending more than $1 million to support the measure, known as initiative 04-A

Leaders of 9/11 Panel Say Attacks Were Probably Preventable
By PHILIP SHENON
NY Times
Published: April 5, 2004

WASHINGTON, April 4 — The leaders of the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks agreed Sunday that evidence gathered by their panel showed the attacks could probably have been prevented.

Their remarks drew sharp disagreement from one of President Bush's closest political advisers, who insisted that the Bush and Clinton administrations had no opportunity to disrupt the Sept. 11 plot. They also offered a preview of the difficult questions likely to confront Condoleezza Rice when she testifies before the panel at a long-awaited public hearing this week.

In a joint television interview, the commission's chairman, Thomas H. Kean, a former Republican governor of New Jersey, and its vice chairman, Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic House member from Indiana, indicated that their final report this summer would find that the Sept. 11 attacks were preventable.

They also suggested that Ms. Rice, Mr. Bush's national security adviser, would be questioned aggressively on Thursday about why the administration had not taken more action against Al Qaeda before Sept. 11, and about discrepancies between her public statements and those of Richard A. Clarke, the president's former counterterrorism chief, who has accused the administration of largely ignoring terrorist threats in 2001.

"The whole story might have been different," Mr. Kean said on the NBC News program "Meet the Press," outlining a series of intelligence and law enforcement blunders in the months and years before the attacks.

"There are so many threads and so many things, individual things, that happened," he said. "If we had been able to put those people on the watch list of the airlines, the two who were in the country; again, if we'd stopped some of these people at the borders; if we had acted earlier on Al Qaeda when Al Qaeda was smaller and just getting started."

Mr. Kean also cited the "lack of coordination within the F.B.I." and the bureau's failures to grapple with the implications of the August 2001 arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui, a French citizen who was arrested while in flight school and was later linked to the terrorist cell that carried out the attacks.

Commission officials say current and former officials of the F.B.I., especially the former director Louis J. Freeh, and Attorney General John Ashcroft are expected to be harshly questioned by the 10-member panel at a hearing later this month about the Moussaoui case and other law enforcement failures before Sept. 11.

Mr. Hamilton, a former chairman of the House Intelligence and International Relations committees, said, "There are a lot of ifs; you can string together a whole bunch of ifs, and if things had broken right in all kinds of different ways, as the governor has identified, and frankly if you'd had a little luck, it probably could have been prevented." He said the panel would "make a final judgment on that, I believe, when the commission reports."

Mr. Kean has made similar remarks in the past, but commission officials said it appeared to be the first time Mr. Hamilton, the chief Democrat on the panel, had said publicly that he believed the attacks could have been prevented.

Mr. Kean and other members of the commission also agreed in interviews Sunday that the Bush administration's skepticism about the Clinton administration's national security policies might have led the Bush White House to pay too little attention to the threat of Al Qaeda.

Microsoft settles with SunMicro for $2bn
By Scott Morrison in San Francisco, Paul Taylor in New York and Daniel Dombey in Brussels
Published: April 3 2004 5:00 | Last Updated: April 3 2004 5:00

Sun Microsystems and Microsoft settled a long-running legal battle over patents and unfair competition yesterday, ending more than 10 years of animosity between the two information technology giants. Microsoft will pay Sun nearly $2bn (�1.1bn), with the two rivals agreeing to make their competing technologies work together "in the interests of customers".

Sun had been due to go to court accusing Microsoft of trying to sabotage its Java software. It had also helped launch a European Union case against the company. The EU imposed a record $610m fine on Microsoft last week, ruling that the company must share more information about its software code with Sun and other computer server groups.

Yesterday's agreement ended all legal action between Sun and Microsoft. Sun said the deal fulfilled the goals it was pursuing in EU actions pending against Microsoft. However, a spokeswoman for Mario Monti, EU competition commissioner, said: "This case was never about helping particular competitors; it was about consumers and promoting competition."

The companies' agreement, coupled with restructuring and job cuts at Sun, was welcomed on Wall Street. Sun's shares closed up 21 per cent at $5.06. Meanwhile Sun announced that it would slash 3,300 jobs, about 10 per cent of its workforce. The company has reported 11 consecutive quarters of falling revenues, mainly reflecting the declining market for its proprietary systems.

From Talking Points Memo

I am a little surprised that the White House's new insistence on a joint private meeting with President Bush and Vice President Cheney hasn't elicited more notice.

In its Wednesday editorial the Times writes ...

Yesterday, Mr. Bush's lawyer told the [9/11] 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. So the Times doesn't even mention the jointness issue or any problems it could raise.

Now, amidst all the stonewalling and foot-dragging and character assassination I guess this matter won't get top-billing. But just what is behind this demand -- to which the Commission has apparently agreed?

All the other arguments adduced for ducking the Commission investigators have had at least some conceivable constitutional basis, however weak: testimony in private, testimony not under oath, privilege for White House aides, etc.

(One might note that there will be no recording kept of this meeting -- just one sore-wristed Commission staffer allowed to take written notes of what is said by the ten Commission members, the president and vice president.)

In any case, clearly there cannot be any matter of constitutional precedent or principle involved in needing the president and vice president speak to the Commission together.

So, again, what's the deal?

Only three scenarios or explanations make sense to me.

The first -- and most generous -- explanation is that this is simply another way to further dilute the Commission's ability to ask questions. If, say, the meeting lasts three hours, that's three hours to ask questions of both of them rather than three hours to ask questions of each -- as might be the case in separate meetings.

That wouldn't be any great coup for the White House. But it would be one more impediment to throw in front of the Commission's work, which would probably be a source of some joy for the White House.

From here the possible explanations go down hill -- in every respect -- pretty quickly.

Explanation number two would be that this is a fairly elementary -- and, one imagines, pretty effective -- way to keep the two of them from giving contradictory answers to the Commission's questions. It helps them keep their stories straight.

(It's a basic part of any criminal investigation -- which, of course, this isn't -- to interview everyone separately, precisely so that people can't jigger their stories into consistency on the fly.)

The third explanation is that the White House does not trust the president to be alone with the Commission members for any great length of time without getting himself into trouble, either by contradicting what his staff says, or getting some key point wrong, or letting some key fact slip. And Cheney's there to make sure nothing goes wrong.

These last two possibilities do, I grant you, paint the President and his White House in a rather dark light. But I would be curious if anyone can come up with another explanation for this odd demand.
-- Josh Marshall